Environmental engineering education (E3) in the Gulf Co-operation Countries

12 - XE in Australia and New Zealand, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the world: c.1991–2017

Environmental engineering education at universities is a rapidly changing field globally. Traditionally it has resided in the civil engineering program addressing water and wastewater quality, treatment, design and regulatory issues. In recent years environmental engineering has become a much broader field encompassing water, wastewater, soil pollution, air pollution, risk assessment, ecosystems, human health, toxicology, sustainable development, regulatory aspects and much more. The need to introduce environmental engineering/green engineering/pollution prevention/design for the environment concepts to undergraduate engineering students has become recognized to be increasingly important. This need is being driven in part through the US Engineering Accreditation Commission Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology criteria 2000. Thus there has been a major shift in environmental engineering education and it no longer resides only within the civil engineering discipline. This paper focuses on the development of innovative curricula for a brand new engineering program at Rowan University that integrates environmental education for all engineers. A common course known as "engineering clinic" was developed for all engineering students throughout their eight semesters of engineering education. One of the clinic goals is to integrate engineering design and the environment. The program, in its seventh year, indicates successful implementation of environmental education in all four engineering disciplines in their course work and clinics.

Nowadays all documents and studies related to sustainable development emphasize the need for a change of attitude and the responsibility of the universities for its implementation. Depend on this objective of environmental engineering BSc education is to develop competences like complex system approach, problem recognition and resolution, lifelong learning and responsible attitude for the environment in addition to high level scientific knowledge. To achieve this goal, besides professional academic training, environment education needs to be implemented, where project pedagogy -as the strategy of environment pedagogy-can be efficiently applied. The study aims to prove the effectiveness of project education in terms of professional knowledge as well as in environmental attitudes by the results of project and practical training with an ecological-minded. This paper elaborates a field practice in Aggtelek National Park, Hungary. Based on the results it can be stated, that project pedagogy and the field practice can be well integrated with traditional pedagogical methods and may become their efficient supplement in environmental engineering BSc education.

PDG10 COST-EFFECTIVENESS OF CELECOXIB VERSUS IBUPROFEN AND NAPROXEN IN PATIENTS WITH OSTEOARTHRITIS IN UNITED ARAB EMIRATES AND SAUDI ARABIA BASED ON RESULTS FROM THE PRECISION TRIAL

The allegation against Qatar for its link with terrorist financing has resulted in the country incorporated in the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) regional organization being excluded from its membership in the organization. Qatar is considered to have violated the agreement in the organization because it has received a Muslim Brotherhood that is con-sidered to threaten and disrupt the stability of the Gulf region’s security. In the case of this diplomatic termination, Saudi Arabia became the main control holder. But as we know that Saudi Arabia is a neighboring coun-try that has good relations with Qatar. So that allegedly there is a linkage of the United States in this country’s Gulf of diplomatic conflicts. This is based on the inconsistency of the united states in action. Qatar is cele-brating one of America’s largest trading partners in military supplies, but precisely the United States’s president trump, strongly opposed to Qatar’s unproven crime. So with the qualitative method, this paper will discuss the involvement of the united states in Qatar’s alleged terrorism financing in terms of national interest achievement.

The World Health Organization recommends taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) as part of cost-effective interventions to prevent diet-related noncommunicable diseases. To analyse the adoption and implementation of SSBs taxation in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and its impact on obesity rates. Using a semi-structured questionnaire, we collected information on progress with implementation of SSBs taxes in Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates between January 2015 and December 2023. We searched literature published in Arabic and English on the subject and used the WHO acceleration scenario modelling tool to forecast the potential impact of SSBs on overweight and obesity in the 2 countries over the same period. Both countries implemented SSBs taxation consistently between 2015 and 2023, generating additional revenue and reducing obesity rates. The acceleration scenario estimates showed that SBB taxation could reduce overweight prevalence among children and adolescents (aged 5-19 years) from 38.2% in 2020 to 34.4% in 2030 in Saudi Arabia and from 37.0% to 34.6% in United Arab Emirates, and could reduce obesity rate by approximately 12.7% in Saudi Arabia and 9.5% in United Arab Emirates in the same period. This review provides further evidence that SSBs taxes can be effective in reducing sugar consumption, thereby reducing overweight and obesity rates. However, to effectively combat obesity and overweight among children and adolescents, taxation policies must be implemented alongside other strategies, including public health campaigns to increase awareness about the health risks associated with excessive sugar consumption.

