*Article* **A Comparative In Vitro Evaluation of the Anti-Inflammatory Effects of a** *Tisochrysis lutea* **Extract and Fucoxanthin**

**Elisabetta Bigagli 1, Mario D'Ambrosio 1, Lorenzo Cinci 1, Alberto Niccolai 2, Natascia Biondi 2, Liliana Rodolfi 2,3, Luana Beatriz Dos Santos Nascimiento 2, Mario R. Tredici 2,3 and Cristina Luceri 1,\***

**Abstract:** In this study, we compared the effects of a *Tisochrysis lutea (T. lutea)* F&M-M36 methanolic extract with those of fucoxanthin (FX) at equivalent concentration, on lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulated RAW 264.7 macrophages. The *T. lutea* F&M-M36 methanolic extract contained 4.7 mg of FX and 6.22 mg of gallic acid equivalents of phenols per gram. HPLC analysis revealed the presence of simple phenolic acid derivatives. The *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract exhibited a potent and concentrationdependent inhibitory activity against COX-2 dependent PGE2 production compared to FX alone. Compared to LPS, *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract and FX reduced the expression of IL-6 and of Arg1 and enhanced that of IL-10 and of HO-1; *T. lutea* F&M-M36 extract also significantly abated the expression of NLRP3, enhanced mir-223 expression and reduced that of mir-146b, compared to LPS (*p* < 0.05). These findings indicate that *T. lutea* F&M-M36 methanolic extract has a peculiar anti-inflammatory activity against COX-2/PGE2 and NLRP3/mir-223 that might be attributable to the known antiinflammatory effects of simple phenolic compounds found in the extract that may synergize with FX. Our data suggest that *T. lutea* F&M-M36 may serve as a source of anti-inflammatory compounds to be further evaluated in in vivo models of inflammation.

**Keywords:** microalgae; *Tisochrysis lutea*; fucoxanthin; inflammation; RAW 264.7; microRNA


*Editorial* **COVID-19 and the Creeping Necropolitics of Crimmigration Control**

**Robert Koulish 1,2**

> 1 MLAW Programs, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
2 Department of Government and Politics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a drastic impact on migration and migrants and immigration policies worldwide. Considering that over 250 million people have contracted the disease globally, includingin that figure 5.1 million deaths, there is hardly any part of the globe which has escaped government attempts to control migration in order to stop the spread of disease. Migrants, particularly those in detention, have been the most susceptible to COVID-19, and the most vulnerable to punitive COVID-19 politics, as the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on institutionalized populations (Turcotte 2021).

Governments have responded to COVID-19 with border closures, travel bans, and other disruptions to migrant flows world-wide. At first, these initial immigration responses were generally accepted as reasonable attempts to mitigate the spread of disease (Banulescu-Bogdan et al. 2020; O'Brien 2021). However, the obvious fact is that viruses are not easily deterred by border walls or gated ports of entry. Short of stopping the return of nationals or at least quarantining them upon arrival to their home country, deploying public health protocols for contact-tracing, social distancing, and supplying masks, immigration authorities can achieve little to mitigate the spread of the infectious disease.

This Special Issue was inspired by the observation that migration controls flourished despite their inability to mitigate the spread of the Coronavirus. More than 750,000 people in the U.S. died after former President Trump first imposed COVID-19 inspired travel restrictions in March 2020. Many countries including the U.S. have since deployed migration penologies as a pretext to deter and punish new arrivals. Migrant penologies include anti-immigrant narratives intended to distract public opinion from the governments' own inabilities to remain ahead of the virus and redirect growing public anxiety towards immigrants as a convenient and regrettably hate-filled scapegoat.

The Special Issue contends with this pretext, in particular the pattern of *how,* why and when (and also, who) migration-centered COVID-19 policies ended up punishing rather than protecting immigrants through this public health nightmare. The Issue follows a recent book Maartje van der Woude and I co-edited called *Crimmigrant Nations: Resurgent Nationalism and the Closing of Borders* (Koulish and van der Woude 2020). The book was published about a week before the virus hit and governments shut down borders around much of the world in spring 2020. The articles in this Special Issue grapple with regulating crimmigration in relation to COVID-19, following along similar lines as to those in our book. That is to say, the articles in this Special Issue draw direct and indirect reference to three overlapping theories of migration control catalogued by Weber and McCulloch (2018). The theories are (1) crimmigration, (2) new penology, and (3) enemy penology. These theories help understand efforts to criminalize, securitize, and even terrorize immigrants in the name of protecting public safety and national security. As much as these theories interrogate the harsh regulation of migrant life through controls, COVID-19 directs attention to the necropolitics of migration control.

