A Transmogrifying Discourse of Sexual Violence: Resisting, Redressing, and Re-writing Racial Scripts in Contemporary African American Women's Theatre

This dissertation examines contemporary African American women's theatre that addresses the absented and erased reality of black women as victims of sexual violence. This thesis investigates how contemporary African American Theatre and performance unfolds two realities of rape: one reality is of the erased victims, and the second of the perpetrators of sexual violence. Working at the intersections of gender and black feminist studies, critical race theory and performance studies this dissertation studies how the African American creative impulses are re-writing rape narratives by deconstructing debilitating racist myths and stereotypes. It seeks to expand limited definitions of rape in legal discourses, pointing out limitations of concepts like date rape and issues of consent, but also looks at forms of sexual violation that simply do not usually register within legal parameters like lesbian rape, rape through verbal sexual harassment, and medical rape. Furthermore, this project engages with racist stereotypes that either nullify black women's experiential realities of sexual violence or demonize black men. One of the main objectives of this dissertation is to examine the perpetrators of violence as well as the victims through dramatic and performative engagements with sexual violence. Therefore, this thesis examines the rapist, be it a man, a lesbian, a mother, or an adolescent youth as part of African American contemporary Theatre's engagement with the narratives of rape. This equalizing representation of sexual violence as an act not just done to black women, but is done by men and women to black women makes African American Theatre and performance redress the imbalance wherein black women as victims of sexual violence bore the burden of the violence committed against them alone. This impulse to redress the imbalance raises many thorny issues of black manhood, black motherhood, and the role of black community that these playwrights fiercely bring into conversation, not to repeat historical racist narratives this dissertation contends, but to re-evaluate the roles and responsibilities of black people, and what it means to be black in the face of sexual violence

A High-Performance System Architecture for Medical Imaging

Medical imaging is classified into different modalities such as ultrasound, X-ray, computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), single-photon emission tomography (SPECT), nuclear medicine (NM), mammography, and fluoroscopy. Medical imaging includes various imaging diagnostic and treatment techniques and methods to model the human body, and therefore, performs an essential role to improve the health care of the community. Medical imaging, scans (such as X-Ray, CT, etc.) are essential in a variety of medical health-care environments. With the enhanced health-care management and increase in availability of medical imaging equipment, the number of global imaging-based systems is growing. Effective, safe, and high-quality imaging is essential for the medical decision-making. In this chapter, we proposed a medical imaging-based high-performance hardware architecture and software programming toolkit called high-performance medical imaging system (HPMIS). The HPMIS can perform medical image registration, storage, and processing in hardware with the support of C/C++ function calls. The system is easy to program and gives high performance to different medical imaging applications

The Impact of Inflation on Pakistan Stock Exchange

The aim of the study is to determine the impact of inflation on equity prices in Pakistan's economy. The examination time frame is 2012-2018; monthly information was gathered from the State Bank of Pakistan and the Pakistan Stock Exchange. The information was dissected utilizing the relapse model and factual consequences of these investigations to demonstrate a negative connection among expansion and stock costs. All exploration as of late has demonstrated that inflation and stock costs have a positive relationship universally. Some studies, however, indicated that inflation and equity prices were negative. In general, the stock market provides an overview of investors whether they want to invest in the financial market. Equity prices also affect inflation. Keywords Stock price, Inflation, Karachi Stock Exchange, KSE 100 index, CPI DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/11-16-11 Publication date:June 30th 201

AMC: Advanced Multi-accelerator Controller

The rapid advancement, use of diverse architectural features and introduction of High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools in FPGA technology have enhanced the capacity of data-level parallelism on a chip. A generic FPGA based HLS multi-accelerator system requires a microprocessor (master core) that manages memory and schedules accelerators. In a real environment, such HLS multi-accelerator systems do not give a perfect performance due to memory bandwidth issues. Thus, a system demands a memory manager and a scheduler that improves performance by managing and scheduling the multi-accelerator’s memory access patterns efficiently. In this article, we propose the integration of an intelligent memory system and efficient scheduler in the HLS-based multi-accelerator environment called Advanced Multi-accelerator Controller (AMC). The AMC system is evaluated with memory intensive accelerators, High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and implemented and tested on a Xilinx Virtex-5 ML505 evaluation FPGA board. The performance of the system is compared against the microprocessor-based systems that have been integrated with the operating system. Results show that the AMC based HLS multi-accelerator system achieves 10.4x and 7x of speedup compared to the MicroBlaze and Intel Core based HLS multi-accelerator systems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

