Investment and Inequality in Pakistan's Education Sector

In this paper we present arguments for increasing expenditure on the education sector. We show that there exist large inequalities in the distribution of education services across regions and across genders so that ensuring equal opportunity for all in education, either for normative or economic reasons, will require large additional investments in this sector. We also present evidence which shows that while the rate of return to education in the country may not be high it has been increasing over time, so that higher expenditure on the education sector is also economically justifiable. Enrollments at all levels have been increasing over time, along with household and institutional expenditure on the education sector, which suggests a greater willingness to invest in education. If the productivity of education is low then it would be natural to expect a decline over time in the willingness of the people and the government to bear t he costs of education. But first, we examine the evidence about the increasing unemployment of educated labour and show that this does not mean that there is an economic surplus of education in the country, nor that the education sector is overextended, but that it can be explained by 'search time'

Averting Behavior Framework for Perceived Risk of Yersinia enterocolitica Infections

The focus of this research is to present a theoretical model of averting actions that households take to avoid exposure to Yersinia enterocolitica in contaminated food. The cost of illness approach only takes into account the value of a cure, while the averting behavior approach can estimate the value of preventing the illness. The household, rather than the individual, is the unit of analysis in this model, where one household member is primarily responsible for procuring uncontaminated food for their family. Since children are particularly susceptible and live with parents who are primary decision makers for sustenance, the designated household head makes the choices that are investigated in this paper. This model uses constrained optimization to characterize activities that may offer protection from exposure to Yersinia enterocolitica contaminated food. A representative household decision maker is assumed to allocate family resources to maximize utility of an altruistic parent, an assumption used in most research involving economics of the family

Accidental Leaders: Experiences and Perspectives of Higher Education Leaders in Pakistan

This research explored the experiences and perspectives of university leaders in Pakistan.  Using a qualitative narrative approach, we explored leadership stories, challenges, and opportunities at various positions unique to the Pakistani context.  Findings underscored the accidental nature of higher education leadership in Pakistan, the significance of mentoring provided by teachers and family support for nascent academic leaders, as well as the challenges these academic leaders face ranging from financial barriers to teaching quality issues, to retention of foreign qualified faculty.  The research offers several policy recommendations including institutionalized leadership training and support for promising leaders; transparency in policies regarding leader appointment, promotion, and succession; support for existing universities rather than expansion; and addressing brain drain due to the attrition of foreign qualified faculty members.This research explored the experiences and perspectives of university leaders in Pakistan.  Using a qualitative narrative approach, we explored leadership stories, challenges, and opportunities at various positions unique to the Pakistani context.  Findings underscored the accidental nature of higher education leadership in Pakistan, the significance of mentoring provided by teachers and family support for nascent academic leaders, as well as the challenges these academic leaders face ranging from financial barriers to teaching quality issues, to retention of foreign qualified faculty.  The research offers several policy recommendations including institutionalized leadership training and support for promising leaders; transparency in policies regarding leader appointment, promotion, and succession; support for existing universities rather than expansion; and addressing brain drain due to the attrition of foreign qualified faculty members

Aligning daily activities with personality: towards a recommender system for improving wellbeing

Recommender Systems have not been explored to a great extentfor improving health and subjective wellbeing. Recent advances inmobile technologies and user modelling present the opportunityfor delivering such systems, however the key issue is understand-ing the drivers of subjective wellbeing at an individual level. Inthis paper we propose a novel approach for deriving personalizedactivity recommendations to improve subjective wellbeing by maxi-mizing the congruence between activities and personality traits. Toevaluate the model, we leveraged a rich dataset collected in a smart-phone study, which contains three weeks of daily activity probes,the Big-Five personality questionnaire and subjective wellbeingsurveys. We show that the model correctly infers a range of activ-ities that are ’good’ or ’bad’ (i.e. that are positively or negativelyrelated to subjective wellbeing) for a given user and that the derivedrecommendations greatly match outcomes in the real-world

