Impact of Globalization on Education Policy: Bangladesh Perspective

Globalization is a process, which has affected many areas of human life and it\u27s aided by the ICT. It has both positive and negative effects on education. These effects have been influenced our National Education Policy in 21st century. To identify the new issues and topics of education that was included in National Education Policy in 21st century of Bangladesh as an effect of globalization is the main objective of this paper. This Study was conducted following the qualitative research approach. In order to ensure the feasibility of the study, only two education policies which were formulated in 2000 and 2010, have purposively been selected for the study sample and the data has been analyzed qualitatively. Through this analysis, it has been found that the National Education Policy of Bangladesh was inspired by globalization. This paper will help to carry out further research on the similar topics in any other countries

Fixed Inter-Neuron Covariability Induces Adversarial Robustness

The vulnerability to adversarial perturbations is a major flaw of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) that raises question about their reliability when in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, human perception, which DNNs are supposed to emulate, is highly robust to such perturbations, indicating that there may be certain features of the human perception that make it robust but are not represented in the current class of DNNs. One such feature is that the activity of biological neurons is correlated and the structure of this correlation tends to be rather rigid over long spans of times, even if it hampers performance and learning. We hypothesize that integrating such constraints on the activations of a DNN would improve its adversarial robustness, and, to test this hypothesis, we have developed the Self-Consistent Activation (SCA) layer, which comprises of neurons whose activations are consistent with each other, as they conform to a fixed, but learned, covariability pattern. When evaluated on image and sound recognition tasks, the models with a SCA layer achieved high accuracy, and exhibited significantly greater robustness than multi-layer perceptron models to state-of-the-art Auto-PGD adversarial attacks \textit{without being trained on adversarially perturbed dat

Designing an IT-Based System for Optimizing Lung Cancer Management

Digital health offers lung cancer patients to improve their health status while allowing patients, providers, and administrators to coordinate data and care at individual and community levels. While technology improvements provide lung cancer patients and healthcare providers with a valuable new tool for disease management, these are yet to be widely accepted. In particular, we aim to: (1) develop a Machine Learning (ML)-based framework for data collection from active online lung cancer forums and other parameters for patients, providers and their organizations, (2) build an AI-based model to develop a cancer ontology for exploring different factors and patients’ emotions associated to lung cancer management, (3) Design a mHealth app to set up a support system in terms of providing patients with information and social support, and ML models-based treatment recommendation system. The IT-based support system will provide the best and most specific treatment plan and recommendation system for lung cancer management

Investigating Organizational Commitment of Information Professionals working at University Libraries in Pakistan

This study investigated the organizational commitment of information professionals working at university libraries in Pakistan. Survey method was adopted using a questionnaire to collect data from 329 information professionals of Punjab and Islamabad. The questionnaire contained 18-items measure of organizational commitment, developed by Meyer, Allen and Smith (1993), along with certain demographic variables. Each statement was measured on 5-point Likert scale (e.g. 1=Strongly Disagree, 2=Disagree, 3= Neutral, 4=Agree, 5= Strongly Agree). The collected data were analysed by applying descriptive as well as inferential statistics in SPSS. Results indicated that information professionals were slightly committed to their organizations and most of these had emotional attachment with the organization. There were no significant mean differences in the index of organizational commitment based on age, gender, sector, area, and continuing education. However, the qualification, designation, experience, employment nature, and salary of the participants appeared to be predictor of organizational commitment. These results are important for university administration especially human resource department who work for retention of productive and committed employees and ensure strategic human resource development. This study would make worthy contribution in the existing research on organizational commitment in general and information professionals in particular

Classroom Environment at Secondary Level: Is it learning-friendly?

