The Public Sphere during the Later Abbasid Caliphate (1000- 1258 CE): The Role of Sufism

This study reconsiders and overturns key Orientalist assumptions about popular agency and despotic rule in medieval Islamic society. These assumptions encompass the notions that no relationship existed between the lower rungs of society and the ruling elite except through the hegemonic pattern of the absolute and unfettered rule of sulṭāns/caliphs, and that people at large enjoyed little to no agency in regard to effecting social, political, spiritual and economic change. My study argues against these assumptions by clearing a space for better understanding of where the social, economic and political agency of ordinary people lay. I argue that medieval Islamic societies did not merely have a single authoritarian sphere of social activity in which only the elite had agency; rather, there were multiple public spheres where people recruited from a range of private spheres expressed differing modes of social agency. This study reveals that there was a vibrant public sphere in medieval Islamic societies, and particularly in later Abbasid Baghdad, in which Ṣūfīs played a significant role. The establishment of Ṣūfī lodges in Baghdad created a much broader public space where the community of believers would be involved in public sphere activities of various kinds, through which they could contribute to the public good. The plethora of evidence that I have gathered and analysed in this study reveals that Ṣūfīs as social actors used their agency to influence state policies for the betterment of common people. Through their autonomous activities, by instructing the authorities or collaborating with the ruling authorities, Ṣūfīs regularly and successfully intervened in the public domains for the welfare of the community, sometimes to quite radical effect. A number of Ṣūfīs also tried to build bridges between ruling elites and commoners, to develop and sustain an environment where social actors and community members from various walks of life could contribute to and shape the common values of society. My investigation breaks new ground in documenting the fact that later Abbasid Baghdad functioned well as a social sphere in terms of social cohesion and a growth in prosperity, not because governments fulfilled their responsibilities impeccably but rather because ordinary people took on some of these responsibilities. I demonstrate clearly a shift in emphasis from the state to society, where whole social strata would contribute to the constitution of public spheres. The involvement of rulers as patrons and facilitators of these public spaces reveals that medieval rulers were not by any means necessarily ‘despotic’

How to Solve the Fronthaul Traffic Congestion Problem in H-CRAN?

The design of efficient wireless fronthaul connections for future heterogeneous networks incorporating emerging paradigms such as heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) has become a challenging task that requires the most effective utilization of fronthaul network resources. In this paper, we propose and analyze possible solutions to facilitate the fronthaul traffic congestion in the scenario of Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) for 5G cellular traffic which is expected to reach ZetaByte by 2017. In particular, we propose to use distributed compression to reduce the fronthaul traffic for H-CRAN. Unlike the conventional approach where each coordinating point quantizes and forwards its own observation to the processing centre, these observations are compressed before forwarding. At the processing centre, the decompression of the observations and the decoding of the user messages are conducted in a joint manner. Our results reveal that, in both dense and ultra-dense urban small cell deployment scenarios, the usage of distributed compression can efficiently reduce the required fronthaul rate by more than 50% via joint operation

Semi-persistent RRC protocol for machine-type communication devices in LTE networks

In this paper, we investigate the design of a radio resource control (RRC) protocol in the framework of long-term evolution (LTE) of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project regarding provision of low cost/complexity and low energy consumption machine-type communication (MTC), which is an enabling technology for the emerging paradigm of the Internet of Things. Due to the nature and envisaged battery-operated long-life operation of MTC devices without human intervention, energy efficiency becomes extremely important. This paper elaborates the state-of-the-art approaches toward addressing the challenge in relation to the low energy consumption operation of MTC devices, and proposes a novel RRC protocol design, namely, semi-persistent RRC state transition (SPRST), where the RRC state transition is no longer triggered by incoming traffic but depends on pre-determined parameters based on the traffic pattern obtained by exploiting the network memory. The proposed RRC protocol can easily co-exist with the legacy RRC protocol in the LTE. The design criterion of SPRST is derived and the signalling procedure is investigated accordingly. Based upon the simulation results, it is shown that the SPRST significantly reduces both the energy consumption and the signalling overhead while at the same time guarantees the quality of service requirements

