Le film Rachida est sorti à la fin de la décennie noire en Algérie. Sa réalisatrice, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh, cherchait à privilégier un récit d’espoir pour les femmes et les enfants que l’on a oubliés parmi toute la violence. Cet espoir peut se lire à travers le féminin sacré inspiré de la Vierge Marie dans le Coran. Les quatre personnages principaux représentent les cinq noms, ou facettes, de Marie : Aïcha, la mère de Rachida, est القانتة(al-Qanitah) la pieuse ; Yasmina, l’amie, est الساجدة(al-Sajidah) l’orante ; Zohra, la jeune femme que les terroristes ont enlevée, est الطاهرة (al-Tahira) la purifiée ; et Rachida est الصدقة(al-Siddiqah) la porteuse de vérité. L’espoir, inspiré du féminin sacré, se propage de manière intergénérationnelle, de chaque femme aux autres, des femmes aux enfants. En analysant ces représentations de Marie j’explique comment les femmes et le féminisme musulman sont pluriels et pour établir un avenir sûr, il faut mettre en avant toutes ces facettes différentes.

During model-based systems engineering or software engineering activities, diagrams representing use cases (sequence diagrams) and diagrams representing object behaviors (state machine diagrams or statecharts) can conflict with each other in what is called an inconsistency. Detecting these inconsistencies is crucial to check if a given specification is realizable through the behavior that was conceived to meet it. This paper provides a systematic literature review of inconsistency detection methods for UML state machine diagrams and sequence diagrams. The selection process is aided by an open-source machine-learning tool, and resulted in the qualitative synthesis of 27 works. The included publications offer methods to tackle the detection of horizontal-semantic behavior inconsistencies.

This research paper explores the origins of the border industrial complex, current American policies supported by private corporations regarding border infrastructure, and the impact of these policies on Central American asylum seekers. My investigation draws from critical border studies literature on the existence of borders as political tools as opposed to ‘neutral lines’ demarcating sovereignty, interrogating how border policies fuel the neoliberal economy. Given this background, I examine the commercialization of human mobility using border policies at the U.S.-Mexico border as a case study. The question at the core of my investigation is: to what extent does corporate investment in U.S-Mexico border militarization obstruct protection for Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States? In response, I argue that the issue of corporate involvement in U.S. border policy is important to examine because of how it impedes the implementation of progressive immigration policy by centering the border security market, and decentering human rights. More specifically, I contend that border violence as funded by corporate investment in state bordering becomes a way of maintaining racial hierarchy through movement and citizenship restrictions against racialized migrants from the Global South.

The Syrian conflict is a significant humanitarian crisis. An estimated 6.5 million Syrians have been forced to flee the Syrian Arab Republic since 2011. In 2015, the Canadian federal government promised to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees, and expanded the number to 40,000 in 2017. Since 2015, Canada’s intake of Syrian refugees has exceeded 50,000, representing the largest number of refugees admitted in Canada since the Immigration Act of 1978. This paper reviews and analyzes the literature corresponding to Syrian refugees’ experiences as they transition to Canada by exploring key topics including sponsorship streams, employment, housing affordability, language acquisition, and educational opportunities. It examines obstacles in Syrian refugees’ successful integration into the aforementioned community and social services and underscores the importance of providing financial and material support for language acquisition and education opportunities to improve Syrian refugees’ acculturation process. The findings reveal two key themes in the literature—financial stability, and language and education—which are discussed in the context of their implications on Syrian refugees’ mental health. The paper discusses how the challenges of integrating into a host country can significantly undermine refugees’ ability to transition successfully. The review points to the importance of providing Syrian refugees with the necessary financial and material stability so as not to compound the stress and anxiety being experienced during the transition. The importance of language acquisition and education programs are also discussed in the literature review in the context of better facilitating Syrian refugees’ acculturation and contributing to positive mental health outcomes.