Crimmigration highlights the *how* of migration and border control, with a focus on legal form and process (Weber and McCulloch 2018; Stumpf 2006). Crimmigration drew its name from immigration policies enacted during the 1990s that perversely blurred

**Citation:** Koulish, Robert. 2021. COVID-19 and the Creeping Necropolitics of Crimmigration Control. *Social Sciences* 10: 467. https://doi.org/10.3390/ socsci10120467

Received: 1 December 2021 Accepted: 1 December 2021 Published: 6 December 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

1

the distinctions between crime control and immigration law. This occurred within an immigration law framework that dilutes due process and other procedural safeguards for immigrants while importing a robust carceral regime to immigration driven by the private prison complex.

Second, new penology responds to the *why* of migration and border control, to bring immense and sophisticated technologies to bear on migration and migrant communities. Technologies are purposed to control mobility and migrants through surveillance, detention, and removal (Weber and McCulloch 2018). A deeper dive connects mobility and migration control to larger shifts in political economy and the preservation of white elite hegemony (Miller 2019; Mercille 2011; Xenakis and Cheliotis 2020; Koulish and van der Woude 2020). New penology scholars, including van der Woude and Van Lersel, have in this Issue applied Jonathan Simon's *Governing Through Crime* thesis to migration control (Bosworth and Guild 2008). Governing through migration rather than governing migration shifts from regulating borders through entry and exit requirements, to regulating migrants through punitive bordering, detention, and harsh expulsions (Koulish and van der Woude 2020).

Third, enemy penology describes the *who and when* of migration and border control (Krasmann 2007; Weber and McCulloch 2018). It starts with a triggering event (*the when*) by a perceived enemy (*the who*). The event could be real (the 9/11 catastrophe or COVID-19) or manufactured (migrant caravans heading to the U.S. border in 2018; border closures to asylum seekers in Poland during COVID-19). Similarly, *the who* can be real or imagined. The triggering event rationalizes the deployment of august state power: border closures, travel bans, and state of emergency declarations, followed by military deployment. Migrant control mechanisms also include surveillance, detention, and removal. What turns executive power into august power is the combination of vast resource allocation with the lack of accountability and oversight from the courts or legislature. Almost always, the who is constituted by people of color: Muslims after 9/11 and AAPI during COVID-19.

Anti-immigrant narratives inform public opinion against immigrants and increase their vulnerability to attack from governments and right-wing vigilantes. Throughout immigration history, pandemics have been associated with exclusionary narratives against foreigners. Nation-states have sought to blame racial and ethnic minorities as responsible for human suffering internally for the purpose of diverting attention from the governments' own failure to protect its people. Scapegoating the ethnic and racial 'other' during pandemics provides a through line for anti-immigration discourses generally. The anti-Asian message in Trump's "china-virus" tweets for example can be traced back to Justice Fields' opinion referring to *unassimilable alien hordes* in the *Chae Chan Ping* case in 1889. Chinese were similarly blamed for spreading smallpox at the end of the 19th century, and more recently for SARs, just as Muslims were put on alert by the moral panic generated after September 11.

This Special Issue features a critical examination of administering migration penologies and crimmigration during Covid in a variety of countries in Europe, Australia, and the United States. The reader will notice that the countries' immigration responses to COVID-19 can be pinpointed along a loosely defined spectrum of punitiveness from abolition to necropolitics. Where they fall on the spectrum is due to a variety of factors beyond the scope of this Special Issue, but include the following: governing type (democratic versus authoritarian) and currents of liberal rights versus ethnonationalism. A country's willingness to engage punitive migrant penologies presumably indicates the salience of ethnonationalism and authoritarianism within a country's politics. Were there a law and policy that foreshadows a country's embrace of authoritarian ethnonationalism, it is immigration law and policy. The through-line is to structural racism, overwhelming executive power, and a pre-Warren Court era application of due process and other procedural rights.

My reading of the authors shows government responses were the most punitive in the United States, U.K., Greece, and Poland, showing, for example, the rising tide of ethnonationalism in the U.S. The Dutch response was more temperate, hence coinciding with its social democratic institutions. The article on Spain highlights temporary abolition. The U.S. case under former President Trump, written by three authors, highlights the former President's infatuation with authoritarian and ethnonationalist power grabs at immigrants' expense, garnering a spot at the punitive side of this sliding scale. Poland's right leaning regime (Bartyzel 2021) similarly steers a punitive turn, and the U.K.'s Brexit policies and fancy with Trumpism helps explain its punitive governing of crimmigration under COVID-19.

