Al Ain University

This study examines market reactions to the US-Houthi conflict on January 11, 2024, across various markets, regions, and industries within the financial sector, emphasizing the role of military strength in shaping global financial responses. An event study methodology is applied to a sample of 3,239 financial sector companies, observing market reactions over multiple event windows: a 15-day pre-event phase and a 15-day post-event phase surrounding the conflict announcement. Cross-sectional analysis is conducted to assess how military strength impacts financial market reactions. The results indicate significant market vulnerability to the US-Houthi conflict, particularly during the period from the event day on January 11, 2024, to the post-event phase, with developed markets experiencing the greatest impact. While American markets showed mixed responses, European, Middle Eastern, and African markets faced notable negative effects due to disrupted trade routes; Asian markets also showed negative reactions, though to a lesser extent. The banking industry recorded the most adverse reaction within the financial sector, and military strength emerged as a critical factor influencing investor behavior in response to the conflict. These findings highlight the need for policymakers to enhance financial market stability by considering military strength and trade route security in risk mitigation strategies, particularly in times of geopolitical uncertainty, such as the period surrounding the US-Houthi conflict in early 2024.

The sustainable green approach is predominant and needed for developing functional nanomaterials. Thus, this article uses a green, non-toxic, and possible recovery chemical pre-treatment using a natural deep eutectic solvent to increase the productivity of isolated cellulose nanocrystals (CNC). Furthermore, extraction and characterization of CNC from kenaf fiber using a 2:1 molar ratio of lactic acid and choline chloride were performed. Indeed, various techniques like infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning calorimetry, scanning electron microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy are used for the deep analysis/characterization of CNC. The results showed that the morphology created by an efficient natural deep eutectic solvent treatment produces CNC with rod and rectangular-shaped structures, whereas a nano-sized needle-like structure was observed in TEM analysis. X-ray results show a higher intensity peak at 22.66° of CNC, and the crystallinity of obtained CNC was 81.2%. Based on the findings, isolated CNC have better morphology. Furthermore, thermally stable CNC is produced compared to traditional CNC-isolated processes. Thus, we believe the green solvent used in the article for the isolation of CNC gives extra advantages compared to the traditional isolation process summarized in the literature.

Homemade explosives (HMEs), commonly used in improvised explosive devices (IEDs), present a significant forensic challenge due to their chemical variability, accessibility and adaptability. Traditional forensic methodologies often struggle with environmental contamination, complex sample matrices and the non‐specificity of precursor residues. Recent advances in analytical techniques and chemometric methods have enhanced the detection, classification and interpretation of explosive residues. Infrared (IR) spectroscopy and gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS) have seen improvements in spectral resolution and real‐time detection capabilities, allowing for more accurate differentiation of explosive precursors. Thermal analysis techniques, such as thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), now provide refined kinetic modelling to assess the decomposition pathways of unstable energetic materials, improving forensic risk assessments. Additionally, x‐ray diffraction (XRD) has contributed to forensic material sourcing by distinguishing between industrial‐grade and improvised explosive formulations. Chemometric approaches, including principal component analysis (PCA), linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS‐DA), have revolutionized forensic data analysis by improving classification accuracy and enabling automated identification of explosive components. Advanced machine learning models are being integrated with spectral datasets to enhance real‐time decision‐making in forensic laboratories and portable field devices. Despite these advancements, challenges remain in adapting laboratory‐based techniques for field deployment, particularly in enhancing the sensitivity and robustness of portable analytical instruments. This review critically evaluates the latest developments in forensic analytical chemistry, highlighting strengths, limitations and emerging strategies to improve real‐world HME detection and classification.

Ga 2 O 3 -based memristor with low-power operation, fast switching via conductive filaments, and potential integration with neuromorphic systems mimicking the human visual pathway.

This study investigated associations of exposure to Fernando Botero's artwork with fatphobia. Using two 2 × 2 designs, participants were exposed to Botero's work and paintings with nudity. Implicit bias was measured using an Implicit Association Test, while explicit bias was assessed with the Fatphobia scale. Results showed that exposure to Botero's art was associated with reduced implicit bias against people with obesity, but had no association with explicit fatphobia. Nudity in art showed no association with either implicit or explicit biases, and no interaction effects were found. The study concludes that Botero's art could be leveraged through various means to combat fatphobia and promote inclusivity, highlighting the potential of art to influence societal attitudes towards body size.

