INDIA-BANGLADESH BORDER: AN ANALYSIS OF SECURITY ISSUES

In 1947, the international border between Pakistan and India was created by the partitioning of the subcontinent. The newly created Pakistan consisted of two land blocks, one to the west and the other to the east. The Bengal province was divided between East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and India what resulted in a poorly defined border between the two nations. The dispute over the ownership of many villages near the border was started as both countries claimed their sovereignty over them. There were 190 disputed enclaves to the India Bangladesh Border (IBB) what worsened the dispute of the border demarcation. In 1971, East Pakistan got independence as a new state named Bangladesh through a 9-month long liberation war and India joined this war physically against Pakistan. The “honeymoon period” of bilateral relations between newly created Bangladesh and India did not continue for long. There are many common issues between the two neighbors that disturbed the bilateral relations such as border killing and other security issues related to the border, and the sharing of 54 common river’s water. Odhikar, Bangladesh-based human rights organization, reported that from 2000 to 2010, India’s Border Security Force (BSF) killed at least 924 Bangladeshi nationals. MASUM, a Non-governmental Organization (NGO) has mentioned many cases only in West Bengal, a state of India. This paper tries to analyze why the IBB is violent and concludes with a recommendation that how to ensure border security. Data has been used for this study from both primary and secondary sources. The primary sources including newspapers, periodicals, and official statistics of Indian and Bangladesh governments as well as NGOs both national and international are studied. In terms of secondary sources, this paper examines academic books and book chapters, publications in scientific journals, and articles published on the topic. This paper preferred realism to explain the nature of the security issues of the IBB. The main argument of this paper is the IBB is the bloodiest in the world. To improve border security conditions the study suggests that India should act like a neighbor, not a big brother, and work with Bangladesh together. Article visualizations

FOREIGN INTERFERENCE IN BANGLADESH: A CASE STUDY OF MILITARY-BACKED CARETAKER GOVERNMENT IN 2007-2008

Foreign intervention in domestic politics is an old phenomenon. The colonial legacy of various countries is the manifestation of this intervention. In this globalization era, external factors are also important for developing countries’ democracy. Bangladesh’s post-independence journey was not as smooth as the country went through a long period of turmoil, characterized by assassinations, coups, counter-coups, and military rule. Since the independence army plays an important role in Bangladeshi politics and foreign powers took that opportunity to influence the country’s internal affairs especially India, China, the United States of America (USA), and other European countries. Earlier military intervention happened after the liberation war in August and November 1975, later in March 1982, December 1990 and May 1996. At last, the military intervened in politics in 2006 and continued until 2008. This period Bangladesh was ruled by the military indirectly and the power behind the Caretaker Government (CTG) is thought by some to reside with the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI). During this military-backed caretaker government, global actors were involved in Bangladeshi politics both directly and indirectly to serve their purposes. The present research has investigated the nature, causes, and consequences of foreign interference in Bangladeshi politics during the last military-backed interim government. This study applied a qualitative research methodology by collecting data from primary sources, i.e., through content review, which will include newspapers, periodicals, party documents such as constitutions, manifestoes, press statements, etc. From the secondary sources, the historical background of the caretaker government, military interventions in politics, failure of political parties after the independence and characteristics of political cultures in Bangladesh have understood. The paper concludes that the failure of political institutions, undemocratic political culture, and lack of consensus among major political parties regarding national issues was one of the main reasons for foreign interference in Bangladeshi politics during 2007-08.  Article visualizations

