Belonging to Nowhere: A Phenomenological Study of the Identity Crisis of the Second Generation of Afghan Refugees in Balochistan

This study investigates how the second generation of Afghan refugees who are born and raised in Balochistan feel about and express their sense of belonging and identity in the hosting community.  The main purpose of this study is to analyze and understand how the second generation of Afghan refugees feel about their identity in terms of who they think they were, how they perceived themselves, whether they felt comfortable or uncomfortable identifying themselves Afghans in local community, and that how their identity affected their sense of belonging and their day to day life in Balochistan. This phenomenological study intended to explore the sense of identity of the young Afghan refugees by drawing on their individual and collective narratives of self and others as they struggle to be part of the social fabric and feel safe and accepted in Pakistani community. It also aimed to highlight how the identity crisis and the feeling of being other affected the needs, attitudes and perceptions of second generation Afghan refugees in the hosting community , and that how the second-generation Afghan refugees experience their sense of belonging and identification in two different national contexts (Afghanistan and Pakistan).This study uses qualitative phenomenological approach. It uses analysis of relevant secondary data, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews. The findings reveal that the identity crisis is still a challenging and major issue for Afghan refugee children

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION (HPE) AS AN EDUCATIONAL DISCIPLINE IN PAKISTAN: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES AND PROSPECTS

Purpose of the study: This article reviews the importance of Health and Physical education (HPE) as an educational discipline in Pakistan: contemporary issues and prospects involved in the negligence of this important sphere of education which range from lack of interest of stakeholders in Pakistan. Methodology: Peer-reviewed and scholarly journals were searched for articles related to Health & Physical education program. Keywords included curriculum, physical activities, instruction, health and nutrition, carrier opportunities, guidance, teacher training because the review aimed to highlight the importance of HPE as an educational discipline in Pakistan and to address the prevailing issues and prospective improvement. Findings: The status of Health and Physical education as an academic discipline was discussed in the article. Among the comparison of the program in Pakistan with that of the others countries, a lack of awareness about the benefits and career opportunities for graduates of HPE is there. Applications of this study: Like other programs and projects, the HPE program aimed at the production of skillful youth who have comprehensive knowledge of the subject and also the practice. This study focused on only Health and physical education program but will help to bring positive change in the other discipline too and will facilitate the production of skilled youth in other academic programs. Novelty/Originality of this study: This review highlights the importance of the Health and Physical education program both at inter, BS ( Bachelor of Studies ), MS, & Ph.D. level and practical outcomes in the shape of physically, mentally, and emotionally fit graduates

Hall effect on unsteady MHD flow along vertical plate with variable temperature and mass diffusion in the presence of porous medium and chemical reaction

The effects of chemical reaction and Hall current on the unsteady magneto hydrodynamic flow along a vertical plate with variable temperature and mass diffusion in the presence of a porous medium is studied hare. The fluid flow model of this paper contains governing partial differential equations of the motion, energy, and diffusion equation. To simplify the analysis, the governing equations are transformed into dimensionless form using non-dimensional variables. The Laplace-transform technique is employed to obtain an exact solution for the flow equations of the MHD model. The results of the analysis are presented using graphical representations of the velocity profiles. With the help of graphs, we discussed the behavior of fluid velocities with different parameters, including the chemical reaction parameter, Hall cur-rents parameter, accelerated parameter, magnetic field parameter, and permeability parameter, and the numerical values of Sherwood number have been tabulated. We found that the values obtained for velocity, concentration and temperature are in concurrence with the actual flow of the fluid

Recent Advances in Decontamination of Chemical Warfare Agents

The recent turmoil and volatile situation in many countries and the increased risk of terrorist activities have raised alarm bells for the field of defense against toxic chemical/materials. These situations poses threats to society as terrorists can take advantage of such situations to strike and cause public mayhem. A number of chemicals have the potential of being used as chemical warfare (CW) agents. CW agents could immediately kill or incapacitate the affected individuals even when they are present in very low concentration. CW agents should be removed quickly to minimize their deleterious health effect. There is no single decontamination system that can be used against all types of chemical warfare (CW) agents. The review briefs about different decontamination processes and approaches for chemical decontamination and also discusses about various decontamination products available globally.Defence Science Journal, 2013, 63(5), pp.487-496, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.63.288

