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This project fuses the conceptual frameworks of Taylor’s Theory of Modern Social Imaginary, Foucault’s Archaeology and Genealogy, and Gadamer’s Hermeneutics that merged in the Fusion of Horizons. I adopt an amalgam of the Hermeneutic Approach and Auto ethnography for methodology frameworks. The people of Pakistan are embedded in three contesting social imaginaries as a result of three parallel education systems. These strands reflect class-based system of education. Pakistan’s education systems can be divided into the Elite School System, the Government Schools and the Madrassa Schools (Seminaries). I present and interpret my own example as a schema for the middle classes and how the transitions from the religious embeddings of my grandfather shifted to dualism in my father, and finally how I acquire the liberal worldview due to the modern education. I retrieve the liberal traditions and a workable model for Pakistan. These retrievals may help develop a fusion of divergent horizons.

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/13612/Jun23-1905.pdf?sequence=2

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/19300/Nov02-1895.pdf?sequence=2

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/15397/Nov13-1901.pdf?sequence=2

Rising global temperatures over the last decades have increased heat exposure among populations worldwide. An accurate estimate of the resulting impacts on human health demands temporally explicit and spatially resolved monitoring of near-surface air temperature (Ta). Neither ground-based nor satellite-borne observations can achieve this individually, but the combination of the two provides synergistic opportunities. In this study, we propose a two-stage machine learning-based hybrid model to estimate 1 × 1 km2 gridded intra-daily Ta from surface skin temperature (Ts) across the complex terrain of Israel during 2004–2016. We first applied a random forest (RF) regression model to impute missing Ts from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Aqua and Terra satellites, integrating Ts from the geostationary Spinning Enhanced Visible and InfraRed Imager (SEVIRI) satellite and synoptic variables from European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts' (ECMWF) ERA5 reanalysis data sets. The imputed Ts are in turn fed into the Stage 2 RF-based model to estimate Ta at the satellite overpass hours of each day. We evaluated the model's performance applying out-of-sample fivefold cross validation. Both stages of the hybrid model perform very well with out-of-sample fivefold cross validated R2 of 0.99 and 0.96, MAE of 0.42°C and 1.12°C, and RMSE of 0.65°C and 1.58°C (Stage 1: imputation of Ts, and Stage 2: estimation of Ta from Ts, respectively). The newly proposed model provides excellent computationally efficient estimation of near-surface air temperature at high resolution in both space and time, which helps further minimize exposure misclassification in epidemiological studies.

Publisher Copyright: © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The hepatitis C virus (HCV) epidemic was forecasted through 2030 for 15 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and the relative impact of two scenarios was considered: increased treatment efficacy while holding the annual number of treated patients constant and increased treatment efficacy and an increased annual number of treated patients. Increasing levels of diagnosis and treatment, in combination with improved treatment efficacy, were critical for achieving substantial reductions in disease burden. A 90% reduction in total HCV infections within 15 years is feasible in most countries studied, but it required a coordinated effort to introduce harm reduction programmes to reduce new infections, screening to identify those already infected and treatment with high cure rate therapies. This suggests that increased capacity for screening and treatment will be critical in many countries. Birth cohort screening is a helpful tool for maximizing resources. Among European countries, the majority of patients were born between 1940 and 1985. A wider range of birth cohorts was seen in the Middle East and Asia (between 1925 and 1995). Peer reviewed

This study replicates and extends the study done by Phan, Sharma and Narayan (2015) using intraday data from two widely available exchange traded funds (SPY and USO), before and after the recent regime change, which was represented by the drop in crude oil prices of 2014. Phan, Sharma and Narayan (2015) use data from futures contracts to demonstrate that lagged trading information like bid-ask spread, number of shares traded and price volatility, from the same market and cross-market, when incorporated in a single volatility prediction setup, can significantly improve future volatility prediction for equity and crude oil markets. The main findings of our study confirms the conclusion reached by the reference paper and also demonstrate that these results hold before and after the drop in crude oil prices, which occurred in 2014.

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/22741/Dec25-1886.pdf?sequence=2

https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/22742/Dec29-1886.pdf?sequence=2