Risk Perception and Management in Smallholder Vegetable Farming in Eastern Ethiopia

This study examines vegetable producing farmers’ risk perception and management strategies. Using survey data collected from 385 smallholder vegetable farmers from East Hararghe zone of Oromia region of Ethiopia, descriptive statistics and factor analysis were used for analyzing farmers risk attitude, classifying risk sources and management strategies. The analysis of risk attitude indicated that the majority of vegetable farmers considered themselves to be risk-takers towards important farm decisions which would help in the adoption of risk management strategies. The result of factor analysis identified low profitability, energy inaccessibility, production, price variability, human / social and institutional factors as principal sources of risk. Moreover, factor analysis also identified production management, loss minimizing and diversification as risk management strategies adopted by smallholder vegetable farmers. Policy makers should focus on enhancing the profitability of smallholder vegetable farmers, stabilizing input and output price, managing production risk, expanding energy access and facilitating the provision of necessary farm inputs. Moreover, it is also necessary to make the operation of cooperatives/unions accountable and their input provision fair and efficient. Keywords: Vegetable farming, factor analysis, risk perception, risk management, risk attitude. DOI: 10.7176/JNSR/10-4-01 Publication date: February 29th 202

Influence of MHD on Some Oscillating Motions of a Fractional Burgers' Fluid

This paper presents a study for the influence of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) on the oscillating flows of fractional Burgers’ fluid. The fractional calculus approach in the constitutive relationship model is introduced and a fractional Burgers’ model is built. The exact solution of the oscillating motions of a fractional Burgers’ fluid due to cosine and sine oscillations of an infinite flat plate are established with the help of integral transforms (Fourier sine and Laplace transforms). The expressions for the velocity field and the resulting shear stress that have been obtained, presented under integral and series form in terms of the generalized Mittag-Leffler function, satisfy all imposed initial and boundary conditions. Finally, the obtained solutions are graphically analyzed for variations of interesting flow parameters. While the MATHEMATICA package is used to draw the figures velocity components in the plane

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation Of Islam and Muslims Following the 9/11 Events As Reported in the New York Times

This study aims to examine and elucidate on how Islam and Muslims are portrayed and represented in the discourses reported in the New York Times (NYT) newspaper in the wake of the September 11 events and in the ensuing two years. The focus of this study was to provide empirical evidence to substantiate claims relating to the representation of Islam and Muslims and in response to these events. Within this focus, the system of representation is grounded in the multi-disciplinary approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (see Fowler, 1991; Fairclough, 1995). The former is the Critical linguistic approach and the latter, the Textual Analysis approach. Together the CDA approach is adopted to reveal the ideological themes imbriacted in the language of the NYT. These ideological themes are assumed within this multi-disciplinary approach to be promoted through certain linguistic structures and discursive strategic practices. The data of this study is collected from Thomson Gale's Pro Quest Newsstand which is affiliated to the British council library in Malaysia. Within the Thomson Gale Data Base, the terms 'Islam' and 'Muslim' were keyed in and searched in two separated processes. Choosing the full text option and entering the specific data ring from September 2001 to September 2003, Thomson Gale Newsstand displayed a total number of 1814 articles. This number of articles was refined further by eliminating editorials, letters to the editor, and those articles whose primary concern had no relevance to the main aims of the study. Thus, the number of these articles was reduced into 450 articles. However, a closer inspection revealed that the focus of many of the left articles did not fit into the logical categorization of this thesis. In addition, a critical reading of the data revealed that certain themes and topics were covered frequently and repetitively in many articles throughout the data. Thus, once the articles were examined and refined more critically, their number was systematically reduced to 78. In the light of the theoretical and methodical approaches of this study, the analysis of the discourses in the NYT showed that most of the themes that dominate the representational discourse of Islam and Muslims hover around the concepts of violence, turmoil, threat, jihad, and evilness of Islam and Muslims. It is also revealed that the NYT utilizes some discursive strategies like generalization and selection to promote these ideological themes that are manifested in the representational discourse of Islam and Muslims. In addition, it is found that these themes are reinforced by linguistic tools like transitivity, nominalization and the choice of some lexical items. However, the examination of the whole representational discourse of Islam and Muslims reveals that it would be a distortion to claim that the representation of Islam and Muslims merely hovers around the themes mentioned. In fact, it is found that the representation of Islam and Muslims took a new shift as the NYT creates a thematic dichotomy of two levels of the subjects under analysis. On one level, it creates a dichotomy between moderate Islam and Muslims and extremist Islam and Muslims. On another level, it creates a dichotomy between external and internal Muslims. This dichotomy is the matized and consolidated through the same linguistic structures mentioned above and other discursive strategies. The discursive strategies that are utilized by the NYT to reinforce this thematic dichotomy are classification and essentialization. The differentiation strategy provides the NYT with great flexibility both to denigrate the enemy, as embodied by extremism and external Muslims, and at the same time, to praise moderate and internal Muslims. From another perspective, the NYT utilizes the essentialization strategy to represent any Muslim who operates in Islamic politics as an extremist. In addition, it lumps all Islamic movements together, portraying them as a threat without concern as to whether they are traditional, modern, violent or peaceful. In adopting this strategy, it thus becomes unclear where moderate Islam ends and where extremism or fundamentalism begins. On the whole, this study has shown that there are several ideological themes that are embodied in the representation of Islam and Muslims in the NYT. These ideological themes are projected through various discursive strategies and linguistic structures. Such findings confirm that our theoretical lines that are based on Fowler's (1991) and Fairclough's (1995) view that language reproduces ideology and hence every thing that is reported in the press is reported from an ideological point of view

