Digital Commons Network^™

Fair Use Guidelines For Educational Multimedia, Aziza Ellozy

Faculty Journal Articles

Faculty at AUC are facing questions that many educators in the US and around the world are facing: What guidelines are there for the production of multimedia materials? Under what conditions can we introduce video and audio clips, digitize images and text for educational purposes? How do we take advantage of innovative instructional technologies and changing educational needs without running the risk of violating the copyright law?

More Thoughts On Plagiarism From A Colleague, Aziza Ellozy

Faculty Journal Articles

The subject matter of our last issue, “The New Plagiarism”, generated a lot of feedback from faculty, and is obviously a high priority on many of our colleagues’ minds. Following are excerpts from a memo circulated by Ms. Cynthia Sheikholeslami, an ELI teacher, to her colleagues in the ELI, which she passed on to me. The issues that she raises address another important aspect of the problem, namely our own responsibilities as faculty.

Assessment Of Refugee Status Determination Procedure At Unhcr’S Cairo Office 2001-2002, Michael Kagan

Faculty Journal Articles

In Egypt, refugee status determination (RSD) by the United Nations refugee agency is frequently the single most important decision anyone will make affecting the life of an asylum-seeker. In 2001, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Cairo received the most individual RSD applications of all of the agency's offices worldwide. The Cairo office has taken some significant steps to improve the RSD process. At the same time, some important international standards of fair and effective RSD procedures have not been implemented. In recent years, the number of refugee applicants in Egypt has grown and UNHCR-Cairo's resources have …

Political Culture And Democracy In The Arab World, Ibtissam Rakha Hassan

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Poverty Reduction, Microcredit, And The Challenges Of Sustainability, Kiros Tadesse Beyene

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The New Plagiarism, Aziza Ellozy

Faculty Journal Articles

As a “newcomer” to AUC, I attended this year’s Newcomer’s Orientation program, where plagiarism and cheating were discussed at length in one of the sessions. Although plagiarism is not new, it is apparently on the rise, and is a topic of great concern not only here at AUC, but at institutions of higher learning in the US and the UK among others.

Critical Thinking (2) Critical Thinking Requires Critical Questioning, The Center For Learning And Teaching

Faculty Journal Articles

Critical thinking theory has its roots in the works of Benjamin Bloom, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. Bloom (1956) categorized thinking into six processes. Bloom’s Taxonomy, as it is called, is one of the most influential critical thinking models and continues to be as applicable today as it did then.

Critical Thinking (1), The Center For Learning And Teaching

Faculty Journal Articles

If there is one feature that distinguishes an AUC education from that of all other institutions in the region, it is that ours is a Liberal Arts education. As faculty, we recognize that critical thinking figures prominently at the core of a liberal arts education, and that our goal is to change our students from being passive receptors of information to being “critical thinkers”.

Pedagogy First, Technology Second The Do’S And Don’Ts Of Teaching With Technology, The Center For Learning And Teaching

Faculty Journal Articles

The Center for Learning and Teaching at AUC has just launched a pilot program (Student Technology Assistants Program) aimed at helping faculty with matters of instructional technology. If you are new to teaching with technology—or even if you are not –here are some tips that you may find useful.

Classroom Assessment Techniques (Cats) The Minute Paper, The Center For Learning And Teaching

Faculty Journal Articles

The Minute Paper is the most commonly used CAT in college classrooms, and according to R. Light (Director of the Seminar on Assessment at Harvard), the most successful classroom innovation at Harvard (2001). It is a simple, non-graded, anonymous, in-class activity.

External Audit And Tax Evasion: Evidence From India, Nermeen Shehata, Siva Nathan, Omar Farooq, Khaled Dahawy

Faculty Journal Articles

This paper aims to examine the relationship between voluntary external audit by privately held firms and tax evasion in India. We use data generated by the World Bank Enterprise Survey which is based on interviews conducted over 2013 and 2014 only. Our final sample includes 7,262 privately held Indian firms. Our research reports the following results for privately held companies in India: (1) Firms with voluntarily audited financial statements are more likely to evade taxes; (2) Firms that face financing constraints are more likely to have stronger relationship between voluntary external audit and tax evasion; (3) Firms operating in Indian …

Schaduf: Adding A Splash Of Greenery To Grim Cities, Ahmed Tolba, Arpi Khatcherian

Faculty Journal Articles

The case tells the story of a recently established technology and agriculture startup, Schaduf, founded in Egypt. Their concept mixes tradition with technology to improve the quality of life for city dwellers. Research and development (R&D) plays a big role in this company’s success. Schaduf uses the concepts of soilless farming to grow rooftop crops for low-income households. The company also provides aesthetic solutions for businesses and homes to increase their green spaces. Driven by a desire to transform the monochrome city to a green paradise, two Egyptian entrepreneurs founded Schaduf, an urban micro-farming and eco-friendly venture. The founders of …

