An Overview of Development of Gender Based Persecution in Refugee Law under Membership of a Particular Social Group: A Study of Comparative Jurisprudence of Canada, UK & USA

Refugees are the most vulnerable people in the world who flee from homeland for saving life because of well fear of being persecution according to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Reports say that women and child refugee are almost 80% of the total number of refugees. Critics also pointed out  that international refugee law is conceptually narrow. It is only limited to particular classes of people that included race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group of people or political opinion, where  women’s view, women’s persecution was neglected and thus it is difficult for a woman to claim and establish as a refugee. Later, UNHCR introduced several guidelines to overcome the limitation of international refugee law, in particularly for women refugees, who face gender based persecution because of her gender. Further, case laws and guidelines for the women refugees  of different jurisprudences also contributed for the protection of women refugees. Now, application for claim of women refugee before the adjudicator is not neglected. Rights for women refugee are well settled at the present world. The aim of this paper is to critically discuss the landmark case laws of Canada, U.K. and U.S. who extremely contributed for the development of gender based refugee claim. And finally, there is a conclusion of the discussion. Keywords: Case, Convention, Discrimination, Female Genital Mutilation, Gender Based Persecution, Guidelines, Jurisprudence, Membership, Particular Social Group, Women

Interception of refugees at sea and international law : a Rohingya perspective

Despite the development of international law, the interception of refugee boats, the turning back of boats to sea and the refusal of disembarkation of refugee boats are common practices around the world. Party states to the Refugee Convention, for instance, Australia and the United States, adopt various laws and policies to deter refugee boats from their coasts, which challenges the refugee protection regime at sea. On the other side, the South East Asian countries, that are the focus of this thesis, are non-party states to the Refugee Convention and there is no particular law and policy for the refugees in the region. Thus, the lack of refugee protection mechanism poses further challenges in South East Asia. The international, regional and domestic legal regime has significantly progressed to provide refugee protection, but the question remains open: is the current legal regime adequate to protect the boat refugees, those who arrive by sea? This thesis explores this question and provides a case study by focusing on the Rohingya boat refugees of South East Asia. This thesis examines the current refugee protection framework for seaborne refugees, and focuses in particular on the principle of non-refoulement and the international law of the sea. It examines how the parties of the Refugee Convention are dealing with the boat refugees, and as a comparative research it also investigates how non-party states to the Convention are dealing with the boat refugees. This thesis evaluates the existing legal protection mechanisms and explores the challenges and gaps in the protection regime for refugees who arrive by boats through sea routes, specially to the non-party states of the 1951 Refugee Convention in South East Asia. By analysing the shortcomings of the protection regime and the opportunities for the boat refugees of South East Asia, this thesis concludes that adoption of a regional framework would be a way of protection for the boat refugees

Quantifying Urban Karachi’s Air Quality Effect on Human Health and Policy Recommendations

Today’s environmental issues are systematic in nature and cannot be tackled in isolation from man-made activities and impacts. The change in land use and land cover resulting from urbanization has aggravated air quality in urban centers of the country. One of the main sources of air pollution is the use of automobiles in human populated regions resulting in an excess of carbon, sulfur and nitrogen compounds. The emission of greenhouse gases in the form of carbon dioxide from 1990 to 2005 showed an increase of 97.4%. The main source of this increment were vehicular and industrial emissions due to which Pakistan is facing glacier melt in northern areas, earthquakes, flooding and lack of fresh water availability. The authors analyze the effects of vehicular emission on human health; this study is focused on the commercial and industrial areas of Karachi where the flow of heavy traffic and heavy vehicular exhaust emissions are common. The sampled areas are Port Qasim, University Road, Korangi and Mosmiyat. The purpose of this study is to evaluate perceptions of health factors due to air borne pollution in 4 different localities in Karachi. The results showed predominance of headache which is due to an excessive quantity of carbon monoxide and air borne dust in the survey areas as slight exposure of Carbon monoxide affiliated with headache, the second highest complain from respondents is the  Eye Irritation, the exposure of NO2 has acute health effects which include eye irritation, cough and asthma. Based on the above study, recommendations are made to reduce GHG and other pollutants

LIGHTING – THE WAY TO REDUCING ELECTRICAL ENERGY DEMAND IN UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS IN BANGLADESH