Objectives The study aimed to investigate the factors influencing adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting among New Zealand’s community and hospital pharmacists. Methods Two surveys were created for distinct practice settings, with the demographics section tailored to each setting while the core content remained consistent. The surveys included six sections: demographics, reporting practices, attitudes and behaviours towards reporting, barriers, facilitators to reporting, and future improvements. Sections 3–6 used Likert scale questions to measure agreement. Participants were identified from a list of registered pharmacists in New Zealand who had consented to participate in research during their practice license renewal, obtained from the Pharmacy Council. The surveys were emailed to 2762 pharmacists with a 23% (n = 632) response rate. The collected data underwent descriptive statistical analysis using SPSS® and inferential statistics were applied. Fisher’s exact test determined relationships between responses and practice setting and Relative Importance Index (RII) quantified statement importance. Key findings The majority of the participants were female (74.8%), European (63%), and aged 31–40 years. Analysis revealed time as the main influence on ADR reporting. While both groups had positive attitudes towards reporting, they identified the time-consuming nature as the most significant barrier. Online reporting was identified as the most important facilitator. Of potential interventions, hospital pharmacists found having full access to patient information most important, whereas community pharmacists prioritized a built-in reporting tool. Conclusions Although pharmacists had positive attitudes towards ADR reporting, time constraints hindered reporting. To improve reporting practices, we recommend the implementation of a pharmacy patient management system and the ability to access full patient information.

High dimensional gene expression datasets consist of a large number of genes, many of which do not play a significant role in classifying tissue samples. The high dimensional nature of this type of data, characterized by a large number of gene features substantially exceeding its sample size, makes it challenging for existing methods to work efficiently in terms of prediction accuracy and execution time. To address this issue, a new classification procedure called double weighted k nearest neighbours ($\hbox {DW}k\hbox {NN}$) is proposed. $\hbox {DW}k\hbox {NN}$ is specifically designed for gene expression data and incorporates feature weights derived from genes’ ability to express deferentially between classes. Features weights are derived in a manner that automatically increase the impact of informative features while decreasing it for features that are less/non informative. To achieve this goal, the estimated weighted distances from the observations in the k nearest neighbourhood to the test point are used in an exponential function. The outputs of the function are summed for both the classes separately and the test point is assigned the class label with the largest sum. By utilizing the proposed weighting method based on the differential capability of genes, the $\hbox {DW}k\hbox {NN}$ method aims to achieve robust and efficient classification by allowing only the most informative features/genes to contribute to the classification task. Experimental evaluations, in comparison with several methods, i.e., standard $k\hbox {NN}$, weighted k nearest neighbours classifier ($\hbox {W}k\hbox {NN}$), random k nearest neighbour ($\hbox {R}k\hbox {NN}$), extended neighbourhood rule ensemble (ExNRule), k conditional nearest neighbour ($k\hbox {CNN}$), $\hbox {E}k\hbox {CNN}$ ensemble and support vector machines (SVM), demonstrate the effectiveness of $\hbox {DW}k\hbox {NN}$ in accurately classifying gene expression datasets. Overall, $\hbox {DW}k\hbox {NN}$ presents a promising approach for gene expression data analysis through the two fold weighted distance calculation strategy using classification accuracy, Cohen’s kappa, sensitivity and $\hbox {F}_1-$score as performance metrics.

This research examines the idea of university social responsibility (USR) in promoting long‐term sustainability. It examined the vast research on corporate social responsibility (CSR), its sustainability in higher education, and its relevance to higher education to identify universities' particular difficulties and possibilities. The study discusses key dimensions of USR, such as environmental sustainability, social inclusion, economic responsibility, and ethical considerations. It also discusses the potential benefits of USR, such as reducing the carbon footprint of education, promoting diversity and inclusion, fostering innovation, and enhancing global collaboration. Data was collected through an online link attached via email to students at the American University of Sharjah, UAE. The study explores students' perceptions of sustainability activities and compares USR to CSR, using a ‘capital stock’ approach to evaluate institutions' sustainability efforts. By examining students' perspectives and critically analyzing existing literature, this paper aims to understand how universities can contribute to sustainable development comprehensively. Many students expressed a great desire to participate in sustainability programs, highlighting the need to incorporate such efforts into university operations, courses, and community participation. The research contributes to the theoretical advancement of USR by providing a comprehensive framework for understanding and analyzing university social responsibilities. It also offers implications for policy and practice and encourages institutions to emphasize and integrate sustainability initiatives across several disciplines. Finally, this study emphasizes universities' critical role in fostering sustainable development via education, research, and community participation.

