The Impact of Financial Leverage on Firm Performance in Fuel and Energy Sector, Pakistan

This research is finds the effect of financial leverage on firm performance of the fuel and energy sector in Pakistan. For this purpose 10 listed public limited firms out of 16 form fuel and energy sector listed at Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE). The main objective of the study is investigate the financial leverage has an effect on financial performance of the firm by taking evidence from listed fuel and energy companies of Pakistan. There is a positive relationship between the financial leverage and financial performance or not?  The main plan of this study is to examine the simplification that the firms get work with high profits may choice high leverage by using different statistical tools. Keywords: Financial leverage, Firm Performance, Financial ratio, Fuel and Energy Sector in Pakistan Paper type: Research pape

A Decade of Mighty Lipophagy: What We Know and What Facts We Need to Know?

From Hindawi via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: publication-year 2021, received 2021-02-22, rev-recd 2021-09-30, accepted 2021-10-15, pub-print 2021-11-05, archival-date 2021-11-05Publication status: PublishedLipids are integral cellular components that act as substrates for energy provision, signaling molecules, and essential constituents of biological membranes along with a variety of other biological functions. Despite their significance, lipid accumulation may result in lipotoxicity, impair autophagy, and lysosomal function that may lead to certain diseases and metabolic syndromes like obesity and even cell death. Therefore, these lipids are continuously recycled and redistributed by the process of selective autophagy specifically termed as lipophagy. This selective form of autophagy employs lysosomes for the maintenance of cellular lipid homeostasis. In this review, we have reviewed the current literature about how lipid droplets (LDs) are recruited towards lysosomes, cross-talk between a variety of autophagy receptors present on LD surface and lysosomes, and lipid hydrolysis by lysosomal enzymes. In addition to it, we have tried to answer most of the possible questions related to lipophagy regulation at different levels. Moreover, in the last part of this review, we have discussed some of the pathological states due to the accumulation of these LDs and their possible treatments under the light of currently available findings

Impact of different levels of zinc and nitrogen on growth, productivity, and quality of aromatic rice cultivated under various irrigation regimes in two districts of Pakistan

Rice is a staple food for more than 50% of the global population and it is one of the most valuable cereal crops. To fulfill the dietary requirement of the ever-growing world population, an increase in per-unit production of rice is direly required. In Pakistan, it stands as the 2nd in consumption after wheat, which is a staple food. A huge gap is observed between yield potential and actual yield of the aromatic rice cultivars at a farmer-field level. The significant limitations responsible for this gap are shortage of irrigation water, inappropriate application of fertilizers, less plant population, deficiency of micronutrients, and improper and poor plant protection measures. A field study was planned to assess the yield response and quality attributes of aromatic rice to three levels of zinc (Zn) and nitrogen (N) under three irrigation regimes (8-, 12-, and 16-acre inches) in the Sheikhupura and Sargodha districts of Pakistan. Irrigation treatments significantly influenced the growth, yield, and quality attributes; however, maximum improvement was observed by the application of irrigation at 12-acre inches. Among the Zn treatments, application of Zn at 10 kg ha–1 was observed to be more responsive to improving the growth and quality parameters of aromatic rice crops. In the case of N treatments, application of N at 140 kg ha–1 produced the maximum total tillers, as well as productive tillers per hill, spikelets per panicle, leaf area index, leaf area duration, crop growth rate, total dry matter, harvest index, kernel length, kernel width, and 1,000-kernel weight. Application of N at 140 kg ha–1 not only improved the growth attributes but also increased the net assimilation rate, photosynthetically active radiation, and radiation use efficiency, with respect to total dry matter and kernel yield. The maximum percentage of normal kernels and minimum percentage of opaque, abortive, and chalky kernels were also recorded by application of N at 140 kg ha–1. The outcomes of current experiments depicted that application of irrigational water, zinc, and nitrogen at 12-acre inches, 10, and 140 kg ha–1, respectively, are responsible to achieve maximum resource utilization efficiency, along with increased yield and quality of rice

The impact of immediate breast reconstruction on the time to delivery of adjuvant therapy: the iBRA-2 study

Background: Immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) is routinely offered to improve quality-of-life for women requiring mastectomy, but there are concerns that more complex surgery may delay adjuvant oncological treatments and compromise long-term outcomes. High-quality evidence is lacking. The iBRA-2 study aimed to investigate the impact of IBR on time to adjuvant therapy. Methods: Consecutive women undergoing mastectomy ± IBR for breast cancer July–December, 2016 were included. Patient demographics, operative, oncological and complication data were collected. Time from last definitive cancer surgery to first adjuvant treatment for patients undergoing mastectomy ± IBR were compared and risk factors associated with delays explored. Results: A total of 2540 patients were recruited from 76 centres; 1008 (39.7%) underwent IBR (implant-only [n = 675, 26.6%]; pedicled flaps [n = 105,4.1%] and free-flaps [n = 228, 8.9%]). Complications requiring re-admission or re-operation were significantly more common in patients undergoing IBR than those receiving mastectomy. Adjuvant chemotherapy or radiotherapy was required by 1235 (48.6%) patients. No clinically significant differences were seen in time to adjuvant therapy between patient groups but major complications irrespective of surgery received were significantly associated with treatment delays. Conclusions: IBR does not result in clinically significant delays to adjuvant therapy, but post-operative complications are associated with treatment delays. Strategies to minimise complications, including careful patient selection, are required to improve outcomes for patients