The contributions in this Special Issue should be read through the three theoretical frames: The *how* of crimmigration, which focuses on law and policies that are intendedly punitive or punitive in their effects. Migrant penologies focus on the administration of the technologies of power regulating the life of migrant populations. The *why* is to render migrant populations productive or docile. The *who and when* that enemy penologies responds to occupy a similar terrain but on securitization rather than criminalization grounds. Enemy penologies helps authorities to distinguish Syrians and Belarusians at the Polish border (the former as enemy), for example, and ban Muslims from U.S. airports (Klaus 2020; Koulish and van der Woude 2020).

Additionally is the necropolitics of crimmigration informed by COVID-19. As much as the three theories contend with the harsh regulation of migrant life, necropolitics addresses the regulation of migrant death. The concept borrows from Giorgio Agamben's *Homo Sacer* (Agamben 1998) and was coined by Achille Mbebe (2019). Mbebe describes necropolitics as "the power to manufacture an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge—people for whom living means continually standing up to death ... (where) Nobody even bears the slightest feelings of responsibility or justice ... " (Mbebe 2019, pp. 37–38).

The concept helps to understand how in the thick of the pandemic governments refused to release immigrants from detention facilities, creating as an outcome the utterly avoidable risk of exposing large numbers of densely populated immigrants to COVID-19. Additionally, it describes the dehumanizing efforts to stigmatize, injure, and humiliate "those not considered to be one of us" (Mbebe 2019, p. 58). The necropolitics of crimmigration in the U.S. is associated with two Trumpian COVID-19 era enforcement practices: Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), forcing asylum seekers back into Mexico, and Title 42, expelling undocumented immigrants on public health grounds. MPP and Title 42 highlight the government's indifference to "small doses" of death at the border. As Human Rights First recently reported, "When the U.S. government delivers people seeking safety to danger in Mexico, through Title 42, or MPP, they face unimaginable violence and persecution" (21 October 2021). In sum, the concept of necropolitics sheds light on efforts to govern migrants through COVID-19.

In the following, I briefly introduce the authors' arguments in order from the least punitive to most punitive country case studies, from abolition to cruelty for its own sake.

In the first article, *Coronavirus and Immigration Detention in Europe: The Short Summer of Abolition?* Jose Angel Brandariz and Fernandez-Bessa provide a case study of Spain drawing on "the multi-scalar nature of mobility governance" in the EU. The case study of the national policy agenda in Spain demonstrates it as an outlier in the E.U. crimmigrationverse. Whereas most countries used COVID-19 to combat immigrants, Spain introduced an abolitionist detention stance during the summer of 2020. Spain closed detention centers and released immigrants as Spanish courts interpreted international law. Additionally, the authors contend with the harsh realities in other detention centers in the Canary Islands and elsewhere under Spanish control to show Spain's position is far from ideal. Still, the authors take a lessons-learned approach to consider a future in Europe that minimizes detention.

Maartje van der Woude and Van Lersel in *Governing Migration through Covid-19? Dutch Political and Media Discourse in Times of a Pandemic*, borrow Jonathan Simon's (Simon 2007) new penology framework to frame empirical research into the Dutch response to COVID-19 using crimmigration. Following Simon, the authors analyze the governing through migration thesis using key factors from Simon's original theory, the proximity and proportionality of government response to the (COVID-19) problem. They find the

Netherland's anti-immigration response is more temperate than some but more punitive than many EU countries.

In *The Exceptional Becomes Everyday: Border Control, Attrition and Exclusion from Within,* Regina Serpa compares crimmigration in the U.K. and the Netherlands. Of the two, the UK has the more coercive crimmigration environment, compared to the Netherland's spiriting a more temperate approach to immigrants in the time of COVID-19. The gist of Serpa's analysis focuses on 'welfare penalism', in which local U.K. housing authorities played 'soft cop' during COVID-19 by reporting homeless migrants to immigration authorities for removal.

In *Dealing with the 'Crimmigrant Other' in the face of a Global Public Health Threat: A Snapshot of Deportation during Covid-19 in Australia and New Zealand,* Henrietta McNeill addresses the tension between using crimmigration to fight COVID-19 and using COVID-19 to exacerbate crimmigration. She focuses on the challenge of detaining and deporting immigrants in the face of the pandemic to discover in both Australia and New Zealand that governments prioritized the constructed securitized threat over the real threat posed by COVID-19.

Byron Villagomez Moncayo's article, The Stigma of Being Venezuelan in Ecuador in the Pandemic Context, frames the crimmigration analysis through the tension between the Constitutional provision opening the door to immigrants and national security restrictions influenced by the United States. The arrival of Venezuelan refugees pushed Ecuador into the punitive camp of harsh xenophobic exclusions.

