Knowledge Management and Sustainable Firms Growth: An Evidence from SMEs Sector of Pakistan

The main drive for this research was to investigate the relationship between knowledge management (KM) and sustainable firms’ growth in SMEs sector of Pakistan. Moreover, the research examined the mediating role of product and process innovations on the association of knowledge management and sustainable firms’ growth. A self-administered survey was structured and employed to gather the data from 218 garments related SMEs. The study employed SEM to measure direct and indirect effects. Findings of the study indicates that knowledge management has a positive and significant influence over sustainable firms’ growth while both product and process innovations significantly mediated the knowledge management and sustainable firms growth relationship. Current research findings offer valuable implications concerning the importance of KM in enhancing and facilitating process and product innovations for sustainable firms’ growth. This is a pioneer study for employing a unified model that illustrates the relationships among multiple variables pertaining to KM

Switch based high cardinality node detection

The detection of supernodes with high cardinality is of interest for network monitoring and security. Existing schemes for supernode detection rely on data structures that are independent of the switching functions. This means that for each packet that traverses the switch, both the switching table and the supernode detection structure have to be checked which requires significant memory bandwidth. This can create a bottleneck and reduce the speed of the switch, especially for software implementations. In this letter, a scheme that performs supernode detection as part of Ethernet switching and does not require additional memory accesses nor separated data structures is presented. The scheme has been implemented and compared with the existing methods. The results show that the proposed scheme can reliably identify supernodes while providing a speed up of more than 15% when compared with the existing solutions.This work was supported in part by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan and the Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiatives under National Centre for Cyber Security; in part by the ACHILLES Project PID2019-104207RB-I00 and the Go2Edge network RED2018-102585-T funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; and in part by the Madrid Community Research Project TAPIR-CM under Grant P2018/TCS4496

Oral lichen planus and hepatitis C virus infection; a symbiotic relationship or a mere co-incidence?

Background: Lichen planus (LP) is a common idiopathic chronic inflammatory immune mediated mucocutanous disease that effects stratified squamous epithelia and appendices. Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is quite common across the world. A couple of reports have suggested positive association of HCV infection and oral lichen planus (OLP) and most of the studies are usually confined to Mediterranean and south European countries. Due to high incidence and suspected alliance between these two diseases in Pakistan, the following study was conducted with the view that it may help clinicians to set guidelines for HCV testing of lichen planus patients.Methods: Approximately 11500 patients from general population coming to dental diagnostics department of Fatima Memorial Hospital, Lahore (from March 2015-February 2016) were screened clinically for OLP and by ELISA for HCV infection. Out of these 11500 patients 103 were selected one of them incidental and the other pre-diagnosed or both incidental and both pre-diagnosed. These patients were unaware but had either one or both OLP and HCV infection which was confirmed clinically and by ELISA respectively.Results: Majority of patients presenting for other dental complaints were unaware of these diseases process going on in them and was mostly an incidental finding by the clinician. Either one or both OLP and HCV infection were more conjoint in females comprising 77.7% of the total subjects. OLP alone was most common finding comprising 66.67% of the cases. HCV infection alone was present in 15.53% whereas 16.50% subjects showed presence of both OLP and HCV infection.Conclusions: The current study could not detect statistically significant relationship between OLP and HCV infection in Pakistani population which could be due to genetic variation or may be geographic relationship

Using Genetic Algorithm to Minimize False Alarms in Insider Threats Detection of Information Misuse in Windows Environment

Insider threats detection problem has always been one of the most difficult challenges for organizations and research community. Effective behavioral categorization of users plays a vital role for the success of any detection mechanisms. It also helps to reduce false alarms in case of insider threats. In order to achieve this, a fuzzy classifier has been implemented along with genetic algorithm (GA) to enhance the efficiency of a fuzzy classifier. It also enhances the functionality of all other modules to achieve better results in terms of false alarms. A scenario driven approach along with mathematical evaluation verifies the effectiveness of the modified framework. It has been tested for the enterprises having critical nature of business. Other organizations can adopt it in accordance with their specific nature of business, need, and operational processes. The results prove that accurate classification and detection of users were achieved by adopting the modified framework which in turn minimizes false alarms

A Low-Cost CPW-Fed Multiband Frequency Reconfigurable Antenna for Wireless Applications

A novel, cedar-shaped, coplanar waveguide-fed frequency reconfigurable antenna is proposed. The presented antenna uses low-cost FR4 substrate with a thickness of 1.6 mm. Four PIN diodes are inserted on the antenna surface to variate the current distribution and alter the resonant frequencies with different combinations of switches. The proposed antenna is fabricated and measured for all states, and a good agreement is seen between measured and simulated results. This antenna resonates within the range of 2 GHz to 10 GHz, covering the major wireless applications of aviation service, wireless local area network (WLAN), worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX), long distance radio telecommunications, and X-band satellite communication. The proposed antenna works resourcefully with reasonable gain, significant bandwidth, directivity, and reflection coefficient. The proposed multiband reconfigurable antenna will pave the way for future wireless communications including WLAN, WiMAX, and possibly fifth-generation (5G) communication

Reconnoitering Mycobacterium tuberculosis lipoproteins to design subunit vaccine by immunoinformatics approach

Background: Tuberculosis is an aerosol transmitted disease of human beings caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). The only available vaccine for Mtb is Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG). Currently no alternative or booster is available for BCG. The objective of this predictive approach was based on binding of MHC-I and MHC-II and B cell epitopes of Mtb for mouse host.Methods: Immunoinformatics approach was used to design subunit vaccine (SV) by joining 8 MHC-I bindings, 6 MHC-II bindings, and 8 B-Cell epitopes with AAV, GPGPG, and KK amino acid linkers, respectively. The efficacy of the SV was enhanced through Mtb protein Rv3763 (LpqH, PDB ID= 4ZJM) as an adjuvant at the N-terminal of SV. The in silico analyses evaluated the SV to predict allergenicity, antigenicity, and physico-chemical properties.Results: Predictions revealed that SV is non-allergic and highly antigenic. The physico-chemical analysis showed that the SV was stable and basic in nature. The three-dimensional structure of SV was stable with a high binding affinity against the mouse TLR2 receptor. In silico cloning suggested the effective transformation of SV into the eukaryotic expression vector.Conclusion: This study permits preclinical validation of the designed SV in mouse host to confirm its immunogenic potential and efficacy, which will help in controlling tuberculosis.Keywords: Immunoinformatics; Docking; Subunit vaccine; Lipoprotein; Tuberculosis

Is Corruption Detrimental for Economic Growth? A Panel Data Analysis of Selected South Asian Economies

The debate regarding the influence of corruption on economic growth is increasing. Therefore, this study examines the impacts of corruption on economic growth of developing South Asian Economies between 2002-2017 period. The study uses fixed effects, random effects and robust least square estimators for the empirical estimation. The outcomes show that in developing South Asian countries corruption is working like grease and enhancing the economic growth. Nevertheless, the study based on the theoretical and empirical literature recommends these countries to formulate policies to lower corruption as it harms the institutional quality, adversely affects the investment decisions of the firms, system of meritocracy, and is considered globally as a moral decay of the society. These all in turn, in the long run adversely affects the economic growth