Accessing International Capital: Pakistan’s Experience, Prospects, and Policy Implications

In the 1990s accessing international capital markets has become a major source of external financing for many developing countries. The paper reviews Pakistan’s experience in tapping the global financial markets. We conduct a cross-sectional econometric analysis of the factors influencing the access to international equity and debt capital. Results indicate that the factors as suggested in the earlier literature do appear to be influential in determining the access to international capital. The study finds that the role of credit rating in attracting debt flows and of the local capital markets in attracting equity flows is prominent. The rate of economic growth is a major determinant of the access to foreign debt and equity funds. It also appears that the country rating which is based on a comprehensive set of variables indicating the financial health of the country subsumes the other proxies of economic stability and debt management. This study underscores the importance of institutional factors. Areas where improvement is possible to facilitate access to the international capital markets are identified as (1) political and legal environment, including improvements in the quality of the system of civil laws and its enforcement (2) private sector development through sustaining economic liberalisation and privatisation programmes (3) improvement in macro-economic management through a prudent internal and external debt management (4) development of capital markets through, improvements in market operations, enforcement of market regulations, strengthening of financial institutions and effective dissemination of market information.

Engineering PEGylated Antibody Fragments for Enhanced Properties and Cancer Detection

3E8 is an antibody that targets Sialyl-Tn, a glycan found exclusively on a subset of cancers called adenocarcinomas. This antibody is particularly interesting to the Magliery Lab because of its use in radioimmunoguided surgery, a modern cancer-detecting technique that allows surgeons to intraoperatively visualize and fully resect diseased tissue. Studies have shown that patient outcome is directly correlated to the surgeon’s ability to entirely remove the tumor; unfortunately, current full-length antibodies, like 3E8 have long serum lifetimes and poor affinity to Siayl-Tn. Consequently, we have engineered a smaller version of 3E8 called 3E8.scFv, an antibody fragment with a tunable serum half-life and affinity and stability nearly equal to full length antibodies. Previous studies have shown that the lifetime of 3E8.scFv can be optimized by attaching polyethylene glycol chains (PEGs) to the antibody, but not without decreasing its ability to bind to Sialyl-Tn. These PEGs, which react non-specifically with surface lysine residues on the fragment, may be responsible for the decrease in affinity of 3E8.scFv as they block the binding site. To determine which lysines are potentially problematic, variants of 3E8.scFv that contain mutations to selected lysines will be engineered. These variants will be characterized and studied using a variety of techniques to locate a more stable form of 3E8.scFv that can be non-specifically PEGylated. In contrast to non-specific PEGylation at lysines, the specific PEGylation of 3E8.scFv.Cys (3E8.scFv with a C-terminal cysteine) will also be studied. A variety of techniques, including gel filtration, surface plasmon resonance, differential scanning fluorimetry, and analytical ultracentrifugation will help investigate the biophysical effects of singly PEGylating 3E8.scFv.Cys with PEGs of different shapes and sizes. The ultimate goal of this project is to create a stable single chain variable fragment with a completely tunable serum half-life by PEGylation (non-specifically or specifically) for use in radioimmunoguided surgery and imaging. In addition to its use in vivo, 3E8.scFv can be used in pathology labs to help detect and diagnose adenocarcinomas. The Magliery lab has engineered a variant of 3E8.scFv called 3E8.scFv.FLAG that contains a C-terminal FLAG tag for immunohistochemistry. Numerous chemistries involving this antibody will be tested and analyzed to develop a sensitive and reliable technique for staining adenocarcinomas.The Ohio State University Office of Undergraduate Education Summer Research FellowshipThe Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research ScholarshipEnlyton Ltd.Ohio Third FrontierSmall Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programNo embargoAcademic Major: Biochemistr

