Inflation Targeting as the Monetary Policy Framework: Bangladesh Perspective

Inflation targeting strategy has become a widely accepted monetary policy framework in many countries all over the world. Our study finds that the central bank of Bangladesh is neither inflation targeting nor does follow any other rule-guided monetary policy, rather the policy is formulated with substantial discretion under the guidelines of donor agencies. This paper provides the evidence that monetary sector of Bangladesh economy has gained considerable degree of maturity and fulfils a number of prerequisites to adopt inflation targeting strategy. Using data over 1980-2010 we estimate an error correction model in order to examine if interest rate policy could fight the inflation. This is evident that deviation in inflation from target can be corrected via the changes in interest rate. Empirical findings jointly with few descriptive statistics provide strong evidence to recommend inflation targeting as the monetary policy strategy for Bangladesh.Bangladesh, Inflation Targeting, Monetary Policy.

Software Development Standard and Software Engineering Practice: A Case Study of Bangladesh

Improving software process to achieve high quality in a software development organization is the key factor to success. Bangladeshi software firms have not experienced much in this particular area in comparison to other countries. The ISO 9001 and CMM standard has become a basic part of software development. The main objectives of our study are: 1) To understand the software development process uses by the software developer firms in Bangladesh 2) To identify the development practices based on established quality standard and 3) To establish a standardized and coherent process for the development of software for a specific project. It is revealed from this research that software industries of Bangladesh are lacking in target set for software process and improvement, involvement of quality control activities, and standardize business expertise practice. This paper investigates the Bangladeshi software industry in the light of the above challenges.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 11 table

Rapidly progressing and resistant warts in an immuno-competent male

Cutaneous warts are common skin conditions caused by different specific strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV), mostly affect children as localized lesion on the hands and feet. They are slowly progressing and disseminated lesions are found in immuno-compromised situations. Usually majority of warts disappear by few months to two years. This is a case of extensive, giant, rapidly progressing and resistant warts in an immuno-competent adult male.

Isolation, Identification and In Vitro Antibiotic Sensitivity Pattern of Citrus Canker Causing Organism Xanthomonas axonopodis.

Background: Xanthomonas axonopodis or X. axonopodis is the devastating causal organism of citrus canker, widely spread bacterial disease of plants from both epidemiological and economic points of view. Furthermore, the situation is worsening by the advent of increased antibiotic resistance among this bacteria. The major interests of this study were isolation, identification and in vitro antibiotic sensitivity pattern of the causal organism. Besides, herbal sensitivity of those organisms was also tested. Methods: In this study, 9 isolates of the organism were identified based on morphological, cultural and biochemical characteristics. All the isolates were tested for antibiotic sensitivity against 5 commonly used antibiotics namely, cefotaxime, bacitracin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin and gentamycin. Results: X. axonopodis was found 100% resistant to cefotaxime and 77.77% to bacitracin. Chloramphenicol was found most effective as all the isolates were sensitive to it. The herbal sensitivity of X. axonopodis was tested with the plant extract of Allium cepa, Allium sativum, Litchi chinensis, Vitis amurensis and Syzygium cumini. Among the plant extracts, the pathogens were found most sensitive to Allium sativum and Syzygium cumini and resistant to V. amurensis. Conclusion: The study showed herbal treatment can be implicated for the disease citrus canker caused by antibiotic resistant X. axonopodis in future

Efficient three-dimensional modelling of high-rise building structures

A multi-storey building is habitually modelled as a frame structure which neglects the shear wall/slab openings along with the inclusion of staircases. Furthermore, the structural strength provided by shear walls and slabs is not precisely incorporated. With increasing building height, the effect of lateral loads on a high-rise structure increases substantially. Inclusion of shear walls and slabs with the frame leads to improved lateral stiffness. Besides, their openings may play imperative role in the structural behaviour of such buildings. In this study, 61 multi-storey building configurations have been modelled. Corresponding analyses are performed to cope with the influence of shear walls, slabs, wall openings, masonry walls and staircases in addition to frame modelling. The finite element approach is used in modelling and analysis. Structural responses in each elemental combination are evaluated through equivalent static and free vibration analyses. The assessment reveals that inclusion of only slab components with frame modelling contributes trivial improvement on structural performance. Conversely, the presence of shear wall slabs with frame improves the performance noticeably. Increasing wall openings decreases the structural responses. Furthermore, it is not recommended to model staircases in addition to frame–slab–shear wall modelling, unless the effect of wall openings and slab openings is adequately considered. First published online: 24 Oct 201

Unexplained recurrent hematuria and clot retention following transurethral resection of the prostate

Severe hemorrhage following a prostatectomy is a rare and serious complication. A 60-year-old male with recurrent hematuria and clot retention following transurethral resection of the prostate  (TURP) which led to anemia presented at our department and was treated with repeated clot evacuation and fulguration and lastly re-resection and fulguration succeed to stop bleeding. At 18 months follow-up, the patient had recovered well. We concluded that re-resection and fulguration on fresh tissue without opening the venous sinusoids should be considered as one of the effective treatment of choice in recurrent hemorrhage following TURP.   

