DIETARY DIVERSITY AND RURAL LABOR PRODUCTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM PAKISTAN

The relationship between rural labor productivity and food diversity was analyzed from the household consumption survey data of Pakistan. The elasticity of wage to diversity (0.77) was higher than to food expenditure (0.13). Lowering the prices of meats and fruits and vegetables will have the greatest impact on labor productivity.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Labor and Human Capital,

An Investigation into the Farm Households Consumption Patterns in Punjab, Pakistan

In the present study, the consumption data of paddy and wheat growing farm households were analysed using the Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) model, incorporating the household composition in addition to the usual price/income variables. Although the general restrictions of demand theory were rejected, the overall results were not seriously out of line of a priori expectations. All the own-price elasticities were negative and most of them were significant. Paddy and wheat were found to be gross complements in consumption whereas meat and pulses emerged as gross substitutes. Dairy products and meat were regarded as luxuries by the sample farm households and expenditure on these items was curtailed in response to any addition to household size. Significant quantitative dietary impacts were found associated with change in the age composition of farm households. A more detailed analysis of consumption behaviour of rural families may be merited; this may explore alternative groupings of consumption goods, additional socio-economic factors or use of panel data.

Ensemble Machine Learning Approaches for Detection of SQL Injection Attack

In the current era, SQL Injection Attack is a serious threat to the security of the ongoing cyber world particularly for many web applications that reside over the internet. Many webpages accept the sensitive information (e.g. username, passwords, bank details, etc.) from the users and store this information in the database that also resides over the internet. Despite the fact that this online database has much importance for remotely accessing the information by various business purposes but attackers can gain unrestricted access to these online databases or bypass authentication procedures with the help of SQL Injection Attack. This attack results in great damage and variation to database and has been ranked as the topmost security risk by OWASP TOP 10. Considering the trouble of distinguishing unknown attacks by the current principle coordinating technique, a strategy for SQL injection detection dependent on Machine Learning is proposed. Our motive is to detect this attack by splitting the queries into their corresponding tokens with the help of tokenization and then applying our algorithms over the tokenized dataset. We used four Ensemble Machine Learning algorithms: Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM), Adaptive Boosting (AdaBoost), Extended Gradient Boosting Machine (XGBM), and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LGBM). The results yielded by our models are near to perfection with error rate being almost negligible. The best results are yielded by LGBM with an accuracy of 0.993371, and precision, recall, f1 as 0.993373, 0.993371, and 0.993370, respectively. The LGBM also yielded less error rate with False Positive Rate (FPR) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) to be 0.120761 and 0.007, respectively. The worst results are yielded by AdaBoost with an accuracy of 0.991098, and precision, recall, f1 as 0.990733, 0.989175, and 0.989942, respectively. The AdaBoost also yielded high False Positive Rate (FPR) to be 0.009

ANTIDIABETIC POTENTIAL OF PERSIMMON PULP POWDER ON ALLOXAN INDUCED DIABETIC RABBITS

Diabetes, a condition when blood glucose level goes beyond the normal range. Natural treatments particularly through bioactive components from fruit and vegetable sources are becoming popular worldwide and are broadly accepted because of no side effects and cost effectiveness. The present study was planned to investigate the antidiabetic potential of persimmon pulp powder by using alloxan induced diabetic rabbits as an animal model. For this purpose, fifteen rabbits were induced Diabetes mellitus by alloxan and divided into three groups. Persimmon pulp powder supplemented diets (0%, 10% and 20%) were given to the diabetic rabbits for the duration of 21 days. The blood samples of rabbits were examined for glucose, serum creatinine and urea levels on weekly basis. The results indicated that there was a significant decline in glucose as well as creatinine and urea levels in blood of diabetic rabbits. The reduction of blood glucose level was ranged from 357.66 mg/dL to 256.45 mg/dL on administration of 20% persimmon peel powder in the feed of rabbits. Similarly, serum creatinine and urea levels were also significantly reduced 1.42 mg/dl and 1.22 mg/dl and 47.50 mg/dl and 24.22 mg/dl, respectively because of supplementation of 20% persimmon pulp powder. It is concluded from the results that persimmon pulp powder might be a potential natural antidiabetic treatment of diabetic complications

Dynamics and Thermodynamics of (2+1)-Dimensional Evolving Lorentzian Wormhole

In this paper we study the relationship between the Einstein field equations for the (2+1)-dimensional evolving wormhole and the first law of thermodynamics. It has been shown that the Einstein field equations can be rewritten as a similar form of the first law of thermodynamics at the dynamical trapping horizon (as proposed by Hayward) for the dynamical spacetime which describes intrinsic thermal properties associated with the trapping horizon. For a particular choice of the shape and potential functions we are able to express field equations as a similar form of first law of thermodynamics $dE=-TdS+WdA$ at the trapping horizons. Here $E=\rho A$, $T=-\kappa /2\pi$, $S=4\pi \tilde{r}_{A}$, $W=(\rho -p)/2$%, and $A=\pi \tilde{r}_{A}^{2}$, are the total matter energy, horizon temperature, wormhole entropy, work density and volume of the evolving wormhole respectively.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, paper presented at the 3rd Algerian Workshop on Astronomy and Astrophysic

Adoption and Impacts of Zero-Tillage in the Rice-Wheat Zone of Irrigated Punjab, Pakistan

This study documents the adoption and impacts of zero-tillage (ZT) wheat in the ricewheat systems of Pakistan’s Punjab province primarily drawing on a detailed empirical survey of 458 rice-wheat farmers. Our random stratified sample revealed 19% to be ZT wheat adopters and a similar share of the wheat area in the surveyed communities to be under ZT. The study suggests that diffusion has stagnated and also flags the issue of disadoption (14%). ZT adopters, non-adopters, and disadopters differ significantly in terms of their resource bases, with adopters typically showing the most favorable values. ZT drastically reduces tractor operations in farmers’ ZT wheat fields from an average of 8 passes to a single pass, implying a saving of 7 tractor hours and 35 liters of diesel per hectare. ZT did not have any significant effect on the mean farmer estimated wheat yield of 3.3 tons per hectare. ZT also had no significant effect on water productivity for wheat or spillover effect on the subsequent rice crop. ZT primarily appears to be a cost-saving technology for wheat in Pakistan’s Punjab. Based on these findings, the study provides a number of recommendations for research and development in Pakistan Punjab’s rice-wheat systems.Wheat, Rice, Agricultural development, Drilling equipment, Economic analysis, Innovation adoption, Farming systems, Cropping patterns, Production costs, Zero tillage, Pakistan, Crop Production/Industries, E16, F08,