Khwaja Sira: Culture, Identity Politics, and Transgender Activism in Pakistan

In 2009, the Pakistani Supreme Court began granting rights to gender ambiguous people who are locally known as khwaja siras. The Court organized this population into taxonomic groups and ordered the government to `mainstream\u27 them. These actions were based on certain cultural assumptions and occurred amid uncertainties about who khwaja siras really were. Meanwhile, khwaja siras began to mobilize in an effort to control their public image. Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork on the identity politics of khwaja siras in Karachi, this dissertation seeks to understand the ways in which gender ambiguous people constructed, negotiated and represented themselves both within their social networks and in the wider society, as well as the factors underpinning their public portrayals. I conceive khwaja sira politics as a `game\u27, that is, as the art of manipulation and concealment. I argue that the games of secrecy and deception in which this minority population engaged were responses to the stigma they experienced in everyday life. Khwaja sira relationships with the general public were strategic game-like interactions that were meant to conceal knowledge, misrepresent gender variant people, and confuse opponents. They allowed khwaja siras to maintain ambiguity about their corporeality, conceal their sexualized lifestyle, and seek inclusion into mainstream society. These everyday forms of agency and deceit emerged on a larger scale and in far more sophisticated ways in the realm of activism. However, social stigma was so pervasive that it permeated into the khwaja sira cultural system, impacting the self-esteem of its members and triggering identity wars between them. These fissures were replicated within activist spaces where they often stifled efforts to empower khwaja siras. The games of secrecy and deception that gender variant people played both facilitated and undermined their movement. These empowering and conscious acts of self preservation enhanced their security within an oppressive social environment. However, khwaja sira politics did not promote understanding of gender and sexual difference. These provisional solutions perpetuated ambiguity about khwaja siras, temporarily grazing the surface of their struggles without promoting long-term stigma reduction

Article Review: Medical Plants: Their Compounds and the Biotechniques for Identifying and Separation of Them

It was possible through this study to give a brief overview of the most important pharmaceutical compounds, which included glycosides, alkaloids, terpenes and their plant sources, which encourages the adoption of various separation techniques protocols to obtain multiple types of pharmaceutical compounds of high pharmacological value from medicinal plants compared to its standard compounds and thus the possibility of using it medically to cure many diseases and dispense with medicines and chemotherapy with multiple side effects and interactions. The study dealt with garlic, ginger and chamomile plants and their pharmaceutical compounds as examples of medicinal plants known since ancient times, research has confirmed its health benefits, as it supports normal body functions and the immune system

Vision based dynamic thermal comfort control using fuzzy logic and deep learning

A wide range of techniques exist to help control the thermal comfort of an occupant in indoor environments. A novel technique is presented here to adaptively estimate the occupant’s metabolic rate. This is performed by utilising occupant’s actions using computer vision system to identify the activity of an occupant. Recognized actions are then translated into metabolic rates. The widely used Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) thermal comfort index is computed using the adaptivey estimated metabolic rate value. The PMV is then used as an input to a fuzzy control system. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated using simulations of various activities. The integration of PMV thermal comfort index and action recognition system gives the opportunity to adaptively control occupant’s thermal comfort without the need to attach a sensor on an occupant all the time. The obtained results are compared with the results for the case of using one or two fixed metabolic rates. The included results appear to show improved performance, even in the presence of errors in the action recognition system

The mediating role of strategic foresight in the relationship between financial knowledge and strategic responses

This study aimed to clarify the mediating role of strategic foresight in its various forms (foresight, acumen, research) in the relationship between financial knowledge and strategic response in its dimensions (resource liquidity, business maturity, reactiveness and reactivity). To achieve this goal, this study was based on the descriptive analytical method, where the questionnaire was used to collect the primary data. (220) questionnaires were distributed to workers in the branches of commercial banks in the middle Euphrates cities (40) branches and (215) were retrieved from them. The results revealed that the adoption of financial knowledge enabled the organization, the study sample, to respond effectively to environmental dynamics through strategic foresight. Moreover, it was revealed that organizations that used financial knowledge were able to maximize their core competencies through strategic foresight, and thus provided added value to services efficiently over their competitors