With a contingent of around 1,500 fighters, Morocco is considered one of the main exporters of foreign fighters to Syria. Until 2014, Moroccan authorities, who were content to see their own jihadis leave and add to the pressure on Bashar al-Assad, mostly turned a blind eye to networks of recruitment. Since the dramatic rise of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, concern over local repercussio...

OBJECTIVE to examine the associations between domains of chronic diseases, social, psychological and environmental factors and long-standing and limiting long-standing illness among older people. DESIGN cross sectional survey. SETTING national sample living in private households. SUBJECTS 999 adults aged 65 years and over, mean age 73.2 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES self-reports of long-...

SUMMARY. Likelihood ratio tests are used to test ordered hypotheses involving the parameters of k independent samples from an exponential family. For the test of constancy of the parameters versus an ordered alternative, the likelihood ratio test statistic is asymptotically distributed as a mixture of k chi-squared distributions under the null hypothesis. This paper derives an asymptotic expans...

In this paper back-propagation artificial neural network (BPANN) with Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm is employed to predict the limiting drawing ratio (LDR) of the deep drawing process. To prepare a training set for BPANN, some finite element simulations were carried out. die and punch radius, die arc radius, friction coefficient, thickness, yield strength of sheet and strain hardening exponent ...

PURPOSE We compared strain ratio vs. qualitative elastography for the further differentiation of focal breast lesions, with special focus on limiting factors. MATERIALS AND METHODS 215 patients with 224 histologically proven breast masses (116 malignant, 108 benign) were prospectively examined using a high-end ultrasound system (Philips iU22) with serial elastography function. B-mode scans an...

We consider a one-dimensional, transient random walk in a random i.i.d. environment. The asymptotic behaviour of such random walk depends to a large extent on a crucial parameter κ > 0 that determines the fluctuations of the process. When 0 < κ < 2, the averaged distributions of the hitting times of the random walk converge to a κ-stable distribution. However, it was shown recently that in this...