In *Covid-19 as the New State-Of-The-Art in Crimmigration Milieu*, Joanna Tsiganou, Anastasia Chalkia, and Martha Lempesi focus on Greece's crimmigration in the age of COVID-19. The authors' analysis shows similarities to the Polish situation but highlighting techniques of control over asylum seekers unprotected from COVID-19. Here the Greek state failed to provide for the public health of asylum seekers, specifically concrete screening. By caging asylum seekers in dystopian camps where social distancing is impossible, and excluding them from vaccines and COVID-19 tests, the authors identify new crimmigrant identities under the rubric of public health discrimination.

Witold Klaus in *The Porous Border Woven with Prejudices and Economic Interests: Polish Border Admission Practices in the Time of Covid-19,* shows how COVID-19 accentuates the harsh realities of crimmigration on migrants. As Klaus reports, Poland's COVID-19 response is "more of the same, only worse." Poland opened and closed the border in pursuit of economic and political interests rather than in response to the public health crisis. Borders were closed to asylum seekers following dictates of xenophobia to prevent entrance to Muslim asylum seekers, but were issuing protocols to accommodate Belarusian refugees, while also opening the border to migrant workers despite the pandemic. Klaus shows that the Polish asylum policy preferred to be governed by old demons rather than public health concerns and followed demands of the Polish labor market for migrant workers over concerns for the pandemic. At the same time, and Belarus refugees were still denied access to protocols protecting them from COVID-19.

Of all the countries' responses to COVID-19 using crimmigration, U.S. policy under Trump was extreme. The border wall could not prevent 750,000 deaths. Although detention decreased from approximately 50,000 per day in 2019, to 19,000 per day in 2020, detainees were excluded from anti-COVID-19 protocols, and, as a result, about 10% of detainees tested positive, with nine reported deaths. Although detention decreased from approximately 50,000 per day in 2019, to 19,000 per day in 2020 due to a federal court order, detainees were excluded from anti-COVID-19 protocols, and as a result about 10% of detainees tested positive, and there were nine reported deaths.

In *On the Other Side of the Looking Glass: Covid-19 Care in Immigration Detention,* Dora Schriro (Schriro 2009) provides an inside perspective on the U.S. detention system. Schriro is a former upper-level policy official inside DHS and the author of the "Schriro Report," a 2009 report that recommended decriminalizing detention through alternatives to detention and risk assessment. Unfortunately, ICE systematically undermined many of the

report's recommendations, positioning Schriro to take a more critical stance towards U.S. detention policy.

In *Detained During a Pandemic: Human Rights Behind Locked Doors*, Justine Stephanelli's take is similarly critical of U.S. detention during COVID-19. Stephanelli frames detention using human rights to show how far U.S. detention has strayed from human rights norms, and even fails much lower domestic standards still designed to mitigate substandard conditions and outright abuse. Stephanelli examines access to health care and counsel, two important tools to advance overriding public health concerns during the pandemic.

In *The House is on Fire but We Kept the Burglars Out: Racial Apathy and White Ignorance in Pandemic-Era Immigration Detention*, Wenjie Liao, Kim Ebert, Joshua Hummel, and Emily Estrada make use of content analysis to discover how activists and direct stakeholders responded to the COVID-19 crisis. Activists and stakeholders were represented by the ACLU, ICE, and the private prison industry (CoreCivic and GEO group). The article is framed by the recognition that crises have the potential and carry opportunities for radical change. They query the responses of stakeholders in the business of detaining immigrants for signs of new approaches to detention. To follow the thread of the Special Issue, the authors show that the health of detainees are not much of a concern for ICE during COVID-19. Additionally, ICE manufactured an alternative storyline featuring "COVID fraud" which adds to the growing list of enemy penologies.

The articles in this Special Issue show how the pandemic exacerbated the perversions of crimmigration to the immigrants' harm. Perversions that flipped a civil process into a largely privatized criminal juggernaut and that endeavors to fill detention beds and contain migrants by the thousands in closely confined spaces.

The authors share the intent to unpack the criminalization of migration. Their contributions help to understand how different countries governed migrants through COVID-19. This introduction is in part intended to guide the comparison along a heuristic scale of punitiveness from abolition to regulating death.

It is my hope that this issue contributes to a growing movement of activist scholarship pointing away from the punitive narratives and techniques that deny justice under immigration law, and towards a process that is fair and respects human dignity. As much as COVID-19 shows governments manipulating crisis as a tool to exacerbate migrant controls, it also reveals a yearning for an alternative paradigm that applies due process and fair procedures to immigrants and provides them with safe routes to membership status in their new destination.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.


**6. Recommendations**

The author has conducted a research of dynamics of region investment appeal of the Kaluga region—the leader in formation of favorable investment climate for foreign investors and to creation of industrial parks in Russia. It is as a result proved that in connection with imposition of economic sanctions the area has faced development problems, namely, deterioration in a solvency of the population, employment and effectiveness of activity of small business. All this has brought to rating downgrade of area to "National rating a state of investment climate in territorial subjects of the Russian Federation." For large businesses in the Kaluga region, the technology of creating industrial parks is effectively applied.

