Grieving for Pigeons

In this poignant and meditative collection of short stories, Zubair Ahmad captures the lives and experiences of the people of the Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan. In an intimate narrative style, Ahmad writes a world that hovers between memory and imagination, home and abroad. The narrator follows the pull of his subconscious, shifting between past and present, recalling different eras of Lahore’s neighbourhoods and the communities that define them. These stories evoke the complex realities of post-colonial Pakistani Punjab. The contradictions of this region’s history reverberate through the stories, evident in the characters, their circumstances, and sometimes their erasure. Skillfully translated from Punjabi by Anne Murphy, this collection is an essential contribution to the wider recognition of the Punjabi language and its literature.Publishe

Security, Trust and Privacy (STP) Model for Federated Identity and Access Management (FIAM) Systems

The federated identity and access management systems facilitate the home domain organization users to access multiple resources (services) in the foreign domain organization by web single sign-on facility. In federated environment the user’s authentication is performed in the beginning of an authentication session and allowed to access multiple resources (services) until the current session is active. In current federated identity and access management systems the main security concerns are: (1) In home domain organization machine platforms bidirectional integrity measurement is not exist, (2) Integrated authentication (i.e., username/password and home domain machine platforms mutual attestation) is not present and (3) The resource (service) authorization in the foreign domain organization is not via the home domain machine platforms bidirectional attestation

Measuring The Evolving Internet Ecosystem With Exchange Points

The Internet ecosystem comprising of thousands of Autonomous Systems (ASes) now include Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) as another critical component in the infrastructure. Peering plays a significant part in driving the economic growth of ASes and is contributing to a variety of structural changes in the Internet. IXPs are a primary component of this peering ecosystem and are playing an increasing role not only in the topology evolution of the Internet but also inter-domain path routing. In this dissertation we study and analyze the overall affects of peering and IXP infrastructure on the Internet. We observe IXP peering is enabling a quicker flattening of the Internet topology and leading to over-utilization of popular inter-AS links. Indiscriminate peering at these locations is leading to higher endto-end path latencies for ASes peering at an exchange point, an effect magnified at the most popular worldwide IXPs. We first study the effects of recently discovered IXP links on the inter-AS routes using graph based approaches and find that it points towards the changing and flattening landscape in the evolution of the Internet’s topology. We then study more IXP effects by using measurements to investigate the networks benefits of peering. We propose and implement a measurement framework which identifies default paths through IXPs and compares them with alternate paths isolating the IXP hop. Our system is running and recording default and alternate path latencies and made publicly available. We model the probability of an alternate path performing better than a default path through an IXP iii by identifying the underlying factors influencing the end-to end path latency. Our firstof-its-kind modeling study, which uses a combination of statistical and machine learning approaches, shows that path latencies depend on the popularity of the particular IXP, the size of the provider ASes of the networks peering at common locations and the relative position of the IXP hop along the path. An in-depth comparison of end-to-end path latencies reveal a significant percentage of alternate paths outperforming the default route through an IXP. This characteristic of higher path latencies is magnified in the popular continental exchanges as measured by us in a case study looking at the largest regional IXPs. We continue by studying another effect of peering which has numerous applications in overlay routing, Triangle Inequality Violations (TIVs). These TIVs in the Internet delay space are created due to peering and we compare their essential characteristics with overlay paths such as detour routes. They are identified and analyzed from existing measurement datasets but on a scale not carried out earlier. This implementation exhibits the effectiveness of GPUs in analyzing big data sets while the TIVs studied show that the a set of common inter-AS links create these TIVs. This result provides a new insight about the development of TIVs by analyzing a very large data set using GPGPUs. Overall our work presents numerous insights into the inner workings of the Internet’s peering ecosystem. Our measurements show the effects of exchange points on the evolving Internet and exhibits their importance to Internet routing

Relations Between 4-H Enrollment and Selected Characteristics of Tennessee\u27s County 4-H Extension Programs

