Measuring the Education Gap in Primary and Secondary Schooling in Pakistan

The investment in primary and secondary education is a fundamental premise for achieving social and economic development, for increasing labour productivity and for facilitating expansion in higher education. Ensuring that new generations of children receive at least primary education and that substantial proportions continue up to secondary levels of schooling, an accurate monitoring of the educational change becomes essential for assessing past progress and planning the future course of educational development. This paper is an attempt in this direction to examine the existing differentials and gaps in enrolment, educational retention and capacity utilisation at primary and secondary levels of schooling in Pakistan with special attention given to the impact of educational plans and policies on these trends. The study is based on both enrolment statistics and data on educational institutions during the seventies and mid-eighties. The enrolment statistics permit calculation of enrolment and continuation ratios for measuring the magnitude of non-participation of children in schools, while information on number of schools provides the possibility of assessing the extent of utilisation of educational facilities and measuring the gaps between existing and needed facilities for schools. We have focused on primary and secondary schooling with a view to recognise and address the basic issue concerning the development of school education in Pakistan

In vitro measurement of nucleus pulposus swelling pressure: A new technique for studies of spinal adaptation to gravity

Swelling of the intervertebral disc nucleus pulposus is altered by posture and gravity. We have designed and tested a new osmometer for in vitro determination of nucleus pulposus swelling pressure. The functional principle of the osmometer involves compressing a sample of nucleus pulposus with nitrogen gas until saline pressure gradients across a 0.45 microns Millipore filter are eliminated. Swelling pressure of both pooled dog and pooled pig lumbar disc nucleus pulposus were measured on the new osmometer and compared to swelling pressures determined using the equilibrium dialysis technique. The osmometer measured swelling pressures comparable to those obtained by the dialysis technique. This osmometer provides a rapid, direct, and accurate measurement of swelling pressure of the nucleus pulposus

Adaptive Processing of Spatial-Keyword Data Over a Distributed Streaming Cluster

The widespread use of GPS-enabled smartphones along with the popularity of micro-blogging and social networking applications, e.g., Twitter and Facebook, has resulted in the generation of huge streams of geo-tagged textual data. Many applications require real-time processing of these streams. For example, location-based e-coupon and ad-targeting systems enable advertisers to register millions of ads to millions of users. The number of users is typically very high and they are continuously moving, and the ads change frequently as well. Hence sending the right ad to the matching users is very challenging. Existing streaming systems are either centralized or are not spatial-keyword aware, and cannot efficiently support the processing of rapidly arriving spatial-keyword data streams. This paper presents Tornado, a distributed spatial-keyword stream processing system. Tornado features routing units to fairly distribute the workload, and furthermore, co-locate the data objects and the corresponding queries at the same processing units. The routing units use the Augmented-Grid, a novel structure that is equipped with an efficient search algorithm for distributing the data objects and queries. Tornado uses evaluators to process the data objects against the queries. The routing units minimize the redundant communication by not sending data updates for processing when these updates do not match any query. By applying dynamically evaluated cost formulae that continuously represent the processing overhead at each evaluator, Tornado is adaptive to changes in the workload. Extensive experimental evaluation using spatio-textual range queries over real Twitter data indicates that Tornado outperforms the non-spatio-textually aware approaches by up to two orders of magnitude in terms of the overall system throughput

TAEO-A thermal aware & energy optimized routing protocol for wireless body area networks

Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) are in the spotlight of researchers and engineering industries due to many applications. Remote health monitoring for general as well as military purposes where tiny sensors are attached or implanted inside the skin of the body to sense the required attribute is particularly prominent. To seamlessly accomplish this procedure, there are various challenges, out of which temperature control to reduce thermal effects and optimum power consumption to reduce energy wastage are placed at the highest priority. Regular and consistent operation of a sensor node for a long-time result in a rising of the temperature of respective tissues, where it is attached or implanted. This temperature rise has harmful effects on human tissues, which may lead to the tissue damage. In this paper, a Temperate Aware and Energy Optimized (TAEO) routing protocol is proposed that not only deals with the thermal aspects and hot spot problem, but also extends the stability and lifetime of a network. Analytical simulations are conducted, and the results depict better performance in terms of the network lifetime, throughput, energy preservation, and temperature control with respect to state of the art WBAN protocols