Report On The Situation Of Refugees In Yemen: Findings Of A One-Month Exploratory Study, Nesya H. B. Hughes

Faculty Journal Articles

The refugee situation in Yemen is of interest to academics and field professionals working on migration in the Arab world for a host of reasons. Yemen has the Arabian Peninsula’s largest non-Palestinian refugee population . Yet, despite the apparent magnitude of the refugee population in Yemen, little field research has been conducted on this country and its refugee situation. In addition, the Republic of Yemen is the first and only country in the Arabian Peninsula to have signed the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Regardless, Yemen is hindered from fulfilling its international obligations because it is simultaneously one of …

Three Dimensional Deformable Modeling Of The Spine, Rania Atef

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this work is the development of a 3D deformable model of the spinal lumbar region. The data for the spine comes from the National Library of Medicine website (NLM). The 3D model uses several NURBS patches as modeling primitives. This work is part of a larger system aimed at building a 3D surgical simulator coupled with a force - feedback.PHANToM robot in a virtual reality CA VE system.

The input to this system is a set of two-dimensional CT images. They are processed and edge detected to produce a set of contoured images containing the vertebral data. …

Building General Indicator Cost Indexes For The Construction Industry Price Movement In The Egyptian Market, Bahaee Nabil Labib Khalil

Archived Theses and Dissertations

This thesis (The "Thesis") is submitted to the Department of Engineering at the American University in Cairo in partial :fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. The aim of the Thesis is Building General Indicator Cost Indexes for the Construction Industry Price Movement in the Egyptian Market. It is prepared by Bahaee N. L. Khalil under the supervision of Dr. Amr A. G. Hassanein (Associate Professor, Construction Engineering Department, the American University in Cairo). Construction cost indexes is mainly utilized in planning estimates required at an early stage of a project conception to assist with the …

Interaction Of Silica Fume And Polypropylene Fibers In High Performance Concrete, May Tarek Massoud

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The use of mineral admixtures and fibers is becoming essential in the new generation of high performance concrete since they introduce enhancement in mechanical properties as well as several durability aspects. Some of the advantages gained when properly employing high performance concrete are significant improvements in strength, drastically reduced permeability, better resistance to a wide spectrum of chemicals, superior performance in freezing and thawing conditions and enhanced thermal resistance. Although silica fume and polypropylene fibers are increasingly used in high performance concrete, yet, relatively little work has focused on the interaction of both ingredients in such concretes. The main aim …

Dimension And Shape Invariant Programming: The Implementation And Application, Manal Ezzat Helal

Archived Theses and Dissertations

This thesis implements a model for the shape and dimension invariant programming based on the notation of the Mathematics of Arrays (MOA) algebra. It focuses on dimension and shape invariance implementation, and their effect in parallel computing. A new design for the MOA notation is implemented that eliminates the need for another PSI-compiler, or a language extension to functional programming languages. The MOA notation is designed as a library of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), contains object oriented classes implemented in C++. The library executes array operations correctly, and is expected to enhance the performance invariant of dimension and shape. To …

Enhancing Image Classification And Content Query Using Perception-Based Models, Ahmed Badr El-Din

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Searching a digital image library, having large number of digital images or video sequences turned to be more and more important in this multimedia age. As time passes, a growing number of people are using the Internet for searching and browsing through different multimedia databases. To make such searching practical, effective image coding and searching based on image semantics is becoming increasingly important. In current real-world image databases, the prevalent retrieval techniques involve human-supplied text annotations to describe image semantics. These text annotations are then used as the basis for searching, using mature text search algorithms that are available as …

Participation And Resistance: Project Success In Telal Zinhom, Maysa Abbas Ayoub

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The main concern of this thesis is the different strategies that the government adopts in the process of upgrading or redeveloping squatter areas. The thesis studies two projects: a redevelopment project that applied a top­down approach and an upgrading project that applied a participatory approach. This thesis focuses on the relation between the project and the people arguing that there is a negative correlation between participation and resistance. The thesis shows the ways in which the adoption of an un-participatory approach in a development projects creates resistance on the part of the beneficiaries, which consequently negatively affects the success of …

Marketing Characteristics Of The Service Of Project Management In Egypt, Mohamed Ali Alhadidi

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The Project Management profession has been facing, since its introduction, a serious impediment establishing a significant and well-defined role among the Egyptian construction community. In an attempt to uncover the reasons behind this impediment, a problem identification research was conducted with service-provider firms of different sizes, origins, and backgrounds. The research confirmed the observation. It also arrived at the main obstacle hampering the development of Project Management in Egypt. This obstacle was the poor communication of the service and its benefits to the market. A barrier, built of mismarketing, has therefore parted between Project Management professionals and their clients. This …

