Why The Green Revolution Was Short Run Phenomena In The Development Process Of Pakistan: A Lesson For Future

Agriculture is the most important sector of Pakistan’s economy. It provides food and fibre, source of scarce foreign exchange earning and a market for industrial goods. In 1960s various policy measures were taken for Agriculture development. The research tries to examine various issues related to this sector. Focus of the research, however, is to analyze the role of Green Revolution in the development process of Pakistan and its short and long term impact on the economy. The paper analyzes weaknesses due to which the Green Revolution remained a shortterm phenomena. The contributing factors of Green Revolution and other supporting institutions are also discussed. The findings of this study show that the Green Revolution increased agriculture production and employment level. It also had impact on distribution of income and the social and political environment in the country. However, there were certain policy gaps due to which the impact of Green Revolution remained a short-term phenomena.

Urdu News Clustering Using K-Mean Algorithm On The Basis Of Jaccard Coefficient And Dice Coefficient Similarity

Clustering is the unsupervised machine learning process that group data objects into clusters such that objects within the same cluster are highly similar to one another. Every day the quantity of Urdu text is increasing at a high speed on the internet. Grouping Urdu news manually is almost impossible, and there is an utmost need to device a mechanism which cluster Urdu news documents based on their similarity. Clustering Urdu news documents with accuracy is a research issue and it can be solved by using similarity techniques i.e., Jaccard and Dice coefficient, and clustering k-mean algorithm. In this research, the Jaccard and Dice coefficient has been used to find the similarity score of Urdu News documents in python programming language. For the purpose of clustering, the similarity results have been loaded to Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA), by using k-mean algorithm the Urdu news documents have been clustered into five clusters. The obtained cluster's results were evaluated in terms of Accuracy and Mean Square Error (MSE). The Accuracy and MSE of Jaccard was 85% and 44.4%, while the Accuracy and MSE of Dice coefficient was 87% and 35.76%. The experimental result shows that Dice coefficient is better as compared to Jaccard similarity on the basis of Accuracy and MSE

What Drives Foreign Direct Investment to BRICS?

This study explores the factors that drive foreign direct investment (FDI) to Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa that are collectively known as “BRICS”. By employing random effect panel estimation technique on the panel data for the years 1990-2011, the study found that market size, trade openness, GDP growth rate, macroeconomic stability and infrastructure availability are the main location factors for FDI in the BRICS countries. While, WTO accession has an insignificant impact on FDI in BRICS

Inguinal Hernia Repair on Day Care Basis During Global COVID-19 Pandemic

  Abstract Background: COVID-19 has effected General Surgical Elective list and most of the surgical procedures are postpone. Inguinal hernia surgery can be performed under local anesthesia on day care basis in selected group of patients taking all necessary precautions for COVID-19. Patients & Methods: This prospective study was conducted at department of General Surgery Federal Hospital, Islamabad for a period of three months from 15th March 2020 to 15th June 2020. All patients were included in the study through purposive sampling and preference was given to patients elder than 50 years of age. This study included 59 adult patients with inguinal hernia who under mesh repair under local anaesthesia on day care basis. Results: A total of 59 patients were included in the study. All patients were male. The age range was from 37 to 82 years (SD=± 10.23).  30 (50.84%) patient had inguinal hernia on left side while 26 (44.06%) had hernia on right side. Mean Operative time was 35 min. Pain was chief complaint postoperatively 30 (50.8%) patients had moderate pain while 6 (10.1%) patients had severe pain in first 24 hours after surgery. Fever was present in 15 (25.42%) patients in first 24 hours. All patients were negative for COVID -19 preoperatively and after 2 weeks none of the patients develop any symptoms of COVID-19. 3 (5.08%) patients needed readmission within 24 hours for pain and some haemorrhage. There was no mortality in our study Conclusions: Inguinal Hernia Surgery under local anaesthesia on day care basis in a very good practice at this time of global pandemic of COVID-19. This is a safe and reliable strategy. Key words: Inguinal Hernia, COVID-19, Local Anaesthesia &nbsp

A new generator for proposing flexible lifetime distributions and its properties

In this paper, we develop a generator to propose new continuous lifetime distributions. Thanks to a simple transformation involving one additional parameter, every existing lifetime distribution can be rendered more flexible with our construction. We derive stochastic properties of our models, and explain how to estimate their parameters by means of maximum likelihood for complete and censored data, where we focus, in particular, on Type-II, Type-I and random censoring. A Monte Carlo simulation study reveals that the estimators are consistent. To emphasize the suitability of the proposed generator in practice, the two-parameter Frechet distribution is taken as baseline distribution. Three real life applications are carried out to check the suitability of our new approach, and it is shown that our extension of the Frechet distribution outperforms existing extensions available in the literature