Effectiveness of Activity-Based Learning on Students’ Academic Achievement in General Science at Elementary Level

The main objective of this study was to find out  the effectiveness  of activity- based learning on the student’s achievement in the subject of general science at elementary level.  Pretest –posttest control group true experimental design was used for this research. Fifty (50) students of 8th class were selected on random basis from a public sector elementary school district Sargodha. Thirty (30) lessons were prepared based on ABL technique from 8th class science subject for the intervention. Fifty (50) students were divided into two groups (EG: Experimental Group & CG: Control group) on the basis of their previous performance and also on the basis of pretest. Pretest was prepared from first five units of 8th class general science. Posttest was developed from unit no.6-10 of class 8th general science. Posttest was developed at the Bloom’s Taxonomy Levels Tools were validated through expert opinion and afterwards reliability by using split half method. Reliability was found to be 0.81 for pretest and 0.87 for posttest. EG was given the intervention of ABL whereas control group students were taught with the traditional method. This intervention lasted for six (6) weeks. It was found that activity based learning had prominent effect on the academic achievement of the general science students of 8th class in all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy under cognitive domain. It was concluded that ABL method was more effective as compared to traditional method, due to development of higher order thinking skills

Empirical analysis of university-industry R&D collaboration: Evidence from Pakistan

University-industry collaboration plays a vital role in nation’s innovation system. This study presents an empirical analysis of R&D collaboration between university and industry. The literature focused on the all those factors including firm size, firm’s innovation activity and openness of the firm affecting university-industry collaboration. Primary data is used and sample contains 15 industrial sectors of Pakistan according to market capitalization at the time of data collection. The empirical results of the study suggest that firm’s size, number of employees and openness of the firm have positive impact on uni-industry collaboration for R&D projects. Whilst annual budget of the firms is found to have negative relationship with R&D collaborations and larger firms are found to be less efficient in taking advantages of R&D collaboration with universities because larger firms have more spending on their fixed costs as they have participated in so many R&D activities

Scene search based on the adapted triangular regions and soft clustering to improve the effectiveness of the visual-bag-of-words model

Abstract The storage size of the image and video repositories are growing day by day due to the extensive use of digital image acquisition devices. The position of an object within an image is obtained by analyzing the content-based properties like shape, texture, and color, while compositional properties present the image layout and include the photographic rule of composition. The high-quality images are captured on the basis of the rule of thirds that divide each image into nine square areas. According to this rule, salient objects of an image are placed on the intersection points or along the imagery lines of the grid to capture the position of the salient objects. To improve image retrieval performance, visual-bag-of-words (VBoW) framework-based image representation is widely used nowadays. According to this framework, the spatial relationship between salient objects of an image is lost due to the formation of a global histogram of the image. This article presents a novel adapted triangular area-based technique, which computes local intensity order pattern (LIOP) features, weighted soft codebooks, and triangular histograms from the four triangular areas of each image. The proposed technique adds the spatial contents from four adapted triangular areas of each image to the inverted index of the VBoW framework, solve overfitting problem of the larger sizes of the codebook, and overwhelmed the problem of the semantic gap. The experimental results and statistical analysis performed on five image collections show an encouraging robustness of the proposed technique that is compared with the recent CBIR techniques

Multiple sclerosis in Pakistan; histocompatibility antigen (HLA) composition and disability

Background and Objectives: An association between multiple sclerosis (MS) and histocompatibility antigen (HLA) is well known. This study was conducted to identify prevalence of various haplotypes among our MS patients as compared to control population. We also evaluated a possible correlation between haplotypes and disease severity (EDSS). Methods: Patients with confirmed MS were prospectively enrolled from nine centers in Pakistan from January 2009 to September 2010. HLA alleles were identified using polymerase chain reaction and sequence specific primers (PCR-SSP). Control group comprised of a total of 1000 individuals, representing all major ethnic groups in Pakistan, tested for the distribution of HLA class II DRB1 and DQB1 alleles. Results: One hundred patients were enrolled in study (Male; 40%). Age range was 16-62 years (Mean 32 years). Out of these 23 patients (23%) developed severe disability (EDSS 6 or more) within five years of symptoms onset. Most important factors associated with this progression included primary or secondary progressive course and spinal cord involvement. Almost 50% patients in severe disability group had primary or secondary progressive course while 70% patients in this group had spinal cord involvement. Higher disability had a significant correlation with primary and secondary progressive type of MS (P=0.001) and spinal cord involvement (P=0.03).HLA typing and haplotype analysis of MS patients were compared with controls. There was no statistically significant difference between two groups. There was a statistically significant association between high disability and DQB1*0203 haplotype (P=0.04). The association between High disability and DRB1Alleles was non-significant. Conclusion: 23 patients (23%) developed severe disability within five years of symptoms onset. Higher disability had a significant correlation with primary and secondary progressive type of MS (P=0.001) and spinal cord involvement (P=0.03). There was a statistically significant association between high disability (EDSS 6 or more) and DQB1*0203 haplotype (P=0.04)