EMVS: Embedded Multi Vector-core System

With the increase in the density and performance of digital electronics, the demand for a power-efficient high-performance computing (HPC) system has been increased for embedded applications. The existing embedded HPC systems suffer from issues like programmability, scalability, and portability. Therefore, a parameterizable and programmable high-performance processor system architecture is required to execute the embedded HPC applications. In this work, we proposed an Embedded Multi Vector-core System (EMVS) which executes the embedded application by managing the multiple vectorized tasks and their memory operations. The system is designed and ported on an Altera DE4 FPGA development board. The performance of EMVS is compared with the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing Odroid XU3, Parallela and GPU Jetson TK1 embedded systems. In contrast to the embedded systems, the results show that EMVS improves 19.28 and 10.22 times of the application and system performance respectively and consumes 10.6 times less energy.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

ViPS: Visual processing system for medical imaging

Imaging has become an indispensable tool in modern medicine. Various powerful and expensive platforms to study medical imaging applications appear in recent years. In this article, we design and propose a Visual Processing System (ViPS) that processes medical imaging applications efficiently. ViPS provides a user-friendly programming environment and high-performance architecture to perform image analysis, features extraction and object recognition for complex real-time images or videos. The data structure of image or video is described in the program memory using pattern descriptors; ViPS uses specialized 3D memory structure to handle complex images or videos and processes them on microprocessors or application specific hardware accelerators. The proposed system is highly reliable in terms of cost, performance, and power. ViPS based system is implemented and tested on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA VC707 Evaluation Kit. The performance of ViPS is compared with the Intel i7 multi-core, GPU Jetson TK1 Embedded Development Kit with 192 CUDA cores based graphic systems. When compared with the Intel and GPU-based systems, the results show that ViPS performs real-time video reconstruction at 2x and 1.45x of higher frame rate, achieves 14.6x to 4.8x of speedup while executing different image processing applications and 20.3% and 12.6% of speedup for video processing algorithms respectively.Peer Reviewe

Periodontal Treatment Needs of Patients Undergoing Orthodontic Treatment in Comparison To Non-Orthodontic Treatment Patients: A Comparative Study

OBJECTIVES To determine the periodontal treatment needs of patients undergoing orthodontic treatment compared to those not undergoing the treatment.   METHODOLOGY A cross-sectional comparative study was conducted on 100 patients visiting the Dental OPD of Sharif Medical and Dental College, Lahore, from June 2019 to July 2020. Clinical examination was done using the Community Periodontal index for treatment needs (CPITN) to assess the participants' periodontal health and treatment needs. RESULTS There was a statistically significant difference in the scores of CPITN across the treatment and control groups (≤0.001). The patients requiring scaling and prophylaxis and Oral hygiene instructions (TN 2) were more (94%) in the orthodontic treatment group in comparison to the non-orthodontic treatment group (62%). A higher percentage of patients (6%) requiring complex treatment (deep scaling, root planning and complex surgical procedures), scaling and prophylaxis and Oral hygiene instructions (TN3) belonged to the non-orthodontic treatment group, while only 4% required it from the orthodontic treatment group. CONCLUSION All orthodontic and non-orthodontic treatment group participants required oral hygiene instructions and had periodontal treatment needs (TN1). The patients requiring scaling and prophylaxis and Oral hygiene instructions (TN 2) were more in the orthodontic treatment group than the non-orthodontic treatment group. A higher percentage of patients requiring complex treatment (deep scaling, root planning and complex surgical procedures), scaling and prophylaxis and Oral hygiene instructions (TN3) belonged to the non-orthodontic treatment group

Association Of Maternal Age And Hemoglobin Level With Apgar Score Of Newborns In A Tertiary Care Hospital Of Suburbs Of Islamabad

