Financial Development and Textile Sector Competitiveness: A Case Study of Pakistan

Kletzer and Bardhan (1987) argue that countries with a relatively well-developed financial sector have a comparative advantage in industries that rely on external finance. Beck (2002), and Fanelli and Medhora (2002) find that well-developed financial sector translates into a comparative advantage in the production of manufactured goods. There has been no attempt so far to explore the relationship between the financial development and international trade competitiveness in the case of Pakistan. We construct Balassa’s Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index for textile sector of Pakistan. Using ratio of credit extended to the textile sector to the total non-government credit of the banking system (TCS) as proxy for external finance we estimate long run relationship, and ECM, between RCA index and TCS while controlling for other determinants of the international trade competitiveness of textile sector of Pakistan. In line with the findings of Beck (2002), and Fanelli and Medhora (2002), our results suggest that recourse to external finance has a strong positive impact on the country’s textile sector competitiveness both in the short and the long run even when we control for traditional determinants of competitiveness.Financial Development, Competitiveness

AMCTD: Adaptive Mobility of Courier nodes in Threshold-optimized DBR Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

In dense underwater sensor networks (UWSN), the major confronts are high error probability, incessant variation in topology of sensor nodes, and much energy consumption for data transmission. However, there are some remarkable applications of UWSN such as management of seabed and oil reservoirs, exploration of deep sea situation and prevention of aqueous disasters. In order to accomplish these applications, ignorance of the limitations of acoustic communications such as high delay and low bandwidth is not feasible. In this paper, we propose Adaptive mobility of Courier nodes in Threshold-optimized Depth-based routing (AMCTD), exploring the proficient amendments in depth threshold and implementing the optimal weight function to achieve longer network lifetime. We segregate our scheme in 3 major phases of weight updating, depth threshold variation and adaptive mobility of courier nodes. During data forwarding, we provide the framework for alterations in threshold to cope with the sparse condition of network. We ultimately perform detailed simulations to scrutinize the performance of our proposed scheme and its comparison with other two notable routing protocols in term of network lifetime and other essential parameters. The simulations results verify that our scheme performs better than the other techniques and near to optimal in the field of UWSN.Comment: 8th International Conference on Broadband and Wireless Computing, Communication and Applications (BWCCA'13), Compiegne, Franc

Decolonising quantitative research methods pedagogy: teaching contemporary politics to challenge hierarchies from data

Decolonisation of the curriculum in higher education is a radical, transformative process of change that interrogates the enduring Eurocentric and racist narratives surrounding the production of academic ‘knowledge’. Our key argument is that it is essential for students of politics to understand the authorities and hierarchies exerted through quantitative data. In this paper, we show that (1) quantitative methods and data literacy can be an explicit tool in the endeavour to challenge structures of oppression, and (2) there is a need to apply decolonial principles to the teaching of quantitative methods, prioritising the historical contextualisation and anti-racist critique of the ways in which statistics amplify existing micro and macro power relations. To explain how this can be done, we begin with a commentary on the ‘state of decolonisation’ in higher education, its relevance to the sub-disciplines of politics, and its application to quantitative teaching in the UK. We then suggest some guiding principles for a decolonial approach to quantitative methods teaching, and present substantive examples from political sociology, international political economy, and international development. These suggestions and examples show how a decolonial lens advances critical and emancipatory thinking in undergraduate students of politics when it is used with quantitative methods

Low prevalence of the intact cag pathogenicity island in clinical isolates of Helicobacter pylori in Karachi, Pakistan