Combatting Misinformation During the COVID-19 Pandemic Via Social Media

Misinformation or "fake news" has existed in society for quite a while, with healthcare related misinformation being especially problematic, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the false news circulating on the social media, many misconceptions exist about the disease and the pandemic, leading to people reacting in extreme and unrecommended ways that cause more harm than benefit. In order to combat this, the CMH Arts and Design Society took an initiative and formed a facebook page named "Pakistan Corona Virus Research Outlook" that aimed to present well researched facts regarding COVID-19 in the form of video or poster presentations, so that they could be understood easily by the general public. We also drafted an online handbook that addressed the basic concerns regarding the signs and symptoms of the disease, and the basic principles of management, so as to equip the people without medical knowledge with sufficient information for them to be able to manage mild symptoms themselves, without burdening the healthcare system. We also formed a facebook group by the name "Corona Virus (COVID-19) Free Counselling" that aimed to provide a platform to the public to ask their queries regarding COVID-19 which were then addressed by medical professionals. A post-COVID syndrome series was also initiated on these platforms that addressed the post-COVID symptoms individually and provided a follow up plan for each, based on expert guidelines

A BLOCKCHAIN BASED POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR THE MANAGEMENT OF ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD (EHRS)

The rapid development of information technology during the last decade has greatly influenced all aspects of society, including individuals and enterprise organizations. Adopting new technologies by individuals and organizations depends on several factors, such as usability, available resources, support needed for adoption benefits, and return on investment, to mention a few. When it comes to the adoption of new technologies, one of the main challenges faced by organizations is the ability to effectively incorporate such technologies into their enterprise solutions to maximize the expected benefits. For the last several years, Blockchain technology has become a popular trend in a variety of sectors, attracting the attention of many governments and industries. Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger with the general purpose of information exchange that requires authentication and trust. It acts as an immutable ledger and allows for distributed, encrypted, and secure logging of digital transactions after the participating nodes or entities have reached a consensus. Because of the asymmetric cryptography and distributed consensus algorithms that have been built for users’ security and ledger consistency, this technology has gained a lot of attention. Blockchain has enormous potentials; however, as with any emerging technology, several drawbacks may exist and have negative consequences. To determine how the technology may be deployed, a framework is usually required. However, due to the lack of clear national and international standards for controlling and reducing risks associated with such technology, legal and organizational factors must be addressed before the technology can be implemented. The thesis herein is a proposal for such a new policy framework for Electronic Health Records (EHRs) management. Through the establishment of a new policy framework specifically related to Blockchain technology, this proposal aims to achieve the following: first, provide policies to govern sustainable management of the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information concerning Blockchain applications and solution implementation across health care entities; and second, the prevention and reduction of related information security risks and threats

Towards Detecting, Recognizing, and Parsing the Address Information from Bangla Signboard: A Deep Learning-based Approach

