A hybrid technique using minimal spanning tree and analytic hierarchical process to improve functional requirements prioritization

Software for large enterprises such as the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is more likely to be developed by a team of software developers where the functional requirements (FRs) are distributed in parallel developers. Therefore, development of pre-requisite FRs must be carefully timed to see which requirement is to be implemented first by assigning priority to some FRs over others, so that FRs can be made available on time to parallel developers. Well-known prioritization technique such as the Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP), although accurate, is not scalable for large set of FRs as in ERP due to high number of pairwise comparisons when the size of FRs is more than ten or twelve. To address this issue, this research proposes a hybrid prioritization technique of Minimal Spanning Trees (MST) and AHP called the Spanning Analytic Hierarchical Process (SAHP) for FRs prioritization by exploiting MST capability to prioritize large size software FRs with smaller pairwise comparisons but with more consistent results. Using Numerical Assignment (NA) technique, prioritized FRs from SAHP are assigned to priority groups such that top priority groups contain high priority FRs and low priority groups contain low priority FRs. Low priority group of FRs are dependent on high priority groups. As a result, within each priority group, inter-dependencies in FRs are reduced for parallel developers. Implementing high priority groups will reduce number of dependencies in FRs among the lower priority groups. The proposed technique is evaluated based on ERP case study and the results showed that SAHP reduces estimation time of parallel developers as compared to AHP and other techniques. This shows that SAHP is scalable to cater large number of pairwise comparisons for large systems like ERP

An Empirical Study on the Role of Parents in Academic Achievement of Children in Private Schools of Karachi

This study examines the parental involvement in the academic achievement of the children in Old Golimar, Karachi. The factors included in the study were parental involvement which is measured with; communicating of parents, decision making of parents, friendly behavior of parents, qualification of parents, parents' schools' association, parent child interaction, parent teachers' meetings, to understand the children, solving children problems, helping the children in school works and academic achievement which is measured with; response of children, potential of children, hesitation of children, outcome of children, academic performance, good marks, participation in activities, school work completion, good attendance, being active in class, understanding the lecture and over all factors of parental involvement in the academic performances of the children in Old Golimar, Karachi. After getting the list of total enrollments of schools then the researcher used Raosoft sample size calculator, and got the sample of 165 out of total population, which was 714. Proportionate stratified sampling technique was used and data collected through a structured questionnaire. The results and findings of the whole research show that there is a significant relationship between the parental involvement and the academic achievement of the children

Social and Economic Determinants of Child Health: The Case Study of Pakistan

This study used cross sectional data from Pakistan demographic health survey (DHS) 2006- 2007 to determine the social and economic determinants of child health in Pakistan. The sample of children under five (0-4) years is taken. The DHS sample is taken from different regions of Pakistan which is divided into rural and urban areas. Logistic regression technique is used to measure the coefficients of the model. This study revealed that the male children are more likely to be indulged into diseases as compared to female children. Results showed that there are fewer chances for a child to become ill if the household head is male. The study indicated that child sex, household head gender, size of child at birth, region and place of residence affect child health in Pakistan. Whereas the variables like wealth status, mother education, twin children and source of drinking water do not affect the child health under five years. Measures should be taken to reduce the risk of child morbidity by reducing the pollution and by giving proper vaccination. Keywords: Child health, Logistic regression technique, Pakistan demographic health survey, social and economic determinants. JEL classification Codes: I1, I110

Requirement Elicitation Model (REM) in the Context of Global Software Development

Contxext Requirement elicitation is difficult and critical phase of requirement engineering and the case is worst in global software development GSD The study is about requirement elicitation in the context of GSD Objective Development of requirement elicitation model REM which can address the factors that have positive impact and the factors that have negative impact during elicitation in GSD The propose model will give solutions and practices to the challenges during elicitation Method Systematic literature review SLR and empirical research study will be used for achieving the goals and objectives Expected Outcomes The expected results of this study will be REM that will help vendor organizations for better elicitation during GS

Textural Implications in Assessment of Physico-Mechanical behaviour of Metavolcanic Rocks from Dir Upper, north western Pakistan

The Dir-Utror meta-volcanics from the south western portion of the Kohistan arc in northern Pakistan areanalyzed in term of their petrography, physico-mechanical properties. Field observations and petrography show thecollected representative samples to be fine-grained meta-andesites (FMA), coarse-grained meta-andesites (CMA) andagglomerate (AG). The relationship between petrography and physico-mechanical properties has been investigatedwhich inferred the grain size to be the major factor, alongside grains’ shape, arrangement and size distribution as wellas degree of mineral alteration significantly affecting the mechanical behavior of rocks. The CMA yield more strength(98 MPa) than FMA (93 MPa) due to its lesser degree of mineral alteration, inequigranular texture, lack of preferredmineral alignment, relatively low porosity and water absorption. The lower strength of agglomerate (57 MPa)corresponds to abundance of soft minerals (calcite), exotic rock fragments and coarse-grained texture. Based onphysico-mechanical properties including specific gravity, bulk density, aggregate impact value, Los Angeles abrasionvalue and unconfined compressive strength (UCS), these rocks fall within permissible range to be utilized for multipleengineering purposes including dimension stones and foundation materials for other civil structures. However,petrographic investigations reveal excessive amount of reactive silica in these rocks making them prone to alkali-silicareactivity in concrete works with ordinary Portland cement (OPC). Hence these rocks are not recommended for use assole aggregate material or low-alkali cement is recommended, if used

Mother Schooling and Malnutrition among Children of Rural-Urban Pakistan

Background: Although many causes of malnutrition are discussed in previous studies, the impact of mother schooling on malnutrition among children of rural-urban Pakistan and mediating factors is not posited in case of Pakistan. Hence, this study examine the effect of mother schooling and intervening linkages on acute and chronic malnutrition. Methods: The prior empirical relationship is examined by calculating adjusted risk-ratio with the help of binary logistic regression analyses using a sample size of 3184 rural-urban mothers retrieved from the latest Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2012-13 (PDHS). Results: The urban mothers without education are more likely to have stunted and underweighted infants as compared to rural ones. Rural (urban) mothers with poor (moderate) economic position have more chances of having stunted infants than urban (rural) mothers. However, only urban mothers with poor status have more chances of having underweight kids relative to mothers with rich class. The rural mothers with empowerment and with seeking for medical services are less likelihood to have stunted infants than urban ones. Value of the Study: The impact of mediating factors arising from education on rural infants’ health is higher than that on urban infant

Discovering Lexical Similarity Using Articulatory Feature-Based Phonetic Edit Distance

Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting linguistic insights such as phylogenetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, common etymology, and loan words. There are various methods through which LS is evaluated. This paper presents a method of Phonetic Edit Distance (PED) that uses a soft comparison of letters using the articulatory features associated with their International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription. In particular, the comparison between the articulatory features of two letters taken from words belonging to different languages is used to compute the cost of replacement in the inner loop of edit distance computation. As an example, PED gives edit distance of 0.82 between German word ‘vater’ ([fa:tər]) and Persian word ‘ ’ ([pedær]), meaning ‘father,’ and, similarly, PED of 0.93 between Hebrew word ‘ ’ ([ʃəɭam]) and Arabic word ‘ ’ ([səɭa:m], meaning ‘peace,’ whereas classical edit distances would be 4 and 2, respectively. We report the results of systematic experiments conducted on six languages: Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu. Universal Dependencies (UD) corpora were used to restrict the comparison to lists of words belonging to the same part of speech. The LS based on the average PED between pair of words was then computed for each pair of languages, unveiling similarities otherwise masked by the adoption of different alphabets, grammars, and pronunciations rules