The paper describes Environmental Engineering education in Germany. The dual system of engineering education is outlined having scientific-oriented programmes at university level and application-oriented programmes at ‘school of engineers’ level. The historical development of Environmental Engineering and its main topics are described as well as its common integration in the study programme of Civil Engineering. The paper then focusses on the educational programmes for Environmental Engineering itself. The organisation in a preparatory module, a basic subject module and a specialized module is discussed. Topics, special courses and the time frame of the education programmes in Environmental Engineering are presented. The programmes of 3 selected universities, Hannover, Kaiserslautern and Cottbus, are described in greater detail and their specific character is outlined.

In The Politics of Islam, Birol Baskan sets out on the ambitious task of explaining the relationship between the Muslim Brotherhood and the governments of five Gulf states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). He traces what began as a symbiotic relationship between these states and the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s before chronicling a divergence of attitudes among the Gulf’s ruling elites toward the Muslim Brotherhood today, marking key events like the Iranian Revolution, Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring uprisings in the 2010s as critical junctures in this change. This comparative and chronological approach is useful, although Saudi Arabia, as Baskan highlights, emerges as an outlier. Baskan explains the unique continued relevance of Saudi religious actors by the fact that their influence predated the construction of institutions of the modern nation-state.Baskan also finds that “the level of state religiosity seems to have little impact on whether Islamism generates opposition in a country or not” (2–3, emphasis original). To this end, he investigates literature about Islamism’s oppositionality―an understudied topic and one that certainly deserves attention, particularly when writing and thinking about state-Muslim Brotherhood relations. In his view, Islamism “seeks to expand the scope of Islam beyond the specific areas explicitly covered by the Islamic law” and as a result sets out to compel the state that all rules and norms should be derived from Islamic sources (11). Meanwhile, modern states have sought to harness the political and social capital of religion, and thus, even if they try to put in place religious rules, as in many Gulf states, they often run into Islamist opposition. And yet the Muslim Brotherhood has not become oppositional in all cases; Baskan notes Bahrain and Qatar as examples.After an introduction in which he discusses Islamism as an oppositional movement and state-religion relations in the Gulf, Baskan’s book has five substantive chapters. The first of these (chapter 2) describes how the Gulf states were founded and highlights the role of religious scholars in the formation of educational and judicial systems. It is interesting that Baskan begins his analysis in the pre-independence period. In my own book tracing state-Muslim Brotherhood relations in Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE, I began after independence and indeed after the realization of oil wealth. Baskan’s longer historical lens, however, gives a sense of the extent to which Ottoman and British legacies affected state-religion relations in the Gulf, since religious figures held political capital in Saudi Arabia long before the advent of the modern Saudi state.The second substantive chapter (chapter 3) covers the period 1950–70 and shows how the regional political context in which Arab nationalism was ascendant as the oppositional political ideology and the choice of all five of the states covered to welcome members of the Muslim Brotherhood who escaped repression elsewhere in the region―namely from Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser. Indeed, it was during this period that all five of the states under study in the volume were aligned in their policies toward the Muslim Brotherhood, welcoming many of its members from abroad to staff nascent educational and judicial sectors.Chapter 4 examines the period between 1980 and the late 2000s, tracing how domestic reforms in education and justice, sectors in which members of the Muslim Brotherhood had once been active, changed how these four states interacted with Islamists, particularly as Islamists accrued power in both sectors. In this discussion, however, Baskan appears to conflate modernity with secularism. The Gulf states, not to mention the United States, prove that religiosity can be interwoven into modern, purportedly secular, institutions. In his words, “all the Gulf states issued man-made laws to regulate increasingly complex modern life. This does not suggest, however, that they intentionally pursued state secularization. It rather suggests that the Islamic law is insufficiently developed to regulate all, new or old, fields of human life and in fact grants rulers extensive discretion to regulate a range of them” (69–70). I find it difficult to accept the notion that religion necessarily is at odds with modernity or modernizing reforms, especially considering that Islamic law exists as a living and adaptable body rather than a strictly codified legislative text. Baskan later states that “the modern state inescapably confronts religious actors” (215)―a claim that I believe can be contested, since modernity does not always imply secularism or Westernization, as it has in many countries of the Gulf. Further, because much