Contemporary Issues in Current Account Operations in Pakistani IBs - Sharia Compliant Solution

Contemporary Sharia scholars have three stances about the Current Account Operations in Pakistani Islamic Banks (IBs) i.e., (i) Ijarah based contract (ii) Wadi'ah based contract, and (iii) Qard based contract. This paper is an attempt to delve into the root causes of the differences of scholars and to find the Sharia-compliant solution acceptable for all. Descriptive as well as applied approaches are used in this paper. Clearing of ambiguity on this issue may result in twofold benefits: from the public point of view, it would satisfy practising Muslims which may result in form of huge deposits in this account (ii) from IBs viewpoint the Current Account is a bonus deposit

Allometry and growth of eight tree taxa in United Kingdom woodlands.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0As part of a project to develop predictive ecosystem models of United Kingdom woodlands we have collated data from two United Kingdom woodlands - Wytham Woods and Alice Holt. Here we present data from 582 individual trees of eight taxa in the form of summary variables relating to the allometric relationships between trunk diameter, height, crown height, crown radius and trunk radial growth rate to the tree's light environment and diameter at breast height. In addition the raw data files containing the variables from which the summary data were obtained. Large sample sizes with longitudinal data spanning 22 years make these datasets useful for future studies concerned with the way trees change in size and shape over their life-span

Isolation and characterization of arsenite oxidizing Pseudomonas lubricans and its potential use in bioremediation of wastewater

A bacterium, Pseudomonas lubricans, isolated from heavy metal laden industrial wastewater, has been shown to tolerate multiple heavy metals suggesting its importance in bioremediation of industrial effluents. P. lubricans tolerated As(III) up to 3 mg ml-1, Cu2+ up to 0.7 mg ml-1, Hg2+ up to 0.4 mg ml-1, Ni2+ up to 0.4 mg ml-1 and Cr6+ up to 0.5 mg ml-1. P. lubricans showed optimum growth at pH 7 while optimum temperature for growth was 30°C. P. lubricans could oxidize As(III) 42% (42 μg mg-1 of protein), 78% (78 μg mg-1 of protein) and 95% (95 μg mg-1 of protein) from the medium after 24, 48 and 72 h of incubation at optimal conditions, respectively. The arsenite oxidizing ability shown by P. lubricans indicates its potential application in biological treatment of wastewaters contaminated with arsenic

Application of impact dampers in vibration control of flexible structures

Impact dampers belong to the category of passive vibration devices used to attenuate the vibration of discrete and continuous systems. An impact damper generally consists of a mass which is allowed to travel freely between two defined stops. Under the right conditions, the vibration of the structure to which the impact damper is attached will cause the mass of the impact damper to strike the structure. Previous analytical and experimental research work on the effect of impact dampers in attenuating the vibration of discrete and continuous systems have demonstrated their effectiveness. It has been shown in this study that impact dampers can increase the intrinsic damping of a lightly-damped flexible structure. The test structure consists of a slender flexible beam supported by a pin-type support at one end and supported by a linear helical flexible spring at another location. Sinusoidal excitation spanning the first three natural frequencies was applied in the horizontal plane. The orientation of the excitation and the test structure in the horizontal plane minimizes the effect of gravity on the behavior of the test structure. The excitation was applied using a linear sine sweep technique. The span of the test structure, the mass of the impact damper, the distance of travel, and the location of the impact damper along the span of the test structure were varied. The damping ratio are estimated for sixty test configurations. The results show that the impact damper significantly increases the damping ratio of the test structure. Statistical analysis of the results using the method of multiple linear regression indicates that a reasonable fit has been accomplished. It is concluded that additional experimental analysis of flexible structures in microgravity environment is needed in order to achieve a better understanding of the behavior of impact damper under conditions of microgravity. Numerical solution of the behavior of flexible structures equipped with impact dampers is also needed to predict stresses and deformations under operating conditions of microgravity in space applications

Discrete breathers in a two-dimensional hexagonal Fermi-Pasta-Ulam lattice

We consider a two-dimensional Fermi-Pasta-Ulam (FPU) lattice with hexagonal symmetry. Using asymptotic methods based on small amplitude ansatz, at third order we obtain a reduction to a cubic nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLS) for the breather envelope. However, this does not support stable soliton solutions, so we pursue a higher-order analysis yielding a generalised NLS, which includes known stabilising terms. We present numerical results which suggest that long-lived stationary and moving breathers are supported by the lattice. We find breather solutions which move in an arbitrary direction, an ellipticity criterion for the wavenumbers of the carrier wave, asymptotic estimates for the breather energy, and a minimum threshold energy below which breathers cannot be found. This energy threshold is maximised for stationary breathers, and becomes vanishingly small near the boundary of the elliptic domain where breathers attain a maximum speed. Several of the results obtained are similar to those obtained for the square FPU lattice (Butt & Wattis, J Phys A, 39, 4955, (2006)), though we find that the square and hexagonal lattices exhibit different properties in regard to the generation of harmonics, and the isotropy of the generalised NLS equation.Comment: 29 pages, 14 Figure

Design and Analysis of Even-Positioned Cavity - Based Optical Amplification Device in Dielectric Metasurface

Recently, the development in the field of optical technology is exemplary, specifically relating to the design of the components necessary for optical integrated circuits. This research work investigates optical amplification action in a 2D Photonic Crystals (PhCs) structure with variable radius even-positioned PhC-cavity within its lattice. Twooptical signals are used, first acting as data signals coupled into the optical structure using the phenomenon of the Guided-mode-resonances (GMR) and the second one as a pump signal index-guided into the optical structure. The pump signal is used to amplify the data signal and the PhC-cavity is used for spectral tuning of the device operating in near-infrared (NIR) range. The dielectric structure consists of an optical waveguide packed in between the substrate and a cladding layer. The design and analysis of the proposed device is performed in a Finite-Difference-Time-Domain (FDTD) based open-source software package. The investigated results present optical amplific

Impact of reciever on time on the energy saving performance of the watchful sleep mode in a passive optical network

Due to increasing bandwidth demands from users, this evolution towards next generation PON (NG-PON) with higher network capacity and split continues. However, increasing split ratio in NGPON also leads to higher power consumption of the PON network due to 60% of the power is being consumed by the optical network units (ONUs). For energy conservation of the ONU, the Watchful Sleep Mode (WSM) has been recently added to the PON standards. This is an integrated mode that combines both the cyclic sleep and doze mode in one operation by periodically turning on the ONU receiver (RX) during the sleep cycle. However, still, the impact of RX on time on the energy saving performance of WSM has not been studied. Therefore, this study presents a performance evaluation of the watchful sleep mode in a 10 GB-capable PON (XG-PON) network with varying RX ON times. The investigation is performed with a dynamic bandwidth assignment scheme and real traffic data from Broadcom CATV head end. A comprehensive review of the power saving techniques for XGPON is also presented. The simulation study results show that higher RX ON time leads to higher energy savings for the ONUs without significantly increasing upstream and downstream delays