In the 1970s, the Philippine state implemented a labour-export policy to alleviate the country’s economic crisis. This policy centres the needs of employers at the expense of the rights and lives of Filipino migrants. As a consequence, many Filipino migrants find themselves in low-paying, precarious, and exploitative working conditions. However, as foreign employment of Filipino labour is tied to the state’s economic agenda, the Philippine state is caught between protecting the rights of its citizens and economic profits. In this essay, I argue that the Philippine state constructs ‘docile’ and ‘subservient’ migrant subjectivities to serve the state’s neoliberal interests. Although, as migrants learn to become acutely aware of their exploitation, they re-construct a subjectivity premised on challenging the Philippine state’s neoliberal interests through the help of transnational migrant activist groups. This essay employs a qualitative case study analysis of the Philippines’ foremost institution serving migrants, the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) and the largest transnational Filipino migrant activist group, Migrante International. I use a Critical Filipino Studies (FilCrit) framework to analyze these case studies. FilCrit recognizes that the institutionalization of migration under US colonization largely influences how Filipinos are incorporated into the global economy to this day. This essay finds that the goals of the Philippine state and migrant activist groups stems from their opposing values. The Philippine state is concerned about its neoliberal agenda, while migrant activist groups are concerned with Filipino migrants’ everyday lives.

as the workday began, Thomas Frazier experienced academic whiplash. First, the editors at Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology let him know that they had published his paper on a new autism trait measure. Then, an hour later, a colleague alerted him that the Daily Mail had covered it, with a splashy headline boasting the tool's ability to "diagnose autism with up to 95 percent accuracy." "I freaked out," says Frazier, professor of psychology at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio. According to Frazier, the data behind the new measure, the Autism Symptom Dimensions Questionnaire (ASDQ), are far too preliminary to justify its clinical use absent the addition of other validated measures.

Listen to this story: https://www.spectrumnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/audio-c4f117ae-9e13-448b-a879-14327e6eece8-encodings.mp3 A new metric called a motion impact score could help identify whether study participants' movements during functional MRI (fMRI) scans bias the correlations researchers glean from those data, according to a preprint posted to bioRxiv in December. Using the statistical approach, its creators found that 39 out of 45 traits they evaluated, including measures of cognitive function as well as physical traits such as body mass index (BMI), significantly correlated with head motion, even though the data had been corrected to remove such artifacts in advance. This so-called leftover motion could confound the results of many brain connectivity studies, the researchers say. Calculating a motion impact score, however, could help scientists plan studies that are better at sussing out real correlations while avoiding spurious ones. False negatives -in which head motion serves to weaken an apparent correlation -could be a particular problem for autism studies that use effect sizes estimated from non-autistic people, who tend to move less in the scanner than autistic people do, says study investigator Benjamin Kay, assistant professor of neurology at Washington University School of Medicine. "Those studies might be underpowered, because that extra residual motion artifact is obscuring what you really want to see." The new result is "another illustration that simply applying [existing] tools, while they do help, is insufficient to fully address, to the degree that it can be fully addressed, head motion," says Eric Porges, assistant professor in the clinical and health psychology department at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the study but has similarly found that head motion may affect fMRI results in older adults.

An altered eye reflex may distinguish children with mutations in SCN2A, one of the genes most strongly linked to autism, according to a new preprint. The simple test the researchers used to analyze the reflex "may be a useful clinical biomarker of SCN2A-related autism," says Alfred George, professor and chair of pharmacology at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, who was not involved in the work. "This has potential uses for diagnosis and as a 'read-out' for therapies."

https://www.spectrumnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Edited_Epidural.mp3 The spread of misinformation -and the way fear can burn through a landscape -was forefront in Tor-Arne Hegvik's mind when, in October 2020, he opened up his web browser and found a new autism paper in JAMA Pediatrics. Hegvik is a gynecologist and researcher at the University of Bergen in Norway, and the study, co-led by biostatistician Anny Xiang of Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC), made what appeared to be an improbable claim: The epidural analgesia given during labor is associated with increased chances of having a child with autism. Hegvik had never wondered whether epidurals could contribute to autism, and he didn't think anyone else had seriously considered it either. He assumed the association detailed in the paper was due to confounders -unaccounted-for factors that skew a result. Plus, he had clinical duties to attend to and patients to see. He tried to put it out of his mind. But the paper continued to plague him. It reminded him of Andrew Wakefield's infamous fraudulent statement that vaccines cause autism: Though the link was easy to disprove, it was exceedingly difficult to quash in the public consciousness. The epidural paper was not exactly that -Hegvik could see it was honest science -but the potential for harm felt similar. The decision to get an epidural requires clear, straightforward information. The Xiang paper, he worried, would muddy the waters. He couldn't turn away. So he emailed some of his colleagues and asked: Would anyone be interested in trying to refute this? Other worried researchers were also talking about the paper, united by the thought that the study's 1 / 4