Retrieving textual information from natural scene images is an active research area in the field of computer vision with numerous practical applications. Detecting text regions and extracting text from signboards is a challenging problem due to special characteristics like reflecting lights, uneven illumination, or shadows found in real-life natural scene images. With the advent of deep learning-based methods, different sophisticated techniques have been proposed for text detection and text recognition from the natural scene. Though a significant amount of effort has been devoted to extracting natural scene text for resourceful languages like English, little has been done for low-resource languages like Bangla. In this research work, we have proposed an end-to-end system with deep learning-based models for efficiently detecting, recognizing, correcting, and parsing address information from Bangla signboards. We have created manually annotated datasets and synthetic datasets to train signboard detection, address text detection, address text recognition, address text correction, and address text parser models. We have conducted a comparative study among different CTC-based and Encoder-Decoder model architectures for Bangla address text recognition. Moreover, we have designed a novel address text correction model using a sequence-to-sequence transformer-based network to improve the performance of Bangla address text recognition model by post-correction. Finally, we have developed a Bangla address text parser using the state-of-the-art transformer-based pre-trained language model

PENGARUH HUBUNGAN KERJA DAN BEBAN KERJA TERHADAP KEPUASAN KERJA PEGAWAI PADA BADAN PERTANAHAN NASIONAL (BPN) KOTA CILEGON

Penelitian ini untuk menguji pengaruh Hubungan Kerja dan Beban Kerja Terhadap Kepuasan Kerja Pegawai pada Badan Pertanahan Nasional (BPN) Kota Cilegon. Metode yang digunakan adalah Metode Kuantitatif berjenis Deskriptif dan Asosiatif. Populasi sebanyak 90 pegawai dan sampel sebanyak 90 pegawai. Sampel yang digunakan teknik sampel jenuh (tidak sampai 100). Data dikumpulkan dengan menggunakan kuesioner dan wawancara. Untuk menguji model dan hipotesis, digunakan program SPSS Versi 22. Analisis yang digunakan adalah analisis linier berganda dengan menggunakan teknik analisis data yang telah memenuhi uji validitas, uji reliabilitas dan uji asumsi klasik. Berdasarkan hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan: Hubungan Kerja secara parsial berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap Kepuasan Kerja Pegawai, hasil uji t menunjukan bahwa thitung 6,449 > 1,662 ttabel dengan tingkat signifikansinya sebesar 0,000 < 0,05. Beban Kerja secara parsial berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap Kepuasan kerja Pegawai, hasil uji t menunjukan bahwa thitung 9,663 > 1,662 ttabel dengan tingkat signifikansinya sebesar 0,000 < 0,05. Hasil uji F menunjukan bawah Fhitung 112,897 > 3,10 Ftabel dengan tingkat signifikansinya sebesar 0,000 < 0,05 dapat disimpulkan bahwa variabel Hubungan Kerja dan Beban Kerja secara simultan berpengaruh positif dan signifikan terhadap Kepuasan Kerja

Spot the fake lungs: Generating Synthetic Medical Images using Neural Diffusion Models

Generative models are becoming popular for the synthesis of medical images. Recently, neural diffusion models have demonstrated the potential to generate photo-realistic images of objects. However, their potential to generate medical images is not explored yet. In this work, we explore the possibilities of synthesis of medical images using neural diffusion models. First, we use a pre-trained DALLE2 model to generate lungs X-Ray and CT images from an input text prompt. Second, we train a stable diffusion model with 3165 X-Ray images and generate synthetic images. We evaluate the synthetic image data through a qualitative analysis where two independent radiologists label randomly chosen samples from the generated data as real, fake, or unsure. Results demonstrate that images generated with the diffusion model can translate characteristics that are otherwise very specific to certain medical conditions in chest X-Ray or CT images. Careful tuning of the model can be very promising. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to generate lungs X-Ray and CT images using neural diffusion models. This work aims to introduce a new dimension in artificial intelligence for medical imaging. Given that this is a new topic, the paper will serve as an introduction and motivation for the research community to explore the potential of diffusion models for medical image synthesis. We have released the synthetic images on https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hazrat/awesomelungs.Comment: 8 pages. Submitted to AICS 2022 conferenc