The Role of Cultural Capital in Learning of English in a Government School in Hyderabad District

This study aims to demonstrate the influence of parents’ attitudes on students’ English language proficiency in Government Secondary School Halepota (GSSH), district Hyderabad rural, Sindh, Pakistan. The study uses Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital as a theoretical framework to this study, analyzes the data following this theory, and applies the theory. Moreover, this is a qualitative study and uses Interpretivist paradigm to understand the social reality. This research pursues to construct the connection between family background, especially the attitudes of parents which are influenced by family structure, socioeconomic position of the parents, and parents’ education level and the English proficiency of the students. The research investigates these elements and discovers that parents’ attitudinal support with regards to emotional and material support is lacking on the basis of micro factors, such as parents’ interest, care, seriousness, and importance of English. Moreover, this study also finds that some of the parents emotionally and economically support their students. However, the main concern is that most of the parents are not literate in English language; therefore they are not able to linguistically support their children. DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/88-03 Publication date:May 31st 202

Malaria Parasitic Detection using a New Deep Boosted and Ensemble Learning Framework

Malaria is a potentially fatal plasmodium parasite injected by female anopheles mosquitoes that infect red blood cells and millions worldwide yearly. However, specialists' manual screening in clinical practice is laborious and prone to error. Therefore, a novel Deep Boosted and Ensemble Learning (DBEL) framework, comprising the stacking of new Boosted-BR-STM convolutional neural networks (CNN) and the ensemble ML classifiers, is developed to screen malaria parasite images. The proposed Boosted-BR-STM is based on a new dilated-convolutional block-based split transform merge (STM) and feature-map Squeezing-Boosting (SB) ideas. Moreover, the new STM block uses regional and boundary operations to learn the malaria parasite's homogeneity, heterogeneity, and boundary with patterns. Furthermore, the diverse boosted channels are attained by employing Transfer Learning-based new feature-map SB in STM blocks at the abstract, medium, and conclusion levels to learn minute intensity and texture variation of the parasitic pattern. The proposed DBEL framework implicates the stacking of prominent and diverse boosted channels and provides the generated discriminative features of the developed Boosted-BR-STM to the ensemble of ML classifiers. The proposed framework improves the discrimination ability and generalization of ensemble learning. Moreover, the deep feature spaces of the developed Boosted-BR-STM and customized CNNs are fed into ML classifiers for comparative analysis. The proposed DBEL framework outperforms the existing techniques on the NIH malaria dataset that are enhanced using discrete wavelet transform to enrich feature space. The proposed DBEL framework achieved Accuracy (98.50%), Sensitivity (0.9920), F-score (0.9850), and AUC (0.997), which suggest it to be utilized for malaria parasite screening.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, 9 Table

METHOD TO ACHIEVE SECURITY AND STORAGE SERVICES IN CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud storage enables users to remotely store their data and enjoy the on-demand high quality cloud applications without the burden of local hardware and software management. Though the benefits are clear, such a service is also relinquishing users ‘physical possession of their outsourced data, which inevitably poses new security risks toward the correctness of the data in cloud. In order to address this new problem and further achieve a secure and dependable cloud storage service, we propose in this paper a flexible distributed storage integrity auditing mechanism, utilizing the homomorphism token and distributed erasure-coded data. The proposed design allows users to audit the cloud storage with very lightweight communication and computation cost. The auditing result not only ensures strong cloud storage correctness guarantee, but also simultaneously achieves fast data error localization, i.e., the identification of misbehaving server. Considering the cloud data are dynamic in nature, the proposed design further supports secure and efficient dynamic operations on outsourced data, including block modification, deletion, and append. Analysis shows the proposed scheme is highly efficient and resilient against Byzantine failure, malicious data modification attack, and even server colluding attacks

Towards nurturing the entrepreneurial intentions of neglected female business students of Pakistan through proactive personality, self-efficacy and university support factors

