The knowledge, experiences, and barriers associated with male involvement in family planning at Lal Qila, District Dir (Lower), KPK, Pakistan: A descriptive exploratory study

Background: Pakistan is one of the world’s most populous countries with a high growth rate. The overgrowth in population negatively affects the country’s socioeconomic progress in many aspects, like education, housing, employment, and health. Family Planning (FP) is the best way to reduce the fertility rate and control population overgrowth through contraception. FP positively impacts the mother\u27s health and the productive results of every pregnancy.Purpose: This study aims to explore the knowledge, experiences, and barriers associated with male involvement in family planning.Method: A qualitative exploratory design was used with a purposive sampling technique to explore the perceptions of male community members. Considering eligibility criteria and the saturation point, 12 participants were recruited from Tehsil Lal Qila, district Dir (Lower), KPK, Pakistan. Open-ended questions were asked with the semi-structured guide. The data was analysed using content analysis.Findings: Three themes have emerged from the interviews including (i) Understanding FP from a community men’s lens, (ii) Challenges encountered by community men in practicing FP, and (iii) Proposed strategies to enhance uptake of contraceptives among community men. The findings of the study discovered that the majority of the men who had knowledge regarding FP shared various benefits and disadvantages of using contraceptives. There were different barriers and challenges to the use of FP for instance, myths and misbeliefs about FP. Additionally, other barriers that prevented the use of FP were the unavailability and unaffordability of contraceptives, pressure from intimate partner and relatives and gender discrimination. The findings of the study led to some recommendations including the need for frequent awareness sessions at the community level to enhance the use of contraceptives and the availability of affordable and free-of-contraceptives and FP services to men. Moreover, including men as healthcare workers as an FP counsellor in initiatives related to maternal and child health and improving the communication and counselling skills of the existing FP workers through job trainings can promote the use of FP among men.Conclusion: The collaborative efforts among various stakeholders are needed to promote the practice of FP among men. The finding of the study suggests diverse FP understanding among the community and highlighted barriers such as misbeliefs and limited access to FP services. To overcome these barriers, the opinions from the community recommends community-level awareness campaigns, accessible and affordable FP services, male involvement in healthcare initiatives (as family planning counsellors alongside female counsellors) and improved communication skills among healthcare providers working in FP programs. These measures can collectively promote the practice of FP among men and contribute to enhanced reproductive health outcomes

Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale': an Appreciation in Keatsian Aesthetics with Possible Sources and Analogues

Sanatsal açıdan Keats’in en iyi algılanan, en tatminkar ve en çok tartışılan şiiri Bülbüle Ağıt’tır. Ancak şiirin ana teması olan doğanın sürekliliği ile insan türünün geçiciliği ve yaratıcı hayal gücünün güvenilmezliği karşıtlığı sıkça ve uzun süre tartışılırken, düşünme sürecinin iç ve yapısal mekanizmaları ve şiirdeki tema ve zıtlıkları kontrollü ama aynı zamanda öneren bir tavırla ortaya koyan söz sanatları detaylı olarak incelenmemiştir. Bu makale görünürdeki gerilimin, ince alaycılığın, belirsizliğin ve septisizmin altında yatan şiirin temel bütünlüğünü göstermek için şiirin iç mekanizmalarına orjinal, canlandıran detaylı bir yaklaşım ve yeni eleştirel bir bakış açısı getirmektedir. Fakat en önemli ve ciddi nokta, şiirin mümkün olan tüm kaynaklarını, benzerlik ve zıtlıklarını en kapsamlı biçimde bir araya getirmesi ve bunların çoğunu ilk defa bu makalede öne sürmesidir.Artistically Keats's Nightingale Ode is one of his best conceived and most satisfying and as such most discussed poems. However, while its principal theme of the contrast between the permanence of nature and the shortlastingness of the human lot and that of the precarious nature of creative imagination have received wide critical attention, the internal and structural mechanisms of the movement of the thought process and the figures of speech by which those themes and contrasts reveal themselves in a controlled but suggestive manner have not been examined in details. This article provides an original, refreshing, and detailed approach, largely from a New Critical point of view, to those mechanisms in order to show the poem's essential unity beneath its apparent tension, irony, ambiguity, and skepticism, which are indeed part of its aesthetic conception in light of Keats's own poetic and aesthetic ideas. But the most original and scholarly point is that it is rich and comprehensive in bringing together a whole range of possible sources and analogues of the poem, many of which have been suggested here for the first time

Literature of the New Year: Literary Variations on the Celebration of the New Year

Is the New Year really new or old? Happy or sad? Is it only part of the process and the cycle of seasons making one look back and think of death? Is it a time to wish to stay where one is or hope for opportunities and possibilities? Like a point in a circle, is every day a New Year’s day? Is it a time for nostalgia and reminiscence or promises and resolutions for the future? With the (Gregorian and the British Government) changes in the Western calendar at different times in history and with different countries/cultures celebrating the New Year at different times of the year and with the fiscal year, political (election) year, and academic year being different from the traditional New Year of January 1st, does the New Year mark the beginning and the ending in just an arbitrary way? Centuries ago Britain’s earliest Poets Laureate introduced the tradition of writing a New Year poem. Since then there have been many authors writing New Year essays and poems. They include Robert Herrick, Charles Cotton, Johann Von Goethe, S. T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Lord Alfred Tennyson, William Cullen Bryant, Helen Hunt Jackson, Emily Dickinson, George Curtis, Thomas Hardy, Fiona Macleod (William Sharp), D. H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore, and Sylvia Plath, among others

