Decision Making Style in Islam: A Study of Superiority of Shura(Participative Management) and Examples from Early Era of Islam

Shura or Consultative Management is as a toll to arrive at a consensus on management decision of great importance to the community or organization rather than on routine daily decision of the organization. The holy prophet Mohammad (saw) and his immediate successors ran the administration of the polity with the aid and advice of men having acumen in matters religious, social, economic and political. The consultation must be trustworthy. But if the matters relates to the mundane affairs of the believers for which counsel is sought, then the consultant should be wise enough to give a sound opinion. Modern management thinkers and practitioners can find many lessons about decision making from the events of the golden era of Islam. It is expected that present study will indicate the fact that the Shura or consultative management is a toll which ensure not only the better management, but also ensure the peace, cooperation, coexistence and progress of the organization as well as positive impacts to the society. It is concluded that decision making style of consultative management in Islam produces much shared value for all aspect which is bigger challenging in conventional management practices. Keywords: Management, Consultation, Decision, Divine, Shura

Assessment of in-vivo anti-diabetic and anti-diarrheal effects of Flemingia stricta Roxb. leaf

The objective of this study was to evaluate the anti-diabetic and anti-diarrheal activity of methanol extract of Flemingia stricta Roxb. (Fabaceae) leaf. In anti-diabetic study, the extract was administered to alloxan-induce diabetic mice at two concentrations (200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg body weight) for acute (12 hours) and prolong treatments (15 days) and blood glucose levels of diabetic mice were monitored at intervals of hours and days throughout the duration of treatment. Antidiarrheal test was conducted by castor oil induced diarrhea and enteropooling as well as intestinal motility in mice at three different concentration (100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg body weight). Treatment of alloxan induce diabetic mice with the extract caused a significant reduction in fasting blood glucose level of the diabetic mice both in acute (12 hours) and prolong treatment (15 days) and it was determined that the F. stricta methanol extract at both concentration (200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg) showed the significant (P<0.05) hypoglycemic effect in comparison to the standard drug metformin. In the case of castor oil induced diarrheal test, enteropooling test and gastrointestinal motility test, the extract of F. stricta  at 100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg has given significant effect (P<0.05) compared to the standard drug loperamide. But 400 mg/kg demonstrated the highest activity amongst the three doses. These results suggested that the methanol extract of F. stricta Roxb. possess promising anti-diabetic effect on alloxan-induced mice and significant antidiarrheal effect on castor oil induced diarrheal mice. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.383974

Developing Paper Based Diagnostic Technique to Detect Uric Acid in Urine

Urinary or serum uric acid concentration is an indicator of chronic kidney condition. An increase in uric acid concentration may indicate renal dysfunction. Reliable instantaneous detection of uric acid without requiring sophisticated laboratory and analytical instrumentation, such as: chromatographic and spectrophotometric methods, would be invaluable for patients with renal complication. This paper reports the early development of a simple, low-cost, instantaneous and user-friendly paper based diagnostic device (PAD) for the qualitative and quantitative detection of uric acid in urine. A colorimetric detection technique was developed based on the intensity of Prussian blue color formation on paper in presence of uric acid; the reaction rate of corresponding chemical reactions on paper surface was also studied. Based on the colorimetric signal produced on paper surface, a calibration curve was developed to detect unknown concentration of uric acid in urine. The effect of temperature on formation of color signal on paper surface was also analyzed. In this study, estimation of urinary uric acid using MATLAB coding on a windows platform was demonstrated as the use of software application and digital diagnostics. This paper-based technique is faster and less expensive compared to traditional detection techniques. The paper-based diagnostic can be integrated with a camera of smart phone, tablet computer or laptop and an image processing application (using windows/android/IOS platform) as a part of digital diagnostics. Therefore, with proper calibration, the paper-based technique can be compatible and economical to the sophisticated detection techniques used to detect urinary uric acid

DoubleU-NetPlus: A Novel Attention and Context Guided Dual U-Net with Multi-Scale Residual Feature Fusion Network for Semantic Segmentation of Medical Images

