Enduring Resilience of Capitalist Power: The Role of Capitalist Education as a Technology of Governance

Capitalism has experienced several crises since its emergence but its present global dominance apparently remains unassailable. This paper argues that capitalism’s resilience is grounded in the systemic hegemony of capitalist individuality—an individuality, committed to freedom as an ultimate end and seeking abundance in this world. It has been argued that the successful manufacturing of capitalist subjectivity is significantly dependent on the inculcation of capitalist values to the subject of capital through capitalist education. Section one focuses on freedom as capitalism’s telos and sketches the historical emergence of capitalist subjectivity formed by processes of capitalist governance. Section two investigates the formational role of capitalist education as a technology of capitalist governance. It analyzes capitalist education as a means for the construction of capitalist individuality. Section three argues that capitalism’s main antagonists, especially Marxist socialism, cannot effectively challenge capitalist hegemony in the lifeworld or at the level of the state because they (i.e. main antagonists) endorse freedom (the core capitalist value) as an ultimate end in itself. Socialism does not propose to alter the subjectivity of an individual that the capitalist education constructs

Container-based IoT Sensor Node on Raspberry Pi and the Kubernetes Cluster Framework

In recent years, Internet of Things is envisioned to become a promising paradigm in the future Internet. It allows physical objects or things to interact with each other and with users, thus providing machine-to-machine communication that is long been promised. As this paradigm continues to grow, it is changing the nature of the devices that are being attached. This opens a path of embedded systems to be the natural means of communication, control, and development. The ability of these systems to connect and share useful information via Internet is becoming ubiquitous. In many cases, enormous amount of data is generated from embedded devices that need to be processed in an efficient way along with the required computation power. Container-based virtualization has come into existence to accomplish those needs in order to produce an improved system, which has the capability to adapt operational features in terms of security, availability, and isolation. This thesis project is aimed to design and develop a Kubernetes managed container-based embedded IoT sensor node through the use of a cluster. In this project, the cluster was formed by connecting five Raspberry Pi boards to a network switch. This sensor node operates by collecting data from camera and temperature sensors, processing it in a containerized environment, and then sending it to the cloud platform using the Apache Kafka framework. The main motivation of adopting state-of-the-art technologies is to achieve fault-tolerant behavior and processing location flexibility using edge computing. In the end, the overall cluster is evaluated on the basis of architecture, performance, fault-tolerance, and high availability that depicts the feasibility, scalability, and robustness of this sensor node. The experimental results also conclude that the cluster is fault tolerant and has a flexibility over data processing in terms of cloud and edge computing

Impact of Country-of-Origin on Product Purchase Decision.

The purpose of this study is to explain, explore and to analyse the possible impact of the different Country-of-Origin on consumers purchase decision on three different categories of products. This study is conducted from a consumer-based view to investigate what to what extend Country-of-Origin effect the customers purchasing decision for three different categories of products? The study also investigated the possible behaviour of different customers regarding different Country-of-Origin depending upon the different demographic variables different choices and preferences of different customers segments were explored. Different age, gender, education and different income subgroups will be examined and the relevant importance of "Made in Pakistan" cue was analysed with other countries products. Study also analyses the impact of Product Involvement on product purchase decision an relationship of Product Knowledge and product purchase decision is also study. Primary data was collected using standardized questioners from four different cities of Pakistan. Results demonstrated that the people who looks for Country-of-origin information, they have certain images of different countries in different product categories. Research also concluded that Pakistan is only preferred country in Fabric products and not in electronics and cosmetics products.  Product Involvement and Product knowledge does affect the customer choices in term of selecting the countries across different product categories. Demographic variables also influenced the Country-of-Origin effect. “Made in Pakistan” was evaluated better for Fabrics but not for Electronics or Cosmetics. Keywords: Country-of-origin, Product Involvement and Product knowledge, Demographic Variables, Pakistan

Optimal Spectrum Sensing Threshold for Unequal Priors Case

Classical spectrum sensing techniques utilize maximum likelihood (ML) detection for identification of spectrum holes. The approach is sub-optimal for the case of un-equal priors where the probabilities of channel occupation and vacancy are not the same. Such situations are bound to occur in most commercial bands such as GSM etc and hence are of more interest. The loss in performance has been disregarded as negligible in most of the work done on spectrum sensing techniques. This paper quantifies the effects of changing priors on classical energy detection and infers that the loss in spectrum sensing performance is not negligible. The deterioration is especially considerable at low SNR values and at low probabilities of channel occupation. An optimum threshold for achieving minimum probability of error has been derived in this work for unequal prior case. Detection based on the proposed threshold out-performs classical detectors under the assumption that priors are known at the receiver

A Novel Radio Mode Identification Approach for Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radios

The paper suggests a radio mode identification algorithm for spectrum sensing that utilizes time frequency analysis and digital image processing techniques to identify various transmission parameters of the primary user. The classical spectrum sensing techniques only provide information about existence of spectrum holes in the spectrum band of interest. However the proposed approach enables the cognitive radio to identify spectral behavior of the primary users in addition to identifying the spectrum holes with greater accuracy. These parameters can be utilized to decide the suitability of the identified spectrum holes and predict pattern of spectrum usage in near future

Climate Changes and its Impact on the Agriculture Sector in Selected South Asian Countries