TextMI: Textualize Multimodal Information for Integrating Non-verbal Cues in Pre-trained Language Models

Pre-trained large language models have recently achieved ground-breaking performance in a wide variety of language understanding tasks. However, the same model can not be applied to multimodal behavior understanding tasks (e.g., video sentiment/humor detection) unless non-verbal features (e.g., acoustic and visual) can be integrated with language. Jointly modeling multiple modalities significantly increases the model complexity, and makes the training process data-hungry. While an enormous amount of text data is available via the web, collecting large-scale multimodal behavioral video datasets is extremely expensive, both in terms of time and money. In this paper, we investigate whether large language models alone can successfully incorporate non-verbal information when they are presented in textual form. We present a way to convert the acoustic and visual information into corresponding textual descriptions and concatenate them with the spoken text. We feed this augmented input to a pre-trained BERT model and fine-tune it on three downstream multimodal tasks: sentiment, humor, and sarcasm detection. Our approach, TextMI, significantly reduces model complexity, adds interpretability to the model's decision, and can be applied for a diverse set of tasks while achieving superior (multimodal sarcasm detection) or near SOTA (multimodal sentiment analysis and multimodal humor detection) performance. We propose TextMI as a general, competitive baseline for multimodal behavioral analysis tasks, particularly in a low-resource setting

BenLLMEval: A Comprehensive Evaluation into the Potentials and Pitfalls of Large Language Models on Bengali NLP

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as one of the most important breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) for their impressive skills in language generation and other language-specific tasks. Though LLMs have been evaluated in various tasks, mostly in English, they have not yet undergone thorough evaluation in under-resourced languages such as Bengali (Bangla). In this paper, we evaluate the performance of LLMs for the low-resourced Bangla language. We select various important and diverse Bangla NLP tasks, such as abstractive summarization, question answering, paraphrasing, natural language inference, text classification, and sentiment analysis for zero-shot evaluation with ChatGPT, LLaMA-2, and Claude-2 and compare the performance with state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Our experimental results demonstrate an inferior performance of LLMs for different Bangla NLP tasks, calling for further effort to develop better understanding of LLMs in low-resource languages like Bangla.Comment: First two authors contributed equall

Clinico-epidemiological study of childhood psoriasis

The clinico-epidemiological data of 276 childhood psoriasis were studied. The mean age was 7.64 years (range 1 day to 15 years). There was no complain of any discomfort in 198 cases. Itching was present in 67 cases and burning in 11 cases. Plaque psoriasis was the most common type (68.8%) followed by guttate (18.8%). Erythrodermic and pustular psoriasis were found in 2.2% and 1.5% cases. Scalp was the most frequently affected site (75.36%) followed by extensors of extremities (41.3%), trunk (37.7%), palm and/or sole (13.0%) and diaper area (11.6%). Nail involvement was found only in 8%, joint was affected in 3.6% and only 2.2% children with psoriasis were erythrodermic. In Bangladeshi children with psoriasis, plaque is the most common type and scalp is the mostly affect site. Nail and joint involvement is less common. Pustular and erythrodermic psoriasis is rare

Non-linear dynamic analysis of coupled spar platform

Spar platforms are treated as cost-effective and resourceful type of offshore structure in deep water. With increasing depth there are significant changes in its structural behaviour due to coupling of spar hull-mooring line along with radical influence of mooring line damping. So these phenomena should be precisely counted for accurate motion analysis of spar mooring system. In present study, spar platform are configured as a single fully coupled integrated model in ABAQUS/AQUA. Non-linear dynamic analysis in time domain is performed adopting Newmark-β automatic time incrementation technique. Non-linearities due to geometric, loading and boundary conditions are duly considered. Displacement and rotational responses of spar and mooring tensions are obtained during long-duration storm. spar responses get significantly modified and mean position of oscillations gets shifted after longer wave loading. The surge, heave and pitch responses are predominantly excited respectively. The energy contents of PSDs of these responses reduce considerably after long wave loading. Mooring tension responses are significantly different reflecting the damping effect of mooring lines. The pitch response is fairly sensitive to the wave loading duration. After long duration of storm the wave frequency response increases. However, low frequency and wave frequency responses may simultaneously occur due to synchronising sea states