Customer perceptions towards Islamic financing : An comparative studies between Islamic finance and conventional loans

The expansion of Islamic banking industry the financial markets of the world has made this newly born industry a ground reality. Islamic banking industry have shown the current global financial crisis in entire market. Islamic banking is a new phenomenon that has taken many observers by surprise. The speed with Islamic banks have sprung up and the rate at which they have progressed make it worthwhile to study them systematically. The purpose of this paper is to examine the main factors that motivate customers to deal with Islamic banks particularly in a dual banking environment. A discussion on factors relating to how Shariah complaints and Islamic value initiatives as part of potential customers' banking selection criteria is also included. Islamic Banking and Finance (IBF) involves wider ethical and moral issues than simply 'interest-free' transactions. Its advocates argue that these make it more economically efficient than conventional banking and promote greater economic equity and justice. To what extent. then, do actual Islamic Banking practices live up to the ideal, and how different are they from conventional banking? A preliminary investigation shows that, three decades after its introduction, there remain substantial divergences between IBF's ideals and its practices, and much of IBF still remains functionally indistinguishable from conventional banking. This runs counter to claims by IBF advocates that it would rapidly differentiate itself from conventional banking. However, despite not providing an alternative to conventional banking and finance. IBF does strengthen a distinctly Islamic identity by providing the appropriate Islamic terminology for the factor of conventional financial transactions

Attention deficit in children: a multiprofessional approach

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most common behavior disorder in children characterized by attention deficit, overactivity and impulsivity, which may persist into adolescence and adulthood. It is often complicated with multiple comorbid disorders which when undiagnosed or untreated significantly affects the children on aspects like academic skills, peer relationship, social life and difficulty in leading productive lives. This report presents a case of 12 year old male child with attention deficit and poor academic performance, diagnosed and treated for ADHD with a complex array of coexisting disorders untreated. An attempt is made to highlight the differential diagnosis for attention deficit in children, comorbid disorders, and the necessity for a multiprofessional approach in complete evaluation and comprehensive management of the same

Endoscopic coblation assisted laryngo pharyngeal corrosive stricture adhesiolysis-the first of its kind

Corrosive pharyngeal strictures without significant damage to esophagus and stomach were rarely reported. Here we report a case of corrosive acid poisoning with laryngopharyngeal strictures suffering for 39 years with difficulty in breathing, swallowing, phonation and sleep for whom endoscopic coblation assisted stricture adhesiolysis was done which was the first of its kind to our knowledge. As early as 5th postoperative day tracheostomy was decannulated, and the patient was able to swallow soft solids without maneuvers, liquids without nasal regurgitation, breathing via naturalis, phonating with normal neck position and a good sleep with no recurrences in 12 months follow up

Causal-aware Safe Policy Improvement for Task-oriented dialogue

The recent success of reinforcement learning's (RL) in solving complex tasks is most often attributed to its capacity to explore and exploit an environment where it has been trained. Sample efficiency is usually not an issue since cheap simulators are available to sample data on-policy. On the other hand, task oriented dialogues are usually learnt from offline data collected using human demonstrations. Collecting diverse demonstrations and annotating them is expensive. Unfortunately, use of RL methods trained on off-policy data are prone to issues of bias and generalization, which are further exacerbated by stochasticity in human response and non-markovian belief state of a dialogue management system. To this end, we propose a batch RL framework for task oriented dialogue policy learning: causal aware safe policy improvement (CASPI). This method gives guarantees on dialogue policy's performance and also learns to shape rewards according to intentions behind human responses, rather than just mimicking demonstration data; this couple with batch-RL helps overall with sample efficiency of the framework. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework on a dialogue-context-to-text Generation and end-to-end dialogue task of the Multiwoz2.0 dataset. The proposed method outperforms the current state of the art on these metrics, in both case. In the end-to-end case, our method trained only on 10\% of the data was able to out perform current state in three out of four evaluation metrics

ENERGY MANAGEMENT AND HARMONIC MITIGATION OF HYBRID RENEWABLE ENERGY MICROGRID USING COORDINATED CONTROL OF MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM

In this paper, a novel energy management method that is based on a Multi-Agent System (MAS) is presented for hybrid Distributed Energy Sources (DES) in a microgrid. These DESs include Photovoltaic (PV), wind energy systems, and Fuel Cell (FC) in the Microgrid (MG). The MG is responsible for supplying both active and reactive powers, allowing it to serve variable linear and non-linear loads. The MAS that has been proposed and is based on a decentralized control structure offers control not only for the energy management of the Distributed Generation (DG) but also for the management of power flow between the MG and the power grid that is connected to the MG. This control is offered by the MAS. The main objective of the control strategy is to manage the amount of energy that is transferred between the power grid and the MG concerning the supply conditions of the required internal energy via DES, which will ultimately result in a reduction in the dependence on the MG on the grid. For current harmonic compensation, a Static Compensator (STATCOM) with a Fuzzy Logic (FL) based Instantaneous Reactive Power control scheme is used. On the other hand, a discrete controller is utilized to manage the energy of the MG. The findings of the simulation and the experiments demonstrated that the implementation of the suggested Energy Management System (EMS) has good performance as a novel energy management solution for a hybrid distributed power generating system and harmonic compensation

