Foreign Aid, Economic Growth, and Policies

The aid-growth relationship has been reviewed under various macroeconomic policy environments. This paper analyzes similarities and differences in the sources of data, types of data, and various types of methodologies used in some of the most recent and widely debated literature regarding the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth under various fiscal, monetary, and trade policies. Different studies have ended up with different outcomes. Some studies find positive aid-growth relationship under good policy environment; some find non-existent aid-growth relationship whereas some others find positive aid-growth relationship without being conditional on any kind of policy

Level of English language proficiency among rural and urban based learners in Sri Lanka

Many in the academic field believe that urban based learners perform well in English language and their English language proficiency seems to be reasonable, while low proficiency and poor performance in English could be observed among the majority of the rural learners at South Eastern University of Sri Lanka. This issue has become a major challenge for the University community at South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, and so the author was persuaded to undertake this research to establish the truth. This research aims to investigate and establish the truth of this consideration and find out to what extent English Language proficiency is lower in rural areas. This research adopts primary and secondary data using mix methodologies (qualitative and quantitative): 139 questionnaires were administrated among undergraduates from three universities and 99 teachers' questionnaires were also administrated from English trainee teachers in in-service teacher training colleges using Convenient Random Sampling. A brief questionnaire was also administrated to collect data from selected professionals followed by telephone interviews. The above collected data from different sources were triangulated. This research found out the root causes of low level English language proficiency in rural areas; especially in the north-east region which was considerably affected by the long lasting war. This research also found out the rural and urban learners' attitude towards languages and investigates other relevant factors, especially how the long lasting war affected the English Language teaching and learning in the North-East region. In addition this research suggests some possible solution to overcome these problems and improve the English language proficiency in rural areas, especially in the South Eastern region

Citizenship education, quality assurance and national integration

Since the attainment of independence in 1960, the cry for national integration has remained loud among Nigerians. This might be because of certain presumed defects in the nature of our federation. The call for nation building involves providing among other important things quality education which over the years have detoriated. The call is also loud on providing a kind of education that will do bring the citizenry to proper knowledge of the society, hence the teaching of citizenship. This paper is central on the Concepts of Citizenship Education, quality assurance and national integration. The paper examines the nature of citizenship education system offered in the country; it discussed the importance of citizenship education to national integration and finally concludedby making some suggestions

A comparative perspective of fact in Thirukkural and Thiruvarutpayan

In Tamil Nadu, literature is one of the prime sources of information on religion, culture, history, philosophy, social customs, beliefs, etc. Literature that originated in the history of Tamil Nadu from time to time identifies the unique features of those times. In the development of Tamil literature, the period in which moral literature originated is called the Moral Era distinctively, which is the same time where many philosophical works of literature refer to the period of origin as the period of philosophical ethics. This study reveals the uniqueness and the generalities of God as claimed in Thirukkural and the God as portrayed in the literature of Thiruvarutpayan that originated in the philosophical period. In particular, this article gives a comparative basis for the ideas that come to mind in the 36th chapter on the power of realization in Thirukkural, and on the three elements that can be found in Thiruvarutpayana, viz., God, Life, and affection

Sister R.S. Subbalakshmi's Role in the Renaissance of Hindu Community : A special study based on the Educational standard of Tamil Nadu women in 19th and 20th Centuries