### **7. Conclusion**

Author examines the effectiveness of region government policy on investment policy. Investment policy among her works plays a major role, through the human, innovation, and financial side and the development of strategies to attract investment. For realization of statistical research in Russia regions, she proposes normative model of region investment appeal, monitoring effectiveness of government and business for the development of the region. It is as a result proved that in connection with imposition of economic sanctions the leaders in formation of favorable investment climate in Russia regions have faced development problems. She proved that the imposition of sanctions in 2014 significantly affected the investment climate of the Kaluga region, since its economy is more dependent on the activities of foreign investors. For other leaders—the Tula, Voronezh, and Moscow regions, Moscow and Russia in general, the sanctions played a stimulating role.


**2.10 ZipTip**

After digestion and drying of peptide samples, some were desalted and purified by the use of ZipTipC18® pipette tips (Millipore, Billerica, MA, USA). Samples were diluted up to 10 µL with 0.1% TFA. A ZipTip was wet by loading 3x10 µL with 50% ACN and discarding the liquid. Ziptip was equilibrated by loading 3x10 µL of 0.1% TFA and discarding the fluid before peptide sample was carefully loaded into the ZipTip by pipetting. The ZipTip was washed with 5x10 µL of 0.1% TFA before peptides were eluted with 10 µL 50% ACN.

#### **2.11 Mass spectrometry**

Peptides obtained after digestion were mixed 1:1 with matrix, α-Cyano-4-hydroxycinnamic acid (CHCA, 0.02 mg/mL) or 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid (DHB, 0.02 mg/mL) in 70% ACN/0.3% TFA, and then spotted onto a stainless steel target plate. Analyses of peptide masses were performed using MALDI TOF-MS (Voyager DE PRO; Applied Biosystems) equipped with a 337 nm N2 laser operated in reflector mode with delayed extraction. Positive ionization, a delay time of 200 ns, and an accelerating voltage of 20 kV were used to collect spectra in the mass range of 600–3600 Da. Data processing of the spectra was performed in a Data Explorer TM Version 4.0 (Applied Biosystems). External mass calibration with a standard peptide mixture and internal calibration using known trypsin autolysis peaks (*m/z* 842.5100, 1045.5642, 2211.1046) were also performed prior to the database search. For tandem MS analysis, the digested peptides were dried and dissolved in 10 µL 0.1% TFA. The peptides were desalted and purified by using ZipTipC18® columns. Elution was acidified by the addition of 1% formic acid. About 2 µL of the sample was applied into a silver-coated glass capillary and analyzed by a hybrid (triple quadrupole-TOF) mass spectrometer (API Q-STAR Pulzer; Applied Biosystems) equipped with a nanoelectrospray ion source (MDS-Protana, Odense, Danmark) operated in the nanopositive mode. Data processing was performed with Analyst QS software (Applied Biosystems). Fragmentation spectra were interpreted manually.

#### **2.12 Database search**

Peptide masses (major peaks) in the spectra were submitted to database search. NCBI and Swiss-Prot were used with Aldente or MS-Fit as search engines. Restrictions were human species, mass tolerance >75 ppm in most of the searches, maximum one missed cleavage, and cysteine modification by carbamidomethylation. MS-Digest, MS product, and BLAST search was used for protein identification of the derived tags resulting from amino acid sequencing with MS/MS. In peptide mass fingerprinting, protein matches with p-values below 0.05 are used and with LC-MS/MS analyses an FDR < 1 % is considered significant.


**Author details**

Ana Paula Urzedo1,2\*, Mariane Martins Manso1,3,4 and Thaisa Macarini de Faria5,6,7

\*Address all correspondence to<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


*Edited by Miroslav Choma*

In the last few decades, electric drives have found their place in a considerable number of diverse applications. They are successfully replacing some other traditional types of drives owing to their better performance and excellent controllability. The introduction of electric drives is in most cases also beneficial from the ecological point of view as they are not directly dependent on fossil fuels and an increasing part of electric energy they consume is generated in renewable energy sources. This book focuses on applications of electric drives that emerged only recently and/or novel aspects that appear in them. Particular attention is given to using electric drives in vehicles, aircraft, non-road mobile machinery, and HVAC systems.