GAEA: Graph Augmentation for Equitable Access via Reinforcement Learning

Disparate access to resources by different subpopulations is a prevalent issue in societal and sociotechnical networks. For example, urban infrastructure networks may enable certain racial groups to more easily access resources such as high-quality schools, grocery stores, and polling places. Similarly, social networks within universities and organizations may enable certain groups to more easily access people with valuable information or influence. Here we introduce a new class of problems, Graph Augmentation for Equitable Access (GAEA), to enhance equity in networked systems by editing graph edges under budget constraints. We prove such problems are NP-hard, and cannot be approximated within a factor of $(1-\tfrac{1}{3e})$. We develop a principled, sample- and time- efficient Markov Reward Process (MRP)-based mechanism design framework for GAEA. Our algorithm outperforms baselines on a diverse set of synthetic graphs. We further demonstrate the method on real-world networks, by merging public census, school, and transportation datasets for the city of Chicago and applying our algorithm to find human-interpretable edits to the bus network that enhance equitable access to high-quality schools across racial groups. Further experiments on Facebook networks of universities yield sets of new social connections that would increase equitable access to certain attributed nodes across gender groups

Tourism Carrying Capacity for Beaches of South Andaman Island, India

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands (ANI) is one of the largest tourist areas in India attracting both the international and domestic tourists each year. The Island Administration has a vision to develop the islands as an upmarket island destination for ecotourism. Among the island group, the South Andaman region is the most visited tourist destination and beaches of these islands have great potential for tourism attractions. The present work is an attempt to understand the potential of these beaches by assessing the carrying capacity in terms of number of visitors that can be allowed over a period of time, which will further help with better tourism management. The methodology used to estimate the tourism carrying capacity (TCC) is based on the physical and ecological conditions of each site and the existing infrastructure. The total effective carrying capacity (ECC) estimated for the beaches of Port Blair area (126,301 visitors/day) reveals that the current tourism activity is in lower level compared to its carrying capacity. Such carrying capacity assessments can be used as an input into the regular planning process. Preliminary estimates suggest that A&N Islands can be promoted for high value-low volume, eco-friendly, and environmentally sustainable tourism

Detecting a Higgs Pseudoscalar with a Z Boson Produced in Bottom Quark Fusion

We investigate the prospects of detecting a Higgs pseudoscalar ($A^0$) in association with a $Z$ gauge boson produced from bottom quark fusion ($b\bar{b} \to ZA^0$) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A general two Higgs doublet model and the minimal supersymmetric standard model are adopted to study the discovery potential of $pp \to ZA^0 \to \ell \bar{\ell} b\bar{b} +X (\ell = e, \mu)$, via $b\bar{b} \to ZA^0$ with physics backgrounds and realistic cuts. Promising results are found for m_A \alt 400 GeV in a general two Higgs doublet model when the heavier Higgs scalar ($H^0$) can decay into a $Z$ boson and a Higgs pseudoscalar ($H^0 \to ZA^0$). We compare the production rates from bottom quark fusion ($b\bar{b} \to ZA^0$) and gluon fusion ($gg \to ZA^0$) and find that they are complementary processes to produce $ZA^0$ in hadron collisions. While gluon fusion is the major source for producing a Higgs pseudoscalar associated with a $Z$ boson at the LHC for \tan\beta \alt 10, bottom quark fusion can make dominant contributions for \tan\beta \agt 10.Comment: Version to appear in Physics Letters

Discovering the Higgs Bosons of Minimal Supersymmetry with Bottom Quarks

We investigate the prospects for the discovery of a neutral Higgs boson produced with one bottom quark followed by Higgs decay into a pair of bottom quarks at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. We work within the framework of the minimal supersymmetric standard model. The dominant physics background is calculated with realistic acceptance cuts and efficiencies including the production of $bb\bar{b}$, $\bar{b}b\bar{b}$, $jb\bar{b}$ ($j = g, q, \bar{q}$; $q = u, d, s, c$), $t\bar{t} \to b\bar{b}jj\ell\nu$, and $t\bar{t} \to b\bar{b}jjjj$. Promising results are found for the CP-odd pseudoscalar ($A^0$) and the heavier CP-even scalar ($H^0$) Higgs bosons with masses up to 800 GeV for the LHC with an integrated luminosity ($L$) of 30 fb$^{-1}$ and up to 1 TeV for $L =$ 300 fb$^{-1}$.Comment: Revised version to appear in Physics Letters