A SHORT REVIEW ON HERBAL PRODUCTS ACTING AS ANTI-HIV AGENTS

Over the previous decade, considerable advancement has been made in research on the regular items having hostility to HIV movement. An assortment of optional metabolites got from natural origin demonstrated mild to strong anti-HIV properties. Nature has consistently given a wellspring of medications to different sicknesses. Various therapeutic plants have been accounted for to have against HIV. The investigation of regular items in biomedical exploration is not an advanced idea. vast numbers of the best medicinal therapeutic drugs are extracted from natural products and concentrated in HIV/AIDS. The Biomedical review has a long history of disclosure depending on the screen of medicinal spices and conventional medicines. It is essential to remember the clinical study convention to conclude Therapies based on these herbal products combat the negative view of alternative medicine as therapeutic remedies. This review addressed different herbal products that are having anti-HIV properties

Nonsurgical Maxillary Expansion in Adults: Report of Two Cases

Correction of maxillary transverse discrepancy requires expansion of palate by combination of orthopedic and orthodontic movements. Isolated maxillary transverse deficiency can be treated either orthodontically or surgically with assisted rapid maxillary expansion (RME). Nonsurgical expansion modalities include rapid maxillary expansion and slow maxillary expansion. Haas popularized the idea of orthodontic palatal expansion in the 1960s, and since then transverse deficiencies have been treated successfully  in children and adolescents. The use of palatal expanders in adults was widely frowned upon and was generally considered to be unsuccessful. Handelman published a clinical review in 1997, proving a nonsurgical expansion in adults was possible

Ensemble Learning using Transformers and Convolutional Networks for Masked Face Recognition

Wearing a face mask is one of the adjustments we had to follow to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Having our faces covered by masks constantly has driven the need to understand and investigate how this behavior affects the recognition capability of face recognition systems. Current face recognition systems have extremely high accuracy when dealing with unconstrained general face recognition cases but do not generalize well with occluded masked faces. In this work, we propose a system for masked face recognition. The proposed system comprises two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models and two Transformer models. The CNN models have been fine-tuned on FaceNet pre-trained model. We ensemble the predictions of the four models using the majority voting technique to identify the person with the mask. The proposed system has been evaluated on a synthetically masked LFW dataset created in this work. The best accuracy is obtained using the ensembled models with an accuracy of 92%. This recognition rate outperformed the accuracy of other models and it shows the correctness and robustness of the proposed model for recognizing masked faces. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Hamzah-Luqman/MFRComment: 6 page

The role of zakat and waqf institutions in enhancing small and medium enterprises towards the socio-economic development of Muslim countries: leveraging on Malaysia’s potentials

Zakat and Waqf institutions have played a significant role in the socio-economic development of Muslims throughout Islamic civilization. This role had declined during the colonial period but is now being revived by several contemporary Muslim countries. This research was conducted to study the current practice and propose means to harness the potential of these two institutions and direct them to enhance the socio-economic development of the Ummah via assisting in developing SMEs

Economic Thought, Foundational Problems of Mainstream Economics and the Alternative of Islamic Economics

Economic thought always permeated human living. Economic thought and the development of economics as a discipline in the last few centuries made it central to the world order. However, the foundational problems that mainstream economics suffers from led to uncounted crises and issues within the same order that created it. A physicalist ontology, rationalist epistemology, axiological futility, and methodological deficiency are the problems of philosophical foundations of mainstream economics we reviewed in this paper. The methodology of this paper is qualitative and generally adopts the library research and critical content analysis methods to review and respond to identified foundational problems. Muslims islah and tajdid responses to the West and mainstream economics problems and issues found shape in Islamisation of Knowledge (IOK) and Islamic Economics (IE). The recent shift to Integration of Knowledge (IoK) universalizes the appeal and revives the zeal for IE development in light of IoK based on IOK in this paper. A thorough analysis of IOK, IoK, and IE responses to the West and mainstream economics enabled us to appraise it as the alternative and solution to the foundational problems. The paper clarified the way for future research in IE in light of IoK and directed the academia and industry towards economic reasoning based on robust foundations

Integrated waqf based islamic microfinance model (IWIMM) for poverty alleviation in OIC member countries