Photo by zhu difeng / DollarPhoto

New Applications of Electric Drives

New Applications of

Electric Drives

*Edited by Miroslav Choma*


**3. Methodology**

This study was conducted in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). A review of relevant past literature was undertaken to understand the state of research in the area of traffic sign comprehension levels among motorists. Traffic comprehension studies at the global, regional and country level were explored. The UAE is a melting pot of people from across the globe working or visiting for tourism. Despite the efficient public transportation, residents often opt to own and drive their own cars, resulting in a highly diverse respondent population within the survey sample. A Likert-based questionnaire was designed based on similar ones used for past studies by Al-Madani and Al-Janahi [11]. The questionnaire was composed of two parts. Part one intended to collect information about drivers' age, gender, nationality, marital status, education level, number of years having a driving license and whether they have multiple ones, the number of fines and number of accidents they have had. Part two of the questionnaire was designed to present to the respondent a list of 18 traffic signs (including regulatory, warning, and guide sign types) with a multiple-choice query so they could pick the meaning of the traffic sign from the offered choices.

Purposive sampling technique [24] was adopted for the administration of the questionnaires. The respondents were chosen among visitors to three major shopping malls within Abu Dhabi, including Marina mall, Al Wahda mall and Abu Dhabi Mall. Due to the often high temperatures, these are the places many residents like to visit and stay during the day, engaging in shopping, dining and amusement activities for children. The parking managers at the three malls were used to distribute the questionnaires to drivers on their way in and they dropped off the questionnaires on their way out. About 203 questionnaires were returned out of the 300 that were distributed. However, only 200 were used for the analysis; three questionnaires were removed for incomplete information. The number of respondents was comparable with previous studies that reported 32 respondents, 59 respondents and 53 respondents used by Alnuaimi and Al Mohsin [25], Ruqaishi and Bashir [26] and Oyegoke and Al Kiyumi [27], respectively. The response rate of about 67% can be regarded as good considering the low responses to surveys within the GCC, knowing that the average response rate for survey data collection from organizations was 35.7% [28].

#### **4. Results**

The analyses involved 200 respondents who owned a UAE drivers' license as a minimum requirement to be eligible to complete the questionnaire. The respondent's educational profile showed that there were five respondents with a PhD., 10 respondents with a Master's degree, 85 respondents with a B.Sc. degree, 36 with a Diploma certificate and 64 respondents with a high school certificate. In terms of marriage status, there were 88 married and 112 single respondents within the sample. The respondents were a rich reflection of the basic profile of Abu Dhabi's residents, with 20 respondents from Europe, 10 Americans, 42 Asians, 19 Africans and 109 Middle Easterners, as shown in Table 1 below.

**Table 1.** Crosstab marital status vs. region of respondents.

A further analysis of the respondents' profile, shown in Table 2, revealed that respondents with only one country's drivers' license constituted 50.5%, while respondents with over three countries' drivers' license constituted only 4% of the total respondents. The respondents' profile also showed that 170 respondents drove their private cars, 12 were taxi drivers, 7 drove a bus or a lorry, while 11 rode motorcycles.

**Table 2.** Crosstab of vehicle type vs. number of drivers' licenses.

A normality test was conducted on the data to determine the distribution and decide whether parametric or non-parametric procedures would be used in the analysis. Both Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk tests, presented in Table 3, revealed that the data violates normality assumptions, hence non-parametric procedures were employed in analyzing the data [29].

#### **Table 3.** Tests of normality.

a Lilliefors Significance Correction.

There are two variables within the data set that qualify for analysis using the Mann-Whitney U test for independent samples: they are the gender and marital status variables, while the Kruskal-Wallis H test was used for independent samples with more than two categories. The Mann-Whitney U test to determine whether there exists a statistically significant difference in responses between the genders (males and females) and respondents' marital status returned non-significant results, indicating that these independent variables did not affect road sign comprehension in any way, as shown in Table 4 below.

Kruskal-Wallis H test was conducted on the independent variables of age, academic qualifications, type of vehicle driven, and the region of origin of the respondents. The results shown in Table 5 reveal that there was no statistically significant difference across the respondents based on age of respondents (*p*-value = 0.184); academic qualification (*p*-value = 0.217); type of vehicle driven (*p*-value = 0.541); and region of respondents (*p*-value = 0.390). The implication of this result is that road sign comprehension capacity is not affected by a driver's age, academic qualification, type of vehicle or the geographical region from which the driver originates. This last result is especially important given the fact that non-citizen residents in the UAE are treated based on their country of origin when seeking to convert their home-country drivers' licenses to a UAE drivers' license. However, the test revealed that there was a statistically significant difference based on respondents' number of licenses.

**Table 5.** Kruskal Wallis H test results.

To investigate further and determine which group was responsible for the difference, a Kruskal-Wallis one-way ANOVA was conducted, and the results are shown in Table 6 below. This test compares the median of the distribution to determine which group differs from the others [29]. The group with more than three licenses was responsible for the difference, even though the number of cases in this group was very small (8). However, due to their very small number, it would be unwise to generalize the results of this research endeavor.