This study depicts an inclusive estimation of climate variation and its effects on agriculture sector in theselected South Asian countries (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan and Sri-Lanka) over the period of 1990-2014. Agriculture sector plays vigorous role in the economy of selected South Asian states because more than 60%people work in this sector. The rapid growth of industrialization and weather variation causes the raise of thetemperature level by which reduce production of agriculture crops and the people face heavy losses. Therefore, mainobjective of this study is to detect the influence of the global weather variation in agriculture sector of selected SouthAsian countries. Agriculture sector is used as dependent variable. CO2 emission, gross capital formation, labor forceand temperature are used as explanatory variables. Auto regressive distributed lag model is employed to examine theinfluence of climate variation on the agricultural sector. For analysis panel data were collected from selected SouthAsian countries. The existence of the short and long term relationship between dependent and independent variables isalso assessed by this model. Thus, findings show the climate variation has significant effect on the agricultural sector.In a policy recommendation, government should use sector-wise policies and friendly environmental policies whichminimize the negative effect of climate change

IoTEF: A Federated Edge-Cloud Architecture for Fault-Tolerant IoT Applications

The evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has led to an increased emphasis on edge computing for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), in which applications rely on processing data closer to the data sources, and sharing the results across heterogeneous clusters. This has simplified the data exchanges between IoT/CPS systems, the cloud, and the edge for managing low latency, minimal bandwidth, and fault-tolerant applications. Nonetheless, many of these applications administer data collection on the edge and offer data analytic and storage capabilities in the cloud. This raises the problem of separate software stacks between the edge and the cloud with no unified fault-tolerant management, hindering dynamic relocation of data processing. In such systems, the data must also be preserved from being corrupted or duplicated in the case of intermittent long-distance network connectivity issues, malicious harming of edge devices, or other hostile environments. Within this context, the contributions of this paper are threefold: (i) to propose a new Internet of Things Edge-Cloud Federation (IoTEF) architecture for multi-cluster IoT applications by adapting our earlier Cloud and Edge Fault-Tolerant IoT (CEFIoT) layered design. We address the fault tolerance issue by employing the Apache Kafka publish/subscribe platform as the unified data replication solution. We also deploy Kubernetes for fault-tolerant management, combined with the federated scheme, offering a single management interface and allowing automatic reconfiguration of the data processing pipeline, (ii) to formulate functional and non-functional requirements of our proposed solution by comparing several IoT architectures, and (iii) to implement a smart buildings use case of the ongoing Otaniemi3D project as proof-of-concept for assessing IoTEF capabilities. The experimental results conclude that the architecture minimizes latency, saves network bandwidth, and handles both hardware and network connectivity based failures.Peer reviewe

Fly Ash an Alternative of Clay in Bricks: A Sustainable Solution for Future Constructions

Clay (CL) bricks have been commonly used in construction industry for centuries. The negative environmental impacts of use of CL bricks include rapidly depleting fertile clayey layer of soil and the high energy consumption of CL bricks, which have led to the development of alternative brick units incorporating waste materials. Fly ash (FA) brick has been identified as a sustainable and environmental friendly alternative of traditional CL brick, which reduces carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and hence global warming. This study aims to develop eco-friendly geopolymer mortar brick mixes using FA and CL without heat curing and applying molding pressure. This study investigates influences of percentage replacements of CL with FA and curing period on the compressive strength (CS) of geopolymer mortar brick mixes. In the preparation of geopolymer mortar mixes, the percentage replacements of CL with FA varied from 0 to 100% (0%, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100%) using 12 M sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution. A total of 11 geopolymer mortar mixes were cast and cured at 14, 28, 56 and 90 days. The optimum CS of 49.7 MPa with 80% replacement of CL with FA using 12 M NaOH solution at 90 days was achieved. This study is expected to contribute in reducing the level of CO2 emissions, which will subsequently reduce global warming and smog formation in Pakista

Recent updates on ions and nutrients uptake by halotolerant freshwater and marine microalgae in conditions of high salinity

Algae is an appropriate natural resource to augment the optimal use of undesired ions in water and wastewater. Increasing algal cells, the consumption of particular ions, including chloride, nitrate, phosphate, and ammonium, provides a suitable way to optimize water treatment processes. Different algal species have the capability to survive in extreme salinities by developing resistance against osmotic pressure in saline water. The current study reviews the effect of salinity on algal biomass production, algal growth rate, chlorides, nitrates, phosphates, chemical oxygen demand (COD), total nitrogen, total phosphorus, and ammonium ions. Mainly algae cultivated in freshwater, synthetic brackish water, seawater, and hypersaline water, were studied for this review. Various ion uptake mechanisms used by the algal cell are summarized, focusing on biosorption and bioaccumulation processes. Critical parameters such as light intensity, pH, and temperature variations significantly influence ion and nutrients uptake efficiencies. Analysis performed on collected data indicated that halophytic algae could survive in high salinities at elevated growth rates compared to freshwater. The halotolerant algal species showed an inclining trend of chloride ion removal with an elimination capacity of 7.5 g.m-3.h-1. Moreover, the nitrate uptake rate in halophytic algae is 10-folds higher to phosphate, regardless of salinity level. It could be concluded that microalgae will be beneficial for ion and nutrient uptake processes in treating high saline water

Rapid, Scalable Assembly of Stereochemically Rich, Mono- and Bicyclic Acyl Sultams

A one-pot, sequential protocol is reported that involves complementary ambiphile pairing (CAP) of a vinyl sulfonamide with a variety of unprotected amino acids via aza-Michael addition and subsequent intramolecular amidation. The method generates diverse, sp3-rich mono- and bicyclic acyl sultams in a highly scalable manner. Modular pairing of stereochemically rich building blocks allows quick access to all possible isomers. Extension to include one-pot, sequential 3-, 4- and 5-multicomponent protocols is also discussed