LEGITIMACY CRISIS IN BANGLADESH: A CASE STUDY OF 10th GENERAL ELECTION

Method of an election, the participation of voters and political parties to the election without barriers, conducting a free and fair election, credibility of election’s result, as well as legitimacy of the government, are one of the arguable issues in Bangladeshi politics. The 10th general election in Bangladesh was held on 05 January 2014 with the lack of all of the criteria of legitimacy. The ruling Bangladesh Awami League (BAL) government was accused to use all possible ways to prevent the opposition political parties from participating the election as a result Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) led opposition political parties boycotted the national election in the issue of caretaker government (CTG) and the BAL came in power again without any competition. The majority of parliament members (MPs) were elected without any contest, voters’ turnout was about 22.66%, a lot of polling centers were empty, a large number of opposition party leaders and candidates were arrested, and many people died in the clash. Local and International experts, observers, and donor agencies expressed their dissatisfaction with the credibility of the election although the ruling party claimed the election was free and fair. The BAL government had faced a legitimacy crisis both at home and abroad. From 2014 to 2018 Bangladesh had missed all norms of democracy practically but formally it was a “democratic regime”! The main question of the research is how the 2014 national election made the BAL govt. illegitimate? For this study the data was collected from both primary and secondary sources what includes books, articles, newspapers, periodicals, statements of the political parties; statements of the various election observers’ organizations as well as Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) both national and international. The current paper has designed with three parts. The introductory part decorated with the conceptual framework and literature review. The second part tried to give a clear picture of the 2014 national election. This part explained how the 2014 national election made the BAL govt. illegitimate and why it was a step of one-party rule. The third part concluded with some findings.  Article visualizations

THE PRINCIPLES OF ISIS’S IDEOLOGY: AN ACADEMIC DEBATE

Since the terrorist attack on 9/11 in the United States, the world sees a superfluity of contributions to the academic debate on the shifting character of terrorism. Huntington argued the new actors in international conflicts are no longer nation-states but civilization. He defines this concept as the highest cultural grouping of people (…) defined both by common objective elements (language, history, religion, customs, institutions) and by the subjective self-identification of people. ISIS is the latest version of terrorism has all of the characteristics of a state without international recognition and legitimacy. From 15 May 2010 to October 26, 2019, ISIS had been led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who spent five years in American captivity in the Bucca prison in Iraq. On 5 July 2014, he declared himself as the first caliph of a newly created Islamic Caliphate, known as the Islamic State. Within a short period, ISIS captured a large part of Iraq and Syria and then Baghdadi proclaimed himself with the acronym “Caliph Ibrahim.” Current research intends to evaluate the ideology of ISIS and tries to find out the factors that influenced Muslim youths around the world to join the group. The study has applied a qualitative research methodology by collecting data from content review; this includes books, scholarly articles, newspapers, and periodicals. For the reason that statistics would probably not be the answer to understanding beliefs and ideologies, qualitative data would better serve the purpose of this paper. The information will be largely dependent on an examination of scholarly sources that have provided analysis on jihadism in Islam as well as the political situation in Iraq and Syria that had led to the rapid rise of ISIS. The paper concludes by arguing that the extremist ideology of ISIS is a synthesis of counter-terror policy implications and the group’s ideology was rejected by Muslim scholars around the world.  Article visualizations

The risk of misclassifying subjects within principal component based asset index.

The asset index is often used as a measure of socioeconomic status in empirical research as an explanatory variable or to control confounding. Principal component analysis (PCA) is frequently used to create the asset index. We conducted a simulation study to explore how accurately the principal component based asset index reflects the study subjects' actual poverty level, when the actual poverty level is generated by a simple factor analytic model. In the simulation study using the PC-based asset index, only 1% to 4% of subjects preserved their real position in a quintile scale of assets; between 44% to 82% of subjects were misclassified into the wrong asset quintile. If the PC-based asset index explained less than 30% of the total variance in the component variables, then we consistently observed more than 50% misclassification across quintiles of the index. The frequency of misclassification suggests that the PC-based asset index may not provide a valid measure of poverty level and should be used cautiously as a measure of socioeconomic status

Predicting knee osteoarthritis severity: comparative modeling based on patient's data and plain X-ray images

