Apple: Global Ethics and Transformational Leadership

Apple Inc. is an American technological company that designs, manufactures, and sells various products such as laptops, phones, accessories, streaming services, licensing services, and so much more. The paper explores the corporate responsibility and unethical business practices that arise from the global sourcing of Apple’s products. The company established many relationships with suppliers in East Asia to meet the rigorous demands of consumers, promising high-quality products at the expense of factory workers. However, global sourcing comes with unethical business practices. There have been various cases against Apple’s suppliers. This research highlights unfair working conditions, overworking employees, and environmental pollution that Apple’s suppliers are guilty of

EXACERBATED ECZEMA: ROLE OF BUILT ENVIRONMENT IN INCREASING DISEASE SEVERITY AMONG PAKISTANI PATIENTS

Atopic Eczema is a non-contagious skin disease. This study was undertaken to determine the role of home environment allergens in aggravation of atopic eczema by using EASI (Eczema Area And Severity Index) and POEM (Patient Oriented Eczema Measure). Furthermore statistical analysis was conducted to ascertain contribution of indoor environment allergen in exacerbating disease severity among male and female patients in Pakistan. The results revealed that home environment allergens have the potential to increase severity of atopic eczema experienced by the patients. Paints, air quality and fabric coverings were the most eczema deteriorating elements found inside Pakistani homes

Whole genome comparison of a large collection of mycobacteriophages reveals a continuum of phage genetic diversity

The bacteriophage population is large, dynamic, ancient, and genetically diverse. Limited genomic information shows that phage genomes are mosaic, and the genetic architecture of phage populations remains ill-defined. To understand the population structure of phages infecting a single host strain, we isolated, sequenced, and compared 627 phages of Mycobacterium smegmatis. Their genetic diversity is considerable, and there are 28 distinct genomic types (clusters) with related nucleotide sequences. However, amino acid sequence comparisons show pervasive genomic mosaicism, and quantification of inter-cluster and intra-cluster relatedness reveals a continuum of genetic diversity, albeit with uneven representation of different phages. Furthermore, rarefaction analysis shows that the mycobacteriophage population is not closed, and there is a constant influx of genes from other sources. Phage isolation and analysis was performed by a large consortium of academic institutions, illustrating the substantial benefits of a disseminated, structured program involving large numbers of freshman undergraduates in scientific discovery

Role of S180L polymorphism in etiology of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum in a small group of Pakistani population

The aim of our study was to investigate the role of S180L polymorphism in modulation of acquisition of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum in a small group of Pakistani population. A total of 133 individuals including 60 controls and 73 patients of malaria, caused by Plasmodium falciparum, were genotyped using allele-specific PCR. Ninety-two samples successfully demonstrated the PCR amplification results, while forty-one samples could not be genotyped due to failure in PCR amplification.  The allele frequency for S180L polymorphism was deviant from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) of the population under observation. Association was found between the observed polymorphism and the occurrence of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum (p = 0.01). Chances of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum were low in CC genotype carriers in comparison to other genotypes (Odds ratio: 0.3016; 95% CI: 0.124-0.729). The present findings suggest that S180L polymorphism is important in modulating the probability of acquisition of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum in Pakistani population. The CC genotype plays a protective role in local population against this type of malaria

A Machine Learning Approach for Reliable Object Tracking

Object tracking is a critical task that finds its applications in various fields including surveillance and autonomous robots. However, most of the work on object tracking has been developed on images and video data. In contrast, the aim of our work is to develop reliable object tracking system based on sequence of measurements which can be obtained from radio sensors, that are more suitable for privacy-concerned applications. In addition, we propose to use linear regression, in contrast to complex data-driven models, to demonstrate its performance against conventional tracking algorithm i.e., particle filter. Our experimental results show that LR can predict a moving object’s position with minimal error and significantly outperforms the particle filter by more than 90%. All the experiments have been validated via simulations.</p

An investigation into the acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by young Sindhi high school ESL learners

AbstractThe present study aims to explore the acquisition order of eight English grammatical inflectional morphemes, i.e. plural –s, possessive -s’, third person singular, present tense-s, past tense-ed, present participle-ing, past participle-en, comparative-er, and superlative-est by young Sindhi ESL (English as second language learners) learners at the high school. The study aimed to test the hypothesis that the high school English learners do not follow the universal order of grammatical morphemes and to investigate the effect of linguistic interference of L1 (Sindhi) in the acquisition order of English grammatical morphemes. The primary instrument used for data collection in this study was written essays. The time gap between first and second samplings was around three months. A mixed methods research design was utilized. The study used an exploratory-descriptive-qualitative methods coupled with a quantitative as per the objectives of the study corresponding to the research questions. A convenience sampling technique was employed to select participants from 10th Grade level. Specifically, the data was analyzed using the Dulay and Burt (1974) scoring method. The statistical tests were utilized to test the null hypothesis. The data confirmed that they indeed do not follow the universal order of grammatical morphemes. There exists the effect of linguistic inference of L1 in the acquisition order English grammatical morphemes. Finally, the finding is not in line with the sequence as determined by Dulay and Burt (1974), and Brown (1973)