The paper describes and explains empirically the economic performance of four key creative industries (the book publishing, music sound recording, film production and software industries) in five Arab countries (Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon). Using the Porter (Diamond) model as its theoretical background, a survey was conducted in the years 2002-03 among 242 experts, covering fir...

The article by Larrazabal et al1 in this issue of Circulation can be analyzed from several points of view. The first is the humanitarian aspect involved in the decision of Dr Aldo Castañeda to return to Guatemala and start a program of congenital heart surgery. After so many contributions to congenital heart surgery as chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Children’s Hospital...

Through history, Arabs and Muslims have made valuable contribution to medicine and science. The main objective of this study was to assess the contribution of Arab researchers to ophthalmology using bibliometric indicators. Published articles in "Ophthalmology" authored by Arab researchers were screened and analyzed using ISI Web of Science database. Worldwide research productivity in ophthalmo...

While e-Government has the potential to improve public administration effectiveness as well as efficiency by increasing convenience, performance and accessibility of different government services to citizens, the success of these initiatives is dependent not only on government support, but also on citizens’ willingness to accept and adopt those e-government services. Although there is a great b...

The Saudi Arabian government has taken a range of positive steps in order to improve health services across the country. Since the 1970's, Saudi Arabia has been focusing on improving the quality of systems in the health care sector. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in accreditation programs in developing countries, and Saudi Arabia is one of the first Arab countries that i...

The economic situation in the Arab countries is due to several factors as the political crisis in a socio-economic vulnerability. Political changes are usually accompanied by a drop in production, a deterioration of macroeconomic balances, a high level of poverty, an appearance of economic corruptions and a structural increase in unemployment. In addition, the expansion of terrorism is a main i...

We assemble a few remarks on the supergravity solution of hep-th/0007191, whose UV asymptotic form was previously found in hep-th/0002159. First, by normalizing the R-R fluxes, we compare the logarithmic flow of couplings in supergravity with that in field theory, and find exact agreement. We also write the 3-form field strength G3 = F3 − τH3 present in the solution in a manifestly SO(4) invari...

The cave of Isturitz is one of the most important archaeological sites of the prehistory of Western Europe. Human occupations followed each other in the cavity from at least the Middle Paleolithic to the Roman age. In 1913, Passermard started archaeological excavations there, and a calcite pillar was discovered next to the original entrance that was sculpted with a dozen of animal representatio...