The Impact of International Labour Standards on Freedom of Association in Bangladesh.

This thesis focuses on examination of the impact of international labour standards on freedom of association in Bangladesh. The aim is to trace the influence of the ILO Conventions on freedom of association in the development of legislation and policy on the right to freedom of association in Bangladesh and to determine the effectiveness and relevance of the ILO's effort in this context. The present study undertakes to focus and analyse the impact from three perspectives. First, by outlining the legislative development of the right to freedom of association in Bangladesh, the thesis attempts to ascertain the impact of the ILO Conventions on freedom of association on domestic legislation and policy. Secondly, an assessment is undertaken of the extent to which the Government of Bangladesh has fulfilled its international obligations under the ILO Constitution and evaluate the role of the ILO supervisory machinery in ensuring the right to freedom of association in Bangladesh. Thirdly, an investigation is carried out on the awareness, views and attitudes of the workers, union leaders and employers on the right to freedom of association through an empirical survey carried out in Bangladesh

Linking dephosphorylation to cellular events: Functional analysis of human CDC14 (hCDC14) phosphatases

Mitotic phosphatases play crucial roles in anaphase regulation and mitotic exit by annulling the kinase-mediated protein phosphorylation. In budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cdc14 (cell division cycle 14) phosphatase antagonizes key Cdk1 (cyclin-dependent kinase 1) functions to drive cells out of mitosis. Despite the presence of highly conserved catalytic domains, human CDC14s are dispensable for cell cycle progression. Nevertheless, to decipher the molecular mechanisms of human CDC14s functions, we have investigated the knockout cellular models aided by various imaging and proteomics approaches. Phenotypic analyses of the generated hCDC14A knockout in human retinal pigment epithelium (hTERT-RPE1) cells have exhibited the occurrence of longer primary cilia upon serum starvation. The intermediate longer cilia in haploid-insufficient cells, as well as the extended cilia observed upon siRNA-mediated acute depletion of hCDC14A, have further confirmed the phenotype. Primary cilia are microtubule-based structures that control various aspects of growth and development through sensing extracellular signals. Defects in this regulation lead to a host of pathological conditions collectively known as ciliopathies. Indirect immunofluorescence and electron microscopy have revealed that the disassembly pathways, as well as the crucial structures like axoneme and basal body, were intact in the elongated cilia. Inducible expression of hCDC14A has indicated its presence in the proximal end and subdistal appendage of the basal body. Global phosphoproteome along with proximity-based interaction proteomics approaches under conditions that favor ciliation have identified substrates for hCDC14A. Some of the identified substrates are involved in actin cytoskeleton reorganization with a function in cilia length control. The actin bundling protein drebrin (DBN1) was one of the identified hCDC14A substrates that have recently been reported to be associated with ciliogenesis. We show that the counteracting phospho-regulation of DBN1 at serine residue 142 by the proline directed kinase CDK5 and hCDC14A phosphatase regulates cilia length. However, significantly longer cilia in hCDC14A knockout cells than those from DBN1 knockout cells indicate that there are more substrates for hCDC14A that might be involved in ciliogenesis. The longer cilia phenotype in hCDC14A knockout cells could be explained by the enhanced recycling endosomes (transferrin) as well as increased ciliary vesicle docking (smoothened) in the pericentrosomal areas

Local Government Level Restorative Adjudication: An Alternative Model of Justice for Children in Bangladesh

Keeping the best interests of children in mind, this paper examines the prevailing restorative model of justice at local government level of Bangladesh and argues that this model, if adequately activated and reformed, can be a desirable alternative to the formal system of justice for children who come into contact or conflict with the law. In doing so, the paper outlines the historical development of local government adjudication mechanisms, analyzes the existing norms and procedure of such adjudication, outlines the potential of such adjudication bodies as viable alternatives to juvenile courts in protecting the best interests of children, sets out the shortcomings of the local government bodies and the challenges involved in capturing their potential, and finally suggests a number of ways in which the model could be improved

