The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries namely, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia, have experienced unique demographic changes. The major population growth contributor in these countries is young migrants, which has led to a shift in the population age pyramid. Migrants constitute the vast proportion of GCC countries' population reaching >80% in Qat...

PURPOSE To compare optic nerve head parameters, the thicknesses of the peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (pRNFL), the macular retinal nerve fiber layer (mRNFL), the ganglion cell complex (GCC), and the ganglion cell-inner plexiform layer (GCIPL) in macrodisks and normal-sized healthy disks using spectral domain optical coherence tomography. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 88 healthy eye...

Community’s characteristics are important indicators in the study of disseminating electronic systems on a large scale. A community might be influenced positively to accept electronic systems if their basic requirements to use said electronic systems are commonly available. Therefore, determining communities’ characteristics is the first pillar in identifying a population segment interested in ...

PURPOSE To evaluate the diagnostic ability to detect glaucoma in highly myopic eyes using spectral domain-optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) parameters in a cross-sectional comparative study. METHODS A total of 82 patients with high myopia (≤-5 D) presented between April 2008 and August 2009. Subjects comprised 31 participants with high myopia but not perimetric glaucoma (no glaucoma group...

We develop an online variant of the GCC-NMF blind speech enhancement algorithm and study its performance on two-channel mixtures of speech and real-world noise from the SiSEC separation challenge. While GCC-NMF performs enhancement independently for each time frame, the NMF dictionary, its activation coefficients, and the target TDOA are derived using the entire mixture signal, thus precluding ...

Growing numbers of healthcare facilities are routinely collecting standardized data on healthcare-associated infection (HAI), which can be used not only to track internal performance but also to compare local data to national and international benchmarks. Benchmarking overall (crude) HAI surveillance metrics without accounting or adjusting for potential confounders can result in misleading conc...

This paper analyzes the interactive linkages between carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, energy consumption (EC) and economic growth (EG) using a novel approach namely wavelet windowed cross correlation (WWCC) for six oil-exporting countries from the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) region over the period 1980–2012. Our empirical results show that there exists a bidirectional causal relationship betw...

Data caching is a popular technique that improves data accessibility in wired or wireless networks. However, in mobile ad hoc networks, improvement in access latency and cache hit ratio may diminish because of the mobility and limited cache space of mobile hosts (MHs). In this paper, an improved cooperative caching scheme called group-based cooperative caching (GCC) is proposed to generalize an...

This study aimed to assess egg laying and egg quality in quail lines in diallel crosses. We evaluated 16 genetic groups obtained from crosses of four strains of meat quails (L1, L2, L3, and L4) in a complete diallel. We assessed weekly egg number (WEN), egg yield (EY), egg weight (EW), and Haugh unit (HU) for: 51-80, 81-110, 111-140, and 51-140 days (whole period) old. The general combining cap...

GCC’s optimization for space seems to have been often neglected, in favor of performance tuning. With this work we aim at determining the weakpoints of GCC concerning its optimization capability for space. We compare (1) GCC with two nonfree ARM cross-compiler toolchains, (2) how GCC evolved from release 3.2.2 to version 3.3, and (3) two runtime libraries for the Linux kernel. All tests were pe...