Clinical diseases that follow Helicobacter pylori infection are associated with expression of the cagA gene, a part of cytotoxin-associated gene pathogenicity island (cag-PAI). This study aims to determined whether or not the presence of cagA is associated with the presence of complete cag-PAI and to evaluate inflammatory changes associated with the five loci in the cag-PAI of H. pylori comprising cagA, cagA promoter region (cagAP), cagE, cagT and the left end of the cagA gene (LEC). H. pylori isolates were obtained from patients with dyspeptic symptoms. Clinical strains of H. pylori were screened by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for respective genes of the cag-PAI. Of 115 H. pylori isolates, 31 (28%) were positive for the five cag-PAI loci. H. pylori isolates with intact cag-PAI were associated with gastric carcinoma (GC; n=9[60%]) and gastric ulcer (GU; n=5[45%]) compared to non-ulcer dyspepsia (NUD; n=14[18%]) (P=0.001 and P=0.049, respectively). In patients with intact cag-PAI, acute on chronic inflammation was present in 25 (81%) and was more common than chronic inflammation (P=0.013). The cagE and cagAP had deletions in 25 (37%) and 23 (35%) cases, respectively. The cagAP region was significantly associated with GC (n=12[80%],

Granulomatous gastritis: a diagnostic dilemma?

Granulomatous inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract is an uncommon entity, an aetiopathogenic diagnosis can be reached only by combining the morphological examination with clinical and laboratory investigations. We report two cases of granulomatous gastritis: a 27-year-old woman presenting with weight loss and a 55-year-old woman presenting with epigastric pain and vomiting. Upper oesophagastroduodenoscopy in these cases showed antral hyperaemia and histopathology showed non-caseating gastric granulomatous inflammation. Both the cases were extensively worked-up for possible tuberculosis (TB) as the Patients lived in an endemic area, before starting steroids for the possibility of Crohn\u27s disease (CD). The first Patient improved but the second Patient had a flare of underlying undiagnosed TB. Granulomatous gastritis present a diagnostic challenge for treating physicians because of similar clinical, laboratory and endoscopical features between CD and intestinal TB

LINE SEGMENTATION OF 2D LASER SCANNER POINT CLOUDS FOR INDOOR SLAM BASED ON A RANGE OF RESIDUALS

Indoor mobile laser scanning (IMLS) based on the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) principle proves to be the preferred method to acquire data of indoor environments at a large scale. In previous work, we proposed a backpack IMLS system containing three 2D laser scanners and an according SLAM approach. The feature-based SLAM approach solves all six degrees of freedom simultaneously and builds on the association of lines to planes. Because of the iterative character of the SLAM process, the quality and reliability of the segmentation of linear segments in the scanlines plays a crucial role in the quality of the derived poses and consequently the point clouds. The orientations of the lines resulting from the segmentation can be influenced negatively by narrow objects which are nearly coplanar with walls (like e.g. doors) which will cause the line to be tilted if those objects are not detected as separate segments. State-of-the-art methods from the robotics domain like Iterative End Point Fit and Line Tracking were found to not handle such situations well. Thus, we describe a novel segmentation method based on the comparison of a range of residuals to a range of thresholds. For the definition of the thresholds we employ the fact that the expected value for the average of residuals of n points with respect to the line is σ / √n. Our method, as shown by the experiments and the comparison to other methods, is able to deliver more accurate results than the two approaches it was tested against

Antibiotic susceptibility patterns of Helicobacter pylori and triple therapy in a high-prevalence area

This study aims to determine primary Helicobacter pylori resistance and its effect on eradication of the organism. Ninety-two Patients with dyspeptic symptoms were enrolled. H. pylori was cultured and antibiotic sensitivity was determined by the Epsilometer test (Etest) for clarithromycin (CLR), amoxicillin (AMX) and metronidazole (MTR). 23S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) point mutations associated with clarithromycin resistance were also detected. Patients were treated with omeprazole (40 mg daily), CLR (500 mg) and AMX (1g twice a day) for 14 days. A (14)C-urea breath test ((14)C-UBT) was repeated four weeks after completion of treatment to confirm eradication. Triple therapy failure was seen in 30(33%) Patients. The resistance rates were: CLR 33% (30/92), MTR 48% (44192) and AMX (2/92). Clarithromycin resistance (CLR-R) was present in the 16-39 age group in 21 (47%) (P=0.007) compared to nine (19%)in the 40-79 age group. CLR resistance was seen in 30 H. pylori isolates, 20 (67%) from Patients with non-ulcer dyspepsia (NUD), six (20%) with gastric ulcer (GU) and four (13%) with duodenal ulcer (DU). Triple therapy failure was associated with CLR-R in 28 (93%) (