of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) is made by humans rather than coming directly from God, it is perhaps uniquely open to reform.The fifth chapter focuses on geopolitics during the same period (1980s to the late 2000s), particularly the fall of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the 9/11 attacks. In so doing, Baskan discusses ways in which regional events fundamentally shaped how Gulf regimes viewed Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Increasingly, Islamists came to be seen as part of a viable political opposition (except in Bahrain and Qatar) in the aftermath of the fall of Arab nationalism. It was during this period that the Gulf states developed different attitudes toward the Brotherhood, ranging from suspicion in those states in which the Brotherhood became oppositional (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE), and co-optation in states in which the Brotherhood was a potential partner (Bahrain and Qatar).The sixth chapter focuses on the Arab Spring, when state-Muslim Brotherhood relations shifted sharply in the five states under study, from a loyalist Muslim Brotherhood in Bahrain and Qatar, to a tolerated Brotherhood in Kuwait, to the Muslim Brotherhood’s being designated as a terrorist organization in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He uses statements of specific Islamist figures to tell the story of how relations change, yet not all of the figures he uses are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. This approach also overlooks existing scholarship on Islamism in the Gulf as well as primary source material from the local organizations themselves. In Saudi Arabia, Baskan uses the figure of Salman al-ʿAwdah, in the UAE―Muhammad al-Siddiqi, in Kuwait―Tareq al-Suwaidan, and in Qatar―Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In my view, it would have been more effective to analyze what Muslim Brotherhood movements did and the statements which they produced in the wake of the events of the Arab Spring. Also, the use of Egyptian-born Shaykh Qaradawi to give a sense of the position of Qatari Islamists points to a larger issue about the importance of indigenous religious scholarship in the Gulf.While Baskan makes an important point about a lack of indigenous religious scholars at independence in the Gulf states, I would argue that the field has changed significantly in intervening decades, with many Bahraini, Kuwaiti, and Qatari religious figures having emerged in their own right in the past decades. Throughout the volume, Baskan, in my view, underestimates the role of Gulf-based Islamists in the field of Islamism writ large. For instance, he states “The Arab Gulf region did not produce any Islamists who made a contribution to the development of Islamism” (47). This statement dismisses the substantial scholarship produced by Gulf-based Islamists ranging from the extreme (Osama bin Laden), to the quietist Salafi strand, which has found a home in Kuwait since the 1980s, to ideologues of the Sahwa movement in Saudi Arabia. Baskan further claims that a “home-grown” Muslim Brotherhood organization emerged only in Bahrain and Kuwait (88), denying the agency of local Islamists in other countries he studies. While the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements in the Gulf were certainly influenced by outsiders initially, the Gulf has produced its own types of Islamists and strand of Islamist ideology.All in all, Baskan’s book provides a helpful reference and overview of state-Muslim Brotherhood relations in five Gulf states, a huge undertaking to be applauded. He claims that modern states inevitably face opposition from religious actors such as the Muslim Brotherhood, as they try to expand control over new state institutions (especially in education and the judiciary), which once were controlled by religious actors. Nonetheless, variation exists among the Gulf states, as the Brotherhood did not become oppositional in all five states―an important finding of the book. Still, Baskan leaves some important issues unaddressed. For instance, is authoritarianism rather than modernity to blame for the attempted state takeover of arms of the state once ceded to religious figures? And while Saudi Arabia maintains a cohesive native religious class, how much independent political capital does it still retain as the state seeks to take over more areas previously under their control? At what point does coherence no longer imply political capital?Further, Baskan recognizes throughout the book that the states under study have massive financial resources, which they used to help finance state modernization, to try to buy off political discontent during the Arab Spring, and to fund the Morsi and later the Sisi governments in Egypt after the Arab Spring. However, he does not explicitly engage the academic literature linked to rentierism, which I believe may have helped to show how state-Muslim Brotherhood relations in the Gulf are qualitatively different from those elsewhere in the region. He mentions these issues tangentially in a brief conclusion, but the book would benefit from a broader assessment and recognition of how the Muslim Brotherhood operates as an oppositional movement in rentier states of the Gulf. This kind of assessment could then be tied to a more general discussion of opposition in such states. The result, in my judgment, would have been a very useful contribution to Gulf studies.To be fair, Baskan never sets out to make a contribution Gulf studies specifically, seeking instead to question the oppositional nature of Islamist movements and the degree to which opposition might be predicted in certain contexts in the region. This he largely succeeds in doing.