Lighting is one of the dominant electricity demand factors in the building energy sector and has huge potential for demand reduction. However, concerning the efficacy of energy consumption, this potential energy-saving option entails further investigations, particularly for developing countries. This study addresses the issues of an efficient lighting system design for educational institutions with particular attention to classroom and laboratory lighting systems for a university in Bangladesh as a case study. Measurements show that during the daytime, under clear and average sky conditions both rooms received sufficient natural light (>300 lx) for educational activities, whereas under an overcast sky, only 50% space receives sufficient natural light. At night, the installed fluorescent tube lights illuminance level was found insufficient (<300 lx) for educational activities. The inefficient lighting system design was found to be the main reason for this illuminance level. Simulation results reveal that light emitting diode (LED) tube lights with a maintenance factor of 0.8 could save 10,080-15,120 kWh, 91,929-137,894 BDT (1USD=84BDT), and 6,753-10,130 kgCO2-eq, energy, cost, and, greenhouse gas emissions respectively per year for the classrooms

Measuring Social Media Activity of Scientific Literature: An Exhaustive Comparison of Scopus and Novel Altmetrics Big Data

This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is comprehensively evaluated by deploying Area Under the Curve (AUC) - an application of receiver operating characteristic. Results indicate a rapid increase in the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database from 10.19% in 2011 to 20.46% in 2015. A zero-truncated negative binomial model is implemented to measure the extent to which different bibliometric and altmetric factors contribute to citation counts. Blog count appears to be the most important factor increasing the number of citations by 38.6% in the field of Health Professions and Nursing, followed by Twitter count increasing the number of citations by 8% in the field of Physics and Astronomy. Interestingly, both Blog count and Twitter count always show positive increase in the number of citations across all fields. While there was a positive weak correlation between bibliometric and altmetric indices, the results show that altmetric indices can be a good indicator to discriminate highly cited publications, with an encouragingly AUC= 0.725 between highly cited publications and total altmetric count. Overall, findings suggest that altmetrics could better distinguish highly cited publications.Comment: 34 Pages, 3 Figures, 15 Table

Alt-Index: A proposed Index for measuring the social activity of scientific research

Altmetrics is a broad term used to refer to article level metrics, which focus on a more timely measurement of interest in scholarly documents made visible through social media (Priem et al., 2010). As with any new metric, concerns have been raised regarding its use (Prime, 2013; Kwok, 2013), due to the fact that an Altmetric score might potentially be manipulated or gamed, just as it is possible to game citations (Bartneck & Kokkelmans, 2011; Wilhite et al., 2012). However, given that there are so many diverse measures now compiled within Altmetrics, the tampering process is actually not that easy (Piwowar, 2013). Altmetric scores have therefore attracted the attention of the scientific community, who, parallel to traditional forms of scholarly communication, are now relying on social media to disseminate research as part of their daily practices (Piwowar, 2013). Thus far, a few studies have shown weak to medium correlations between bibliometric measures and Altmetric scores (Costas et al., 2015). More recently, a comprehensive study using data from Altmetic.com and Scopus has shown that when compared to journal citation scores, Altmetric scores demonstrate a higher-level of accuracy for identifying highly cited publications (Hassan et al., 2017). With this paper, we would like to propose a new measure, termed the alt-index. It is analogous to the h-index (Hirsch 2005), and it is defined as follows: "a scholar has an alt-index of a, if a of her/his Np papers have at least a social mentions, and the other (Np-a) papers have no more than a mentions each"

Towards optimal multimode fiber imaging by leveraging input polarization and conditional generative adversarial networks

Deep learning techniques provide a plausible route towards achieving practical imaging through multimode fibers. However, the results produced by these methods are often influenced by physical factors like temperature, fiber length, external perturbations, and polarization state of the input light. The impact of other factors, except input light polarization, has been discussed in the literature for imaging applications. The input polarization has been considered by researchers while looking at the characterization and control of polarization in multimode fibers. Here, we show experimentally that the state of polarization of light, being injected at multimode fiber input, affects the fidelity of reconstructed images from speckle patterns. Certain polarization states produce high-quality images at fiber output, while some yield degraded results. We have designed a conditional generative adversarial network~(CGAN) for image regeneration at various degrees of input light polarization. We demonstrate that in the case of multimode fibers that are held fixed, optimal imaging can be achieved by leveraging our CGAN model with the input light polarization state, where the fidelity of images is maximum. Our work exhibits high average structural similarity index values exceeding 0.9, surpassing the previously reported value of 0.8772. We also show that the model can be generalized to image adequately for all input light polarization states when the fiber has bends or twists. We anticipate our work will be a stepping stone toward developing high-resolution and less invasive multimode fiber endoscopes