This chapter moves away from the more textualist approach adopted heretofore in the philosophical and literary discussions of narrative identity, digitality, and wellbeing. In employing a transdisciplinary ethos and elements of interdisciplinarity, the chapter employs a psychological approach to examine the relationship between narrative identity online and psychological wellbeing. Transdisciplinary research (TDR) has been described as research that focuses on a “complex problem that cannot be solved by methods, concepts, theories, and knowledge produced by a single or even multiple disciplines. It requires another fundamental component, society” (N. Rezaei, 2022, p. 4). How narratives of identity mediate the wellbeing of young people in a digital age is one such complex problem that necessitates collaborative work across disciplines while at the same time working with users, stakeholders, and young people to produce new insights. While interdisciplinary research is described as also involving work from various disciplines in solving a common problem where researchers enrich their knowledge with ideas from methodologies from different areas in making disciplinary boundaries transparent, there is perhaps less focus on the input of users, stakeholders, and non-experts. As discussed, my interest in narrative identity emerged from readings in literature and philosophy. However, narrative identity is also an important concept for the social and behavioural sciences, for counselling practice, and for education studies. The transdisciplinary impetus of this project arose from frustrations in regard to the difficulty of bringing insights around narrative identity from different disciplines and practices together to foster collaborative enquiry. The work of this chapter offers one example of such collaborative work. It describes a psychological experiment conducted into the relationship between narrative identity online and psychological wellbeing. The project involved the use of experiment-building software, statistics software, and quantitative and qualitative methods. The insights from the philosophical works and literary narratives examined in the previous chapters offer important speculative insights that inspired the motivations for the experiment. For example, literary theorist Spencer Jordan regards smartphone app-based texts and other born-digital texts as inaugurating a new mode of embodied exploration for readers that does not do away with physical materiality but instead introduces a “hybridic mix of body, movement and text” as a new kind of “embodied space” (198). Materiality is as important as ever, he argues, in granting a “reenchantment with authentic experience”. Spencer also argues that these new digital texts inaugurate a new sense of conflict for readers. However, literary studies typically have no way of assessing the nature and verifiability of such claims in relation to the emotions of readers. Psychological studies have also conducted experiments to examine the nature of the “hybrid reality” young people inhabit in navigating lives between online and offline practices. This chapter, therefore, practices an interdisciplinary approach in taking insights from how literary studies and philosophical studies describe the relationship between narrative and wellbeing and testing them out using a psychological experiment on narrative identity and psychological wellbeing. The insights from literary studies inform the psychological investigation into the relationship between narrative identity and psychological wellbeing.

Why narrative? Sure, it’s everywhere. “What’s the story?” is a popular form of greeting in Cork where I grew up. It might have been there that the interest in stories arose. Stories and the narratives that mediate them are as old as our understanding of ourselves.

New literary narratives have also examined new emotional aspects of digital life and work in digital societies. Burnout and stress are two key emotions that have been associated with new digital practices in personal life and in the workplace. In this chapter, I examine what I am calling Narratives of Burnout in recent novels. The chapter will examine thematic readings that examine how contemporary writers describe the personal, phenomenological, and political aspects of the burnout society for their characters. These readings extend the exploration of digitality into new narrative forms by focusing on formal advances in the narratives in the context of recent social materialist theories of society. The new narrative forms and aspects examined include: capture capitalism and algorithmic rationality in the context of what Byung-Chul Han describes as the burnout society.

Spencer Jordan’s recent study, Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the contemporary novel, (2024) sums up the current dilemma or zeitgeist endemic to the “postdigital narrative” (and by postdigital Jordan is referring to works created in our current digital age) as one that inaugurates a new troubling conflict for readers.

This chapter explores some points of overlap between narrative theory and narrative therapy, two disciplines whose shared grounding in narrative has rarely been examined in terms of how narrative’s role in a phenomenology of care and wellbeing can be developed and integrated into university education.

In this chapter, I seek to assess the impact of technology in the English classroom in Irish DEIS post-primary schools and also in a lecture course in university in Ireland. This is a multi-faceted issue and it was necessary to focus the analysis by looking in particular at a key area of language—the language of narration—one of the designated areas of language privileged by the Department of Education and Skills (DES) Leaving Certificate English Syllabus (LCES). The chapter assesses the impact of technology in the English class in DEIS post-primary schools by analysing how the language of narration of students is impacted by the use of technology. However, this study also goes further by analysing how the impact of technology on the language of narration in the English class may also affect student wellbeing. The motivations for this chapter arose from concerns raised at Student Support Team (SST) meetings in post-primary schools in Ireland during work as a Guidance Counsellor in DEIS post-primary schools in Ireland and from reflection on the Department of Education and Skills (DES) (2023) document on smartphone use in schools.

Narrative, Digitality, Wellbeing adopts a transdisciplinary ethos in exploring new forms of narrative that have emerged in a digital age, an age of new online practices that are both associated with increased risk (Twenge et al., 2021; Primack et al., 2017) and enhanced sense of identity (Darvin, 2022).