Prevalence of thyroid dysfunction in type 2 diabetes mellitus: a case control study

Background: Diabetes mellitus and thyroid disorders are the most common endocrine disorders worldwide. Various studies have found that diabetes and thyroid disorders mutually influence each other and both disorders tend to coexist. So, we conducted a study to find out the prevalence of thyroid disorders in patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus.Methods: This study was conducted on 100 diabetic patients and 100 controls. All the participants were evaluated for thyroid dysfunctions by testing thyroid profile. The correlation of prevalence of thyroid disorder with age distribution, gender distribution, BMI, duration of diabetes and HbA1C was then done.Results: The prevalence of thyroid dysfunctions were high in diabetic patients compared to controls (29% versus 9%, P value <0.001). Most common thyroid disorder in diabetic patients was subclinical hypothyroidism (16%) while least common was hyperthyroidism (1%). The levels of serum T3 and T4 were significantly low while serum TSH levels were significantly high in diabetic group compared to control group. Prevalence of thyroid disorders in diabetics were significantly more in patients with age ≥ 50 years, more in females, more in patients with BMI ≥ 30 and more in patients with duration of diabetes ≥ 5 years. The association of prevalence of thyroid disorders with HBA1C was not significant.Conclusions:Current study showed high prevalence of thyroid dysfunctions in diabetic patients. We conclude that screening for thyroid dysfunction among patients with diabetes mellitus should be routinely performed, so as to recognize these dysfunctions early. 

Physiomorphic and molecular-based evaluation of wheat germplasm under drought and heat stress

Drought and heat stress are potential problems that can reduce wheat yield, particularly during the terminal growth stages in arid and semiarid regions of the world. The current study intended to examine the impact of individual and combined drought and heat stress on the biochemical contents (antioxidant enzymes, proline, soluble proteins, and soluble sugars), physiological parameters (chlorophyll content, cell membrane stability, photosynthesis, stomatal conductance, and transpiration), plant–water relations (relative water content, water potential, osmotic potential, and pressure potential), agronomic traits (flag leaf area, plant height, number of tillers per plant, spike length, grains per spike, and thousand-grain weight), and gene expression (TaHSF1a, TaWRKY-33, TaNAC2L, and TaGASR1) in four different thermostable and drought-tolerant wheat genotypes (i.e., Gold-16, HS-240, Suntop, and Hemai-13) collected from different countries. The tri-replicate experiment was conducted using two factorial arrangements in a randomized complete block design (RCBD). All measured traits, except total soluble sugars, proline, and cell membrane stability index, showed significant reduction under both combined and individual treatments. Furthermore, correlation analysis revealed a significant association between biochemical and physiological characteristics and crop agronomic productivity. Furthermore, principal component analysis (PCA) and heatmap analysis demonstrated significant levels of variation in traits according to the type of stress and nature of wheat genotype. The spectrographs and micrographs generated by scanning electron microscopy for the selected high- and low- tolerance samples revealed clear differences in mineral distribution and starch granulation. All studied genes showed comparatively high levels of relative expression under combined treatments of drought and heat stress in all wheat genotypes, but this expression was the highest in ‘Gold-16’ followed by ‘HS-240’, ‘Suntop’, and ‘Hemai-13’. Overall, this study concluded that plants are proactive entities and they respond to stresses at all levels; however, the tolerant plants tend to retain the integrity of their biochemical, physiological, and molecular equilibrium

Multiscale Damage Modelling of Notched and Un-Notched 3D Woven Composites With Randomly Distributed Manufacturing Defects

This work proposes a stochastic multiscale computational framework for damage modelling in 3D woven composite laminates, by considering the random distribution of manufacturing-induced imperfections. The proposed method is demonstrated to be accurate, while being simple to implement and requiring modest computational resources. In this approach, a limited number of cross-sectional views obtained from micro-computed tomography (µCT) are used to obtain the stochastic distribution of two key manufacturing-induced defects, namely waviness and voids. This distribution is fed into a multiscale progressive damage model to predict the damage response of three-dimensional (3D) orthogonal woven composites. The accuracy of the proposed model was demonstrated by performing a series of finite element simulations of the un-notched and notched tensile tests (having two different hole sizes) for resin-infused thermoplastic (Elium®) 3D woven composites. Excellent correlation was achieved between experiments and the stochastic finite element simulations. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed stochastic multiscale model. The model successfully captured the stochastic nature of tensile responses (ultimate tensile strength and stiffness), damage modes (matrix damage and fibre failure), and initiation and propagation of transverse cracks in thermoplastic 3D woven composites, consistent with experimental observation. The stochastic computational framework presented in this paper can be used to guide the design and optimization of 3D textile composite structures