Standard English in Bangladesh: A legacy of colonization

The paper aims to reveal the debate of Standard English (SE) and Non-standard English from a sociolinguistics perspective in Bangladesh. The validity of so-called Standard English is examined in the light of post-colonial reaction linguistically. The legitimacy of accepting local verities of English as Global Englishes is investigated with due socio-political references. The myth and reality of Standard English in ELT (English Language Teaching) has priority in this paper and it reveals how so-called Standard English is associated with Linguistic Imperialism. The paper examines the sociolinguistic reality of English in Bangladesh from the perspective of 'My English (ME)', which is a linguistic revolt against Standard English (SE). It describes the saturation of English in various domains to understand the place of English in the local linguistic ecology in Bangladesh. Certain linguistic and non-linguistic factors are highlighted here, which may interrupt determining English variety status in Bangladesh. As education is a required field where English has a predominant presence, not only as a language for learning but also as a language in which Bangladeshi learners are anticipated to develop practical proficiency, it is high time to establish rights on own variety of English under the umbrella of Global Englishes. In Bangladesh, thus, the practice of learning Standard English is a colonial legacy. Apart from the mother language, people have been learning English subsequently the British became successful in colonizing this land and its citizens

A Comparison of Sugarcane Seedling and Vegetative Shoot Reaction to Sugarcane Mosaic Virus.

Sugarcane seedlings, Saccharum (interspecific hybrids) from a susceptible by susceptible (S x S) cross, a moderately susceptible by susceptible (MS x S) cross, a susceptible by moderately susceptible (S x MS) cross, and a susceptible by resistant (S x R) cross were categorized with regard to mosaic resistance after inoculation with strains H and I of Sugar Cane Mosaic Virus (SCMV). No particular relationship was observed among the four crosses on the basis of seedling reactions to SCMV. All seedlings were planted in the field. All susceptible and resistant seedlings were further classified respectively as highly susceptible (HS), moderately susceptible (MS), or recovered (RC); and field resistant (FR) or field susceptible (FS). All selected clones were treated with hot-water at 57.3(DEGREES)C for 5, 20, 20 minutes in three sequential dates and single bud pieces were planted in the greenhouse. Across all crosses 85% of the susceptible and 95% of the field susceptible shoots were completely cured of mosaic. Mosaic free stubble and plant shoots were spray inoculated after five months. In every cross the percentage of infected clones in the susceptible group was higher than in the resistant group. There were significant differences among the HS, MS, RC clonal types and the S, R, FS clonal types after stubble shoot inoculations. The over all r value was .61 with regard to plant and stubble shoot comparisons. This indicates that stubble shoots can be inoculated for an estimate of mosaic reaction. Recovered seedlings were reinfected by stubble shoot inoculation. On the whole 17% of the susceptible clones and 28% of the resistant clones remained mosaic free after stubble shoot inoculation. Further research is needed to determine the actual mosaic reaction of the escaped clones of the susceptible group. If escaped clones are found susceptible during subsequent inoculations then one can introduce the sugarcane seedling screening in the greenhouse without fear of loosing good materials. This screening procedure will help to increase the frequency of mosaic resistant progenies as well as to save in effort, expense, and greenhouse and field space in the breeding program

Legal and political intervention on language issues in Bangladesh: A sociolinguistic perspective

The article outlined the legal and political intervention on language issues in Bangladesh from a historical sociolinguistic perspective. More specifically, it chronologically criticised the constitution and laws issued regarding language for the time being by state holders. In his article, the author tried to present the current issue and the question of language policy and planning in Bangladesh. Furthermore, it showed the drawbacks of previous language acts in Bangladesh. Consequently, the article illustrates the contextual interplay between language policy and linguistic rights in Bangladesh. This article used data from primary sources (constitution and government orders, ordinances, and circulations, etc.) to draw some preliminary conclusions about the challenges involved in the language controversy. One of its central themes was the linguistic rights of ethnic people, minor communities, and indigenous language speakers respectively. This article investigated how state politics and language historically affected each other. The analytical framework of the article is built on Language Education Policy (LEP) as a conceptual framework of Baldauf and Ingram (2003) which is one of the most widely researched theoretical perspectives in language policy and planning. The findings confirmed linguistic hegemony and dominance in Bangladesh by constitution and law. The most important contribution of the article was the sociolinguistic overview of the significant language laws of Bangladesh chronologically. It provided recommendations on the development of democratic language policy in Bangladesh.Keywords: Language in the Mughal period; Language in the British period; Language in the Pakistan period; Language in the Bangladesh period; Language rights for indigenous people; Language debate; Linguistic rights