Construction Delays Of High Investment Projects In Egypt, Nora Mohamed El-Gohary

Archived Theses and Dissertations

In evaluating the overall performance and success of construction projects, time is usually used as a major factor in such evaluation. Unsatisfactory time performance shows up as delays. Construction delays are very critical to the owner and contractor, because they suffer due to lost profit, additional overhead costs, increased costs of financing, and payment of liquidated or actual damages. Despite that, delays in completion of projects are repetitive in the Egyptian construction industry. Current Egyptian statistics and studies did not provide sufficient information and analysis of the delay phenomenon. Studying and analyzing the problem is a step towards its solution …

A Water And Wastewater Sector Performance Assessment: A Comparative Study, Reham Khalifa

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The water and wastewater sector has been one of the infrastructure sectors gaining increasing importance recently. Governments have been focusing major efforts and significant volumes of their budgets towards the improvement of this sector and the increase of water and wastewater coverage. The key problem in most of the water_and wastewater utilities is the absence of performance assessment tools.

This research utilizes the calculation of a group of financial and operational indicators for a sample size of 234 utilities from countries across the world as a mean of comparison of their performance. Egypt is represented in the sample size by …

A Legal Evalution Of Article 12(2) Of The Rome Statute Of The International Criminal Court, Ahmed Lotfy Abdel Fattah Mohsen

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Nasserist Work Ethic And The Spirit Of State Capitalism, Willa Newton Thayer

Archived Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Egyptian state discourse about and directed at labor during the years 1952-1967, focusing on elements that could be said to comprise a "work ethic" promoted by the state to workers. A work ethic is conceptualized as comprising the individual's approach to their job, the way they interact with management/capitalists and the role of labor within the nation. Speeches by Gama! Abdel-Nasser, articles from the daily newspaper Al­Ahram and Al- 'Umaal, a monthly magazine of the Federation of Labor Syndicates are the sources of discourse used. Samples comprising material relevant to the three aforementioned categories were culled from …

3d Finite Element Modeling Of The Welding Process, Ihab Fanous Zakaria

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The modeling and simulation of the welding process has been of main concern for different fields of applications. It is used mainly to check for the residual stresses generated due to welding. These stresses may reach a value near the yielding level and may cause several failure types in the welded strnctures. Several attempts have been clone in analyzing the welding process using different approaches. Analytical methods have been developed with many approximations and assumptions to handle the highly non-linear behavior of the problem. On the other hand, experimental methods in monitoring the residual stresses in a welded structure may …

Impact Of Lignin From Non-Wood Pulping Processes On Kraft Wastewater Treatment And Receiving Water Quality, Mohamed Hamdy Nour

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The Kraft process is typically used for pulping non-wood raw materials, I ike rice straw, in order to dissolve the non cellulose organic fraction, essentially lignin, and leave behind the fibrous residual as pulp for paper production. Rice straw, however, also contains a high percentage of silica that dissolves in the process. The wastewater derived from vacuum filtration of the pulp solution is referred to as black liquor, owing to its dark color and complex makeup with high BOD, caustic, silica, and TDS. The high silica concentration in the black liquor prohibits conventional chemical recovery due to scaling of the …

Implementation Of Iso 9000 Standards In The Egyptian Construction Contracting Companies: A Quality Managers' View, Mohamed El-Sayed Mohamed El-Bassuni

Archived Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the status of the ISO 9000 standard in the Egyptian construction contracting companies. It investigates the opinion of the quality managers of the cun-ently ISO 9000 certified construction contracting companies in regard to the reasons for implementing ISO 9000 standard and the associated problems. In addition it addresses their views about the benefits that return to contracting companies as a result of implementing the ISO 9000 standards. Furthermore, the items that might prevent the construction contracting companies from becoming certified for the new standard ISO 900 l :2000 are identified, along with the recommended methods to resolve …

Secular Women Activism And Neo-Patriachy: The Case Of Egypt, Rasha S Mansour

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Relationship Between The Government And Developmental Ngos, Nevine Ellia Mikhael Bishai

Archived Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the relationship between the government and developmental NGOs in Egypt with a close study of the level of coordination between NGOs and the Ministry of Social Affairs. The thesis is submitted to the Management Department at the American University in Cairo by Nevine Ellia Mikhael Bishai under the supervision of Dr. E. H. Valsan, Director of the Public Administration Program. The research tries to examine the inter-organizational relations in terms of coordination between the government and NGOs and how this kind of coordination can be improved. Five main aspects are tackled, these include:

I.Establishment and registration

2. …

Do Remittances Change Household Spending?, Dalia Hammam El Sherbiny

Archived Theses and Dissertations

The impact of remittances on household spending has been a debatable issue. A I arge body of literature has been concerned about remittances in Egypt as well as other developing countries. However, there are conflicting views regarding the way remittances are circulated. Some believe that remittances negatively the economy of the recipient country by increasing personal consumption. On the other hand, others supported that remittances enhance productive asset accumulations and increased savings and investments. This thesis uses 1997 Egypt Integrated Household Survey (EIHS) to empirically assess whether remittances change household spending. For understanding of the way remittances affect spending decision, …