Greenly, Everett and Marion, 1878-1903

(from The Complete and Unabridged History of North American Aviation

Non-invasive prenatal testing: what an obstetrician needs to know

No field in obstetrics has seen such fast advancement, as the field of prenatal screening and diagnosis. A wide variety of tests are available today, and this at times becomes confusing both for the patient and the treating doctor that which screening test would be best suited in the given circumstances. Non-invasive prenatal screening, with its numerous advantages is rapidly becoming the test of first choice, especially in the affording set of population.  Although, the test has a very high sensitivity and a very good positive predictive value, this too suffers from some disadvantages which should be clear to the obstetrician ordering the test. A good knowledge about the test, the ideal target population in which this should be offered as the primary screening tool and limitations of the test should be known to all practicing obstetricians and primary health care providers. The current review aims to provide a simplified and updated knowledge regarding non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), its major advantages and disadvantages and summarizes the role of ultrasound in patients with negative NIPT

Nocturnal Enuresis

Guest Comment on Nocturnal Enuresis by Dr. Ankit Mangla, MBBS, MD, FPN, Fellow critical care (IAP/ISCCM), Director & HOD Pediatric Institute of Renal Sciences & Senior Consultant,  PICU HOPE Hospital, Jaipu

An obstetrician's own experience of having an extremely preterm baby: an autoethnography

Parental stress after the birth of a preterm baby is well known. Being an obstetrician who herself had an extremely premature delivery, the author thought of narrating self-experience regarding delivering a preterm baby. The objective is to engage the reader both cognitively and emotionally regarding aspects of preterm birth that obstetricians often disregard. Autoethnography is a unique form of research that examines an interplay between self and cultural norms. The role of narrating self-experience by the author, though well established in mental health issues, has not been explored much in maternal and child health. Mothers of preterm babies go through a mixed bag of feelings. The feelings of happiness and delight are in no time transformed into anxiety, guilt, sufferance, and sometimes even frank depression. Preventing preterm births as far as possible should be the goal of every obstetrician

Social Media Advertisement Outreach: Learning the Role of Aesthetics

Corporations spend millions of dollars on developing creative image-based promotional content to advertise to their user-base on platforms like Twitter. Our paper is an initial study, where we propose a novel method to evaluate and improve outreach of promotional images from corporations on Twitter, based purely on their describable aesthetic attributes. Existing works in aesthetic based image analysis exclusively focus on the attributes of digital photographs, and are not applicable to advertisements due to the influences of inherent content and context based biases on outreach. Our paper identifies broad categories of biases affecting such images, describes a method for normalization to eliminate effects of those biases and score images based on their outreach, and examines the effects of certain handcrafted describable aesthetic features on image outreach. Optimizing on the describable aesthetic features resulting from this research is a simple method for corporations to complement their existing marketing strategy to gain significant improvement in user engagement on social media for promotional images.Comment: Accepted to SIGIR 201

An Annual Money Demand Function for Pakistan: Some Further Results

The paper highlights the main issues involved in the theoretical and empirical estimation of the money demand function in Pakistan. Much of the recent empirical work on money demand has used income as a scale variable. Our work seeks to assess the relevant importance of the permanent income as an argument of the demand function for money. The results of our estimation indicate that a stable money demand function exists using permanent income

Toilet as an Asset: Necessity versus Luxury

Sanitation hinders overall development process and poor sanitation practices deprive human access to healthy living conditions. Improving sanitation is crucial to gear the development process in India whose sanitation performance has been unsatisfactory even after a program for better sanitation in place since 1986. This paper focuses on sanitation condition in 78 villages of Mewat district of Haryana in comparison to Haryana and India as a whole. The findings show that Mewat’s sanitation condition has been dismal negatively affecting the other paradigms of development. Also, we studied on to the asset holding preferences of the rural inhabitants to understand the effectiveness of fiscal benefits under the current scheme- Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan. The findings report that rural households which own other kinds of luxury and mediocre assets still fail to have toilets in their homes. In such cases, non-affordability could not be a reason and instead households do not consider toilet as a necessity. Therefore, compensatory policy becomes inefficient and ineffective means to improve sanitation situation. Additionally, financial support has become a disincentive for people to install toilet facility and the real poor continues to be deprived of the compensation as he can’t afford the start up cost of building toilets which makes him eligible for the sum of rupees under the scheme. Strengthening IEC and promoting community led sanitation are ways ahead to improve sanitation condition in India. Keywords: Sanitation, Toilets, Asset Ownership, NB