Post-crisis political economy: neoliberalism or Islamic alternative?

The global financial crisis that unfolded since the end of 2006 has shaken the very foundation of the Western free-market economic system. Its fundamental regulatory principle of the separation of state and market is now seriously discredited. The objective of this article is to argue that the economic principles of Islam can provide a better alternative to the free-market system. Firstly, an Islamic economic system is highly integrative where the purpose and interest of the state and the individual citizen overlap and are complimentary to each other. So, market and state are rather inseperable in Islamic political economy. Secondly, the free-market system is fundamentally oriented to the philosophy of unlimited consumption, that is – greatest number produces greatest happiness, which demands production and appropriation of resources beyond needs. But the Islamic economic philosophy puts restrictions on unnecessary consumption, thereby capping competition over resources. These two essential principles in Islamic political economy are highly interdependent on state and individual agency of a human being. Therefore, once the economic needs and purpose of the state and the individual citizen are properly enmeshed, it produces a balanced market system. Islamic political economy has moral regimes and instrumental structure for economic behavior that reinforce each other

Imbalanced data classification and its application in cyber security

Cyber security, also known as information technology security or simply as information security, aims to protect government organizations, companies and individuals by defending their computers, servers, electronic systems, networks, and data from malicious attacks. With the advancement of client-side on the fly web content generation techniques, it becomes easier for attackers to modify the content of a website dynamically and gain access to valuable information. The impact of cybercrime to the global economy is now more than ever, and it is growing day by day. Among various types of cybercrimes, financial attacks are widely spread and the financial sector is among most targeted. Both corporations and individuals are losing a huge amount of money each year. The majority portion of financial attacks is carried out by banking malware and web-based attacks. The end users are not always skilled enough to differentiate between injected content and actual contents of a webpage. Designing a real-time security system for ensuring a safe browsing experience is a challenging task. Some of the existing solutions are designed for client side and all the users have to install it in their system, which is very difficult to implement. In addition, various platforms and tools are used by organizations and individuals, therefore, different solutions are needed to be designed. The existing server-side solution often focuses on sanitizing and filtering the inputs. It will fail to detect obfuscated and hidden scripts. This is a realtime security system and any significant delay will hamper user experience. Therefore, finding the most optimized and efficient solution is very important. To ensure an easy installation and integration capabilities of any solution with the existing system is also a critical factor to consider. If the solution is efficient but difficult to integrate, then it may not be a feasible solution for practical use. Unsupervised and supervised data classification techniques have been widely applied to design algorithms for solving cyber security problems. The performance of these algorithms varies depending on types of cyber security problems and size of datasets. To date, existing algorithms do not achieve high accuracy in detecting malware activities. Datasets in cyber security and, especially those from financial sectors, are predominantly imbalanced datasets as the number of malware activities is significantly less than the number of normal activities. This means that classifiers for imbalanced datasets can be used to develop supervised data classification algorithms to detect malware activities. Development of classifiers for imbalanced data sets has been subject of research over the last decade. Most of these classifiers are based on oversampling and undersampling techniques and are not efficient in many situations as such techniques are applied globally. In this thesis, we develop two new algorithms for solving supervised data classification problems in imbalanced datasets and then apply them to solve malware detection problems. The first algorithm is designed using the piecewise linear classifiers by formulating this problem as an optimization problem and by applying the penalty function method. More specifically, we add more penalty to the objective function for misclassified points from minority classes. The second method is based on the combination of the supervised and unsupervised (clustering) algorithms. Such an approach allows one to identify areas in the input space where minority classes are located and to apply local oversampling or undersampling. This approach leads to the design of more efficient and accurate classifiers. The proposed algorithms are tested using real-world datasets. Results clearly demonstrate superiority of newly introduced algorithms. Then we apply these algorithms to design classifiers to detect malwares.Doctor of Philosoph

Political economy of millennium development goals: a critical assessment of achievement and strategies

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a noble initiative to deal with certain chronic socioeconomic problems of the backward societies. Targeted to achieve eight major goals by 2015, the initiative deserves critical assessment of its achievement and strategies as its time frame is approaching to an end. Based on data on the goals achievement from the relevant countries, this article argues that while significant achievements are noticeable, these are far less than satisfactory in real terms, secondly, nonachievement of the goals are due to three large factors; first, uncertain international political economic structure and market functioning; second, international power-politics which intentionally affect regime sustainability in the countries concerned; and third, domestic dynamics of political power-play which influences allocation of resources for short-term political gains. The research makes a cross-country comparative analysis adopting an approach of institutional analysis in comparative politics

A Study on Cyclone Recovery and Rehabilitation of Hizla Upazila in Barisal District of Bangladesh: A Case of Cyclone Sidr