Objectives: To determine the association of Apgar score with maternal age and hemoglobin. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted on mothers (n=306) delivering live, full-term, singleton babies by spontaneous vertex delivery. Women who suffered stillbirths had babies of unknown gestational age or showed co-morbidities were excluded. SPSS version 26 was used for data analysis. Mean + standard deviation, and percentages were calculated. Cross-tabulation and logistic regression were done to see the association between dependent and independent variables. A p-value of <0.05 was statistically significant. Results The ages of women ranged from 20 to 40 years (mean= 25+1.9).  The number of patients aged 24 years with Hb <7g/dl was 6 (37.5%). Out of all, 90 (29.4%) patients had Hb >11g/dl, and their ages were 30 years which was significant (p = 0.000). Apgar score for the neonates showed that 258 (84.3%) had an Apgar score >7 while 48 (15.7%) had a score < 7. Babies of mothers whose age was 26 years had Apgar score < 7(25%) (p = 0.001). Neonatal birth weight, of <2kg was observed in infants born to young mothers of 26 years of age (20%) (p = 0.001), and a weight >3.5kg was recorded in 20 infants (6.5%). The younger mothers had lower Hb, and their babies had low Apgar scores <7 at the time of birth (p = 0.001). Conclusion Women of younger age and lower hemoglobin levels give birth to infants with low Apgar scores and birth weight. Low birth weight in neonates is significantly associated with a low five-minute Apgar score

Host biomarkers for monitoring therapeutic response in extrapulmonary tuberculosis

Purpose The aim of this study was to explore the utility of inflammatory biomarkers in the peripheral blood to predict response to treatment in extrapulmonary tuberculosis (EPTB). Methods A Luminex xMAP-based multiplex immunoassay was used to measure 40 inflammatory biomarkers in un-stimulated plasma of 91 EPTB patients (48 lymphadenitis, and 43 pleuritis) before and at 2 and 6 months of treatment. Results Overall a significant change was observed in 28 inflammatory biomarkers with treatment in EPTB patients. However, MIG/CXCL9, IP-10/CXCL10, and CCL23 decreased in all patients' groups with successful treatment at both time points. At 2 months, 29/64 (45%) patients responded partially while 35/64 (55%) showed complete regress. Among good responders, a higher number of biomarkers (16/40) reduced significantly as compared to partial responders (1/40). Almost half (14/29) of partial responders required longer treatment than 6 months to achieve satisfactory response. The levels of MIG, IP-10, MIF, CCL22 and CCL23 reduced significantly among 80, 74, 60, 71, 51% good responders, as compared to 52, 52, 52, 59, 52% partial responders, respectively. A biosignature, defined by a significant decrease in any one of these five biomarkers, corresponded with satisfactory response to treatment in 97% patients at 2 month and 99% patients at 6 months of treatment. Conclusion Change in inflammatory biomarkers correlates with treatment success. A five biomarker biosignature (MIG, IP-10, MIF, CCL22 and CCL23) could be used as an indicator of treatment success.publishedVersio

Cultivating a greener future:Exploiting trichoderma derived secondary metabolites for fusarium wilt management in peas

This study aimed to identify efficient Trichoderma isolate(s) for the management of Fusarium wilt in peas. Four different pea germplasms (Sarsabz, Pea-09, Meteor and Supreme) were evaluated for resistance against Fusarium oxysporum in pot assay. Resistant germplasm exhibits a varying range of disease severity (23%) and percent disease index (21%), whereas susceptible and highly susceptible germplasm exhibit maximum disease severity (44–79%) and percent disease index (47–82%). The susceptible germplasm Meteor was selected for in vivo experiment. Five different Trichoderma spp. (Trichoderma koningii, T. hamatum, T. longibrachiatum, T. viride, and T. harzianum) were screened for the production of hydrolytic extracellular enzymes under in vitro. In-vitro biocontrol potential of Trichoderma spp. was assayed by percentage inhibition of dry mass of Fusarium oxysporum pisi (FOP) with Trichoderma spp. metabolite filtrate concentrations. Maximum growth inhibition was observed by T. harzianum (50–89%). T. harzianum metabolites in filtrate conc. (40%, 50%, and 60%) exhibited maximum reduction in biomass and were thus used for in vivo management of the disease. The pot experiment for in-vivo management also confirmed the maximum inhibition of FOP by T. harzianum metabolites filtrate at 60% by reducing disease parameters and enhancing growth, yield, and physiochemical and stress markers. Trichoderma strains led to an increase in chlorophyll and carotenoids (34-26%), Total phenolic 55%, Total protein content 60%, Total Flavonoid content 36%, and the increasing order of enzyme activities were as follows: CAT > POX > PPO > PAL in all treatments. These strains demonstrate excellent bio-control of Fusarium wilt in pea via induction of defense-related enzymes. The present work will help use Trichoderma species in disease management programme as an effective biocontrol agent against plant pathogens