Catalytic Degradation of Organic Dyes in Aqueous Medium

Water pollution by the textile industry is an emerging issue. Textile industry is the major industrial sector which contributes to water pollution. Textile industry releases a huge amount of unfixed dyes in wastewater effluents. About 20% of the dye production all over the world is discharged as waste in industrial effluents by textile industry. These dyes are highly stable and colored substances which disturb the aqueous ecosystem significantly. Therefore, there is a need for methods to remove organic dyes from textile industrial effluents. Photo catalysis and catalytic wet oxidation are best practices for degradation of dyes in wastewater. In photo catalysis, the dye molecules can be completely degraded into inorganic non-toxic compounds by irradiation of the dye solution under visible or ultraviolet light in the presence of semiconductor metal-oxide photo catalysts. In catalytic wet oxidation, various metal-based catalysts in supported or unsupported form can be used as heterogeneous catalysts for degradation of dyes in the presence of oxygen or hydrogen peroxide. These processes have several preferences like easy separation of the catalyst from reaction mixture and recycling of the catalyst

Development of Faster SMA Actuators

Large cycle time, resulted from slow cooling, is the core hindrance to the wide spread applications of shape memory alloys (SMAs) as actuators. This chapter discusses a novel cooling technique to decrease the cycle time of SMAs. Under this technique, the SMA actuator of 0.15 mm diameter was run through a grease-filled Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) tube of 0.5 mm outside diameter. Later, same tests were repeated with oil filled PTFE tube. The test results conducted in ambient air were used as standard for comparison. The actuation current in ambient air was set at 210, 310 and 410 mA. While testing with heat sink, i.e. grease and oil, the SMA was heated with 210, 310, 410, 500, 615 and 720 mA currents for 1 and 2 seconds, whereas the SMA was heated for 1 second only with 810 mA current. It was found that the grease cooling reduced the cooling time up to 30% and oil cooling by 20%, as compared to the ambient air-cooling time. However, the grease-cooled actuators had shown less strain, and their response was non-linear at many instances. Heat loss to the sinks resulted to more power consumption than that in ambient air cooling for equivalent amount of strain

Burn-up dependent steady-state thermal hydraulic analysis of Pakistan research reactor-1

The burn-up dependent steady-state thermal hydraulic analysis of Pakistan research reactor-1, reference operating core, has been carried out utilizing standard computer codes WIMS/D4, CITATION, and RELAP5/MOD3.4. Reactor codes WIMS/D4 and CITATION have been used for the calculations of neutronic parameters including peaking factors and power profiles at different burn-up considering a xenon free core and also the equilibrium xenon values. RELAP5/MOD3.4 code was utilized for the determination of peak fuel centerline, clad and coolant temperatures to ensure the safety of the reactor throughout the cycle. The calculations reveal that the reactor is safe and no nucleate boiling will commence at any part of the core throughout the cycle and that the safety margin increases with burnup as peaking factors decrease

Management and Complications of Arnold Chiari Hydrocephalus at Tertiary Health Care Center

Objective: to investigate the role of CT and MRI in diagnosis of Arnold chiari malformation of hydrocephalus and its treatment with VP shunt along with complications. Study Design: Prospective study Place and duration: Department of Neurosurgery, DG Khan Medical College from May 4, 2018 to May 4, 2019. Methodology: Fifty patients of congenital hydrocephalus who were not treated previously were selected. Detailed history about disease and clinical examination of patients was performed. Follow ups were done at neurosurgery OPD. SPSS software for data analysis was used and mean ± SD, frequency and percentages were calculated for variables. P value ≤0.05 was considered as significant. Results: Treatment in case of congenital hydrocephalus as VP shunt, intra-aneurysmal coiling, excision of meningomyelocele with VP shunt and suboccipital craniectomy + upper cervical laminectomy (scucl) were observed as 10%, 6%, 8% and 8% respectively.  Twelve percent of patients were not treated. Conclusion: CT and MRI are the main diagnostic tools for diagnosis of Arnold chiari malformation and VP shunt is the treatment of choice. Among complications of VP shunt infection of shunt and shunt block are the main complications