Image-Based Measurement of Leaf Area Index and Radiation Interception for Modelling of Oil Palm

Leaf area index (LAI) is an important parameter for precise characterization of the plant canopy structure. M I describes a fundamental property of the plant canopy that has often been used as a critical variable to simulate the growth and yield models. The present conventional method used in determining LA1 is laborious, difficult and time consuming. Thus an imagebased measurement using camera system with fish eye lens offers an alternative means for accurate indirect measurement of LA1 in oil palm. In this study leaf area index was determined by direct and indirect methods. The LAI-2000 plant canopy analyser (PCA), fish eye lens with charge couple device (CCD) camera and radiation sensor were used as indirect methods. Results show that the LA1 value was overestimated (30.8%-153%) for immature palm and underestimated (24%-52%) for mature palm as compared to direct measurement. The MI-2000 PCA reading varies according to the condition of sky, measuring technique, view cap, height of the measuring point and shade. Four models (leaflet shape factor model,frond area model, leaflet dry weight model and leaflet area model) were tested for accurate estimation of leaf area. Results show that the leaflet dry weight was strongly correlated (r = 0.98) with leaflet area. Light interception by a canopy is a fundamental requirement for crop growth and important for biomass production and plant growth modelling. In this study, two operational methods for estimating the amount of photosynthetically active radiation intercepted by a canopy of the oil palm were developed, i.e. "Triangular" method and "Circular" method. Results show that both methods were suitable for oil palm PAR measurement. A nonlinear relationship was found between radiation interception and LAI. Results show that the radiation interception decreased with increasing distance from the frond base to frond tip. Hemispherical photography was used in this study to estimate the leaf area index and gap fraction in oil palm plantation. Photographs were taken from different palm ages i.e. 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 13 and 16-year old after field planting. The average LAI values obtained from photography method were 0.68 to 1.71 for 2 to 16-year old palms. The average LA1 value was underestimated as compared to destructive method. The LA1 values need to be multiplied by a conversion factor to get the accurate LA1 as obtained from the photography method. For palms less than 5-year olds, the photographic method gave the accurate MI value. The gap fractions obtained from photographic method ranged from 0.51 to 0.18 for palm age range from 2 to 16-year old palms. The gap fraction was linearly correlated (r = 0.99) with leaf area index.Computer simulation models have become powerful tools to enhance information derived from costly and laborious field experiments. Particularly in oil palms where field experiments are expensive, time consuming and labours intensive. A computer simulation model was developed using Visual C++ computer language for simulation of leaf area index and yield of oil palm. The simulated results were reasonably comparable to the field data for both LA1 and yield. The LA1 data was collected by field experiment for 2 to16- year old palms, whereas yield data was obtained from Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB). A strong linear relationship was found between the measured LA1 and the simulated LA1 with correlation coefficient r of 0.96. A good linear relationship (r = 0.95) was found between the simulated LA1 and the simulated yield. Also a strong relationship (r = 0.98) was found between the simulated yield and observed yield. The proposed photographic method for LA1 estimation, different regression models, methodology for PAR measurement as well as computer program for LA1 and yield simulation have potential application in oil palm sector, oil palm R&D and also as teaching tools

An Empirical Study on the Effectiveness of Testing Metrics to Test Deep Learning Models