This study aims to explore whether the secondary classroom environment is learning friendly or not. Mixed method approach is employed for collecting and analyzing data from respective sources. Teachers, students and classroom sessions have been selected randomly from 24 schools. Interview schedule, questionnaire and observation checklist are used as data collection tools. Findings reveal that majority teachers share experiences, discuss familiar issues and tell stories in relation with class lesson. A good number of teachers use the most traditional aids like chalkboard along with few emphasize on charts, posters and real objects. The students friendly aids are to some extent ignored in secondary classrooms. Surprisingly, students are still physically harassed or verbally abused by their friends and teachers. Teachers assess students\u27 learning during class and feedback to students is provided but not extensively. However, majority teachers disallow students to asked questions and not answer properly. Therefore, this study suggests that learning friendly environment should be ensured that can invite students to achieve expected outcomes

Classroom Assessment Practices in Urban Secondary Science Classes in Bangladesh

Aiming to explore classroom assessment practices in Bangladesh, this study confined on some selected secondary science classroom. A total of seven schools are selected purposively from seven divisional cities. The General Science class of Class Eight is selected purposively and observed in five consecutive days. The class teachers and students are also interviewed as respondent. This study shows that assessing student learning achievement and feedback are considered as the major objectives of classroom assessment, however, modifying teaching is totally ignored. Classroom feedback is \u27right\u27 or \u27wrong\u27 oriented follow by task-oriented and self-oriented in nature. Teachers mainly dominate the classroom assessment practices and basically relied on the traditional methods specifically on oral questioning for assessing students\u27 classroom learning. The classroom questions are basically focused very specific or limited responses. Therefore, this study suggests to change the current practices by using several assessment strategies and focus on assessment for students\u27 learning

Redistributive Effects of Fiscal Policy across the Income Groups in the Urban-Rural Areas of Pakistan

There exist a large number of studies related to the estimates of government budgetary redistributive effects and its related problems with regard to different countries of the world.1 Studies of the impacts of government expenditures and taxes in Pakistan have been conducted within the framework of either incidence of taxes or the impact of expenditures across the income groups. The studies carried out by Azfar (1972); Jeetun (1978); Alauddin and Raza (1981) Malik and Saqib (1985, 1989) cover different aspects of taxation—tax incidence, progressivity or regressivity of the tax system across the income groups/individuals and regions. These studies did not discuss the expenditure side of the budget. Shirazi (1996) analysed the impact of government transfer programmes (Zakat and Ushr) across the income deciles. Ghaus (1989) studied the incidence of provincial and municipal government service-related expenditure benefits in Karachi metropolitan and therefore, the scope of her study was limited to one city only. Despite the existence of a rich bibliography on the subject of government redistrbutive budgetary effects and its related problems, no study is available which covers the overall redistributive impacts of government budgetary policy in Pakistan. This study explores the impacts of government expenditures and taxes on the distribution of income across various income groups along with net fiscal impacts in the urban-rural areas of Pakistan. The rest of our study is organised as follows. In the following section, Part II, we describe the methodology and data set. In Part III, the results of the study are presented. The Part IV concludes the paper

Reproductive Health Education in NCTB Curriculum and Text Books: A Critical Review

The Education Policy-2010, paved the way to introduce Reproductive Health (RH) as part of curricula of few selected subjects for the secondary school children in Bangladesh, which can be considered as a first step in the right direction. Consequently subjects like Physical Education and Health and Home Science has been chosen to incorporate some aspects of RH for the students of classes VI-VIII, and Science are for the students of classes IX-X. This article aimed to explore, examine and review critically to what extent incorporation has taken place and whether this has fulfilled the learning needs of the adolescent groups at the secondary level. Class/grade wise analysis revealed that topics, contents, narration of information, facts, examples, illustrations and use of language are aged and grade specific and need oriented to a moderate extent. However the lapses were observed in the use of language in describing contents and illustrations for the younger children (particularly for class VI) and other classes also. A more gender balanced approach should have been undertaken in the whole development process of curriculum and text books which incorporated RH as part of other subjects. Intensive teacher training program along with development of supplementary learning and teaching materials will be needed in order to provide right and proper knowledge, information and facts to these young learners and keep the safe from wrong information from wrong sources. For the students of 21st century knowing about Reproductive Health in broader terms and Sexual Reproductive Health is not merely a policy issue but a right also

Some novel schemes by using multiplicative calculus for nonlinear equations

This research is supported by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan.In this paper, we suggest and analyze a new family of two-step predictor corrector type iterative schemes for solving nonlinear equations in the framework of multiplicative calculus. We also discuss the convergence criteria of these newly developed iterative methods. Some numerical examples will be given to illustrate the efficiency and performance of derived methods.Publisher's Versio