AN INTELLIGENT FRAMEWORK TOWARDS FULLY AUTONOMOUS DRIVING FUELED BY SMART ROADS

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are transforming next-generation autonomous mobility. Such vehicles promise to increase road safety, improve traffic efficiency, reduce vehicle emissions, and enhance mobility. The development of AVs involves the integration of various disciplines and technologies, i.e., sensors, communication, computation, and artificial intelligence (AI), to achieve higher levels of autonomous driving (AD). The main objective of this dissertation is to design and develop a novel approach for achieving higher levels of automation in AD through an end-to-end intelligent framework. This involves addressing the challenges of technological augmentation of road infrastructure to support intelligent transport system (ITS) services, service satisfaction in perception systems of AVs, enhancing the orchestration of perceptual tasks for complex driving scenarios, perceiving diverse objects in urban environments, real-time information exchange, decision-making based on distributed information, and integration of heterogeneous technologies. The methodology includes a comprehensive survey focused on 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardization perspectives to identify fundamental components of the proposed intelligent framework. It also encompasses the design of an enhanced Connected Cooperative and Automated Mobility (CCAM) infrastructure, the development of an intelligent perception model, the deployment of Deep Learning (DL) models on a diverse range of devices, and the integration of these components within a hierarchical vehicle-edge-cloud architecture. The dissertation presents several key findings: i) an exhaustive design and specification of sensory technologies and architecture for enhancing CCAM infrastructure, validated through ML algorithms for mobility applications; ii) an analytical model for selecting the right perception for AVs, which is validated through a custom dataset and DL-based model instances fine-tuned for object detection; iii) the proposed intelligent model accurately determined that AdamW-based DL model outperforms the SGD-based DL model when comparing performance at the class level; iv) a computational framework that integrates the perception model with enhanced CCAM infrastructure across a hierarchical structure and show consistent performance metrics and reduced inference times across different devices. The significant contributions of this dissertation include: i) enhancements in CCAM infrastructure imperative for intelligent road systems and decision-making of AVs; ii) the development of an intelligent service model for AV perception, improving service satisfaction and enabling proactive functionalities for AVs in urban environments; iii) The design of a computational framework that smartly stitches together the enhanced CCAM infrastructure and intelligent perception model to facilitate learning across different layers and settings. This research addresses the gap in integrating heterogeneous technologies and disciplines for higher levels of AD. It offers a novel approach that combines enhanced infrastructure, an intelligent perception model, and a computational framework to support advanced AD functionalities, thus filling a crucial gap in the current solution approaches for autonomous driving

Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale': an Appreciation in Keatsian Aesthetics with Possible Sources and Analogues

Sanatsal açıdan Keats’in en iyi algılanan, en tatminkar ve en çok tartışılan şiiri Bülbüle Ağıt’tır. Ancak şiirin ana teması olan doğanın sürekliliği ile insan türünün geçiciliği ve yaratıcı hayal gücünün güvenilmezliği karşıtlığı sıkça ve uzun süre tartışılırken, düşünme sürecinin iç ve yapısal mekanizmaları ve şiirdeki tema ve zıtlıkları kontrollü ama aynı zamanda öneren bir tavırla ortaya koyan söz sanatları detaylı olarak incelenmemiştir. Bu makale görünürdeki gerilimin, ince alaycılığın, belirsizliğin ve septisizmin altında yatan şiirin temel bütünlüğünü göstermek için şiirin iç mekanizmalarına orjinal, canlandıran detaylı bir yaklaşım ve yeni eleştirel bir bakış açısı getirmektedir. Fakat en önemli ve ciddi nokta, şiirin mümkün olan tüm kaynaklarını, benzerlik ve zıtlıklarını en kapsamlı biçimde bir araya getirmesi ve bunların çoğunu ilk defa bu makalede öne sürmesidir.Artistically Keats's Nightingale Ode is one of his best conceived and most satisfying and as such most discussed poems. However, while its principal theme of the contrast between the permanence of nature and the shortlastingness of the human lot and that of the precarious nature of creative imagination have received wide critical attention, the internal and structural mechanisms of the movement of the thought process and the figures of speech by which those themes and contrasts reveal themselves in a controlled but suggestive manner have not been examined in details. This article provides an original, refreshing, and detailed approach, largely from a New Critical point of view, to those mechanisms in order to show the poem's essential unity beneath its apparent tension, irony, ambiguity, and skepticism, which are indeed part of its aesthetic conception in light of Keats's own poetic and aesthetic ideas. But the most original and scholarly point is that it is rich and comprehensive in bringing together a whole range of possible sources and analogues of the poem, many of which have been suggested here for the first time