Accurate segmentation of the region of interest in medical images can provide an essential pathway for devising effective treatment plans for life-threatening diseases. It is still challenging for U-Net, and its state-of-the-art variants, such as CE-Net and DoubleU-Net, to effectively model the higher-level output feature maps of the convolutional units of the network mostly due to the presence of various scales of the region of interest, intricacy of context environments, ambiguous boundaries, and multiformity of textures in medical images. In this paper, we exploit multi-contextual features and several attention strategies to increase networks' ability to model discriminative feature representation for more accurate medical image segmentation, and we present a novel dual U-Net-based architecture named DoubleU-NetPlus. The DoubleU-NetPlus incorporates several architectural modifications. In particular, we integrate EfficientNetB7 as the feature encoder module, a newly designed multi-kernel residual convolution module, and an adaptive feature re-calibrating attention-based atrous spatial pyramid pooling module to progressively and precisely accumulate discriminative multi-scale high-level contextual feature maps and emphasize the salient regions. In addition, we introduce a novel triple attention gate module and a hybrid triple attention module to encourage selective modeling of relevant medical image features. Moreover, to mitigate the gradient vanishing issue and incorporate high-resolution features with deeper spatial details, the standard convolution operation is replaced with the attention-guided residual convolution operations, ...Comment: 25 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables, Submitted to Springe

Developing online shopping intention among people: Bangladesh perspective

Electronic commerce is now a means for business growth and expansion in relation to both small and large firms irrespective of their geographical locations. Bangladesh is still far from development of such e-commerce specially B2C (Business to Consumer) e-commerce. This paper sets out to develop a conceptual but contextually grounded B2C online shopping customer intention model in Bangladesh perspective. We undertake a review of the e-commerce and other literatures in order to arrive at our conceptual model. The paper showed that online purchase intention and its continuity depend on attitude of customer that ultimately influenced by trust or belief on online shopping, subjective norms that depend on social and media role, control variables and some support facilities. This conceptual framework provides good theoretical platform for empirical grounded research on electronic commerce in Bangladesh

An Empirical Investigation of the Continued Usage Intention of Digital Wallets: The Moderating Role of Perceived Technological Innovativeness

Abstract The paper examines the constructs that instigate the users to adopt digital wallets and continued usage behavior in a developing country perspective, Bangladesh. The researcher used a cross-sectional design to collect the primary data using a self-administered questionnaire. The population consisted of the youth, precisely 18–35, who are tech-savvy and knowledgeable about new technology. The study followed the nonprobability purposive sampling technique, and 330 responses were collected through a structured questionnaire survey. In direct path analysis, the findings revealed that perceived usefulness, ease of use, compatibility, insecurity, and behavioral intention to adopt digital wallets found significant relationships among the constructs that supported the proposed hypotheses. Moreover, indirect path analysis of perceived compatibility, perceived personal innovativeness and perceived social influence found no significant relationships that did not justify the proposed hypotheses. Users' behavioral intention partially mediates among perceived usefulness, ease of use, personal innovativeness, and perceived social influence, except perceived compatibility. The findings suggested that perceived technological innovativeness did not support the proposed hypothesis. The incorporated constructs of this study have hardly been found in the existing literature, and the researchers shed light on the unexplored research area. The study results, implications, and limitations have been discussed

The Usefulness of Cell Phones for Crop Farmers in Selected Regions of Bangladesh

This research endeavours the usefulness of cell phones for crop farmers in selected region of Bangladesh. For adequate findings and to achieve its purpose, structured interview schedule was adopted to collect data from 281 randomly selected farmers and it was revealed that a little over 60% of them found cell phones very useful, while only 5.3% respondents found the cell phone as less useful. Based on average talk time hours spend in the last six months, top three sources of agricultural information were friends and relatives, distributors and middlemen, and farmers in advanced categories. The results of the ordered logit model showed that their usefulness was significantly determined by age, farm size, per month call charges, and experience in using cell phones. Higher call rates, lack of awareness and paucity of mobile-based information sources were major bottlenecks in using cell phones for agricultural information. The recommendations suggested therein lead to connecting farmers with reliable and rich information sources, use of MMS and SMS, voice call activities, providing subsidized SIM cards, and ultimately undertake widespread campaigns for training of aged farmers to persuade their interest towards the use of cell phones and mobile-based information sources

