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Abstract The objective of the present study is to address child and maternal malnutrition in nine African countries located in the Western sub-region of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) by incorporating three types of agricultural financing (domestic and external) along with energy poverty, human capital and corruption on malnutrition for the 1990–2019 period and present implications for Sustainable development goals (SDGs). This objective is realized by employing recently advanced panel techniques such as the second-generation panel econometrics techniques and the method of moments quantile regression (MMQR) approach. The estimated results reveal that agricultural credit and foreign aid in the agriculture sector significantly and negatively affect the malnutrition of children and mothers, while research spending in agriculture positively influences malnutrition. Energy poverty and human capital exert a negative and significant influence on child and maternal malnutrition, while corruption induces it. The study finally recommends several policy insights for the governments across the SSA region for tackling child and maternal malnutrition and advancing towards the achievement of SDG 3 through investment in SDG 4, SDG 7 and SDG 17.

Md Anwarul Azim Majumder,1 Abdulmuhaimin Aslam Khatib,2 Taha Alhassan,3 Mohammed S Razzaque2,3 1The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados; 2Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Erie, Pennsylvania, USA; 3Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine, University of Texas (UTRGV), Edinburg, Texas, USACorrespondence: Mohammed S Razzaque, Department of Medical Education, School of Medicine, University of Texas (UTRGV), 1204 W Schunior Street, Edinburg, Texas, 78541, USA, Tel +1 (956) 296 2314, Email mohammed.razzaque@utrgv.eduAbstract: This article describes the evolving landscape of medical education in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, emphasizing the renewed importance of public health, mental well-being, and career choices among medical students. The pandemic has prompted a significant shift in medical student’s career aspirations, highlighting the need for mental health support mechanisms within the medical education framework. Medical students’ career choices are influenced directly and indirectly by the challenges and experiences of the pandemic era, which are discussed in this article under four key themes: traditional values, global health interests and disparities, developing trends, and digital healthcare. There is an urgent need to adjust medical training to the new reality and share the future directions of the medical education landscape by embracing diverse career paths in medicine, integrating technology into medical training, adapting to the changing context of medicine, and strengthening collaboration and communication. The pandemic underscores the importance of evidence-based patient care, necessitating the preparation of tomorrow’s doctors to address the emerging healthcare challenges with resilience, adaptability, and a comprehensive understanding of both local and global health challenges.Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, mental health, career aspirations, medical students, impact

Currently, the world faces an existential threat of climate change, and every government across the globe is trying to come up with strategies to tackle the severity of climate change in every way possible. To this end, the use of clean energy rather than fossil fuel energy sources is critical, as it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and pave the way for carbon neutrality. This study examines the impact of the energy cleanability gap on four different climate vulnerabilities, such as ecosystem, food, health, and housing vulnerabilities, considering 47 European and non-European high-income countries. The study considers samples from 2002 to 2019. This study precedes the empirical analysis in the context of a quadratic relationship between the energy cleanability gap and climate vulnerability. The study uses system-generalized methods of the moment as the main technique, while panel quantile regression is a robustness analysis. Fixed effect and random effect models have also been incorporated. The study finds that the energy cleanability gap and all four climate vulnerabilities demonstrate a U-shaped relationship in both European and non-European countries, implying that when the energy cleanability gap increases, climate vulnerability decreases, but after reaching a certain threshold, it starts to increase. Development expenditure is found to be negatively affecting food and health vulnerabilities in European nations, while it increases food vulnerability and decreases health vulnerability in non-European nations. Regarding industrialization's impact on climate vulnerabilities, the study finds opposite effects for the European and non-European economies. On the other hand, for both groups, trade openness decreases climate vulnerabilities. Based on these results, the study recommends speeding up the energy transition process from fossil fuel energy resources towards clean energy resources to obtain carbon neutrality in both European and non-European groups.

Dina Keumala Sari,1 M Ichwan,2 Dewi Masyithah,3 Ridha Dharmajaya,4 Alfi Khatib5 1Department of Nutrition, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia; 2Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia; 3Department of Parasitology, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia; 4Department of Neurosurgery, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia; 5Kulliyah of Pharmacy, International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, MalaysiaCorrespondence: Dina Keumala SariDepartment of Nutrition, Faculty of Medicine, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Jl. Dr. Mansyur No. 5, Padang Bulan, Kec. Medan Baru, Kota Medan, Sumatera Utara, Medan, 20155, IndonesiaTel +62 81397177693Email dina@usu.ac.idPurpose: Obesity that occurs in adulthood is influenced by various factors, not only energy balance, especially concerning the amount of energy consumed, but also heredity. The hereditary factors of obese parents on childhood obesity have been studied, but what about adulthood? This study examines the relationship between a history of obesity in adolescence, and maternal and paternal incidences of adult obesity.Patients and Methods: This study was a cross-sectional study that included adult men and women aged 20– 60 years old. The subjects had no chronic or metabolic disease. This research was conducted from April to November, 2020, in North Sumatra Province, Indonesia. The parameters studied were demographics, daily food intake, anthropometry and a history of obesity in adolescence, and for the participants’ fathers and mothers. The statistical test used was the chi-squared test/Fisher test.Results: This study included 136 research subjects, 60 male and 76 female; based on the results of the study, 47.8% were found to be obese, but food intake showed a low intake (96.2%). There was a significant relationship between a history of obesity in adolescence and incidences of obesity (≥ 30 kg/m2) in the mother and father, with significance values of p=0.01, p=0.004, and p=0.001, respectively.Conclusion: This study found that there was a significant relationship between a history of obesity in adolescence and incidences of adult obesity (≥ 30kg/m2) in parents, but not with the level of food intake per day. The risk of obesity will increase further with a history of obesity in parents and obesity in adolescence, and this can be used to understand and prevent obesity.Keywords: adolescent, energy, food, heredity, anthropometry

