From Arrest to Trial Court: The Story of Women Prisoners of Pakistan

AbstractThis study used mix methods design and was conducted in all four women prisons of Sindh province of Pakistan. It was a ‘census’, no sampling was done and total respondents were 100. Inmates were involved in six types of crimes i.e. drug trafficking (26), murder of husband (25), kidnapping (23), murder (18), robbery/theft (5), child trafficking (2) and extra-marital relationship (1). The prisoners were tortured to sign confession. Inmates from rural and poor strata were found to be more ignorant, disempowered and vulnerable to existing judicial system. Findings also showed least legal help from government as well as NGOs sector

Efficient channel equalization algorithms for multicarrier communication systems

Blind adaptive algorithm that updates time-domain equalizer (TEQ) coefficients by Adjacent Lag Auto-correlation Minimization (ALAM) is proposed to shorten the channel for multicarrier modulation (MCM) systems. ALAM is an addition to the family of several existing correlation based algorithms that can achieve similar or better performance to existing algorithms with lower complexity. This is achieved by designing a cost function without the sum-square and utilizing symmetrical-TEQ property to reduce the complexity of adaptation of TEQ to half of the existing one. Furthermore, to avoid the limitations of lower unstable bit rate and high complexity, an adaptive TEQ using equal-taps constraints (ETC) is introduced to maximize the bit rate with the lowest complexity. An IP core is developed for the low-complexity ALAM (LALAM) algorithm to be implemented on an FPGA. This implementation is extended to include the implementation of the moving average (MA) estimate for the ALAM algorithm referred as ALAM-MA. Unit-tap constraint (UTC) is used instead of unit-norm constraint (UNC) while updating the adaptive algorithm to avoid all zero solution for the TEQ taps. The IP core is implemented on Xilinx Vertix II Pro XC2VP7-FF672-5 for ADSL receivers and the gate level simulation guaranteed successful operation at a maximum frequency of 27 MHz and 38 MHz for ALAM-MA and LALAM algorithm, respectively. FEQ equalizer is used, after channel shortening using TEQ, to recover distorted QAM signals due to channel effects. A new analytical learning based framework is proposed to jointly solve equalization and symbol detection problems in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with QAM signals. The framework utilizes extreme learning machine (ELM) to achieve fast training, high performance, and low error rates. The proposed framework performs in real-domain by transforming a complex signal into a single 2–tuple real-valued vector. Such transformation offers equalization in real domain with minimum computational load and high accuracy. Simulation results show that the proposed framework outperforms other learning based equalizers in terms of symbol error rates and training speeds

An Analysis of Performance Evaluation of Mutual Funds Based on Fund Nature: A Case of Mutual Fund Market of Pakistan

Pakistan is an emergent country with a developing mutual fund industry. In Pakistan Mutual Fund existed since 1964 capital market conveying certain advantages like risk diversification, assured returns and professional management for the retail investors. There have been lack of evidence on the performance and determinates of performance in the Mutual Fund market of Pakistan. This research is performed to provide comprehensive evidence on the performance measurement of the Islamic and Conventional mutual fund industry in Pakistan. The research measured data of 102 mutual funds, which are divided into two isolated functional natures Islamic and conventional for the period of five years from 2010 to 2014. Performance of the funds is determined using performance measures of Sharpe measure, Treynor measure, Jenson’s Alpha and Information ratio. The performance of two segregations of the funds were measured and compared on yearly bases. Further, using Fama-French three-factor model along with an additional factor suggested by Carhart, the research measured abnormal returns on each of the fund and these abnormal returns were explained by fund characteristics of expense ratio, fund size, fund age and fund family size using cross sectional OLS estimation. No significant performance differences that were found between Islamic and conventional funds. Treynor measure and Jenson’s Alpha presented in-consistent and insignificant performance measurements. The research also provided evidence of a negative influence of expense ratio on mutual fund performance in Pakistan. The research will explore the mutual fund industry for better understanding and recommends devising alternative performance measurements and methods consistent with local context. Keywords: Mutual Funds Association of Pakistan, Asset Management Companies, Mutual Funds, Performance evaluation, Islamic and Conventional Mutual Funds. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/11-22-01 Publication date: August 31st 201