Efficient System Identification of a Two-Wheeled Robot (TWR) Using Feed-Forward Neural Networks

System identification of a Two-Wheeled Robot (TWR) through nonlinear dynamics is carried out in this paper using a data-driven approach. An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is used as a kinematic estimator for predicting the TWR’s degree of movement in the directions of x and y and the angle of rotation Ψ along the z-axis by giving a set of input vectors in terms of linear velocity ‘V’ (i.e., generated through the angular velocity ‘ω’ of a DC motor). The DC motor rotates the TWR’s wheels that have a wheel radius of ‘r’. Training datasets are achieved via simulating nonlinear kinematics of the TWR in a MATLAB Simulink environment by varying the linear scale sets of ‘V’ and ‘(r ± ∆r)’. Perturbation of the TWR’s wheel radius at ∆r = 10% is introduced to cater to the robustness of the TWR wheel kinematics. A trained ANN accurately modeled the kinematics of the TWR. The performance indicators are regression analysis and mean square value, whose achieved values met the targeted values of 1 and 0.01, respectively.© 2022 by the authors. 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/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Epidemiological Survey of Bovine Babesia and Theileria Parasites in Buffaloes in District Dera Ismail, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Piroplasmosis (babesiosis and theileriosis) are the leading blood parasites responsible for significant economic losses to the dairy enterprises. These parasites are transmitted by Ixodid ticks from a diseased animal to a healthy animal. This study was executed to determine the prevalence of Theileria and Babesia in water buffaloes in District Dera Ismail Khan for their risk assessment. During this trial, 350 random blood samples were obtained from buffalos within the region of District Dera Ismail Khan and examined for Babesia and Theileria parasites using Giemsa staining technique under an oil immersion lens. Forty-eight blood samples were found positive and the prevalence of Babesiosis was 7.43 %, followed by the prevalence of Theileriosis (6.28 %). Babesiosis had a significantly higher (p \u3c 0.05) prevalence among both males and females (6.9 % and 7.7 %, respectively) followed by Theileria (5.38 % and 6.8 %, respectively). The significantly highest (p \u3c 0.05) prevalence of Theileria was seen in calves younger than 2 years (16.7 %). Babesiosis was most prevalent (p \u3c 0.05) in calves aged 2 to 5 (11.7 %). The Kundhi buffalo breed had the highest (p \u3c 0.05) prevalence of babesiosis, followed by the Nili Ravi breed, while, the Nili Ravi breed had the highest frequency (p \u3c 0.05)of Theileria. Piroplasmosis prevalence significantly (p \u3c 0.05) peaked in the summer season. Piroplasmosisis the major risk factor in endangering the general health of the buffalo’s population, therefore, stringent control measures are recommended for the management of the tick population

Enhanced Spatial Stream of Two-Stream Network Using Optical Flow for Human Action Recognition

Introduction: Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have maintained their dominance in deep learning methods for human action recognition (HAR) and other computer vision tasks. However, the need for a large amount of training data always restricts the performance of CNNs. Method: This paper is inspired by the two-stream network, where a CNN is deployed to train the network by using the spatial and temporal aspects of an activity, thus exploiting the strengths of both networks to achieve better accuracy. Contributions: Our contribution is twofold: first, we deploy an enhanced spatial stream, and it is demonstrated that models pre-trained on a larger dataset, when used in the spatial stream, yield good performance instead of training the entire model from scratch. Second, a dataset augmentation technique is presented to minimize overfitting of CNNs, where we increase the dataset size by performing various transformations on the images such as rotation and flipping, etc. Results: UCF101 is a standard benchmark dataset for action videos, and our architecture has been trained and validated on it. Compared with the other two-stream networks, our results outperformed them in terms of accuracy

