Involving the third sector in local service delivery in Bangladesh: Why and how?

The rise of involuntary and non-government efforts to deliver services in Bangladesh has opened the way for local government units to involve many community and voluntary organisations (CVOs) and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)– collectively described as the ‘third sector’ – in delivering local services. This article attempts to set out how the third sector can be incorporated into the stream of local service delivery. It analyses the rationale behind the engagement of the third sector in this area. It also looks at suitable mechanisms to enable local government institutions (LGIs) and third sector organisations to meet community objectives seamlessly, transparently and fairly. During the last two decades or so, many third sector organisations have collaborated with public sector organisations including LGIs regardless of any specific long term strategies. To involve the third sector in local service delivery there should be some clear cut standard procedures, strategies including commissioning, partnership, competitive contracting and co-production. The article concludes that, given the current situation of LGIs in Bangladesh, only co-production is a suitable mechanism for incorporating the third sector into local service delivery

Agritouch- An efficient smartphone based approach for rooftop gardening

With the increasing growth of population in mega cities like Dhaka, most of the Agricultural land has given away for housing, factories, highways and other urban needs. As a result, lack of crop production as well as various environmental crisis has already been showing up with a great threat to humankind. Rooftop gardening can be an effective method to reduce this problem and the nutritional needs of the inhabitants. But for the unavailability of the necessary resources, supports and lack of awareness among the people, most of the spaces available at the rooftop are being unutilized. We have proposed an online and smartphone-based approach to overcome the above limitations. Though the current popularity of smartphones causes rising of different mobile application technologies and selecting the appropriate one could be challenging. Here we have introduced some latest technology stack that fit best to develop our application with a comparative study of the suitable geo-location-based services. AgriTouch, a smartphone app, will act as a bridge between the gardeners and the service providers to maintain the balance of nature

Performance Analysis of 2.5 Gbps PIN and APD Photodiodes to Use in Free Space Optical Communication Link

Ever since ancient times, people had a principle need to communicate with one another. This need created interests in device based communication system for sending messages from one distant place to another. Optical communication methods were of special interest among the many systems. In this paper, investigation has been done on two different photodiodes PIN and APD for use as a receiver in free space fiber optical link. We have considered 2.5 Gbps PIN and APD photo diodes for our experiment. From the simulation, we found that APD with single mode fiber gives the better performance over PIN. However, the value of Q-factor is maximum when APD has been used as the receiving photodiode at 1550nm wavelength and minimum when PIN diode has been used as receiving photodiode at 1550nm wavelength. We used OptiSystem and MATLAB software for our investigatio

On The Non-linear Distortion Effects in an OFDM-RoF Link

Radio over Fiber (RoF) system is a promising technique for microcell and picocell applications for deployment of future ubiquitous wireless data networks. However, the performance of RoF systems can be severely degraded due to non-linear effects in the channel. Also, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), as a standard for broadband wireless networks, is being proposed for deployment with RoF systems to facilitate the total performance of a system. In this research, at first, the performance of OFDM-based RoF link with Mach-Zehnder modulator distortion effects has been analyzed at 5.8 GHz. Evaluation of mean-squared error of the proposed OFDM-RoF system was carried out to compare with the conventional single carrier system based RoF link after the modulator distortion case and also for fixed Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of 20 dB using undistorted OFDM signal. Later, nominal and offset biasing pre-distortion techniques are applied in proposed system to linearize the OFDM-RoF link. Thus, finally a comparison between the aforementioned pre-distortion techniques applied showed important observation in terms of distortion-free dynamic range and SNR to choose offset pre-distortion technique for our proposed system

GalliformeSpectra: A Hen Breed Dataset

This article presents a comprehensive dataset featuring ten distinct hen breeds, sourced from various regions, capturing the unique characteristics and traits of each breed. The dataset encompasses Bielefeld, Blackorpington, Brahma, Buckeye, Fayoumi, Leghorn, Newhampshire, Plymouthrock, Sussex, and Turken breeds, offering a diverse representation of poultry commonly bred worldwide. A total of 1010 original JPG images were meticulously collected, showcasing the physical attributes, feather patterns, and distinctive features of each hen breed. These images were subsequently standardized, resized, and converted to PNG format for consistency within the dataset. The compilation, although unevenly distributed across the breeds, provides a rich resource, serving as a foundation for research and applications in poultry science, genetics, and agricultural studies. This dataset holds significant potential to contribute to various fields by enabling the exploration and analysis of unique characteristics and genetic traits across different hen breeds, thereby supporting advancements in poultry breeding, farming, and genetic research