ADVERTISEMENT RETURN TO ISSUEEditorialNEXTTwenty-Five Years of Green Chemistry and Green Engineering: The End of the BeginningPaul T. Anastas and David T. AllenView Author Information Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Yale University, United States Center for Energy and Environmental Resources, Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, United StatesCite this: ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2016, 4, 11, 5820Publication Date (Web):November 7, 2016Publication History Received13 October 2016Published online7 November 2016Published inissue 7 November 2016https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.6b02484Copyright © 2016 American Chemical SocietyRIGHTS & PERMISSIONSArticle Views2235Altmetric-Citations25LEARN ABOUT THESE METRICSArticle Views are the COUNTER-compliant sum of full text article downloads since November 2008 (both PDF and HTML) across all institutions and individuals. These metrics are regularly updated to reflect usage leading up to the last few days.Citations are the number of other articles citing this article, calculated by Crossref and updated daily. Find more information about Crossref citation counts.The Altmetric Attention Score is a quantitative measure of the attention that a research article has received online. Clicking on the donut icon will load a page at altmetric.com with additional details about the score and the social media presence for the given article. Find more information on the Altmetric Attention Score and how the score is calculated. Share Add toView InAdd Full Text with ReferenceAdd Description ExportRISCitationCitation and abstractCitation and referencesMore Options Share onFacebookTwitterWechatLinked InReddit PDF (150 KB) Get e-AlertsSUBJECTS:Chemical engineering and industrial chemistry,Green chemistry,Molecular design Get e-Alerts

Case studies are pedagogic tools that impart learning experiences through simulated problem-solving and discussion-provoking exercises that describe "real-world" situations.Edwin F. Gay, the first dean of Harvard Business School ͑HBS͒, is credited with adapting the case method of instruction in his college as early as 1911 ͑Harvard Business School 2005͒.HBS published its first case study in 1921, and today, the college develops approximately 350 cases each year and sells 6,000,000 cases for use in business courses across the world.Although case studies have clearly evolved into powerful and critical components of professional programs in business, medical, law, and military schools, they remain less utilized in modern engineering education.Incorporating the case method throughout a professional curriculum exposes students to a variety of practical situations applicable to their field of study.For example, a typical business student studies up to 500 cases in an MBA program.Case studies provide insights into the approach used by practicing professionals to resolve real-world issues and have a tendency to empower young graduates with a sense of déjà vu when they encounter similar situations in the real-world.Such simulated experiential learning is a major component of most professional programs and can fill a critical need in the education of today's environmental engineers.Case studies are not merely a professor's stories.They utilize synthesis of knowledge and applied problem solving to illustrate how engineering works in a societal context, and they can serve as highly effective learning tools for preparing a modern environmental engineering workforce.

