The Contemporaneous Correlation of Structural Shocks and Inflation— Output Variability in Pakistan

Monetary policy has changed in a number of ways during the last two decades . Along with the other characteristics, modern monetary policy is forward-looking, and the central banks respond contemporaneously to structural shocks that are expected to make inflation deviate from the future targets. This study aims at investigating this aspect of the monetary policy for Pakistan. Using a modified version of Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) developed by Enders and Hurn (2007), we have found a weak response of policy to supply-side shocks as the correlation coefficient between the demand and supply shocks is only 0.041. Moreover, the results show that the demand shocks have no significant contribution to output variability. On the other hand, both the demand and supply shocks, along with the foreign supply shocks, significantly contribute to inflation variability.Monetary Policy, Contemporaneous Correlation, Pakistan, Structural Shocks, Vector Autoregression

Sparse variational regularization for visual motion estimation

The computation of visual motion is a key component in numerous computer vision tasks such as object detection, visual object tracking and activity recognition. Despite exten- sive research effort, efficient handling of motion discontinuities, occlusions and illumina- tion changes still remains elusive in visual motion estimation. The work presented in this thesis utilizes variational methods to handle the aforementioned problems because these methods allow the integration of various mathematical concepts into a single en- ergy minimization framework. This thesis applies the concepts from signal sparsity to the variational regularization for visual motion estimation. The regularization is designed in such a way that it handles motion discontinuities and can detect object occlusions

Influence of Chemical Properties of Soil on the Corrosion Morphology of Carbon Steel Pipes

Corrosive soils are responsible for the deterioration of buried underground utilities such as buried steel pipes. Frequent pipe failures are reported due to corrosive soil globally. Although soil’s corrosion phenomenon has been understood and identified long time ago, pipe failures due to corrosive soil are uncontrollable and unavoidable despite the use of protective coatings and techniques such as cathodic protection. Therefore, it is essential to review the causes of soil’s corrosivity for the protection of steel pipes. This chapter demonstrates the influence of varying moisture and chloride contents of soils on the corrosion of coated and uncoated steel pipes. Carbon steel specimens (coated and uncoated) were buried in soils of 20, 40, 60, and 80 wt.% moisture content, respectively, while the chloride concentration introduced in soil was 0, 5, and 10 wt.%, respectively. Through the analysis of experiments, it is revealed that the corrosion rate of pipes buried in soil increases with increase in moisture content up to critical moisture and chloride values. The influence of soil’s moisture and chloride on the corrosion products formed on steel pipes was investigated and comprehensively explained in this chapter. Authors believe that the knowledge presented in this chapter can be applied to other structures or utilities buried in corrosive soils

Oil Price Shocks, Systematic Monetary Policy and Economic Activity

This study quantifies the impact of oil price shocks and the subsequent monetary policy response on output for Pakistan. It employs a quarterly Structural Vector Auto-regression framework for the period 1993–2015. It first discovers that Hamilton’s (1996) Net Oil Price Increase indicator appropriately reveals most of the oil price shocks hitting Pakistan’s economy. We find that a contractionary monetary policy, resulting from the oil price shocks, contributes to significant output loss in Pakistan. After encountering the Lucas critique, the present study finds that around 42 percent of the output loss is due to the ensuing tight monetary policy. This suggests that the central bank of Pakistan can reduce the impact of oil price shocks by reducing its intervention in the market. JEL Classification: E1, E3, E5 Keywords: Oil Price Shocks, Monetary Policy, Structural Vector Autoregressio

Collection of Departmental Information by Utilizing Computer Technology: Evidence from Schools of Karachi

This paper is an analysis of Collection of Departmental Information (CDI) of Education Department of Karachi, but the concept of the paper is general in nature and applicable to every department of any country for the purpose of computerization of all the related records and CDI. The Paper examines the existing manually run infrastructure of CDI for onward submission to concerned departmental authorities. With the advent of information technology, the transformation and collection of information is analyzed for comparison between traditional source code and computer based working system. Trend of introducing computer in Government Departments has been examined and recorded with positive results. The Governor of Sindh seems to be very serious and has much emphasized the need of using computer technology for easy access, efficient, diligent and versatile functioning of the departments. In the light of results based on interviews, literature review and their analysis, policy implications are made for better Management of CDI for concerned authorities.Manual Information, Computer Technology, Versatile, Diligent, Acceleration, Access and Management