Balanced Transmissions Based Trajectories of Mobile Sink in Homogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Mobile Sink (MS) based routing strategies have been widely investigated to prolong the lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose two schemes for data gathering in WSNs: (i) MS moves on random paths in the network (RMS) and (ii) the trajectory of MS is defined (DMS). In both the schemes, the network field is logically divided into small squares. The center point of each partitioned area is the sojourn location of the MS. We present three linear programming based models: (i) to maximize network lifetime, (ii) to minimize path loss, and (iii) to minimize end to end delay. Moreover, a geometric model is proposed to avoid redundancy while collecting information from the network nodes. Simulation results show that our proposed schemes perform better than the selected existing schemes in terms of the selected performance metrics

Whole exome sequence of Pakistani acute lymphocytic leukemia patient from Pakhtuns ancestry reveal the novel genetic variant characterization in the GLDC gene

Background: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is the most common malignant disease in children and often involves numerical chromosomal abnormalities, fusion genes, or minor localized deletions that are significant in the development of leukemia. Glycine Decarboxylase (GLDC) gene overexpression and mutation is associated with oncogenic activity in various cancers. However, the pathophysiological roles and structural consequences of GLDC in acute lymphocytic leukemia have not been investigated. Objective: We aimed to identify novel variant in acute lymphocytic leukemia through whole exome sequencing. Methods: This study employs whole exome sequencing to examine seven pediatric patients with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in Pakistan. The patients under investigation are of Pakistani origin. The deleterious effect was predicted by SIFT, PolyPhen2, CADD, FATHMM, HOPE, and Mutation Assessors. Structure stability assessment was performed using the I-Mutant-3.0server. The atomic structure of the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) was analyzed utilizing the Molecular Dynamics (MD) with WEBGRO server. Results: The present study identified a novel pathogenic heterozygous variant NM_000170.2:p.Ser551Cys/c.1651A>T in GLDC gene of early stage diagnose ALL patient the variant was not present in the dbSNP & 1000Genome Project databases. Structural instability, disrupted function, and altered 3D structure were observed in the mutant GLDC protein model compared to the wild-type structure. Conclusion: The novel SNP was found in a highly conserved region of the GLDC protein and is predicted to be a high-risk candidate for leukemia. This variant greatly affects the stability of the protein

The global burden of cancer attributable to risk factors, 2010-19 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Background Understanding the magnitude of cancer burden attributable to potentially modifiable risk factors is crucial for development of effective prevention and mitigation strategies. We analysed results from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 to inform cancer control planning efforts globally. Methods The GBD 2019 comparative risk assessment framework was used to estimate cancer burden attributable to behavioural, environmental and occupational, and metabolic risk factors. A total of 82 risk-outcome pairs were included on the basis of the World Cancer Research Fund criteria. Estimated cancer deaths and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) in 2019 and change in these measures between 2010 and 2019 are presented. Findings Globally, in 2019, the risk factors included in this analysis accounted for 4.45 million (95% uncertainty interval 4.01-4.94) deaths and 105 million (95.0-116) DALYs for both sexes combined, representing 44.4% (41.3-48.4) of all cancer deaths and 42.0% (39.1-45.6) of all DALYs. There were 2.88 million (2.60-3.18) risk-attributable cancer deaths in males (50.6% [47.8-54.1] of all male cancer deaths) and 1.58 million (1.36-1.84) risk-attributable cancer deaths in females (36.3% [32.5-41.3] of all female cancer deaths). The leading risk factors at the most detailed level globally for risk-attributable cancer deaths and DALYs in 2019 for both sexes combined were smoking, followed by alcohol use and high BMI. Risk-attributable cancer burden varied by world region and Socio-demographic Index (SDI), with smoking, unsafe sex, and alcohol use being the three leading risk factors for risk-attributable cancer DALYs in low SDI locations in 2019, whereas DALYs in high SDI locations mirrored the top three global risk factor rankings. From 2010 to 2019, global risk-attributable cancer deaths increased by 20.4% (12.6-28.4) and DALYs by 16.8% (8.8-25.0), with the greatest percentage increase in metabolic risks (34.7% [27.9-42.8] and 33.3% [25.8-42.0]). Interpretation The leading risk factors contributing to global cancer burden in 2019 were behavioural, whereas metabolic risk factors saw the largest increases between 2010 and 2019. Reducing exposure to these modifiable risk factors would decrease cancer mortality and DALY rates worldwide, and policies should be tailored appropriately to local cancer risk factor burden. Copyright (C) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.Peer reviewe