The rise and fall of Hindu Community in India is a historical phenomenon. There are various personalities who dedicated themselves to the renaissance of them, regardless of victory or defeat in their efforts. Though the Hindu community seemed to advance in a number of fields in Tamil Nadu especially during the 19th and 20th centuries despite various forms of oppression and destruction. Under- age marriage was among many other factors that resulted in the backwardness of the society. In such a backdrop, the role played by a number of female personalities was immensely commendable for the reawakening activities. R.S. Subbalakshmi, Dr. Muthulatchumi Rettiyar, Sarojini Naidu, etc are a few to be added to the list of the reformers who tirelessly put all their efforts for the reawakening of Tamil women. Most notably, R.S. Subbalakshmi successfully carried out her mission towards the educational renaissance of widows. Her service has to be specially noted for her careful forward without getting caught into the clutches of the British rulers, instead obtaining their cooperation and support. She carried out her educational activities adopting the modern educational reforms of the British, while preserving the national heritage of India. The Institutions such as Saratha Ashram, Sri Saratha United Women Society, Sri Saratha Vidyalayam, which played a major role in the educational renaissance of the South Indian women, were established by her. She had to encounter untold hardships to operate those Institutions which brought a turning point in a number of educated women. Since she undertook her activities irrespective of societal differences, the rulers, philanthropists and well wishers offered their fullest support and assistance. Her activities were pioneer for the creation of other social organizations and Institutions. She is to be regarded as a forward thinker who always thought of the well being of not only the women of Tamil Nadu but of the whole South India

Computer-aided acute leukemia blast cells segmentation in peripheral blood images

Computer-aided diagnosis system of leukemic cells is vital tool, which can assist domain experts in the diagnosis and evaluation procedure. Accurate blast cells segmentation is the initial stage in building a successful computer-aided diagnosis system. Blast cells segmentation is still an open research topic due to several problems such as variation of blats cells in terms of color, shape and texture, touching and overlapping of cells, inconsistent image quality, etc. Although numerous blast cells segmentation methods have been developed, only few studies attempted to address these problems simultaneously. This paper presents a new image segmentation method to extract acute leukemia blast cells in peripheral blood. The first aim is to segment the leukemic cells by mean of color transformation and mathematical morphology. The method also introduces an approach to split overlapping cells using the marker-controlled watershed algorithm based on a new marker selection scheme. Furthermore, the paper presents a powerful approach to separate the nucleus region and the cytoplasm region based on the seeded region growing algorithm powered by histogram equalization and arithmetic addition to handle the issue of non-homogenous nuclear chromatin pattern. The robustness of the proposed method is tested on two datasets comprise of 1024 peripheral blood images acquired from two different medical centers. The quantitative evaluation reveals that the proposed method obtain a better segmentation performance compared with its counterparts and achieves remarkable segmentation results of approximately 96 % in blast cell extraction and 94 % in nucleus/cytoplasm separation

CHANGES IN HEALTH AND BEHAVIOR DURING THE BUSINESS CYCLE

This dissertation considers to what extent changes in the unemployment rate – a proxy for the business cycle – drives changes in mortality and crime. I use a panel of U.S. counties from 1990 to 2013. I allow changes in the unemployment rate to have different effects upon mortality / crime in large versus small counties as well as between increases versus decreases in the unemployment rate. My results show great nuance along both these dimensions, suggesting that the effects of the business cycle are more subtle than what previous studies report. These results also give one greater insight into what factors could be driving these effects of the business cycle

Reflective Teaching as a Practical Approach

Since the beginning of the 20th-century specialists have strived for ways that could comprise language teaching methods, which can ensure the best results in language training and teaching classes. And there are various methods, especially in the first half of this century. Some language teaching experts progressed further than methods with the hope of earning more results. Only some of teachers’ encouraged towards what is known as reflective teaching (RT).The process of bridging the gap between experience and learning is called Reflection. RT teacher requires a good self-observations of self-assessment, the need to go on patrol in a way to ensure that teachers understand their classes so that they make their own classroom process improvements where needed. RT is the process by which teachers reflect on their classroom procedures for collecting and analysing the descriptive facts that will be modified to show where the change can be made. RT gives teachers material and professional flexibility for teachers. This paper elaborates on the process of reflection practice and deliberates the effects for foreign/second language educators. Keywords: Reflective teaching, reflection in action, reflection on action, the reflective proces

Is the war on terror induced-post traumatic stress disorder; the cause of suicide attack? An approach from psycho-cognitive and neurobiological perspective