Since independence in 1971 Bangladesh has endured almost 200 disaster events cyclones storm surges floods tornadoes earthquakes droughts and other calamities The cyclone Sidr is the superset cyclone in Bangladesh The study has been conducted at Hizla Upazila in the Barisal district of Bangladesh Natural disasters are increasing day by day according to the opinion of the participants of the study The local government does not act systematically as per government rules Damage and losses assessment was not systematic according to standing orders on disaster The dwellers of the study area continue their livelihoods very miserable after Sidr The farmer lost their all crops and crops value was 45 75 362 dollar The fisherman lost their net fish and boat and their wealth value was 35735 dollar 39 education institution fully and 66 education institution partially were damaged But all sectors cannot recover properly from their losses Some national or international NGO and Bangladesh government provided relief like dry foods seeds fertilizer rice and old clothes etc Relief was not sufficient for the dwellers in the study area The study area has no Disaster Management Committee or no Red Crescent members to recover from the impacts of natural hazards during the disaster perio

Impact of climate change in Bangladesh : water logging at south-west coast

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesBangladesh is a densely populated, agriculture-based country and is recognized as one of the areas most vulnerable to the impacts of global warming and climate change. This is due to its unique geographic location, dominance of floodplains, low elevation, high population density, high levels of poverty, and overwhelming dependence on nature for its resources and services. The country experiences severe flood and cyclone events and, in recent years, water logging has become a catastrophic problem along the coast. These coastal areas play important economic and environmental roles in the country. The present paper attempts to show the extent of water logged areas, caused by sea level rise and the sectoral impacts of settlement, agriculture and fisheries in the south-western coastal areas of Bangladesh. A multi-temporal analysis method has been used with remote sensing (LandSat 1975 and LandSat 2000) data. SRTM data has been used to show the actual land elevation and to predict the future height of water logging in the study area. In 2000, 182418 hectares area was inundated by water and almost 50 percent of the study area is classified having high vulnerability. Saline line has entered upto 20 to 35 km into the mainland since 1967 which has great impact on agriculture and health. Many educational institutions of the study area are in vulnerable condition as some of them inundated completely or partially and even some of them are being used as shelter by local victimized due to water logged into their fragile houses. The largest mangrove forest of the world is also at risk to water logging and saline intrusion from the sea. To the Government of Bangladesh, NGOs, policymakers, planners and other interested parties it is important to measure and monitor present issues and to predict the future impacts of climate change. This will help to facilitate effective management and is particularly important where a lagre number of people are threatened. In this regard the present study is expected to be useful and will have strong implications in coastal planning and other climate change adaptation measures

Parliamentary democracy in Bangladesh: an evaluation of the parliament during 1996-2009

This study of three parliaments in Bangladesh during 1991–2006 argues that parliament has failed to become the centre of political and legislative activities. This is mainly because the ruling parties deliberately bypass parliament, while the opposition deserts it. The parliament has been dysfunctional for more than half of its tenure. For the short periods it has been active, its business sessions were devoted more to party political bickering than legislative activity. Due to the opposition boycott, the ruling party’s negligence and the absenteeism of ordinary members, the standing committees of the parliaments were less effective, and parliamentary accountability of government was lacking

Clientelism, corruption and kleptocratic politics in Bangladesh: a political economy analysis

Political clientelism and political corruption reinforce each other. While clientelism either in traditional or modern form remains appreciated in party politics, corruption is considered anathema and anti-systemic. Yet, clientalism and corruption feature prominently in party politics of developing democracies. This largely stems from a weak legal system and strong executive dominance, resulting in clientelism and corruption within a kleptocratic-centred political economy, where a nexus of political, economic and administrative elites exploits and misappropriates already scant resources. In Bangladesh, strong party alignment and political intolerance to opponent parties create a climate of strong political clientelism, leading to rampant state-patronised corruption and misappropriation of public money. Formal and informal legal immunity then institutionalise the practice into a kleptocratic political economy. This article argues that state authorities in Bangladesh consciously patronise the nexus of elites in a kleptocratic political economy, displaying a serious lack of democratic and political accountability

Political economy of millennium development goals: a critical assessment of achievement and strategies

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a noble initiative to deal with certain chronic socioeconomic problems of the backward societies. Targeted to achieve eight major goals by 2015, the initiative deserves critical assessment of its achievement and strategies as its time frame is approaching to an end. Based on data on the goals achievement from the relevant countries, this article argues that while significant achievements are noticeable, these are far less than satisfactory in real terms, secondly, nonachievement of the goals are due to three large factors; first, uncertain international political economic structure and market functioning; second, international power-politics which intentionally affect regime sustainability in the countries concerned; and third, domestic dynamics of political power-play which influences allocation of resources for short-term political gains. The research makes a cross-country comparative analysis adopting an approach of institutional analysis in comparative politics