PulMon-C: A Real-time Monitoring Framework of Pulmonary Function

This project will develop PulMon-C, a real-time monitoring framework of pulmonary function to diagnose COVID-19 patients who are being self-quarantined at home. The tool will identify anomalies in breathe rate and predict pulmonary deterioration to raise alert for immediate actions. The uniqueness of the tool is using non-invasive sensors placed under-mattress that are able to communicate data about the respiratory signal. The customer segment of PulMon-C will be the diagnosed COVID-19 patients and healthcare providers. PulMon-C will assist with the remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients as an urgent need in the USA and will bring larger impact in delivering medical care for worsening conditions of COVID-19 patients timely without overwhelming hospital systems that have otherwise limited capacity and resources. The goal of the research is to perform the needed R&D for real-time monitoring of COVID-19 patients, develop and test signal processing techniques, and preliminary evaluation through end users and healthcare professionals

On the error vector magnitude as a performance metric and comparative analysis

In this paper, we present the error vector magnitude (EVM) as a a figure of merit for assessing the quality of digitally modulated telecommunication signals. We define EVM for a common industry standard and derive the relationships among EVM, signal to noise ratio (SNR) and bit error rate (BER). We also compare among the different performance metrics and show that EVM can be equivalently useful as signal to noise ratio and bit error rate. A few simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of EVM based on these relationships

An Exploratory Analysis of Mobile Security Tools

The growing market of the mobile application is overtaking the web application. Mobile application development environment is open source, which attracts new inexperienced developers to gain hands on experience with applicationn development. However, the security of data and vulnerable coding practice is an issue. Among all mobile Operating systems such as, iOS (by Apple), Android (by Google) and Blackberry (RIM), Android dominates the market. The majority of malicious mobile attacks take advantage of vulnerabilities in mobile applications, such as sensitive data leakage via the inadvertent or side channel, unsecured sensitive data storage, data transition and many others. Most of these vulnerabilities can be detected during mobile application analysis phase. In this paper, we explore vulnerability detection for static and dynamic analysis tools. We also suggest limitations of the tools and future directions such as the development of new plugins

Interfacing Relationship among Work Stress, Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: Evidence from Banking Industry of Bangladesh

The performance of the employees serving at different levels of an organization gets directly affected by work stress which is also associated with employee motivation and customer satisfaction. Many scholars have argued on the previous comment. The present study's primary purpose is to determine the interfacing relationship among work stress, quality of services, and customer satisfaction of Bangladesh's banking industries. The study mainly followed a quantitative research method based on survey technique. The study has been completed in two sections. The first one was designed for bank employees to measure job stress and job satisfaction. The second one was for customers to investigate their satisfaction level on selected banks. Using the SERVQUAL model responses on service quality and customer satisfaction were collected. A total of 200 employees of the sampled banks were selected conveniently from 40 branches. Subsequently, 110 customers of the sampled Bank were selected randomly from bank premises. Besides, a total of 130 customers were selected purposively based on the contact number collected from the Bank, and the link of the google survey was sent to the selected customers but only 90 responses were collected out of the 130 respondents. Collected data were analyzed by using SPSS and Spreadsheet. Job stress and employee satisfaction were measured with the Kahn et al. (1964) instrument by descriptive statistics. The SERVQUAL model of Parasuraman et al. (1988) was applied to measure the quality of service and satisfaction level of customers.The present study found that bank employees are not satisfied with four dimensions: Governance, working environment, structure and facilities, benefits, etc. Subsequently, the SERVQUAL model analysis found that customers are not satisfied at all on all dimensions. The study concludes with having a positive relationship between the stress level of employees, quality of service, and satisfaction level of the customer within Bangladesh's banking industry. Keywords: Work stress, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, SERVQUAL model] DOI: 10.7176/JESD/12-4-04 Publication date: February 28th 202