In recent years, Deep Learning (DL) models have widely been applied to develop safety and security critical systems. The recent evolvement of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is the key reason behind the unprecedented achievements in image classification, object detection, medical image analysis, speech recog nition, and autonomous driving. However, DL models often remain a black box for their practitioners due to the lack of interpretability and explainability. DL practitioners generally use standard metrics such as Precision, Recall, and F1 score to evaluate the performance of DL models on the test dataset. However, as high-quality test data is not frequently accessed, the expected level of accuracy of these standard metrics on test datasets cannot justify the trustworthiness of testing adequacy, generality and robustness of DL models. The way we ensure the quality of DL models is still in its infancy; hence, a scalable DL model testing frame work is highly demanded in the context of software testing. The existing techniques for testing traditional software systems could not be directly applicable to DL models because of the fundamental difference in pro gramming paradigm, systems development methodologies, and processes. However, several testing metrics (e.g., Neuron Coverage (NC), Confusion and Bias error metrics, and Multi-granularity metrics) have been proposed leveraging the concept of test coverage in traditional software testing to measure the robustness of DL models and the quality of the test datasets. Although test coverage is highly effective to test traditional software systems, the effectiveness of DL coverage metrics must be evaluated in testing the robustness of DL models and measuring the quality of the test datasets. In addition, the selected testing metrics work on the activated neurons of a DL model. In our study, we consider the neuron count of a DL model differently than the existing studies. For example, according to our calculation the LeNet-5 model has 6508 neurons whereas other studies consider the LeNet-5 model contains 268 neurons only. Therefore, it is also important to in vestigate how neurons’ concept (e.g., the idea of having neurons in the DL model and the way we calculate the number of neurons a DL model does have) impact the testing metrics. In this thesis, we thus conduct an exploratory study for evaluating the effectiveness of the testing metrics to test DL models not only in measuring their robustness but also in assessing the quality of the test datasets. Furthermore, since selected testing metrics work on the activated neurons of a DL model, we also investigate the impact of the neurons’ concepts on the testing metrics. To conduct our experiments, we select popular publicly available datasets (e.g., MNIST, Fashion MNIST, CIFAR-10, ImageNet and so on) and train DL models on them. We also select sate-of-the-art DL models (e.g., VGG-16, VGG-19, ResNet-50, ResNet-101 and so on) trained on the ImageNet dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate that whatever the neuron’s concepts are, NC and Multi-granularity testing metrics are ineffective in evaluating the robustness of DL models and in assessing the quality of the test datasets. In addition, the selection of threshold values has a negligible impact on the NC metric. Increasing the coverage values of the Multi-granularity testing metrics can not separate regular test data from adversarial test data. Our exploratory study also shows that the DL models still make accurate predictions with higher coverage values of Multi-granularity metrics than the false predictions. Therefore, it is not always true that increasing coverage values of the Multi-granularity testing metrics find more defects of DL models. Finally, the Precision and Recall scores show that the Confusion and Bias error metrics are adequate to detect class-level violations of the DL models

Properties of concrete containing recycled PET bottles as sand replacement

The modern lifestyle along with the new technologies have contributed the increasing of waste materials production. Plastic is one of the waste materials which is non-disposal and non-biodegradable material that can remain on earth without degradation. The world produces nearly 150 million tonnes of plastics per year, which is nearly 4.8 tonnes per second and a per capita production of 25 kg/year [1]. The Malaysian Plastic Industry (2012), reported that Malaysia is one of the largest plastics producers in Asia [2]. In Malaysia, extensive consumption of PET bottle is one of the contribution to the increasing growth of plastic waste disposed in landfills. Reutilization of PET wastes in concrete technology is one of the innovative solution for reduce the materials cost and solve some of the plastics waste problems .

Robust statistical approaches for feature extraction in laser scanning 3D point cloud data

Three dimensional point cloud data acquired from mobile laser scanning system commonly contain outliers and/or noise. The presence of outliers and noise means most of the frequently used methods for feature extraction produce inaccurate and non-robust results. We investigate the problems of outliers and how to accommodate them for automatic robust feature extraction. This thesis develops algorithms for outlier detection, point cloud denoising, robust feature extraction, segmentation and ground surface extraction

Failure mechanism of prepacked concrete

Concrete is a multiphase material in which aggregate particles are distributed in the mortar matrix. Since a large volume of the concrete is occupied by aggregate, it is likely that variation in aggregate content will significantly influence the strength and deformation behavior. Prepacked concrete, as it contains a higher proportion of coarse aggregate, shows characteristics in failure that are widely dissimilar from those of normal concrete. This paper presents some aspects of failure mechanism of prepacked concrete observed during testing in compression. Along with the observations, some theoretical considerations are also made and discussed

Creep recovery of prepacked aggregate concrete

Previously the writer presented the results of a study on the creep and shrinkage behavior of prepacked aggregate concrete. In the same study strain on removal of sustained load was also measured. In this article, results on creep recovery of normal and prepacked aggregate concrete are presented and discussed. It has been observed that the creep recovery of prepacked aggregate concrete is lower than that of normal concret

Creep recovery of prepacked aggregate concrete

Previously the writer presented the results of a study on the creep and shrinkage behavior of prepacked aggregate concrete. In the same study strain on removal of sustained load was also measured. In this article, results on creep recovery of normal and prepacked aggregate concrete are presented and discussed. It has been observed that the creep recovery of prepacked aggregate concrete is lower than that of normal concret