Cell-bound phosphatase activity in cotton (gossypium hirsutum L.) roots

A study was made of phosphorus nutrition in cotton cultivars derived from Pakistan with particular reference to phosphatase activity. Cultivars used were Qalandri, Rehmani, Reshami and TH-3/83; Qalandri was used for most of the phosphatase characteristic studies, since this cultivar exhibited the highest germination percentage and seedling establishment. Investigations of soil parameters from cotton growing region of Pakistan were also carried out. Soil pH was above 8.0 in all sites studied. Soil organic component levels were very variable between sites and within sites at different depths. Soil potassium was found to be at levels regarded as being sufficient for sustaining plant growth at all sites. However, levels of combined nitrogen and inorganic phosphate were in the range of values which could be regarded as being limiting to plant growth. The importance of phosphatase in the mobilization of organic phosphorus was therefore apparent. Phosphomonoesterase (PMEase) activity, assayed using two substrates p- nitrophenyl phosphate (pNPP) and 4-methylumbelliferyl phosphate (4-MUP), was investigated and was found associated with roots of hydroponically-grown seedlings. Staining studies indicated that the enzymes were present in the cell wall. Phosphodiesterase activity was also detected in roots, using bis-pNPP as the substrate. PMEase activity was found to have its greatest activity at pH values between 4.0 and 6.0 for all cultivars. In cv Qalandri the optimum pH for PMEase activity was 5 .5 and the optimum temperature was 55 C when assays were incubated over a 1h period using pNPP or 4-MUP as the substrate. Levels of activity were higher using pNPP than with 4-MUP, but an absolute direct comparison could not be made since the concentrations of the individual substrates used were different. Plants grown in phosphate-limitation conditions showed enhanced PMEase activity. Enhancement of PMEase activity was associated with the levels of phosphate in the plant growth nutrient solution rather than with those in the plant itself This activity was highest in 19-day old seedlings, under the conditions of growth employed here. A comparison between cultivars showed some differences in the level of PMEase activity and in the specific pH optimum for enzyme activity. Limitation of combined nitrogen to seedling also resulted m enhanced PMEase even when plants were under phosphate-sufficient conditions. A similar effect of potassium-limitation was also found and this was associated with reduced uptake of phosphate into the seedlings. No effect of magnesium-limitation on PMEase activity was found. A comparison was also made with other plants; cotton. Primula farinosa, rice, wheat and algae. All had associated phosphatase activity, with cotton showing significantly higher root acid phosphatase activity than the other higher plant species. Acidic phosphatase activity was found in the alga Drapamaldia whilst Stigeoclonium had alkaline phosphatase

Single channel speech enhancement by colored spectrograms

Speech enhancement concerns the processes required to remove unwanted background sounds from the target speech to improve its quality and intelligibility. In this paper, a novel approach for single-channel speech enhancement is presented, using colored spectrograms. We propose the use of a deep neural network (DNN) architecture adapted from the pix2pix generative adversarial network (GAN) and train it over colored spectrograms of speech to denoise them. After denoising, the colors of spectrograms are translated to magnitudes of short-time Fourier transform (STFT) using a shallow regression neural network. These estimated STFT magnitudes are later combined with the noisy phases to obtain an enhanced speech. The results show an improvement of almost 0.84 points in the perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) and 1% in the short-term objective intelligibility (STOI) over the unprocessed noisy data. The gain in quality and intelligibility over the unprocessed signal is almost equal to the gain achieved by the baseline methods used for comparison with the proposed model, but at a much reduced computational cost. The proposed solution offers a comparative PESQ score at almost 10 times reduced computational cost than a similar baseline model that has generated the highest PESQ score trained on grayscaled spectrograms, while it provides only a 1% deficit in STOI at 28 times reduced computational cost when compared to another baseline system based on convolutional neural network-GAN (CNN-GAN) that produces the most intelligible speech.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures, 5 table

Effect of Motivation on Employees Performance: Based in Textile Sector of Faisalabad, Pakistan

Employee motivation is considered as a force that drives the employees toward attaining specific goals and objectives of the organization. Now days, it is one of the sizzling issue in organizations since every wants to make best use of their financial and human resources. Motivation is something that moves the person to action and continues him the cause of action already initiated. Motivation has the role to develop and intensify the desire of every member of the organization to work effectively and efficiently in his position. The motivation for the study was prompted by the low level of concentration on employee motivation. Motivation in Textile sector of Faisalabad is down. The main objectives of the study were, to identify factors that motivate employee’s; to identify determinants of the employee’s performance and to assess the effect of motivation on the employee’s performance in Textile sector of Faisalabad. Questionnaire was used to gather data and analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The study has revealed that promotion and opportunity for advancement are the major motivation factors and the study has also revealed that motivation level is high in the area of wages and salaries. Textile organizations appears to be paying lowest wages and salaries in the industry. It is therefore recommended that Textile Sector (management) should consider as a matter of urgency, the need to make upward adjustment in wages and salaries which will go a long way to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. Keywords: Motivation, Employee’s Performance, Textile Sector DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/11-1-1

Blinatumomab May Induce Graft Versus Host Leukemia in Patients with Pre-B ALL Relapsing After Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant

Blinatumomab, a bispecific T-cell engager monoclonal antibody used to manage Philadelphia chromosome-negative relapsed or refractory B-cell precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) can be used to treat patients by inducing graft versus leukemia reaction post allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, a feature which it was post allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, a feature which this drug was not aimed to do

Analysis of Ellis Fluid in Wire Coating

The focus of the present work is concerned with the study of wire coating analysis using Ellis fluid. Using the binomial series method, closed form solution is obtained and further in the closed form of solution, we discussed a special case for the parameter , and obtained the expressions for axial velocity, shear stress, average velocity, volume flow rate and temperature distribution. Thickness of the coated wire and force on the total wire are also calculated. The effect of different parameters of interest on the variation of the velocity profile, volume flow rate, shear stress, radius of coated wire and force on the total wire are discussed and presented graphically