Coxiellosis is a zoonotic bacterial disease caused by Coxiella burnetii (C. burnetii) infection that occurs as subclinical and clinical infections in animals and humans worldwide except in the Antarctica and New Zealand. The objectives of this study were to estimate the seroprevalences of C. burnetti infections in slaughtered camels and abattoir workers as well as to detect C. burnetii DNA in the clotted blood in the same study subjects at Al Bawadi abattoir of Al Ain city, in the United Arab Emirates, UAE. A cross-sectional study design was used to test 393 slaughtered camels and 86 abattoir workers for C. burnetii antibodies between March 2022 and July 2023 using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kits supplied by ID Vet multispecies and Abbexa, respectively. Besides, real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was used for the detection of C. burnetti DNA in clotted blood of 366 camels and 86 abattoir workers. The seroprevalences of C. burnetii infection were 52.9% (95% confidence interval, CI: 46.0, 60.6%) and 24.4% (95% CI: 15.1, 37.3%) in camels and abattoir workers. But, C. burnetii DNA was not detected in clotted blood samples of camels and abattoir workers. Sex, age and body condition of the camels were not associated with the seroprevalence of C. burnetii while abattoir workers of African origin were more likely to be seropositive (odds ratio, OR = 3.70; 95% CI: 1.05, 13.60) than abattoir workers of south Asian origin. The seroprevalences of C. burnetii infections were high in both slaughtered camels and abattoir workers although its DNA was not detected in the clotted blood of either of the study subjects.

Acromegaly is a chronic disease characterized by excessive growth hormone (GH) secretion leading to high insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF- 1) levels. It results in systemic complications, including vertebral fractures (VFs), which impair quality of life. Bone mineral density (BMD) may not fully capture fracture risk, warranting further research into alternative predictors and mitigation strategies. This study aimed to assess the prevalence of VFs in patients with acromegaly and identify associated risk factors. A multicenter, cross-sectional study was conducted at three centers in Saudi Arabia and one in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Data for patients with acromegaly evaluated between 2010 and 2024 were reviewed. The cohort consisted of 101 patients (63% male) with a median age of 45 years and an median disease duration of 7 years. VFs were present in 10 patients, predominantly affecting the lumbar spine and were generally mild. Although not statistically significant, patients with VFs had longer disease durations. BMD measurements did not significantly differ between those with and without VFs; however, patients with VFs showed a trend toward lower trabecular bone score (TBS), suggesting compromised bone microarchitecture. This study underscores the importance of comprehensive bone health assessment in patients with acromegaly incorporating BMD, TBS, and hormonal evaluations. Continuous long-term monitoring of bone health parameters is necessary in this population. Future research is needed to delineate risk factors associated with VFs.

These are the abstracts of the Clinical Congress of the Gulf Association of Endocrinology and Diabetes (GAED) held on October 18 to 20, 2024. The program included plenary lectures and clinical practice symposia delivered by international and regional key opinion leaders. In addition, free communications on current research and clinical practice within and beyond the Gulf region were presented as oral presentations and posters. We present here the abstracts of these free communications after minimal restyling and editing to suit the journal’s publication requirements. We hope that by publishing them in our open-access journal, we provide early recognition of the work and extend the benefit to those who could not make it to the live presentations, similar to our previous conferences. We also hope to stimulate networking between parties of mutual research interests.

Background The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted medical education worldwide, prompting the need for innovative e-learning solutions. This study evaluated the effectiveness of an online extended Focused Assessment with Sonography in Trauma (EFAST) course, delivered via the International Emergency Medicine Education Project’s platform, to improve participants’ knowledge and perceived confidence in EFAST procedure. Methods A prospective observational study was conducted between May 17, 2020, and December 20, 2023. Pre- and post-course quizzes and surveys were used to assess participants’ knowledge and confidence. Participant demographics, quiz scores, and survey responses were collected. Quantitative data were analysed using the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test and Cohen’s d to evaluate knowledge improvement and confidence changes. Thematic analysis of qualitative feedback was performed with the assistance of large language model AI tools for emerging themes. Results 1758 participants enrolled in the course. From 111 countries, 1515 started the course, and 1190 (78.6%) reached the final exam stage, with 96.1% achieving a passing score. 66.4% indicated they had never attended a prior ultrasound course. Most (81.1%) were medical students, interns, or residents. 36.5% of participants were from low- or lower-middle-income countries. 1175 (77.6%) participants completed both the pre- and post-course formative knowledge quizzes. The median (IQR) scores were 53.3 (40.0–66.7) pre-course and 86.7 (73.3–93.3) post-course (p < 0.001, effect size: -0.958). 771 participants completed both pre- and post-course surveys. Participants’ median (IQR) confidence in EFAST increased from 5 (3–7) to 8 (7–10) (p < 0.001, effect size: -0.844). Qualitative feedback showed that participants found the course practical, well-structured, and effective. They suggested improving video quality and simplifying content for clarity and engagement. Conclusion The online EFAST course enhanced participants’ knowledge and perceived confidence, demonstrating the potential of online clinical education during global crises.