The study was concerned with the problem of decreasing county 4-H enrollment in Tennessee. Twenty-one independent variables concerning the characteristics of Tennessee\u27s county 4-H Extension programs and five independent variables concerning total 4-H enrollment were studied. The independent variables were classified under the headings of 4-H leadership, organization, participation, place of 4-H member residence, potential number of 4-H members, and number of Extension staff members. The purpose was to identify the association between the selected variables concerning county 4-H programs and the total 4-H enrollment in the Tennessee counties. Another purpose was to determine which variable, within each group of 4-H Extension program variables, accounted for the highest percent of variation in the number of 4-H members enrolled per county. It was found that total 4-H enrollment in the ninety-five Tennessee counties was directly related to each of the following variables: total number of adult 4-H leaders, total number of junior 4-H club leaders, total number of basic four organizations, total number of 4-H all stars, total number of honor club members, total number of 4-H senior clubs, total number of junior 4-H clubs, total number of 4-H clubs, average number of senior 4-H members per senior club, total number of senior 4-H district winners, total number of 4-H members participating in 4-H judging and in 4-H camp, total number of full-time Extension staff equivalents responsible for 4-H work, and total number of Extension staff members per county. The variables, within each group of county 4-H program variables, which accounted for the largest percents of variation in total county 4-H enrollment were: total number of junior 4-H leaders (50 percent), total number of 4-H clubs per county (60 percent), total number of 4-H members per county participating in 4-H camp (31 percent), total number of 4-H members per county residing on farm (55 percent), total number of full-time Extension staff equivalents per county (54 percent). Variables under potential number of 4-H members were not significantly relates with enrollment. It was implied that 4-H enrollment in Tennessee counties might tend to increase if either the number of 4-H leaders, number of 4-H clubs, number of members participating in 4-H events and activities, and/or the number of full-time Extension staff equivalents responsible for 4-H work increased. Implications for program emphasis were made

Pride and Prejudice as a Dramatic Novel: An Estimate

Jane Austen is considered as one of the greatest pioneers of the feminist movement in English Literature. Jane Austen was a gifted and sensual author who in her time wrote consistently to amuse her relatives and audience. She had a gift of observing her environment and picture it vividly. Jane Austen’s novels have been rightly called as domestic novels, as she never goes out of the parlour and chooses to work with or two families in a country village. Since Pride and Prejudice is a social comedy in which social relationship, even love and marriage relations, find a mercenary motivation, still in it she deals with the domestic life and aspirations of the Bennets, and to some extent with those of the Lucases. Pride and Prejudice is a novel which is divided into acts just like as a drama or play. This novel is a dramatic one, which envelopes the whole plot of this novel with many love-ridden themes. This paper is going to highlight the dramatic elements present in the novel, as well as their importance within the novel, and the relationships of characters in the novel with each other and their importance with respect to time

Language Learning Strategies of EFL Students in the University General Requirements Unit in the United Arab Emirates University

The purpose of this study was to investigate the patterns of English language learning strategies used by Emirati EFL university students, and to examine the effects of gender and proficiency level on the use of these strategies. This study was conducted at the United Arab Emirates University. The sample consisted of 190 EFL students at the University General Requirements Unit. Data was collected through administering an Arabic translation of Oxford\u27s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) and a demographic questionnaire. The findings indicated that these EFL university students were medium range strategy users and that students favored using metacognitive strategies, followed by social, compensation, affective, cognitive and memory strategies, respectively. Gender and language proficiency levels had no significant effects on strategy use of Emirati EFL university learners, nor did they affect any of each of the six strategy categories. EFL instructors and curriculum planner might find the results of this study beneficial when designing English language instruction and curriculum plans. However, the findings of this study are exclusive to EFL learners at the UAEU and should not be generalized to include all EFL university learners in the UAE

Content Analysis of General Science Text Book for 8th Grade

General science textbooks due to integrated contents of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and; Earth and Space, need special attention of curriculum developers. The contents in general science textbooks can be evaluated through different methods and curriculum analysis taxonomy (CAT) is one of these. This research paper explores the contents of general science textbook of 8th grade taught in all government schools and in some private schools of Punjab province. The contents of textbook were broken down in term of Piagetian developmental levels by using Curriculum Analysis Taxonomy (CAT). The findings show that majority of contents of General science textbook were at Concrete Operational level while a small number of contents demands Formal Operational level. This uneven distribution of contents at different Piagetian developmental levels were also observed when contents of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and; Earth and Space were separately studied. It is recommended that the distribution of contents should follow model based on Piagetian development levels and the selection of contents should be on the basis of breadth and depth of the concepts.

Higher Dimensional Inhomogeneous Perfect Fluid Collapse in \emph{f(R)} Gravity

This paper is about the $n+2$-dimensional gravitational contraction of inhomogeneous fluid without heat flux in the framework of $f(R)$ metric theory of gravity. Matching conditions for two regions of a star has been derived by using the Darmois junction conditions. For the analytic solution of equations of motion in modified $f(R)$ theory of gravity, we have taken scalar curvature as constant. Hence final result of gravitational collapse in this frame work is the existence of black hole and cosmological horizons, both of these form earlier than singularity. It has been shown that constant curvature term $f(R_{0})$ ($R_0$ is constant scalar curvature) slows down the collapsing process.Comment: 17 Pages, to appear in European Physical Journal