**Table 6.** Kruskal-Wallis One-Way ANOVA test.

The overall average performance of the study sample was 77% across all 200 respondents in terms of their ability to correctly recognize the road traffic signs presented to them. This is an improvement on the earlier study which found a 56% average performance in the comprehension of traffic signs [11]. The performance of the sample is shown in Table 7. The performance of the respondents was below 90% on 8 out of the 18 road signs that were presented. Good comprehension of road signs reduces driving mistakes on the road, and consequently a reduction of accidents on the roads. However, the government relies on punitive measures such as fines to ensure adherence and compliance. As the results above reveal, there are a couple of areas where more sensitizations will be required, especially because all the signs used in the questionnaire were taken from the UAE's Emirates Driving Institutes' (EDI) Guidance chart for road signs, road markings and traffic signals.

A further breakdown of the performance of the respondents according to gender (see Table 8) reveals a very interesting trend. A higher percentage of males failed to correctly name each of the "advance warning signs" they were presented compared to their female counterparts. This finding is contrary to the earlier GCC-wide study by Al-Madani and Al-Janahi [11] who found that male drivers performed better than females.

Interestingly, all the road signs where the respondents failed to pick the correct answer were contained in the "advance warning signs" section of the EDI Guidance chart. Therefore, it has become pertinent that training instructors and police driving assessment officers pay more attention to these areas when training or assessing potential drivers, respectively. Furthermore, the government should consider a traffic sign retest exam for all drivers when they apply for their driving license renewal. While the importance of driver education is recommended [20] and aggressive campaigns have been suggested [21], it has also been empirically proven that driver training [3] holds the most potent potential for enhancing safety on our roads.

**Table 7.** Road sign comprehension performance.

**Table 8.** Percentage of the seven road sign comprehension failures by gender.

#### **5. Discussion**

As indicated earlier, the respondents were a rich reflection of the basic profile of Abu Dhabi's residents, which makes the study results more realistic and reflects the real prevailing situation of sign comprehension of drivers in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

The results revealed that there was no statistically significant difference in responses between the genders (males and females) and respondents' marital status, indicating that these independent variables did not affect road sign comprehension in any way. Both results tend to be an improvement on an earlier study conducted by Al-Madani and Al-Janahi [11] across the GCC countries. However, the majority of earlier studies have consistently found that differences exist between the genders when it comes to trafficrelated issues and accidents [30–33]. Cordellieri et al. [30] and McKenna et al. [32], however, found that these differences do not exist in terms of driving risk perception, while the SIRC [33] argued that these differences can best be explained by virture of fundamental evolutionary differences in behavior and psychology rather than levels of competence and driving skills. In a related study, Massie and Campbell [31] found that the differences witnessed between male and female drivers disappear by the age of 60 and onwards. The results from this study may, however, have been impacted by the low number of female respondents, which was about 27%. Another possible explanation could be the large number of under 40 respondents (76%), since it has been found that age tends to mediate the observed difference [31,34].

Moreover, several earlier studies on gender revealed that males were in general better than females regarding traffic sign comprehension [19,35]. Al-Madani and Al-Janahi [36] indicated that posted signs were comprehended better by male drivers than females in Arab, European and American countries. Similarly, Hawkins Jr et al. [37] reported that men better recognized one fifth of the warning signs correctly. When education background is controlled for, the differences between males and females may become less remarkable [35]. Gender was found to have no statistically significant impact in a study that considered male and female European and American drivers having at least undergraduate degrees [11]. Likewise, Ng and Chan [38] indicated that there was no significant difference for traffic sign guessability between males and females of similar education levels. In regards to marital status, the findings of this study were in line with the finding of Ismail [19], who also found that marital status had no significant effect on the comprehension level of drivers.

The results revealed that there was no statistically significant difference across the respondents based on age, academic qualifications, type of vehicle driven and region of respondents. The implication of this result is that road sign comprehension capacity is not affected by a driver's age, academic qualification, type of vehicle and the geographical region from which the driver originates. These results disagree with Al-Madani and Al-Janahi [11], who found that the driver's education level, income range and nationality impacted ability to correctly identify traffic signs in countries within the GCC. However, this could be interpreted as an improvement in the training and testing methods in Abu Dhabi. Previous studies in general indicated that drivers' comprehension of traffic signs increased with increasing education levels [19,35,38].