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is a disease that impairs knee function and causes pain. A radiologist reviews knee X-ray images and grades the severity level of the impairments according to the Kellgren and Lawrence grading scheme; a five-point ordinal scale (0-4). In this study, we used Elastic Net (EN) and Random Forests (RF) to build predictive models using patient assessment data (i.e. signs and symptoms of both knees and medication use) and a convolution neural network (CNN) trained using X-ray images only. Linear mixed effect models (LMM) were used to model the within subject correlation between the two knees. The root mean squared error for the CNN, EN, and RF models was 0.77, 0.97 and 0.94 respectively. The LMM shows similar overall prediction accuracy as the EN regression but correctly accounted for the hierarchical structure of the data resulting in more reliable inference. Useful explanatory variables were identified that could be used for patient monitoring before X-ray imaging. Our analyses suggest that the models trained for predicting the KOA severity levels achieve comparable results when modeling X-ray images and patient data. The subjectivity in the KL grade is still a primary concern

The risk of misclassifying subjects within principal component based asset index

The asset index is often used as a measure of socioeconomic status in empirical research as an explanatory variable or to control confounding. Principal component analysis (PCA) is frequently used to create the asset index. We conducted a simulation study to explore how accurately the principal component based asset index reflects the study subjects’ actual poverty level, when the actual poverty level is generated by a simple factor analytic model. In the simulation study using the PC-based asset index, only 1% to 4% of subjects preserved their real position in a quintile scale of assets; between 44% to 82% of subjects were misclassified into the wrong asset quintile. If the PC-based asset index explained less than 30% of the total variance in the component variables, then we consistently observed more than 50% misclassification across quintiles of the index. The frequency of misclassification suggests that the PC-based asset index may not provide a valid measure of poverty level and should be used cautiously as a measure of socioeconomic status

Effects of water quality, sanitation, handwashing, and nutritional interventions on diarrhoea and child growth in rural Bangladesh: a cluster randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Diarrhoea and growth faltering in early childhood are associated with subsequent adverse outcomes. We aimed to assess whether water quality, sanitation, and handwashing interventions alone or combined with nutrition interventions reduced diarrhoea or growth faltering. METHODS: The WASH Benefits Bangladesh cluster-randomised trial enrolled pregnant women from villages in rural Bangladesh and evaluated outcomes at 1-year and 2-years' follow-up. Pregnant women in geographically adjacent clusters were block-randomised to one of seven clusters: chlorinated drinking water (water); upgraded sanitation (sanitation); promotion of handwashing with soap (handwashing); combined water, sanitation, and handwashing; counselling on appropriate child nutrition plus lipid-based nutrient supplements (nutrition); combined water, sanitation, handwashing, and nutrition; and control (data collection only). Primary outcomes were caregiver-reported diarrhoea in the past 7 days among children who were in utero or younger than 3 years at enrolment and length-for-age Z score among children born to enrolled pregnant women. Masking was not possible for data collection, but analyses were masked. Analysis was by intention to treat. This trial is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCC01590095. FINDINGS: Between May 31, 2012, and July 7, 2013, 5551 pregnant women in 720 clusters were randomly allocated to one of seven groups. 1382 women were assigned to the control group; 698 to water; 696 to sanitation; 688 to handwashing; 702 to water, sanitation, and handwashing; 699 to nutrition; and 686 to water, sanitation, handwashing, and nutrition. 331 (6%) women were lost to follow-up. Data on diarrhoea at year 1 or year 2 (combined) were available for 14 425 children (7331 in year 1, 7094 in year 2) and data on length-for-age Z score in year 2 were available for 4584 children (92% of living children were measured at year 2). All interventions had high adherence. Compared with a prevalence of 5·7% (200 of 3517 child weeks) in the control group, 7-day diarrhoea prevalence was lower among index children and children under 3 years at enrolment who received sanitation (61 [3·5%] of 1760; prevalence ratio 0·61, 95% CI 0·46-0·81), handwashing (62 [3·5%] of 1795; 0·60, 0·45-0·80), combined water, sanitation, and handwashing (74 [3·9%] of 1902; 0·69, 0·53-0·90), nutrition (62 [3·5%] of 1766; 0·64, 0·49-0·85), and combined water, sanitation, handwashing, and nutrition (66 [3·5%] of 1861; 0·62, 0·47-0·81); diarrhoea prevalence was not significantly lower in children receiving water treatment (90 [4·9%] of 1824; 0·89, 0·70-1·13). Compared with control (mean length-for-age Z score -1·79), children were taller by year 2 in the nutrition group (mean difference 0·25 [95% CI 0·15-0·36]) and in the combined water, sanitation, handwashing, and nutrition group (0·13 [0·02-0·24]). The individual water, sanitation, and handwashing groups, and combined water, sanitation, and handwashing group had no effect on linear growth. INTERPRETATION: Nutrient supplementation and counselling modestly improved linear growth, but there was no benefit to the integration of water, sanitation, and handwashing with nutrition. Adherence was high in all groups and diarrhoea prevalence was reduced in all intervention groups except water treatment. Combined water, sanitation, and handwashing interventions provided no additive benefit over single interventions. FUNDING: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