A hybrid content based image retrieval system using log-gabor filter banks

In this paper, a new efficient image retrieval system using sequential process of three stages with filtering technique for the feature selection is proposed. In the first stage the color features are extracted using color histogram method and in the second stage the texture features are obtained using log-Gabor filters and in the third stage shape features are extracted using shape descriptors using polygonal fitting algorithm. The proposed log-Gabor filter in the second stage has advantages of retrieving images over regular Gabor filter for texture. It provides better representation of the images. Experimental evaluation of the proposed system shows improved performance in retrieval as compared to other existing systems in terms of average precision and average recall

Prevention and management of secondary central nervous system lymphoma

Prevention; LymphomaPrevenció; LimfomaPrevención; LinfomaSecondary central nervous system (CNS) lymphoma (SCNSL) is defined by the involvement of the CNS, either at the time of initial diagnosis of systemic lymphoma or in the setting of relapse, and can be either isolated or with synchronous systemic disease. The risk of CNS involvement in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is approximately 5%; however, certain clinical and biological features have been associated with a risk of up to 15%. There has been growing interest in improving the definition of patients at increased risk of CNS relapse, as well as identifying effective prophylactic strategies to prevent it. SCNSL often occurs within months of the initial diagnosis of lymphoma, suggesting the presence of occult disease at diagnosis in many cases. The differing presentations of SCNSL create the therapeutic challenge of controlling both the systemic disease and the CNS disease, which uniquely requires agents that penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Outcomes are generally poor with a median overall survival of approximately 6 months in retrospective series, particularly in those patients presenting with SCNSL after prior therapy. Prospective studies of intensive chemotherapy regimens containing high-dose methotrexate, followed by hematopoietic stem cell transplantation have shown the most favorable outcomes, especially for patients receiving thiotepa-based conditioning regimens. However, a proportion of patients will not respond to induction therapies or will subsequently relapse, indicating the need for more effective treatment strategies. In this review we focus on the identification of high-risk patients, prophylactic strategies and recent treatment approaches for SCNSL. The incorporation of novel agents in immunochemotherapy deserves further study in prospective trials

Diagnostic accuracy of biomarkers and imaging for bone turnover in renal osteodystrophy

Background Renal osteodystrophy is common in advanced CKD, but characterization of bone turnover status can only be achieved by histomorphometric analysis of bone biopsy specimens (gold standard test). We tested whether bone biomarkers and high-resolution peripheral computed tomography (HR-pQCT) parameters can predict bone turnover status determined by histomorphometry.MethodsWe obtained fasting blood samples from 69 patients with CKD stages 4-5, including patients on dialysis, and 68 controls for biomarker analysis (intact parathyroid hormone [iPTH], procollagen type 1 N-terminal propeptide [PINP], bone alkaline phosphatase [bALP], collagen type 1 crosslinked C-telopeptide [CTX], and tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b [TRAP5b]) and scanned the distal radius and tibia of participants by HR-pQCT. We used histomorphometry to evaluate bone biopsy specimens from 43 patients with CKD.ResultsLevels of all biomarkers tested were significantly higher in CKD samples than control samples. For discriminating low bone turnover, bALP, intact PINP, and TRAP5b had an areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of 0.82, 0.79, and 0.80, respectively, each significantly better than the iPTH AUC of 0.61. Furthermore, radius HR-pQCT total volumetric bone mineral density and cortical bone volume had AUCs of 0.81 and 0.80, respectively. For discriminating high bone turnover, iPTH had an AUC of 0.76, similar to that of all other biomarkers tested.ConclusionsThe biomarkers bALP, intact PINP, and TRAP5b and radius HR-pQCT parameters can discriminate low from nonlow bone turnover. Despite poor diagnostic accuracy for low bone turnover, iPTH can discriminate high bone turnover with accuracy similar to that of the other biomarkers, including CTX