Beirut / Blue Hours

American University of Beirut

Oracles used for testing graphical user interface (GUI) programs are required to take into consideration complicating factors such as variations in screen resolution or color scheme when comparing observed GUI elements to expected GUI elements. Researchers proposed fuzzy comparison rules and computationally expensive image processing techniques to tame the comparison process since otherwise the...

American University of Beirut

Placing a certain number of sinks at appropriate locations in WSNs reduces the number of hops between a sensor and its sink resulting in less exchanged messages between nodes and consequently less energy consumption. Since finding the optimal number of the sinks to be added and their locations is an NP Hard problem, we propose in this paper, a topological level solution that uses a meta-heurist...

The Reconstructions of Beirut

Beirut has successively been seen as the icon of the war-destroyed city, the paradigmatic case of “urbicide” and then as the symbol of a city rebirth through the reconstruction of its city center, praised in real estate journals and sold as a booming touristic destination to natives of the Arabo-Persian Gulf. Both images place Beirut as a city out of compare, out of norm, defining it as a uniqu...

Inadequacies of death certification in Beirut: who is responsible?

OBJECTIVE To assess the completeness of data on death certificates over the past 25 years in Beirut, Lebanon, and to examine factors associated with the absence of certifiers' signatures and the non-reporting of the underlying cause of death. METHODS A systematic 20% sample comprising 2607 death certificates covering the 1974, 1984, 1994, 1997 and 1998 registration periods was retrospectively...

Blue dye, blue skin.