Soil salinity-sodicity and land use suitability in the Fordwah Eastern Sadiqia (South) irrigated area

Soil salinity / Sodic soils / Soil classification / Soil surveys / Soil analysis / Groundwater development / Water table / Water quality / Land use / Irrigation canals / Farmer participation / Surface drainage / Subsurface drainage / Soil reclamation / Waterlogging / Pakistan / Fordwah Eastern Sadiqia / Bahawalnagar District

Determination of Credit Programme Participation and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Beneficiaries:Evidence from Sargodha

In Pakistan about 65 percent population live in rural areas. The rural credit markets are segmented and imperfect. Micro -credit is considered as a valuable technique to deal with imperfections of credit markets. In this study, we analysed rural credit market of District Sargodha, Pakistan to study the socio economic characteristics of the beneficiaries and identify the determinants of participation in credit programme in the year 2004-2005. To analyse characteristic the descriptive analysis was used. For identifying the factors affecting household access to credit and participation in programme, a binary Logistic regression model was employed. Results of both analyses showed that at household level, participation in credit programme was significantly related to household characteristics, where participants were indifferent to increase in rate of interest. More than 80 percent loan came from informal sector but the probability of participation significantly increased if there existed any formal financial institution.

Physics studies at a future linear collider

With the start of the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) at CERN, we will obtain a new understanding of the physics beyond our current limits. New discoveries will be made; but we will require a deeper understanding, which the LHC machine, being a hadron collider, will not be able to elucidate. Instead, we will need an e+e- collider to make precision measurements of the newly discovered phenomena. Electroweak symmetry breaking and the origin of fermion and boson masses are fundamental issues in our understanding of particle physics. The essential piece of electroweak symmetry breaking - the Higgs boson - will probably be discovered at the LHC. If there are one, or more, Higgs boson(s) precise measurements of all properties of the Higgs will be very important. In this thesis I present two measurements of Standard Model Higgs boson properties in the context of the International Linear Collider (ILC) at √s = 500 GeV, using the proposed International Linear Detector (ILD). First a performance study of ILD to measure the branching ratios of the Higgs boson with mH = 120 GeV, where the Higgs boson is produced with a Z-boson via the Higgsstralung process, and the Z decays into e+e- or μ+μ-. It will also be essential to study the Higgs Yukawa coupling. Therefore, in the second part of this thesis, I present a study of e+e- → tt¯H with the aim of making a direct measurement of the the top-Higgs coupling, using the semi-leptonic nal state and mH of 120 GeV. I show that the top-Higgs coupling can be measured with an accuracy of better than 28%

Determination of Credit Programme Participation and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Beneficiaries: Evidence from Sargodha

International literature asserts that “micro-finance” began alleviating poverty several decades ago when organisation in Latin America, Bangladesh, and other developing nations started testing the notions of lending small amounts to impoverished people (mostly women). Professor Mohammad Younis1 of Bangladesh and his Grameen Bank brought it on to the world stage and showed how effectively it could be used to change lives. Giving loans of as little as five dollars, Grameen brought millions in to the micro credit net and in doing so lifted people, particularly the rural poor, out of abject poverty [Ayesha (2007)]. By 1980, the success of such institutions prompted many NGO’s and International Organisations to provide micro-finance services

Therapeutic potential and bioactive phenolics of locally grown Pakistani and Chinese varieties of ginger in relation to extraction solvents

Current study compares the Therapeutic/nutra-pharmaceuticals potential and phenolics profile of Pakistani grown Pakistani and Chinese varieties of ginger. Crude yield of bioactive components from the varieties tested, using different extraction solvents including chloroform, ethyl acetate, ether, methanol, ethanol and distilled water. The crude bioactives varied from 14.1-82.5%. The highest extraction yield was noted for Pakistani species. The HPLC analysis revalued significant amounts of phenolics including vanillin, protocatechuic, vanillic, ferulic, sinapinic and cinnamic acids. The highest anti-inflammatory activity was shown by ethanolic extract of Pakistani variety (IC50: 26.5±1.8) whereas Chinese variety exhibited potent anticancer potential against MCF-7 cell line (Inhibition: 91.38 %). The Chinese variety in general showed higher phenolics and anticancer, while the Pakistani exhibited higher anti-inflammatory activity. Pakistani grown ginger and ethanolic extract of Chinese ginger showed highest antimicrobial activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa 18.0±0.02 & 15.00±0.02 mm respectively. Minimum results obtained with water for both varieties of ginger with range of 7.2±0.22 and 6±0.07 respectively. Moreover, the phenolics composition, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and anticancer activities of both tested varieties of ginger were notably affected as a function of extraction solvents. Our findings advocate selection of appropriate solvent for recovery of effective phenolic bioactive compounds from ginger verities to support the Nutra-pharmaceutical formulation

Thyroidectomy with Drain and Without drain; A Clinical Comparative Study

Background: Thyroidectomy is one of the most difficult surgical procedures. The study aims to compare the thyroidectomy procedure with drain placement and without drain concerning the hospital stay, Postoperative complications, and pain assessment using a visual analog scale. Methods: A prospective comparative study was designed in the Department of otorhinolaryngology & Head Neck Surgery---removed for blind review----. A total of 117 patients were enrolled in the study from which 9 were excluded due to loss of follow-up. The patients were divided into two groups by using computer-generated randomized numbers containing sealed envelopes. Both groups contained 54 patients. Group A patients with a drain placed while group B contained patients without a drain. The patients with drain have a longer hospital stay and reported increased pain as compared to the patients with drainless thyroidectomy. Results: The mean age and standard deviation calculated for the patients enrolled in both groups after randomization was 13.28  42.5 and 12.18  43.9 in groups A and B respectively. The mean ages were statistically insignificant. However, Postoperative variables such as length of hospital stay and post-operative pain by visual analog scale were assessed. The hospital stays of the patients with a drain placed was found statistically significant with a P-value < 0.05 Postoperative pain assessed by visual analog scale was also significant having a P-value <0.05 for patients having stayed for 2 to 4 days. Conclusion: Placement of drain after thyroidectomy saves the patient from life-threatening complications but at the same time increases the post-operative pain on day one and increases the length of hospital stay of the patient. The routine practice of drain placement should be avoided unless there must be a risk of the development of hematoma or seroma.

Copy-Move Forgery Detection Technique for Forensic Analysis in Digital Images

Due to the powerful image editing tools images are open to several manipulations; therefore, their authenticity is becoming questionable especially when images have influential power, for example, in a court of law, news reports, and insurance claims. Image forensic techniques determine the integrity of images by applying various high-tech mechanisms developed in the literature. In this paper, the images are analyzed for a particular type of forgery where a region of an image is copied and pasted onto the same image to create a duplication or to conceal some existing objects. To detect the copy-move forgery attack, images are first divided into overlapping square blocks and DCT components are adopted as the block representations. Due to the high dimensional nature of the feature space, Gaussian RBF kernel PCA is applied to achieve the reduced dimensional feature vector representation that also improved the efficiency during the feature matching. Extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed method in comparison to state of the art. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique precisely determines the copy-move forgery even when the images are contaminated with blurring, noise, and compression and can effectively detect multiple copy-move forgeries. Hence, the proposed technique provides a computationally efficient and reliable way of copy-move forgery detection that increases the credibility of images in evidence centered applications