Understanding suicide attack is one of the highly complicated problems in the field of psychological disorders. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), may occur in individuals subjected to traumatic assaults like terrorism, warfare, sexual abuse or natural disaster. Individual's living within war affected area often develops PTSD, which may consequently leads to cognitive and memory impairment. The war induced PTSD patient, is under the influence of severe stress; terror and helplessness as it manipulate and retrieve the past trauma as a current threat. Substantial evidences support that PTSD patients are more prone to varying degree of neurological and psychological complications. In this correspondence, we wish to highlight the biological consequence of suicide attack from the perspective of war induced PTSD. Earlier research also supports that PTSD and suicide have some common basis like alterations in hypothalamic pituitary-adrenal axis, nitric oxide and catecholamine like norepinephrine and serotonin level. Thus it is important to uncover the risk of PTSD due to war on terror with precision towards suicide attack and minimize the detriment followed by it. PTSD through the development of depression, irritability and anger, is one amongst the major causes of suicide attack.In order to clarify the underlying psychological mechanism, there is a pressing need to address it from different aspects like disease causing synaptic plasticity and abnormal brain development. PTSD is a reaction to past traumatic events. For instance, the danger of perceived threat due to witness of deaths in a war, may develop a constellation of properties that may leads to PTSD. Usually, it initiates a sequence of behavioral and cognitive changes that can be anticipated to reduce the perceived threat. However, the consequences of perceived threat lead to cognitive changes and thus maintain a devastating disorder. Appraisals of such memory not only generate situational fear but also the avoidance, which leads to enhanced trepidation and over-activity. For example, a person exposed to a road side traumatic accident may avoid driving; for having an impractical faith that it may happen again, thereby affecting its social life.Patients suffering from PTSD due to war may interpret that the trauma will persist for long time and thus he is no longer safe. He or she may suffer from depression, irritability, anger outbursts, emotional numbing, flashbacks, and nightmares [1]. It has been reported that numbing is an ordinary reaction to traumatic events. Individuals should realize that it is a normal aspect of the recovery process, otherwise it can lead to permanent changes which may worsen their physical or psychological well-being [2-4]. Children experiencing the PTSD, usually underwent alterations in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, catecholamine and norepinephrine, which results in pathological and detrimental brain development [5]. Interestingly, the inhibition of nitric oxide in hippocampus by antidepressant has promising outcome to alleviate the PTSD symptoms [6]. While, the augmented level of plasma nitrates in depressive patients are found to be associated with suicide attempts [7].Figure 1The intention of a suicide attack is to kill a large crowd or bringing mass destruction, even with the notion that he will die in this act. Suicide bombings termed as "suicide bombing" constitute an overall 4% of terrorist attacks, which dates back to the beginning of the 19th century. In most of the modern suicide terrorist is used against non-combatants for the accomplishment of impact on political situation. Although a suicide attack aims to annihilate a primary target, however it can be used as a weapon of psychological warfare to affect the large public population. The main target of this action is not those who are killed but those witnessed it [8]. Intriguingly, it is reported that the level of brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) is directly associated with suicide while indirectly it can affect PTSD. Also, defining body of research proved that altered level of serotonin in dorsal raphe nucleus, amygdala, median raphe, frontal cortex, hypothalamus and hippocampus is associated with aggressive behavior and suicide [9]. PTSD-induce symptoms like impulsivity, violence, suicide attempts, depression, panic, and anxiety can also be associated with altered serotonin levels [10].ConclusionThe mechanism of suicide attack is still highly debated; and need much more to address. Since, PTSD through the development of depression, irritability and anger, accomplish various physiological and cognitive changes in the brain, so it might be one of the causes which increases the susceptibility of acceptance for being a volunteer to suicide attack? This discussion was put forward; as some war induced PTSD patients among temporary displaced people in different regions of the world showed strong willingness for suicide attack as a counter revenge of war. Therefore, we also need to address suicide attack from the perspective of psychological disorders like war induced PTSD