Assessment of personal hygiene knowledge, and practices in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates

There is little information available about incidences and causes of foodborne illnesses that can help the government develop policies, which prevent them in the UAE. This study includes a group of multinational subjects (males and females), residing in Al Ain, UAE, and of an age ranging between 15 and 55 years. A questionnaire designed to assess “Knowledge” and “Practice” of public hygiene measures was piloted in a group of subjects from the public (n = 600). Data shows that 100% of highly educated subjects with postgraduate degrees (Master and PhD) have the proper information about food safety. However, only 70% of them always wash their hands before and after eating, while 80% always wash their hands after using toilets and frequently using warm water and soap. 29% of the total participants were inflicted with foodborne illness, and 85% read articles about food safety and personal hygiene. Most of the subjects in this study are Muslims, and they mainly depended on their daily attitude, which affects their personal hygiene because they must wash before praying. Data generally referred that awareness programs or training are needed, even for the highly educated members of the public. Further research is needed to explain the differences between reports of actual and usual behaviors.     

Multi-metric geographic routing for vehicular ad hoc networks

Wireless Networks - Maintaining durable connectivity during data forwarding in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks has witnessed significant attention in the past few decades with the aim of supporting most...     

Viscometric and Volumetric Properties of 10 Regular Binary Systems at 308.15 K and 313.15 K

The densities and kinematic viscosities of 10 binary subsystems of the regular quinary system, benzene (1) + toluene (2) + ethylbenzene (3) + heptane (4) + cyclooctane (5), were measured at 308.15 K and 313.15 K over the entire composition range. The viscosity-composition data reported herein were utilized to examine the predictive capability of some viscosity models, namely, the predictive version of the McAllister model, a group contribution method (GC-UNIMOD), a generalized corresponding states principle (GCSP), and the Allan and Teja correlation. The results of testing showed that the McAllister model outperformed all other models except for systems containing cyclooctane. The results also showed an overall average absolute deviation (%AAD) of 1.25% for systems that did not contain cyclooctane.     

A Novel Optimized Language-Independent Text Summarization Technique

A substantial amount of textual data is present electronically in several languages. These texts directed the gear to information redundancy. It is essential to remove this redundancy and decrease the reading time of these data. Therefore, we need a computerized text summarization technique to extract relevant information from group of text documents with correlated subjects. This paper proposes a language-independent extractive summarization technique. The proposed technique presents a clustering-based optimization technique. The clustering technique determines the main subjects of the text, while the proposed optimization technique minimizes redundancy, and maximizes significance. Experiments are devised and evaluated using BillSum dataset for the English language, MLSUM for German and Russian and Mawdoo3 for the Arabic language. The experiments are evaluated using ROUGE metrics. The results showed the effectiveness of the proposed technique compared to other language-dependent and language-independent summarization techniques. Our technique achieved better ROUGE metrics for all the utilized datasets. The technique accomplished an F-measure of 41.9% for Rouge-1, 18.7% for Rouge-2, 39.4% for Rouge-3, and 16.8% for Rouge-4 on average for all the dataset using all three objectives. Our system also exhibited an improvement of 26.6%, 35.5%, 34.65%, and 31.54% w.r.t. The recent model contributed in the summarization of BillSum in terms of ROUGE metric evaluation. Our model’s performance is higher than the compared models, especially in the metric results of ROUGE_2 which is bi-gram matching.     

ROBUST FITTING OF INARCH MODELS

We discuss robust M‐estimation of INARCH models for count time series. These models assume the observation at each point in time to follow a Poisson distribution conditionally on the past, with the conditional mean being a linear function of previous observations. This simple linear structure allows us to transfer M‐estimators for autoregressive models to this situation, with some simplifications being possible because the conditional variance given the past equals the conditional mean. We investigate the performance of the resulting generalized M‐estimators using simulations. The usefulness of the proposed methods is illustrated by real data examples.     

The impact of changing solar screen rotation angle and its opening aspect ratios on Daylight Availability in residential desert buildings

In desert sunny clear-sky regions solar penetration can become excessive. This can cause non-uniform daylight distribution, glare and high solar heat gain, affecting both visual and thermal comfort. Shading devices, such as solar screens, were usually used to diffuse and prevent direct solar penetration into spaces. This paper investigates the impact of changing solar screen axial rotation angle and screen opening aspect ratio on daylighting performance in a typical residential living room space under the desert sunny clear-sky. The larger aim is to arrive at efficient solar screen designs that suit the different orientations.The study was divided into three consecutive phases. In phase one, the effect of the two parameters on Daylight Availability was tested. The solar screen was axially rotated by three different angles at 10° increments. Also, the aspect ratio of the screen opening in both horizontal and vertical directions was changed systematically. Simulation was conducted using the annual Daylight Dynamic Performance Metrics (DDPMs). In phase two, the Annual Daylight Glare Probability (DGP) metric was evaluated for the cases that were found adequate in phase one. In the third phase, the annual solar energy transmittance through the screen was calculated for the cases that achieved acceptable performance in the two previous phases in order to identify the more energy efficient screens.Solar screens with openings having horizontal aspect ratios were found to be the most effective, while those with vertical aspect ratios were achieved the lowest performance. In the North orientation, since almost all the cases that were tested in this research provided acceptable daylighting performance, the designer now have a variety of options to choose from. Preference should be given to screen openings of horizontal aspect ratios, especially the 12:1 and 18:1 (H:V) screens that achieved the best performance where 92% of the space was “daylit” in comparison with only 53% of the base case. In the East orientation, it is advisable to use the 12:1 (H:V) screen opening ratio, as it was found acceptable in the two daylighting testing phases and achieved the best performance in regards to annual transmittance of solar radiation. For the South orientation, there were also many acceptable choices. However, the 3:1 screen aspect ratio is recommended as it assists in saving energy by reducing the annual transmitted solar radiation (60% reduction) while achieving acceptable daylighting performance.     

Energy-efficient and reliable data delivery in wireless sensor networks

Clustering has been used as one of energy-efficient mechanisms for data routing in wireless sensor networks. In hierarchical routing approaches, cluster heads are responsible for management (e.g. data aggregation, queries dispatch) and transmission of the collected data in the region controlled by them. For efficient data delivery, several researches have proposed various mechanisms for cluster organization and cluster head selection. However, less focus is given in the area of data transmission associated with Base Station (BS). In such a situation, any failure or packet loss may lead to considerable packet loss. For solving this problem, we propose an efficient data routing scheme for controlling data delivery from nodes to BS. In our proposed approach every node is aware about the link quality of all nodes and is able to deliver data to the BS through the most reliable and energy-efficient route.     

The craving to smoke in flight attendants: Relations with smoking deprivation, anticipation of smoking, and actual smoking.

In the study, the authors examined the effects of smoking deprivation, anticipation of smoking, and actual smoking on the craving to smoke. Flight attendants who were light to heavy smokers rated their craving to smoke at predetermined time points during a 2-way short flight (each leg 3–5.5 hr) and a 1-way long flight (8–13 hr). In both short and long flights, craving increased gradually and peaked as landing approached. Craving levels at the end of the 1st leg of the short flights were equal to those at the end of the long flight and were much higher than those at the parallel time point in the long flight. In the short flight, craving levels at the beginning of the 2nd leg dropped relative to the end of the 1st leg, both for participants who smoked during the intermission and for those who did not, though the drop was steeper for the former. The results provide additional evidence for the role of psychological factors in determining the craving to smoke in a naturalistic setting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)