Technopreneurship Education: The Way to Rebuild COVID-19 Affected Economy

Technopreneurship is a new mode of entrepreneurship that can help us rebuild the devastated economy. With COVID-19 posing rising unemployment and growth related challenges, technopreneurship can prove to be rewarding by decreasing the burden of government, improving socioeconomic conditions, and creating employment opportunities. Technopreneurship has gained significant traction in Pakistan and successive governments have made considerable efforts to promote this concept. In this regard, universities have been directed to include courses of entrepreneurship and IT in their graduation programs, since universities play a major role in transforming the youth into competent professionals. However, actual technopreneurial activities are still limited. Since the efforts to support technopreneurship are ongoing, the current study tends to evaluate the extent to which educational institutes contribute to these efforts. For this reason, 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with technopreneurs to take their viewpoint regarding the courses of entrepreneurship and IT taught to them and the role of these courses in their success. Thematic analysis was performed on the collected data. The findings identified that although the courses offered by universities are a motivator for students to adopt technopreneurship as a field, still there exist some significant gaps in teaching methodology and course design. There is a need for additional and latest courses, field-experienced faculty, and the overhauling of the curriculum to create more successful technopreneurs. Suggestions were also provided at the end of the study regarding how educational institutes can strategize to create more technopreneurs in the future. The current study was limited to the vicinity of Lahore, as time and resources were not sufficient to cover other cities. It used a mixture of purposive and snowball sampling techniques which may have impacted the findings, since the individuals in the population did not have an equal chance of being selected for the sample

Fiscal Responsibility: A Critical Analysis of FRDL (2005) Pakistan

The term fiscal responsibility in financial dictionary is defined as “A balanced budget”. That is a budget wherein expenditures during a given period of time equal to revenues. The fiscal responsibility also includes a budget in which revenue is greater than the expenditures. Fiscal responsibility is achievable and most of the individuals in their private life practice fiscal responsibility. At individual level everybody knows that they have to live within the budget and usually they do not overspend. Usually overspending by individual results in bad crediting rating which one receives from their creditors due to non-payments or late payments of installments and thus denies future benefits to the person concern. Fiscal responsibility at national level implies that a government has a balanced budget and has sufficient revenue to pay for its all expenditures. There would be no overspending if government had a true balanced budget in each period. The economic future of a nation largely depends on the way fiscal responsibility is practiced. There is a direct link between budget deficit today and what nation can enjoy in future. Fiscal responsibility is crucial for a nation to remain prosperous and stronger in future. Fiscal responsibility will also determine what kind of future we are leaving to our children and grandchildren for the next 20 years and beyond. If the fiscal responsibility is not practiced the government would spend more money than its income and it borrows for the difference. If the money borrowed come from domestic savings or from domestic lenders the economy will have less money available for capital investment and future productivity growth rates and levels would be lower. If on the other hand deficit is financed by foreign organisation/country the country will be indebted with growing debt to the rest of the world, with growing interest costs which must be served every year. If we rely more on foreign sources to finance the resource gap the foreign ownership of our resources would grow and so has our dependences on the actions of foreign governments and investors

The Relationship between Federal Government Revenues and Expenditures in Pakistan

A sound fiscal policy is important to promote price stability and sustain growth in output and employment. Fiscal policy is regarded as an instrument that can be used to lessen short-run fluctuations in output and employment in many debates of macroeconomic policy. It can also be used to bring the economy to its potential level. If policymakers understand the relationship between government expenditure and government revenue, continuous government deficits can be prevented. Hence the relationship between government expenditure and government revenue has attracted significant interest. This is due to the fact that the relationship between government revenue and expenditure has an impact on the budget deficit. The causal relationship between government revenue and expenditure has remained an empirically debatable issue in the field of public finance. The question of which variable takes precedence over the other has been a central issue to this debate

Genre Analysis of Business Emails Written by Pakistani Employees: A Case Study in Pakistani Organizational Context

In the wake of rapid advancement of technology, the medium, most widely used for business communication practices by Pakistani employees is electronic mails (emails). This quantitative study aims at analyzing generic features of business emails written by Pakistani employees working in an organization located in Pakistan. The sample text comprised one hundred English business emails exchanged between Pakistani employees and their business counterparts. Analysis was made on macro and micro level, Macro level analysis constituted the investigation of Move and step analysis of the selected corpus by applying   a genre-based approach established by Swales (1990) and Bhattia (1993).  Micro level analysis aimed to explore the lexico-grammatical choices opted by Pakistani writers to operationalize their communicative practices. Seven moves with their realization in one or more steps were identified in emails written by Pakistani employees. Following Louhaila-Salminen, et al (2005), three types of business Email genre were identified in accordance with different communicative purposes they expressed. The results revealed that three types of genre showed variation at the level of steps of Move 4, therefore, Bhattia’s (1993) model was modified to accommodate the genre specific and culture specific differences. The investigation of lexico-grammatical features in corpus led to many interesting findings. Pakistani writers tend to make a frequent use of “please” and “kindly” in Move3 Soliciting/providing information. It implies their concern about the addressee’s negative face and a sense of consciousness to promote an air of warmth and geniality at work places. An increasing tendency of writing concise and shorter emails replete with contractions and abbreviations is also observed inferring the closeness of email data with spoken text instead of the written text. The study emphasized the use of language in real business situations. It offers valuable implications for students of English for business purposes (EBP), teaching staff, material developers and business stakeholders. Keywords: genre analysis, business correspondence, business emails, communicative purpose, move/steps, lexico-grammatical features

Estimation of clock parameters and performance benchmarks for synchronization in wireless sensor networks

Recent years have seen a tremendous growth in the development of small sensing devices capable of data processing and wireless communication through their embed- ded processors and radios. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are ad hoc networks consisting of such devices gaining importance due to their emerging applications. For a meaningful processing of the information sensed by WSN nodes, the clocks of these individual nodes need to be matched through some well de¯ned procedures. This dissertation focuses on deriving e±cient estimators for the clock parameters of the network nodes for synchronization with the reference node and the estimators variance thresholds are obtained to lower bound the maximum achievable performance. For any general time synchronization protocol involving a two way message ex- change mechanism, the BLUE-OS and the MVUE of the clock o®set between them is derived assuming both symmetric and asymmetric exponential network delays. Next, with the inclusion of clock skew in the model, the joint MLE of clock o®set and skew under both the Gaussian and the exponential delay model and the corresponding al- gorithms for ¯nding these estimates are presented. Also, for applications where even clock skew correction cannot maintain long-term clock synchronization, a closed-form expression for the joint MLE for a quadratic model is obtained. Although the derived MLEs are not computationally very complex, two compu- tationally e±cient algorithms have been proposed to estimate the clock o®set and skew regardless of the distribution of the delays. Afterwards, extending the idea of having inactive nodes in a WSN overhear the two-way timing message communication between two active (master and slave) nodes, the MLE, the BLUE-OS, the MVUE and the MMSE estimators for the clock o®sets of the inactive nodes located within the communication range of the active nodes are derived, hence synchronizing with the reference node at a reduced cost. Finally, focusing on the the one-way timing exchange mechanism, the joint MLE for clock phase o®set and skew under exponential noise model and the Gibbs Sampler for a receiver-receiver protocol is formulated and found via a direct algorithm. Lower and upper bounds for the MSE of JMLE and Gibbs Sampler are introduced in terms of the MSEs of the MVUE and the conventional BLUE, respectively