The Usefulness of Cell Phones for Crop Farmers in Selected Regions of Bangladesh

This research endeavours the usefulness of cell phones for crop farmers in selected region of Bangladesh. For adequate findings and to achieve its purpose, structured interview schedule was adopted to collect data from 281 randomly selected farmers and it was revealed that a little over 60% of them found cell phones very useful, while only 5.3% respondents found the cell phone as less useful. Based on average talk time hours spend in the last six months, top three sources of agricultural information were friends and relatives, distributors and middlemen, and farmers in advanced categories. The results of the ordered logit model showed that their usefulness was significantly determined by age, farm size, per month call charges, and experience in using cell phones. Higher call rates, lack of awareness and paucity of mobile-based information sources were major bottlenecks in using cell phones for agricultural information. The recommendations suggested therein lead to connecting farmers with reliable and rich information sources, use of MMS and SMS, voice call activities, providing subsidized SIM cards, and ultimately undertake widespread campaigns for training of aged farmers to persuade their interest towards the use of cell phones and mobile-based information sources

Assessment of in-vivo anti-diabetic and anti-diarrheal effects of Flemingia stricta Roxb. leaf

The objective of this study was to evaluate the anti-diabetic and anti-diarrheal activity of methanol extract of Flemingia stricta Roxb. (Fabaceae) leaf. In anti-diabetic study, the extract was administered to alloxan-induce diabetic mice at two concentrations (200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg body weight) for acute (12 hours) and prolong treatments (15 days) and blood glucose levels of diabetic mice were monitored at intervals of hours and days throughout the duration of treatment. Antidiarrheal test was conducted by castor oil induced diarrhea and enteropooling as well as intestinal motility in mice at three different concentration (100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg body weight). Treatment of alloxan induce diabetic mice with the extract caused a significant reduction in fasting blood glucose level of the diabetic mice both in acute (12 hours) and prolong treatment (15 days) and it was determined that the F. stricta methanol extract at both concentration (200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg) showed the significant (P<0.05) hypoglycemic effect in comparison to the standard drug metformin. In the case of castor oil induced diarrheal test, enteropooling test and gastrointestinal motility test, the extract of F. stricta  at 100 mg/kg, 200 mg/kg and 400 mg/kg has given significant effect (P<0.05) compared to the standard drug loperamide. But 400 mg/kg demonstrated the highest activity amongst the three doses. These results suggested that the methanol extract of F. stricta Roxb. possess promising anti-diabetic effect on alloxan-induced mice and significant antidiarrheal effect on castor oil induced diarrheal mice. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.383974

Relationship between Remittance and Economic Growth: Evidence from Bangladesh

Remittance is one of the major sources of capital especially for the developing countries like Bangladesh. This study attempts to explore the relationship between remittance and economic growth in Bangladesh. Time series data from 1995-2016 extracted from the World Bank database as well as Bangladesh Bank statistics were used to measure the relationship of remittance and gross domestic product (GDP) with some other variables such as gross capital formation, gross domestic saving and household final consumption expenditure. Pearson’s correlation coefficient is estimated between the variables. Moreover, annual growth (%) of remittance earning by Bangladesh has been calculated and compared with the GDP growth of Bangladesh. The study has found that on an average, remittance of Bangladesh has been increased by 10.85% from 1995-2016 which is higher than the average growth of the country’s GDP. It has revealed that there is a positive relationship of remittance with the GDP, gross capital formation, domestic saving and household final consumption expenditure in case of Bangladesh. However, there is a frequent fluctuation of remittance flow in Bangladesh in the recent years. Thus, this study recommends that Bangladesh should take proper initiatives for maintaining an increasing trend of remittance in the coming years which would be useful for the socio-economic development of the country. &nbsp