A modified depth function for outlier detection in multivariate data with applications

Data Science is the new and exciting interdisciplinary response that has emerged as a consequence of the staggering amounts of data generated in many new forms from digital images to audio to text. It is an interdisciplinary field involving Statistics, Computer Science and Mathematics. It involves the study of data, how they are collected, stored, accessed, visualised, modelled and ultimately used to inform decision making by turning data into intelligence. Despite this ’data revolution’ and the development of Data Science as a consequence, the aim of any data analysis is still the same, to make inference about unknown population parameters using sample statistics. One fundamental challenge in inference is the identification of outliers. Such oddities, or atypical observations, could be indicative of poor data management or biased sampling. In this situation the presence of such outliers are considered a negative aspect and efforts are needed to account for them (e.g. correct data entry errors) accordingly to avoid introducing bias in parameter estimation. On the other hand, finding an outlier may be the key focus of the exercise as an outlier may represent something new and novel. Many statistical methods have been developed to identify outlying data points and robust methods developed to account for outliers in statistical models. A central property of all such methods is that an observation is classified as an outlier or not (i.e. a binary decision); being able to quantify an observations ’outlyingness’ is clearly an attractive alternative. In this thesis, a novel method is presented for outlier detection in multivariate data based on the idea of a statistical depth function. The proposed approach enables outlier detection in multivariate data while taking into consideration the local geometry of the underlying probability distribution.2021-09-1

Exploring the impact of pumpkin and sweet potato enrichment on the nutritional profile and antioxidant capacity of noodles

Sweet potato and pumpkin are abundant in β-carotene, fiber, and essential minerals. The use of pumpkin and sweet potato with wheat flour to prepare noodles may increase their nutritional value and provide several health benefits. The purpose of the study was to develop pumpkin, sweet potato, and wheat composite flour noodles with improved nutritional and sensory qualities. All of the quality parameters like nutritional value, water activity, color intensity, β-carotene content, antioxidant capacity, and sensory characteristics were analyzed according to the standard procedures. The addition of pumpkin and sweet potato flour to prepared noodles significantly (p < 0.05) increased the β-carotene (18.30 – 713.99 μg/100 g), protein (8.75 – 14.75 g/100 g), crude fiber (0.38 – 3.84 g/100 g), and minerals like potassium, calcium, iron, and zinc contents. In addition, the DPPH scavenging activity, phenolic and flavonoid content of the noodles were significantly (p < 0.05) higher than those of the control noodles. On the contrary, the noodles redness (a*) and yellowness (b*) increased and their lightness (L*) decreased as the incorporation of sweet potato and pumpkin increased. However, sensory assessment results suggested that noodles containing 15 % pumpkin, 10 % sweet potato, and 75 % wheat composite flour were more appealing than other developed noodles. Newly developed noodles will play a crucial role in increasing nutritional diversity and reducing food insecurity among low-income families