This study examines the impact of religious and educational freedoms on prosperity. The system GMM model is applied by using the data of 45 lower-, middle-, and high-income countries from 2009 to 2018. The results show that religious and academic freedoms are positively and statistically significantly associated with prosperity. It is revealed from the results that the lagged impact of both religious and education freedoms has a higher impact on prosperity than the current level of both variables. Interestingly, the interaction term between academic and religious freedom is also positive and statistically significant, indicating that their combined effect further increases prosperity. Further, the interaction term between government effectiveness and gross fixed capital formation is introduced. Its impact is positive and significant, indicating that capital investment positively affects prosperity in the case of higher government effectiveness. This study uses gross fixed capital formation and trade openness as control variables and these variables have a positive impact on prosperity, but the impact of trade openness on prosperity is insignificant. Thus, this study recommends religious and education freedom to achieve prosperity, especially in low-income countries that are already lagging.

With the growing expectations from the field of education, increases the importance of effective school leadership. The school proves its effectiveness depending on various factors; the principal's leadership style is the main one. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of the female gender and national culture dimensions on the leadership styles of Emirati female school principals, as educational leaders, and the relationships that exist among the different variables. Explanatory sequential mixed method approach was used in two phases for this study. In the first phase, the quantitative data were collected using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (5X-short) survey and the cultural dimensions survey. In the second phase, the researcher conducted semi-structured interviews and qualitative observations. The findings of the study indicated that Emirati female leaders tend to be more transformational in their leadership styles while they still practice transactional leadership to a certain degree. They were found to be more "androgynous" carrying the qualities of both male and female leaders. In addition, the leadership styles and their elements proved to have a significant relationship to national culture dimensions except for management by exception (active). Future research should include a larger sample size and the perspectives of the followers as well. It is important to conduct the study in different organizational contexts not only in schools to confirm the finding that women use "androgynous" style in the United Arab Emirate and beyond.

Within the scope of this study, a psychoeducation program based on multicultural competencies and Berry's acculturation model was developed to improve the adjustment process of international students. In this study, an explanatory sequential design was used. The study group consisted of 34 international students who volunteered for the study. The quantitative results of the study indicated that the Culture-Based Adjustment Program significantly affected the personal and social adjustment of international students. However, it did not significantly affect the adjustment to the university environment, emotional adjustment, dating relationships, and academic adjustment. The qualitative analysis yielded five major categories: (a) expectations, (b) contributions, (c) evaluation of the program, (d) leader, and (e) suggestions. The findings of this study highlight the importance of psychoeducation programs in the adjustment process of international students.

IoT network is a promising technology, IoT implementation is growing rapidly but cybersecurity is still a loophole, detection of attacks in IOT infrastructures is a growing concern in the field of IoT. With the increased use of Internet of Things in different areas, cyber-attacks are also increasing proportionately and can cause failures in the system. IDS becomes the leading security solution. Anomaly based network intrusion detection (IDS) detection plays a major role in protecting networks against various malicious activities. Improving the security of loT networks has become one of the most critical issues. This is due to the large-scale development and deployment of loT devices and the insufficiency of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) to be deployed for the use of special purpose networks. In this article, the performance of several machine learning models has been compared to accurately predict attacks on IoT systems, the case of imbalanced classes was subsequently treated using the SMOTE technique. The Nystrom based kernel SVM is the first time used to detect attacks in the IoT network and the results are promising. The evaluation metrics used in the performance comparison are accuracy, precision, recall, f1 score, and auc-roc curve.

Providing constantly updated information on vegetation serves as a basis for studies of natural resources and ecological issues. This paper discusses the question related to an appropriate season(s) for classification vegetation cover in the Mediterranean region and detecting its changes using Landsat imagery. Autumn, spring, and multi-seasonal satellite images, captured in 2017, were used to classify vegetation cover in a part of the Lattakia province, Syria. The satellite images were classified using the random forest algorithm, and high spatial resolution satellite images Google Earth Pro were used as reference data. The results indicate better effectiveness of the autumn images over spring ones for vegetation cover classification with 73.6% and 62.4% overall accuracy, respectively. In addition, a comparison of autumn and multi-seasonal Landsat images indicates no significant statistical difference in the accuracy of vegetation cover classification at the significance level of 0.05, which illustrates the effectiveness of using autumn images to classify the vegetation cover of the Mediterranean region. Furthermore, the obtained results show the necessity of using additional features as the spectral channels may not be sufficient for mapping vegetation cover in the Mediterranean region with high accuracy.