Purpose - Nowadays in the competitive economy, the field of entrepreneurship and particularly female entrepreneurship is rapidly advancing, and its contribution to the economy is imperative. Consequently, the female business students’ factors and university support factors are imperative to nurture the entrepreneurial intentions, but the literature does not address them at large. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of proactive personality, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and perceived university support factors on female student’s entrepreneurial intentions. Design/methodology/approach - The data from a total of 306 female students from the business schools of universities of Pakistan is collected through the personal physical-survey questionnaires. The data were then analyzed through Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique for results. Findings - The results indicate that the proactive personality, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and university support factors are the significant predictors of entrepreneurial intentions of female students. Moreover, the results also support that entrepreneurial self-efficacy partially mediates the relationship between proactive personality and entrepreneurial intentions of female students. Originality/value - To the best of authors’ knowledge, the study originality lies in the testing of university support factors and individual personality factors (entrepreneurial self-efficacy and proactive personality) as the predictors of entrepreneurial intentions. Moreover, the present study provides the useful insight for the policymakers in formulating, delivering and evaluating educational policies into the universities for female students

Ghost condensates and pure kinetic kk-essence condensates in presence of field-fluid non-minimal coupling in the dark sector

In this article we try to find out the conditions when a ghost field in conjunction with a barotropic fluid produces a stable accelerating expansion phase of the universe. It is seen that in many cases the ghost field produces a condensate and drives the fluid energy density to zero in the final accelerating phase, but there can be other possibilities. We have shown that a pure kinetic $k$-essence field (which is not a ghost field) interacting with a fluid can also form an interaction induced condensate and produce a stable accelerating phase of the universe. In the latter case the fluid energy density does not vanish in the stable phase.Comment: Corrected and modified version. 25 pages, Accepted for publication in Univers

Dynamical Stability in presence of non-minimal derivative dependent coupling of kk-essence field with a relativistic fluid

In this paper we investigate a non-minimal, space-time derivative dependent, coupling between the $k$-essence field and a relativistic fluid using a variational approach. The derivative coupling term couples the space-time derivative of the $k$-essence field with the fluid 4-velocity via an inner product. The inner product has a coefficient whose form specifies the various models of interaction. By introducing a coupling term at the Lagrangian level and using the variational technique we obtain the $k$-essence field equation and the Friedmann equations in the background of a spatially flat Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric. Explicitly using the dynamical analysis approach we analyze the dynamics of this coupled scenario in the context of two kinds of interaction models. The models are distinguished by the form of the coefficient multiplying the derivative coupling term. In the simplest approach we work with an inverse square law potential of the $k$-essence field. Both of the models are not only capable of producing a stable accelerating solution, they can also explain different phases of the evolutionary universe.Comment: 25 pages, 7 tables, 9 figures, Accepted for the publication in EPJ

Dynamical stability in models where dark matter and dark energy are non-minimally coupled to curvature

This work explores the dynamical stability of cosmological models where dark matter and dark energy can non-minimally couple to spacetime (scalar) curvature. Two different scenarios are presented here. In the initial case, only dark matter sector is coupled to curvature in the presence of a quintessence scalar field. In the second case both dark matter and the quintessence field are coupled to curvature. It is shown that one can get an accelerating expansion phase of the universe in both the cases. The nature of the fixed points show that there can be stable or unstable phases where the curvature coupling vanishes and dark energy and dark matter evolve independently. On the other hand there can be stable accelerating expansion phases where both the components are coupled to curvature.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 5 table

DETERMINANTS AFFECTING THE CAPITAL STRUCTURE DECISION OF A FIRM (A CASE STUDY OF TEXTILE SECTOR IN PAKISTAN)

In this paper, we have examined the influence of specific factors based on a capital structure sample of five Pakistani textile sector (Leveraged) companies. The secondary data came from an analysis of the balance sheets of five companies listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange between 2004 and 2014.Regression and correlation analysis on the panel data shows that profitability is negatively correlated with leverage ratio, while tangibility is positively correlated with leverage ratio, but not significantly. Firm size and firm growth are also positively and significantly correlated with leverage. Return on equity is also negatively correlated with leverage. Our findings also show that large textile firms, compared with small ones, finance long-term through debt. Keywords: Capital Structure, Return on equity, Profitability, Tangibility, Leverage, Debt to equity ratio, Pakistan