This paper determines the dynamic linkage of oil price and public expenditures in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and United Arab Emirates from 1991 to 2017. For this purpose, the study uses symmetric and asymmetric ARDL and Granger causality procedures. The results confirm the existence of asymmetric behaviour of oil price, which is a key factor that fiscal authorities used for the decision about public expenditures. Furthermore, the result reveals that the evidence of the Keynesian hypothesis is observed in United Arab Emirates. While Kuwait fits both theories at a time and also confirms Wagner's law only in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the results support the spend‐and‐revenue hypothesis in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait while fiscal neutrality in United Arab Emirates. On the basis of conclusion, the study recommends that the government should re‐invest the surplus from oil receipt into other sectors of the economy on a priority basis that will reduce the negative effects of a decline in oil price.

Based on several small collections, new taxonomic and faunistic data on spiders of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon are presented. Six species are described as new to science: Dorceus saif Szűts & Zamani, sp. nov. (♂; Saudi Arabia), Loureedia melanconi Szűts & Zamani, sp. nov. (♂; Saudi Arabia) (both Eresidae), Leptopilos hajarensis Zamani & Marusik, sp. nov. (♀; UAE), Synaphosus dulcicola Zamani & Marusik, sp. nov. (♀; UAE) (both Gnaphosidae), Arctosa formosa Zamani & Marusik, sp. nov. (♂♀; UAE) (Lycosidae), and Prodidomus emiratus Zamani & Marusik, sp. nov. (♀; UAE) (Prodidomidae). In addition, the previously unknown male of Trichothyse golan (Levy, 1999) (Gnaphosidae) is illustrated and described. Finally, one new family record, 16 new generic records and 22 new species records are documented, and the previous record of Sahastata infuscata (Kulczyński, 1901) (Filistatidae) from Yemen is rejected.

The COVID-19 crisis has made the years 2020 and 2021 an unpolitical and spiritual crisis. It has affected virtually everybody in the world and introduced a new normal. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, people have been hooked on consuming news media to follow the development of this unprecedented disease. Subsequently, a new language with vocabulary, expressions, and metaphors has appeared in various languages, including English and Arabic. Dictionaries have added new words in English and revised others; they are now fully integrated into our everyday vocabularies. COVID-19 has changed the English language in many ways: it has brought previously obscure medical words to the forefront of everyday speech, made terms related to social isolation more common, and witnessed a shift in meaning in other terms. As linguists, researchers, and teachers gradually return to their classrooms next term (Spring, 2022) we undertook this study to identify 57 English terms, expressions, and metaphors that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, either in English-speaking countries or Arabic-speaking countries where English is a first or second language. We deemed the new terminologies necessary for EFL learners in the Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) countries. It can serve the purpose of making a list of these words and expressions to be taught to our EFL students at colleges of nursing and health science in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or any other equivalent colleges in the Arab World. The terms and expressions came from articles, magazines, and English and Arabic dictionaries published during the COVID-19 pandemic.

