PREVALENCE OF LIBRARY ANXIETY AMONG UNDERGRADUATE MEDICAL STUDENTS

This study aimed to explore the frequency of library anxiety among the medical students (first year to fourth year) of Khyber Medical College (KMC), one of the oldest medical institutes of Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Out of 1500 populations of the study, data were collected from 306 students using a convenient sampling technique. The AQAK library anxiety instrument was used to measure the respondents’ library anxiety level and significance differences with respect to respondents’ gender and their level/year of study. The study found that the respondents’ library anxiety level with respect to ‘‘library staff’ were little higher than the ‘user knowledge’. This study also reported that no significance difference was found between the male and female students with respect to library anxiety. However, the library anxiety mean score for the first-year students were little higher than the final year students. This study has not only filled a gap in the literature with respect to examining the library anxiety of medical students in the study context, but would also help the competent authority and medical librarians to formulate effective strategic plan to overcome the library anxiety level among the medical students, improve library services and provide users education

ACCOUNTABILITY AT CROSSROADS: GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES AND CONSEQUENCES IN PAKISTAN

This paper points to how anti-corruption efforts in Pakistan at the national and provincial levels actually contribute to their failure. The broad and flexible definitions of corruption in prevailing laws have led to miscarriages of justice, as numerous interpretations result in potential unfair targeting of individuals. The complex landscape of accountability in Pakistan also evolves from multiple institutional overlaps—lacking clear jurisdictional boundaries. A case in point is the use of plea bargaining as a corruption prevention model that faced criticism for being coercive as well as an infringement on one’s right to fair trial. The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has often been accused of violating fundamental rights protected in the Constitution of Pakistan, and the accountability procedures are seen as humiliating for civil servants. This paper discusses how the overall institutional-legal framework is shaped by its heavy dependence on the government that undermines the operational effectiveness of the Anti-Graft Bodies (A-GBs). It overviews anti-corruption efforts in Pakistan facing mainstream challenges: political-policy implications, legal-institutional inconsistencies, violations of rights, and operational inefficiency, which collectively hinder their effectiveness

Association of seed morphology with seedling vigor in wheat (Triticum aestivum L)

Phenotyping of 225 spring wheat genotypes was carried out to determine theassociation of seed morphological traits with seedling vigour traits. The seed lengthappeared to be key trait being significantly and positively correlated with seed thickness,seed width, and coleoptile length. The seed length was also positively but non-significantlyassociated with root length, shoot length and number of seminal roots. The seed length, seedthickness and seed width were the major contributors to diversity among genotypes. Themost diverse genotypes with respect to seed morphological traits and seedling vigor traitswere KANCHAN, LU-26, OASIS, SHAHKAR-95, and SHALIMAR-88. The overall effect ofseed length, seed width and seed thickness was positive on seedling vigor traits

Information Literacy among Faculty members in the Public Sector Medical Colleges of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-Pakistan

Purpose of the study: This study aims to evaluate faculty members\u27 information literacy skills in public sector medical colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Design/Methodology/approach: The descriptive research design was used to conduct and accomplish the study\u27s objectives. The research population consisted of faculty members at public sector medical colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa southern region. Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors, Lecturers, and demonstrators comprise the faculty. The adapted questionnaires of (Jan & Bahtti, 2018; Ullah, 2015; Sharma & Lata, 2019; and Rafique, 2014) were modified and used as data collection instrument. Key findings: Majority of the public sector medical college faculty recognizes the various sources of information, and they use both printed and online materials to identify needed information. The majority of faculty at these medical colleges consults monographs/textbooks regularly, preceded by online journals/medical databases. A good number of medical faculty members opted to use the HEC digital library to locate and access their contents. Delimitations of the study: This study is delimited to three public sector medical colleges operate in southern districts: of Khyber Medical University Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) in Kohat, the Gomal Medical College (GMC) in Dera Ismail Khan, and the Bannu Medical College (BMC) in Bannu. Practical implication(s): The findings of the study will motivate the policy makers and authorities of these three medical colleges in southern region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to enhance the information literacy skills of medical faculty. This practice will result into an effective medical education in the province. Contribution to the knowledge: No significant work has been done on the Faculty\u27s Information literacy skills at public sector medical colleges in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.. This study will add valuable literature to literary world

Genetic diversity in Balkhi, Hashtnagri and Michni sheep populations using SSR markers

