Ernst G. Frankel. Managing Development: Measures of Success and Failure in Development. Palgrave, USA. 2005. 303 pages.

In this book, Ernst G. Frankel has reviewed development programmes, plans and agendas, initiated by the developed world for the developing countries. He has recounted numerous examples from the developing world to provide a well-structured commentary, which helps the reader to appraise the practical application of development theory, development financing and development management over the last fifty years. Author has himself been involved in development projects and missions for a long time therefore, he explicitly accounts for the causes of the enormous failures and the meagre success rate of development projects. He primarily forms his argument on the call of incorrect perception of local context and thus inappropriate planning, funding and implementation of development projects. Overall, he has taken an unconventional view of development and making development happen. He describes development as a dynamic process, which is flexible and iconoclastic in nature and, thus, should incorporate the mutable nature of human behaviour, culture, science and technology over time

Metatickles and Death in Damascus

The prescriptions of our two most prominent strands of decision theory, evidential and causal, differ in a general class of problems known as Newcomb problems. In these, evidential decision theory prescribes choosing a dominated act. Attempts have been made at reconciling the two theories by relying on additional requirements such as ratification (Jeffrey 1983) or "tickles" (Eells 1982). It has been argued that such attempts have failed (Lewis 1981a; Skyrms 1982). More recently, Huttegger (forthcoming) has developed a version of deliberative decision theory that reconciles the prescriptions of the evidentialist and causalist. In this paper, I extend this framework to problems characterised by decision instability, and show that it cannot deliver a resolute answer under a plausible specification of the tickle. I prove that there exists a robust method of determining whether the specification of the tickle matters for all two-state, two-act problems whose payoff tables exhibit some basic mathematical relationships. One upshot is that we have a principled way of knowing ex-ante whether a reconciliation of evidential and causal decision theory is plausible for a wide range of decision problems under this framework. Another upshot is that the tickle approach needs further work to achieve full reconciliation.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2023, arXiv:2307.0400

The Impact of Merger and Acquisition on Karachi Stock Exchange–Testing Semi-Strong Efficient Market Hypothesis

This paper particularly addresses the impact of mergers and acquisition (M&A) announcements on share prices in Pakistani stock market from 2006 to 2014.  It uses event study method for a sample of 32 M&A announcements from both financial and non-financial sectors. The result shows that M&A declarations do not signal any significant information to Pakistani market. Therefore, the findings show statistically insignificant abnormal returns on announcements of M&A, however a significant positive abnormal return just before proclamation of merger and acquisitions is noted. Similarly, the bidder firms show significant share price reaction and also some gains before the announcement which may be because of leakage of information (Khan, 2011). While after the declaration both target and bidder firms experience losses but overall conclusion detects that the target companies get fewer abnormal earnings as compared to acquirer firms in case of acquisitions. The insignificant unexpected returns on announcement date of M&A do not support semi-strong form of EMH. The findings of this study help investors in devising their investment strategies based on the timing of important announcements by companies such as M&A

Vision-Based Monocular SLAM in Micro Aerial Vehicle

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are popular for their efficiency, agility, and lightweights. They can navigate in dynamic environments that cannot be accessed by humans or traditional aircraft. These MAVs rely on GPS and it will be difficult for GPS-denied areas where it is obstructed by buildings and other obstacles.  Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in an unknown environment can solve the aforementioned problems faced by flying robots.  A rotation and scale invariant visual-based solution, oriented fast and rotated brief (ORB-SLAM) is one of the best solutions for localization and mapping using monocular vision.  In this paper, an ORB-SLAM3 has been used to carry out the research on localizing micro-aerial vehicle Tello and mapping an unknown environment.  The effectiveness of ORB-SLAM3 was tested in a variety of indoor environments.   An integrated adaptive controller was used for an autonomous flight that used the 3D map, produced by ORB-SLAM3 and our proposed novel technique for robust initialization of the SLAM system during flight.  The results show that ORB-SLAM3 can provide accurate localization and mapping for flying robots, even in challenging scenarios with fast motion, large camera movements, and dynamic environments.  Furthermore, our results show that the proposed system is capable of navigating and mapping challenging indoor situations

Collaborative Monocular Visual SLAM for Multi-Robot

Collaborative SLAM is an amazing extension of single robot locations where multiple robots with monocular cameras work together in a dynamic environment to build one global map. The global map is later used by the multiple moving robots to localize themselves on the map. The application of collaborative SLAM can be used in various fields that include collaborative military tasks, search and rescue, agricultural planting, multi-robots working together to improve efficiency, and many others.  Generally, every existing collaborative SLAM method uses an offline technique to process the collected data in the indoor environment. The indoor environment has limited space and lacks GPS connectivity. In this paper, we aim to give a step toward the usage of two drones equipped with monocular cameras and a standard laptop as the server for monitoring indoor workplaces. We worked on Simultaneous localization and mapping standard architecture with building the centralized global SLAM by the micro aerial vehicles such as Tello in our case. We investigated the method and localization of the drone on the global map

Diabetes and Prostate Cancer Aggressiveness at Diagnosis and Progression in White Americans and Black Americans from the North Carolina-Louisiana Prostate Cancer Project (PCaP)

Epidemiological studies have established that diabetes is protective against incident prostate cancer (CaP). However, the existing literature on the association of diabetes with CaP aggressiveness at diagnosis and progression is inconsistent, and research in racially diverse cohorts is limited. The goal of this dissertation was to examine the relationship between diabetes and CaP in cohort of men with incident CaP from the North Carolina-Louisiana Prostate Cancer Project (PCaP), a population-based cohort of White Americans (Whites) and Black Americans (Blacks). Follow-up data for North Carolina participants was available from the Health Care Access and Prostate Cancer Treatment in North Carolina (HCaP-NC) cohort for on average 5 years after CaP diagnosis. Specific aim 1 sought to assess the association between diabetes and CaP aggressiveness at diagnosis in Black and White participants in PCaP. High aggressive CaP was defined as Gleason sum ≥8, or prostate specific antigen >20 ng/ml, or Gleason sum =7 and clinical stage cT3-cT4. We found that diabetes was not associated with high aggressive CaP in the overall cohort (OR: 1.04; 95% CI: 0.79, 1.37), Whites (OR: 1.00; 95% CI: 0.65, 1.57), or Blacks (OR: 1.07; 95% CI: 0.75, 1.53). Specific aim 2 sought to implement a CaP progression algorithm and to assess the association between diabetes and CaP progression in Black and White participants in HCaP-NC. 20.9% of HCaP-NC participants experienced CaP progression. Progression was more prevalent in Blacks (25.0%) than Whites (17.6%). Diabetes was not associated with CaP progression in the cohort as a whole (HR: 0.86, 95%CI: 0.54, 1.35), Whites (HR: 1.03, 95%CI: 0.50, 2.13), or Blacks (HR: 0.77, 95% CI: 0.43, 1.39). Although obesity was not part of our primary aims, given the close relationship between obesity and diabetes we also examined the association of obesity, independent of diabetes, with CaP aggressiveness and CaP progression. Obesity, independent of diabetes, was positively associated with high aggressive CaP in Whites only (OR: 1.98; 95% CI: 1.14, 3.43). No association was observed in Blacks or the cohort as whole. Similarly, obesity, independent of diabetes, was associated with CaP progression (HR: 1.79, 95% CI: 1.08, 2.97) in Whites only.Doctor of Philosoph