School Improvement in multi-grade situation (SIMS): An innovation of the PDCC

Professional Development Center, Chitral (PDCC), since its establishment in Chitral, is committed to work with its partner education providers for the improvement of quality of teaching and learning in schools. PDCC believes that effective teaching and learning in primary, acts as a foundation stone for higher education, but currently it does not happen in majority of our primary schools. Multi-grade situation in primary schools is one of the many reasons of low quality education. School Improvement in Multi-grade Situation (SIMS) was piloted in five schools aiming to improve the current Multi-grade Teaching (MGT) situation in schools. This study intended to explore some of the successes, challenges and lessons learned as a result of the SIMS intervention. The focus of the study was to asses the effectiveness of the in multi-grade situation. For gathering information a number of inquiry tools were used. For example, ongoing assessment of teachers during workshop, field visit reports(field notes) of the Professional Development Teachers (PDTs) who facilitated the teachers of pilot schools, classroom observations of teaching and learning, formal (interviews) and informal discussion with students and teachers, and teacher reflective journals. The collected data was brought together in order to develop themes. Through the comparison of the data collected from various sources, it was found that SIMS creates better teaching and learning environment in the classroom, makes school happy place for the students to be in and provides opportunity of sharing resources. However, MGT demands for both the capacity and will of all the stakeholders especially the teachers

Historicity of Ecocriticism and Ecocritical History: An Introductory Overview

Overlapping and interconnected, interdisciplinary and heterogeneous, amorphous and multilayered, and deep and broad as it is, countless topics on ecoliterature make ecocriticism a comprehensive catchall term that proposes to look at a text--be it social, cultural, political, religious, or scientific--from naturalist perspectives and moves us from “the community of literature to the larger biospheric community which […] we belong to even as we are destroying it” (William Rueckert)

Intraspecific Resource Partitioning By Hampala Macrolepidota (Van Hasselt) In Lotic And Lentic Environment Of Kenyir Reservoir, Malaysia

A study of Intraspecific Resource Partitioning on a tropical sport fish 'Side bar barb' Hampala macrolepidota van Hasselt, was carried out in lotic and lentic habitat at Kenyir Reservoir, Terengganu, Malaysia. Physico-chemical regimes of Kenyir Reservoir were also studied to determine the species ecological requirements. The water quality data showed that Kenyir Reservoir is suitable for fish culture. The most vital ecological factors, temperature and dissolved oxygen levels, were within the acceptable range for fish until 10.0 m depth. Waterlevel and rain fall both showed significant (P<.05) effects on the availability of fish in both habitats. A significant difference (P<. 05) of fish abundance have been observed in different depths of both habitat. Medium and large size fishes were ubiquitous in the study area. In the lotic habitat, medium and larger size fishes mostly used pool and riffle zones as their macrohabitat, whereas smaller size fishes preferred the rapid zone. In the lentic habitat, medium and large size fishes were found mostly around the submerged trees of the littoral area. Significantly, higher proportion (P<. 05) of larger fish were available in the lotic than in the lentic habitat throughout the season. In lotic habitat cobble, boulder and bedrock were predominantly used as substrate by small, medium and large size fishes respectively, whereas sand and clay were predominantly used by medium and large size in lentic habitat. Openwater area had remarkably less density of fish and availability of all sizes in both littoral and open water showed significant difference (P<.0 5).Habitat overlap values responsible for diet variation and food partitioning that evolved according to both temporal and ontogenic trends indicated that different size classes reduce spatial overlap by occupying different habitats and among depths within habitat. Segregation of sexes (aws < aw ) indicated that overlap within a habitat may be reduced by spatial separation of sexes. Niche breadth (Bi < 2) indicated that all size of Hampala macrolepidota appeared to be extreme specialist feeders. Occurrence of food partitioning was not found extensively between size classes of Hampala macrolepidota in Kenyir Reservoir. Diet overlap aw quantifying the sharing of food resources between the different size classes and high dietary overlap (aw >.6 0) between them indicates biological significance

Evolution of human from primates - A review on religio-scientific discourse

The term evolution is the self-modification by any organism to adapt to the changes to their living environment. For many decades, arguments were put forth by scientists to refute the religious beliefs on divinely creation of creatures especially humans. Though, to some extent, the process of evolution is true due to interbreeding efficiency of living organisms, the single ancestral lineage from unicellular to complex multicellular organisms is still under debate among the researchers and also between scientists and theologists. Many arguments were placed by both the groups to prove/refute the existence and continuous process of evolution. However, concrete scientific evidence to prove the evolution of human from primates (immediate ancestral lineage) is still questionable. Numerous scientific articles and books attempted to address this issue put forth by scientific and religious communities. However, they failed to address the connection and turning point in arguments between scientific and religious communities. Hence, the present paper was aimed to review the view point of both pro-evolutionists and arguments given by the religio-scientific community to answer the misconception on primate-human evolution. It also addresses the purpose of human creation in line with the arguments from philosophers and theologist