THE IMPACT OF BRAND TRUST AND BRAND RELATIONSHIP QUALITY ON BRAND LOYALTY IN THE CONTEXT OF EMERGING MARKET LIKE PAKISTAN

Purpose: The concept of brand loyalty is of critical importance to the business as it plays a dominant role in providing competitive advantages for the companies and brands in devising their marketing strategies. With the advent of modern digital platforms of consumer interaction with the brands, the focus of marketing is shifting towards relationships from the traditional approach of marketing mix. So, the emphasis is made by researchers on the determinants and approaches of building relationships between consumer and brand that eventually foster brand loyalty. Methodology: Sample size for this study was 160 with a respondent response rate of 94.3 %. Survey method through questionnaire was adopted to collect data for this study. Constructs were adopted from relevant and established literature. It had 5 items related to demographic based on nominal scale. Additionally, it had 42 items related to the prime objectives of the study. It was based on 7 points grading scale. After preliminary analysis including normality, validity and reliability, an analysis of multiple regression was carried out to test the desired hypothesis. Findings: The study found that brand trust was the strongest predictor of consumers’ brand loyalty towards a particular preferred brand, followed by brand relationship quality, perceived quality and brand identification. The study has taken a narrow perspective with limited number of variables. Further studies would incorporate higher number of variables. Additionally, other studies could incorporate the mediating and moderating roles of independent variables and demographic & other factors. Conclusion: The firm should focus to enhance the trust related to brand among customers to stabilize the consumers’ brand loyalty

Can computer assisted diagnosis (CAD) be used as a screening tool in the detection of pulmonary nodules when using 64-slice multidetector computed tomography?

Objectives:To evaluate (1) whether or not the addition of computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) to 64-slice multidetector computed tomography (CT) can be used as a screening tool for detection of pulmonary nodules in routine CT chest examinations and (2) whether or not to advocate the incorporation of CAD as a screening tool into our daily practice. Materials And Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional analysis of 109 consecutive Patients who had all undergone routine contrast-enhanced CT chest examinations for indications other than lung cancer at the Radiology Department of Aga Khan University Hospital, Karachi, between November 2010 and January 2011. All examinations were evaluated in terms of the detection of pulmonary nodules by a consultant radiologist and CAD (ImageChecker CT Algorithm R2 Technology) software. The ability of CAD software to detect pulmonary nodules was evaluated against the reference standard. In addition, a chest radiologist also calculated the number of pulmonary nodules. The sensitivity and specificity of the CAD software were calculated against the reference standard by using a 2 * 2 table. The Mann-Whitney U test was applied to compare the performances of CAD and the radiologist. Results: CAD detected 610 pulmonary nodules while the radiologist detected only 113. The reference standard declared 198 pulmonary nodules to be true nodules. CAD detected 95% of all true nodules (189/198), whereas the radiologist detected only 57% (113/198). In the detection of true pulmonary nodules, CAD had 98% sensitivity compared with the radiologist who had 57% sensitivity, the statistical difference between their performances had a P value Conclusion: Considering the high sensitivity of CAD to detect nearly all true pulmonary nodules, we advocate its application as a screening tool in all CT chest examinations for the early detection of pulmonary nodules and lung carcinoma

Accelerated Proximal Algorithm for Finding the Dantzig Selector and Source Separation Using Dictionary Learning

In most of the applications, signals acquired from different sensors are composite and are corrupted by some noise. In the presence of noise, separation of composite signals into its components without losing information is quite challenging. Separation of signals becomes more difficult when only a few samples of the noisy undersampled composite signals are given. In this paper, we aim to find Dantzig selector with overcomplete dictionaries using Accelerated Proximal Gradient Algorithm (APGA) for recovery and separation of undersampled composite signals. We have successfully diagnosed leukemia disease using our model and compared it with Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). As a test case, we have also recovered Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal with great accuracy from its noisy version using this model along with Proximity Operator based Algorithm (POA) for comparison. With less computational complexity compared with ADMM and POA, APGA has a good clustering capability depicted from the leukemia diagnosis