Morphological and genetic diversity among the three neighboring sheep breeds native to Central valley of Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (KP, Pakistan) was investigated. A total number of 138 non relative individuals of Balkhi (46), Hashtnagri (44) and Michni (48) was sampled for morphological as well as molecular characters using 31 ovine specific SSR markers. Morphological observations and morphometric traits varied significantly among different sheep breeds. Balkhi having usually brown or white colour, with a tucked up fat tail was the larger breed. Hashtnagri is a medium sized breed; body covered with white wool, having long white tail, with a tail switch. The body colour of Michni sheep was usually brown or some times white. This breed is comparatively small in size with longer fat tail, hanging near  (33.3%) or below (66.7%) hock. Total number of 119 alleles was identified with mean number of 3.8 alleles per locus, ranging from 2 to 8. Twelve unique alleles  were identified in Michni population at different loci. Average gene diversity was higher in Michni (0.561). Inbreeding estimate (FIT) was significantly higher  (27.1%) among three breeds and was highest between Balkhi and Hashtnagri (31%), similarly highest gene flow (Nm = 60.4) and lowest population differentiation (FST = 4.3%) was estimated between these two  breeds. Maximum genetic distance was observed between Balkhi and Michni; however, Balkhi was genetically closed to Hashtnagri population. Balkhi and Michni were assigned at high accuracy to their respective population; however, the identity of Hashtnagri is obscure.Key words: Balkhi, Hashtnagri, Michni, simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, morphological characteristics, genetic diversity

¿Puede el Estado de derecho ser una herramienta eficiente de planificación de políticas para el desarrollo sostenible en Asia?

Sustainable Development is currently overriding problem in UN Millennium agenda of 21st century. Recently, is considered purely a matter of rule of law. Rule of law are now considered as bedrock for Sustainable Development in Asia. Keeping in view, this study evaluates the importance of Rule of law for Sustainable Development policy planning in after taking into consideration of 12 Asian countries over the period of 1984 up to 2012. The analysis depicts that rule of law is primarily important for Sustainable Development policy planning in Asia. For empirical analysis, we estimated the results through dynamic panel data model approach.El Desarrollo Sostenible actualmente es el principal problema en la agenda del Milenio de las Naciones Unidas del siglo XXI. Recientemente, se considera puramente una cuestión de estado de derecho. El estado de derecho ahora se considera la piedra angular del desarrollo sostenible en Asia. Teniendo en cuenta, este estudio evalúa la importancia del Estado de derecho para la planificación de políticas de desarrollo sostenible después de tener en cuenta a 12 países asiáticos durante el período de 1984 a 2012. El análisis muestra que el estado de derecho es principalmente importante para la política de desarrollo sostenible planificación en Asia. Para el análisis empírico, estimamos los resultados a través del enfoque del modelo de datos de panel dinámico

Robust Image Hashing Based Efficient Authentication for Smart Industrial Environment

[EN] Due to large volume and high variability of editing tools, protecting multimedia contents, and ensuring their privacy and authenticity has become an increasingly important issue in cyber-physical security of industrial environments, especially industrial surveillance. The approaches authenticating images using their principle content emerge as popular authentication techniques in industrial video surveillance applications. But maintaining a good tradeoff between perceptual robustness and discriminations is the key research challenge in image hashing approaches. In this paper, a robust image hashing method is proposed for efficient authentication of keyframes extracted from surveillance video data. A novel feature extraction strategy is employed in the proposed image hashing approach for authentication by extracting two important features: the positions of rich and nonzero low edge blocks and the dominant discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the corresponding rich edge blocks, keeping the computational cost at minimum. Extensive experiments conducted from different perspectives suggest that the proposed approach provides a trustworthy and secure way of multimedia data transmission over surveillance networks. Further, the results vindicate the suitability of our proposal for real-time authentication and embedded security in smart industrial applications compared to state-of-the-art methods.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61976120, in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant BK20191445, in part by the Six Talent Peaks Project of Jiangsu Province under Grant XYDXXJS-048, and sponsored by Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province, China.Sajjad, M.; Ul Haq, I.; Lloret, J.; Ding, W.; Muhammad, K. (2019). Robust Image Hashing Based Efficient Authentication for Smart Industrial Environment. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 15(12):6541-6550. https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2019.2921652S65416550151

Fog computing enabled cost-effective distributed summarization of surveillance videos for smart cities

[EN] Fog computing is emerging an attractive paradigm for both academics and industry alike. Fog computing holds potential for new breeds of services and user experience. However, Fog computing is still nascent and requires strong groundwork to adopt as practically feasible, cost-effective, efficient and easily deployable alternate to currently ubiquitous cloud. Fog computing promises to introduce cloud-like services on local network while reducing the cost. In this paper, we present a novel resource efficient framework for distributed video summarization over a multi-region fog computing paradigm. The nodes of the Fog network is based on resource constrained device Raspberry Pi. Surveillance videos are distributed on different nodes and a summary is generated over the Fog network, which is periodically pushed to the cloud to reduce bandwidth consumption. Different realistic workload in the form of a surveillance videos are used to evaluate the proposed system. Experimental results suggest that even by using an extremely limited resource, single board computer, the proposed framework has very little overhead with good scalability over off-the-shelf costly cloud solutions, validating its effectiveness for IoT-assisted smart cities. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Nasir, M.; Muhammad, K.; Lloret, J.; Sangaiah, AK.; Sajjad, M. (2019). Fog computing enabled cost-effective distributed summarization of surveillance videos for smart cities. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 126:161-170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpdc.2018.11.004S16117012