ObjectiveHere we use novel methods of phylogenetic transmission graphanalysis to reconstruct the geographic spread of MERS-CoV.We compare these results to those derived from text mining andvisualization of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) DiseaseOutbreak News.IntroductionMERS-CoV was discovered in 2012 in the Middle East and humancases around the world have been carefully reported by the WHO.MERS-CoV virus is a novel betacoronavirus closely related to a virus(NeoCov) hosted by a bat, Neoromicia capensis. MERS-CoV infectshumans and camels. In 2015, MERS-CoV spread from the MiddleEast to South Korea which sustained an outbreak. Thus, it is clearthat the virus can spread among humans in areas in which camels arenot husbanded.MethodsPhylogenetic analysesWe calculated a phylogenetic tree from 100 genomic sequencesof MERS-CoV hosted by humans and camels using NeoCov as theoutgroup. In order to evaluate the relative order and significance ofgeographic places in spread of the virus, we generated a transmissiongraph (Figure 1) based on methods described in 1.The graph indicates places as nodes and transmission events asedges. Transmission direction and frequency are depicted withdirected and weighted edges. Betweenness centrality, representedby node size, measures the number of shortest paths from all nodesto others that pass through the corresponding node. Places withhigh betweenness represent key hubs for the spread of the disease.In contrast, smaller nodes at the periphery of the network are lessimportant for the spread of the disease.Web scraping and mappingDue to the journalistic style of the WHO data, it had to be structuredsuch that mapping software can ingest the data. We used Import.io tobuild the API. We provided the software a sample page, selected thedata that is pertinent, then provided a list of all URLs for the software.We used Tableau to map the information both geographically andtemporally.ResultsGeographic spread of Mers-CoV based on transmissions identifiedin phylogenetic dataMost important among the places in the MERS-CoV epidemicis Saudi Arabia as measured by the betweenness metric applied toa changes in place mapped to a phylogenetic tree. In figure 1, thecircle representing Saudi Arabia is slightly larger compared to otherlocation indicating its high importance in the epidemic. Saudi Arabiais the source of virus for Jordan, England, Qatar, South Korea, UAE,Indiana, and Egypt. The United Arab Emirates has a bidirectionalconnection with Saudi Arabia indicating the virus has spreadbetween the two countries. The United Arab Emirates also has highbetweenness. The United Arab Emirates is between Saudi Arabia andOman and Between Saudi Arabia and France. South Korea, and Qatarhave mild betweeness. South Korea is between Saudi Arabia andChina. Qatar is between Saudi Arabia and Florida. Other locations(Jordan, England, Indiana, and Egypt) have low betweenness as theyhave no outbound connections.Visualization of geographical transmissions in WHO DataCertain articles include the infected individuals’ countries oforigin. ln constrast, many reports are in a lean format that includes asingle paragraph that only summarizes the total number of cases forthat country. If we build the API in a manner that recognizes featuresin the detailed reports, we can generate a map that draws lines fromorigin to reporting country and create visualizations. However, sinceonly some of the articles contain this extra information, mapping inthis manner will miss many of the cases that are reported in the leanformat.ConclusionsOur goal is to develop methods for understanding syndromicand pathogen genetic data on the spread of diseases. Drawingparallels between the transmissions events in the WHO data and thegenetic data has shown to be challenging. Analyses of the geneticinformation can be used to imply a transmission pathway but it ishard to find epidemiological data in the public domain to corroboratethe transmission pathway. There are rare cases in the WHO data thatinclude travel history (e.g. “The patient is from Riyadh and flew to theUK”). We conclude that epidemiological data combined with geneticdata and metadata have strong potential to understand the geographicprogression of an infectious disease. However, reporting standardsneed to be improved where travel history does not impinge on privacy.A transmission graph for MERS-CoV based on viral genomes and place ofisolation metadata. The direction of transmission is represented by the arrow.The frequency of transmission is indicated by the number. The size of the nodesindicates betweenness.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship among cultural values, using the dimension of power distance (PD), and employee job satisfaction in engineering firms in United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Design/methodology/approach – A well-known leading survey design, the Value Survey Module 94 developed by Hofstede (1980), is used in measuring PD as a quantitative methodology in the form of a questionnaire survey in UAE and Saudi Arabia. Findings – Power distance index (PDI) show variation not only at country level, but also at firm level. Consultative is found to be the most preferred manager type by the employees. Employees perceiving their managers to be consultative are the least afraid of disagreement with their managers. “Work”, “co-workers” and “operating procedures” find to be the major job satisfaction facets while “opportunities for promotion” and “reward” are the least attracted to job satisfaction. Age is found positively correlated with “pay”, “work”, “opportunities for promotion” and “benefits”. “Work” and educational qualification of the employees are negatively correlated but no significant correlations appear to exist with other job satisfaction facets. No significant correlation existed between education level and PDI is found. Originality/value – This paper is one of the first studies on PD and job satisfaction in UAE and Saudi Arabia. This can provide significant insight of how the Middle East countries, UAE and Saudi Arabia, react with globalization in the recent years. Recommendations for improving the existing job satisfaction in the Middle East countries are also explored.