The Impact of Leverage Levels on Firm’s Performance and Profitability: a case of Pakistani Industries

This paper examines the relationship between the leverage levels, performance and profitability of the 19 Pakistanis firms with in three sectors, commercial banking, cement and fertilizer sector starting from 2004 to 2010. The purpose was to check the trends which are being followed by these industries and how much their capital structure policy is dynamic and relating to their sale, earnings, performance and stock values. Arithmetic Mean (A.M), standard derivation (S.D) were used to check the trend of data and then correlation was used sector wise to check the relationship of dependent and independent variables. At the end Regression test was employed on data .Study finds that there is relationship between leverage ratio i.e. DTCM (independent variable) and its determinants i.e size, tangibility, return on asset and RET except cash. A debt does not represent a suitable form of financing with value-enhancing investment projects of the firms, as an alternative, such firms issue equity. On the other hand, when there is a lack of profitable projects, a firm prefers issuing debts and increasing dividends. Management can increase the performance and profit indicators just by changing the debt equity structure

Teachers' Beliefs About Teaching Reading to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Students in Saudi Higher Education

This study explores teachers’ beliefs about teaching reading and reading instructional practices. The study seeks to answer the questions such as what the English language teachers believe about teaching reading in English to the Saudi EFL learners and how they form/develop their beliefs in this particular context. The study also tries to find out why teachers hold particular sets of beliefs about teaching reading in English and what reading instructional practices do teachers of apparently different beliefs use with Saudi EFL learners. The main objective of the study is mainly achieved by conducting a survey questionnaire with 75 and audio-recording active interviews with five practising English language teachers who are currently working in Saudi higher education. Thus the study is a combination of both the qualitative and the quantitative research methodologies. The findings of the study show that the teachers’ beliefs are not stagnant, rather they are flexible and are guided by what works well and less well for their learners. A clear consensus is also seen about the significance of teachers’ beliefs in teaching reading and teachers have no doubt about the importance of reading in the learners’ overall English language learning. Though there is a general belief of the teachers that their role should be of a facilitator, practically a teacher has to perform a very active role and lead the reading activities in a reading class. This research study not only brings some useful data to the higher education institutes in Saudi Arabia to help them figure out teachers’ beliefs on various aspects of teaching reading but also presents some recommendations on how to improve teaching of reading in the context of Saudi Arabia. The findings of the study can be useful to the English language teachers and researchers in identifying the beliefs of one of the key elements of the educational system

Enhanced Handover Mechanism in Long Term Evolution (LTE) Networks

Femtocell is a low power base station, wireless access point designed especially for homes and small organizations. It is promising technology for operators to improve their capacity and for users to give indoor coverage. As mobile users are increasing day by day so the legacy system is unable to provide such a high data rates to all these users. In this case femtocells play a key role to offload the data traffic from macro base station. The implementation of femtocell has posed so many challenges like interference, localization, access control and mobility management. The aim of this paper is to present an enhanced algorithm for handover in Hand-In scenario. In already existing algorithms handover is decided on the basis of a single parameter but here we have simulated an algorithm that considers multiple parameters instead of a single parameter for handover. Through this algorithm, the most suitable femtocell will be selected for handover, hence number of handovers will be decreased. Simulation results show that the system performance has been improved.

Prion Protein Strain Diversity and Disease Pathology

The infectious agents, prions, are composed mainly of conformational isomers of the cellular prion protein (PrPc) in its abnormal accumulated scrapie forms (PrPSc). The distinct prion isolates or strains have been associated with different PrPSc prion protein conformations and patterns of glycosylation and are associated with disease progression and severity. In humans, sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) is the most common form and has been divided into six subtypes, based on PrPSc electrophoretic mobility and allelic variation at codon 129, among which sCJD MM1 and sCJD VV2 are the two most commonly occurring subtypes with known clinical manifestations. The strain-specific response of PrPSc suggests both the molecular classification and the pathogenesis of prion diseases along with posttranslational modification of PrP in humans and animals

Implications of Pak-India Relations in Pre & Post Revocation of Article 370 And 35a in Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir

The revocation of Articles 370 and 35A in Jammu and Kashmir, which is administrated by India, has severely changed relations between Pakistan and India. This article determines the aftermath of this move, with persistent cross-line tensions, disturb diplomatic dialogue, inside anarchy in Kashmir, and unconventionalities in regional security dynamics. The revocation of Article 370 and 35A has degraded long-established bitterness, hampering efforts to resolve the Kashmir conflict with peace. Pakistan, on the other hand has heatedly gone against India's autonomous movements, expanding its diplomatic efforts to wrinkle international help. Meantime, India claims that it is our internal matter, further mystifying bilateral relations. The things centre around the complications of accomplishing synchronisation and anticipation in the area because of established doubts. Key Words: Peace, Deterrence, Mediation, Hate Speech, Militarizatio

Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: An Empirical Analysis of Banking Sector in Pakistan

The basic aim of this study is to explore most common constructs for quality of banking services, which influence customer satisfaction and examine the impact of customer satisfaction on customer loyalty in the context of banking relationships. The questionnaire was used to collect the data from 192 valid respondents by convenience sampling method. SPSS was used to analyze the data and AMOS was used to test the model. The results of the study show that there is a positive and significant link between customer satisfaction and constructs of service quality like tangibility, reliability, competence conflict handling and further study inferred that customer satisfaction is positively significant related to customer loyalty