Poverty dominates the agenda of developing countries. Poverty was and still is one of the major impediments of human progress and societal development. Its existence is as old as human history while its alleviation is attributed to effective and successfull economic policies. Various approaches/policies are offered towards reducing poverty. These policies vary depending on time, space and the country concernced. However, reduction of poverty the major goal of many economic systems as stated by the Millenium Development Goals, thought sometimes not explicitly stated It was found that in OIC member countries religious and cultural norms drive preference of Islamic microfinance over conventional microfinance.The study further developed an Integrated waqf based Islamic micrfinance model (IWIMM) for poverty reduction in OIC memebr countries.This is expected to overcome the challenges of conventional microfinance such as, high cost of capital, low quality of human resource, vulnerabilites of poor borrowers due to lack of sustainable takaful and limited products for the clients with different occupationanl backgrounds. However, the model is yet to be verified empirically. Thus, further studies should be conducted to test the model using quantitative techniques such as, structural equation modelling (SEM)

Integration of waqf-Islamic microfinance model for poverty reduction: the case of Bangladesh

Purpose – This paper aims to develop an integrated waqf-based Islamic microfinance (IsMF) for poverty reduction in Bangladesh. Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have been constrained by the high cost of funds, high interest rate charges and poor human resource quality of the recipients. Islamic MFIs have recently evolved with the hope of overcoming these financial, ethical and human capital deficiencies faced by the conventional financial institutions. Moreover, a good number of integrated models have been proposed to enhance the role played by Islamic MFIs. Most of these models, however, lack empirical justifications. Design/methodology/approach – The research uses survey techniques. A total of 381 respondents were included in the survey. The integrated waqf-based Islamic microfinance model (IWIMM) was earlier on developed using literature and intellectual discussions. There are six constructs presenting the IWIMM, namely, waqf resources, IsMF, takaful, project financing, human resource development and poverty alleviation. In the survey instrument, 45 items represent the six constructs, but only 26 items have been retained after factor analysis. Structural equation modelling has been adopted to examine the relationship among the constructs. Findings – The results show that there are significant relationships between IsMF and takaful, waqf resources and human resource development, takaful and human resource development, IsMF and human resource development and, waqf resources and project financing. The results also indicate that poverty alleviation is possible through the integration of these constructs. Research limitations/implications – Though the paper has studied conventional and Islamic MFIs in Bangladesh, one of the populated Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member countries and also where poverty incidence is high, further studies need to be conducted in other OIC member countries to adopt the model in line with practical and regulatory environment of those countries. Similarly, the study is based on the perception of the respondents, which limits the generalization of the result. Practical implications – The paper proposed a model that has the potential of being applied for poverty alleviation programmes in most of the OIC member states. Originality/value – The present paper has developed an IWIMM for poverty reduction

Muslim Feminists` Reading of the Quran: A Juristic Analysis on Family Law Issues

Muslim feminist movement represents an indigenous voice among the contemporary literature on women and family. Its main contention is that women in Muslim society are accorded less favourable treatment especially in terms of legal rights. To remedy the situation, feminist scholarship`s main argument is that there is a need for feminist-reading of the sacred texts so as to purge the juristic legacy of male-biased views and achieve justice and equality for Muslim women in contemporary families. One principal methodological framework for this idea to materialise is to embark on the re-reading of the Qur`an from the women`s perspective. In this context, this paper presents issue-based analysis of Amina Wadud`s reading of the relevant Qur`anic passages on family law matters and finds that in spite of its merits, its main handicap lies on its methodological flaws, both in terms of approach and outcome. Methodologically, it is regarded as selective and ultra-vires of Islamic methodology of legal reform. It terms of impact, it is suspected as being tainted with Western inspired assumptions of rights in terms of justice and equality between the genders. To overcome this impasse, the paper argues for a mediated holistic approach to harmonise relations between men and women in the family.  Keywords: Family law, gender equality, justice, Muslim feminist

Comparing linear and circular supply chains: A case study from the construction industry

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. In the last decades, green and sustainable supply chain management practices have been developed in efforts to try and reduce the negative consequences of production and consumption processes on the environment. In parallel to this, the circular economy discourse has been propagated in the industrial ecology and production economics literature and, lately, in business and practice. The ideals of circular economy principles suggests that the frontiers of environmental sustainability can be pushed by emphasising the idea of transforming products in such a way that there are workable relationships between ecological systems and economic growth. By arguing for these ideals to be integrated into green supply chain management theory and practice, the paper uses a case study from the construction industry to demonstrate the environmental gains in terms of carbon emissions that can be achieved through some circular economy principles as against traditional linear production systems. The paper therefore asserts that an integration of circular economy principles within sustainable supply chain management can provide clear advantages from an environmental point view despite some external supply chain influences and scenarios. Further to this, emerging supply chain management challenges and market dynamics are also highlighted and discussed