As presented in the Results section, the overall average performance of the study sample was 77%, reflecting respondents' ability to correctly recognize the road traffic signs presented to them. This result can be considered as an improvement on the earlier study which found a 56% average performance in the comprehension of traffic signs, and 62% for the UAE in particular [11]. Similar studies showed that drivers could not comprehend a large percentage of the road signs presented to them [12]. In Turkey, participants correctly identified 81% of the signs presented [13]. In Kano city, Nigeria, it was found that the average traffic sign comprehension level was as high as 79% [14]. A study of drivers' sign comprehension across four countries (Poland, Finland, Canada and Israel) found that on average the drivers only identified 58.5% of the signs correctly [5]. This goes to show that the problem is not limited to developing countries only, as developed countries are also struggling.

The timeliness and the robustness of traffic sign comprehension while driving is very important to drivers. Safe driving and accident avoidance can be ensured when a timely visual recognition of traffic signs takes place [21,39,40]. Zhang et al. [41] clustered the factors that affect a traffic sign's visual recognizability into three groups: (1) geometric factors of traffic sign, such as sign's size, placement, mounting height, aim, depression angle, occlusion angle, curvature of road and changing road surface [41]; (2) movement factors of vehicle, such as speed, Geometric Field Of View (GFOV), which decreases with speed being increased [42], and height and direction of line of sight which governs whether the traffic sign is contained by the GFOV; and (3) other factors, for example, weather conditions [43], lighting conditions [44], drivers' view reaction time which is affected by drivers' age and sight capabilities [44], and traffic density cognitive burden [45]. Moreover, occlusion may cause interruptions to visual continuity, thus affecting the recognition of the traffic signs [46]. Considering the abovementioned factors that affect the recognizability of the traffic sign in real-life driving practice, it is expected that the level of comprehension of drivers will reduce to an extent that might be significant if the above factors are not considered in the design and placement of these signs.

Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) systems have recently become common in car manufacturing industries. Road safety enhancement can be achieved using TSR technology by providing timely warnings and dynamically assisting drivers in adhering to posted speed limits [47]. The most basic TSR systems employ vehicle-mounted cameras for identification of traffic signs. Their main function is to notify the driver of near traffic signs in a process that starts with scanning the roadside for signs, then using real-time image processing software to identify and inform the driver by a sound or displaying a symbol on the vehicle's dashboard panel [48]. Zhang et al. [41] indicated that the most current traffic sign detection and classification methods are based on color and shape information within images or videos. These methods use color information to segment the sign candidate area, and then to extract the traffic sign. Challenges to the vision-based TSR systems include variations in lighting and weather conditions, occluded signs and image distortion due to vehicle motion [41,48]. Zhang et al. [41] pointed out that there are different methods for recognition evaluation (simulator and image methods and naturalistic driving experimentation), but each has its own limitations. As indicated earlier, deployment of TSR systems will bring great enhancement to road safety and reduce accident involvement. Meanwhile, limitations to TSR deployment should be addressed, which include fixing conflicts in signage design, cooperation between the vehicle industry and road operators to achieve reliability of the TSR system, and adaptation with continuous development of the TSR technology which is expected to become more accurate and more reliable [48].

The study outcomes clearly show that traffic safety can be enhanced by means of providing well maintained, readable and well-placed signs; driver education and training; inclusion of TSR technology into the transportation system; and consideration of traffic sign retest exams for all drivers when they apply for their driving license renewal.

#### **6. Conclusions**

Traffic signs are components of road infrastructures that are meant to assist road users in safely navigating to their destinations. This study sought to assess the comprehension level of drivers in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (UAE). The respondents' overall performance was an improvement on earlier studies, however, there is still much to be improved upon. Although earlier studies found that driver's age, marital status, gender, nationality, level of education and type of vehicle all had a statistically significant impact on road sign comprehension, the data analysis for this study did not support such a conclusion. Furthermore, contrary to earlier studies, a higher percentage of males failed to correctly identify the "advance warning signs" compared to female respondents. One of the most critical findings from this study is the ability to identify the category of road signs that are problematic to drivers in Abu Dhabi. This finding should assist driving instructors and police driving assessment officers in redesigning their teaching materials and assessments, respectively. The fact that despite increased fines driving violations persist points to the need to shine a spotlight on the training of drivers and the assessment methods for issuing licenses, as well as requirements for license renewal.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, T.M.A.-R.; methodology, T.M.A.-R.; formal analysis, T.M.A.-R., A.A.U.; resources, T.M.A.-R., A.A.U.; data curation, T.M.A.-R., A.A.U.; writing—original draft, T.M.A.-R., A.A.U.; writing—review and editing, T.M.A.-R., A.A.U.; supervision, T.M.A.-R.; project administration, T.M.A.-R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research did not receive any specific grants from any funding agencies.

**Data Availability Statement:** All data of this research were presented in the article.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors would like to thank the following individuals for their help in distributing and collecting the survey questionnaires: Samir Aldraidi, Mahmoud M. Ayman, Abdullah S. Abueidda and Mohammed S. Almansoori.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **References**