An Improved Approach for Extracting Frequently Extracted Code Idioms

Source code refactoring is a process of restructuring or changing the existing codes without changing their external behaviour. This is a continuous process done by the developers to improve code quality, readability, maintainability of the source code, and address technical debt. There have been studies and tools to aid developers to refactor effectively their source code and to understand the motivations behind refactorings applied by developers. We aim to find Code Idioms that developers tend to refactor more frequently and investigate whether there are unique refactored code idioms for production code and test code. We use the RefactoringMiner tool to detect and collect EXTRACT METHOD refactoring from the commit history of the projects and propose a technique to represent the code fragments as structure-preserving context-free independent graphs and apply graph-similarity measure techniques to find similar code idioms among 65,742 EXTRACT METHOD instances. We measure both exact matching and partial matching with constraint checking from the associated metadata of the nodes and edges of the graphs. We divide our data set into production code and test code and found a total of 489 code idiom patterns. We present in detail 22 of the most frequently refactored code idioms. There are unique patterns to production code and test code and patterns shared among them. We limit our study to only Java-based open-source projects and EXTRACT METHOD refactoring, but we believe the approach can be applied to other object-oriented languages or refactorings. The findings can be useful to design an effective refactoring recommender system, help developers gain confidence in refactoring recommendation tools, and help researchers understand refactoring motivations and API usage patterns

MONITORING OF NORTH AMERICAN SNOW COVER AND ENSO EFFECTS

This study was conducted to monitor the Snow Cover Area (SCA) and to evaluate the effects of El Nino and La Nina on SCA in North America (Excluding Greenland) since 2000/2001 to 2010. The NASA ((National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Earth Observing System Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)/Terra satellite provided every eight-day (MOD10C2) and monthly (MOD10CM) Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) products were used in this study. These both products were analyzed using MATLAB HDF import tool to measure SCAs and to create Climate Model Grid (CMG) maps. The largest SCA in individual month (21.16 M.Km2) and in individual year (11.39 M.Km2) were reported in January, 2001 and 2001, respectively. The maximum effect of El Nino occurred in April, where SCA was significantly below than average. During El Nino, southwestern state (New Mexico) to upper east states occupied more SCA than neutral years, while reduction of snow cover observed over upper northwest states. La Nina months received more SCA than El Nino months in the Northwest part of USA

Risk committee, corporate risk-taking and firm value

We empirically examine the impact of the stand-alone risk committee on corporate risk-taking and firm value. We argue that the existence of a stand-alone risk committee enhances the quality of corporate governance which results in improved investor protection by reducing corporate risk-taking and enhancing firm value. We find several measures of risk-taking decline significantly for firms that have a stand-alone risk committee compared with firms that have a joint audit and risk committee. We also find that the presence of a stand-alone risk committee is positively associated with firm value. The evidence is consistent with the proposition that the firms with a stand-alone risk committee can effectively evaluate potential risks and implement a proper risk management system

Combating terrorism under human rights and humanitarian law regimes

The measures to counter terrorism, if devoid of the norms of human rights (HR) and international humanitarian law (IHL), might be fatal for the very principles and values that terrorism threatens. The paper observes that during the last decade, particularly after the atrocious events of 9/11, new interpretations are being offered and new techniques are being employed to deviate from the state obligations under HR and IHL regime. By critically examining these techniques in the light of HR and IHL jurisprudence, the authors submit that the interpretations offered to justify these techniques have hardly any legal basis and apprehend that these interpretations and techniques are posing potential threats to the very essence and existence of the basic norms of HR and IHL. The paper also analyzes the consequences of undermining or marginalizing HR and IHL norms in the fight against terrorism. Finally, the paper argues that existing norms of HR and IHL should not be compromised on the plea of the fight against terrorism since the best long-term guarantee of security is embedded in these norms. Acting outside the realm of these norms, while responding to terrorism, will ultimately prove counterproductive.peer-reviewe

A Review on Embryonic Development of Inland Fishes of Bangladesh

The early developmental pattern of inland fishes of Bangladesh are not well studied though it has a great importance in fisheries and aquaculture sector. The embryonic study provides interesting information on further growth and health of the fish and considered as an essential component for optimization of fish seed production by natural and induced breeding. Therefore, the current review work has been undertaken to provide a detail information on embryonic development of important inland fishes of Bangladesh. Information was collected from published scientific papers, un-published Masters and PhD dissertations from universities, popular articles and other published and grey literature. Diameters of unfertilized egg of the reviewed fish species were found to be 0.5 to 1.3 mm and fertilized egg were 0.49 to 1.6 mm. Shapes of the egg were also variable from species to species. There is little information available on egg activation and egg micropyle of fish species of Bangladesh. The fertilization rate of different fishes ranged from 40.1% to 93.9%. There are different stages of early development in different species and time needs to complete the stages also vary. The timing of post hatching development by metamorphosis was found to vary based on the fish species from several days to weeks. Different factors like temperature, photoperiod, DO, seasonality and presence of chemicals in water were found to affect the early development of fish. The review included eighteen inland fishes and unearthed useful insights of their embryonic development and influence of different factors. As we expect, the outcome of the study would provide a baseline and would be very useful in conducting further research on the embryology of indigenous fishes of Bangladesh.&nbsp