DOES OWNERSHIP MATTER? A STUDY OF FAMILY AND NON FAMILY FIRMS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract Researchers have been trying to find out whether ownership makes any difference to a firm's performance

Impact of Training and Development on Employee’s Performance: A Case Study of Private Local Schools, District Nowshehra, KPK

Training and development has been the phenomena related to organizations in different programs and activities and its objective to improve the performance of individual employee. This research study was aimed to identify the impact of training and development on employee’s performance. The research methodology was based on primary data that was collected through self administered questionnaires from teaching staff in private local schools in district Nowshehra, KPK. 250 question- naires were distributed among the teaching staff. 217 questionnaires were returned, whereas 8 improperly filled questionnaires were discarded and 209 properly filled questionnaires were included in the analysis of the study. From the results, it has been concluded that training and development was found to have significant impact on employees’ performance, hence hypothesis H1 was accepted

Select Financial Ratios as a Determinant of Profitability Evidence from Petrochemical Industry in Saudi Arabia

The pedestal of economic growth of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia cardinally hinges upon the growth and development of the Petrochemical companies. Of late, there is risk of an increase in feedstock cost, which can pressurize margins for Saudi companies. This has encouraged the researchers to analyze the profitability and select financial ratios of petrochemicals industry in Saudi Arabia. The research paper makes an endeavor to determine the profitability of listed Petrochemical companies in Saudi Arabia with five years accounting period from 2008 to 2012. The paper encompasses six variables, namely, Creditors’ Velocity (CRSV), Debtors’ Turnover Ratio (DTR), Inventory Turnover Ratio (ITR), Long-Term-Debt to Equity Ratio (LTDER), Total Assets Turnover Ratio (TATR) and Net profit Margin (NPM). Profitability as a dependent variable is exhibited by Net profit Margin (NPM) while the select ratios (CRSV), (DTR), (ITR), (LTDER), (TATR) are expressed as independent variables. Based on the findings of the study, it is cogently revealed that there is a significant relationship between the four selected ratios and Net Profit Margin (NPM) of Petrochemical companies in Saudi Arabia. Keywords: Profitability, Financial Ratios, Petrochemical industr

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

A New Generalized Modified Weibull Distribution

We introduce a new distribution, so called A new generalized modified Weibull (NGMW) distribution. Various structural properties of the distribution are obtained in terms of Meijer’s G–function, such as moments, moment generating function, conditional moments, mean deviations, order statistics and maximum likelihood estimators. The distribution exhibits a wide range of shapes with varying skewness and assumes all possible forms of hazard rate function. The NGMW distribution along with other distributions are fitted to two sets of data, arising in hydrology and in reliability. It is shown that the proposed distribution has a superior performance among the compared distributions as evidenced via goodness–of–fit tests

Introduction and Promotion of Off-Season Vegetables Production under Natural Environment in Hilly Area of Upper Swat-Pakistan

An experimental project entitled “Introduction and promotion of off season vegetables production under natural environment in hilly area of Swat-Pakistan” was conducted at district Swat in Farm Services Centre Madyan (FSC) with the collaboration of Agriculture Extension Department Swat during Kharif season 2014. The field experiment was carried out in randomized complete block design (RCBD) having 600 plots at different location and altitudes.  The sub plot size was kept 1 kanal in each vegetable plot. Tomato was planted on an area of 185 kanals, cucumber was grown on an area of 103 kanals, French bean was grown on 225 kanals, squashes was on 62 and peas were on 25 kanals in all the three location. From the results it is observed that all types of vegetable cultivars positively responded for high yield at different location and altitude. Maximum yield of Tomato and Cucumber (1026.8 and 1124.8 kg kanal-1) was recorded in Kalam location. While in Behrain, Squashes and Peas produced highest yield (894.3 and 482.1 kg kanal-1). In Madyan, highest yield was observed in French bean (784.6 kg kanal-1). Kalam valley temperature was a little bit varied in vegetable growing season. There were 15-20 days difference was recorded in crop germination, development and growth in different location due to different altitudes in Madyan, Behrain and in Kalam. On the basis of above result it was concluded that Swat valley; Specially Upper Swat is most suitable for Off-season vegetable production under natural environment to enhance the socio-economic condition of the farmer community. Keywords: Off-season, vegetables, natural environment, location, altitude, FS

Conversion of Waste Marble Powder into a Binding Material

In the marble industry, a lot of marble is wasted in the form of odd blocks of various sizes and slurry consisting of water and micro-fine particles. The slurry on drying converts into powder. Both slurry and powder have adverse effects on the environment. This research is focused on the gainful utilization of waste marble powder (WMP) by converting it into a valuable binding material. For this purpose, WMP and clay were collected, and their physical and chemical properties were determined. A mix of WMP and clay was prepared and burnt at a temperature around 1300 oC. The burnt mix was ground to powder form to get marble cement (MC). The MC was then used in mortar. The compressive and flexural strengths of mortar cubes and prisms were determined. Apart from this, X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, thermo-gravimetric analysis (TGA) and scanning electron microscopic (SEM) analysis were also carried out. The chemical composition showed that the MC has 52.5% di-calcium silicate (C2S) and 3.5% tri-calcium silicate (C3S).The  compressive strength of MC mortar after 28 days curing is 6.03 MPa, which is higher than M1 mortar of building code of Pakistan (5 MPa). The compressive strength of MC mortar after one year is 20.67 MPa, which is only 17% less than OPC mortar

Effect of Empagliflozin On Liver Enzymes of Patients In Non-Alcoholic Steatohepatitis In Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

OBJECTIVES To assess the effect of 10 mg and 25 mg once daily Empagliflozin on liver enzymes of patients of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis in patients of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). METHODOLOGY The study design was Quasi Experimental. Thirty three adult patients of  Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) who were already on 2000 mg of Metformin and 100 mg of Sitagliptin and were having suboptimal glycemic control (HBA1C > 7% <12%), had elevated Alanine Transaminase (ALT) levels and had ultrasonographic features consistent with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) were divided into three groups, one group receiving 10 mg Empagliglozin as add-on treatment (Group A), the second group receiving 25 mg of Empagliflozin (Group B) as an additional treatment, and the third group continued with previous medications without any additional treatment (Group C). HbA1C levels and ALT levels of all the three groups were taken at baseline and at 12 weeks. RESULTS Total patients and their mean ages in group A, B and C were 10, 12 and 11 and 52.40 ±4.24 years, 52.42 ± 5.27 years and 52.34 ± 4.37 years, respectively. There was a statistically significant (p > 0.05) decrease mean ALT levels in Group A pre-treatment and 12 weeks post-treatment. Similarly, there was a statistically significant (p > 0.05) decrease mean ALT levels in Group B pre-treatment and 12 weeks post-treatment.CONCLUSION Empagliflozin in both 10mg and 25 mg once daily doses cause statistically significant reduction in ALT levels in patients with NASH associated with T2D

Op2Vec: An Opcode Embedding Technique and Dataset Design for End-to-End Detection of Android Malware

Android is one of the leading operating systems for smart phones in terms of market share and usage. Unfortunately, it is also an appealing target for attackers to compromise its security through malicious applications. To tackle this issue, domain experts and researchers are trying different techniques to stop such attacks. All the attempts of securing Android platform are somewhat successful. However, existing detection techniques have severe shortcomings, including the cumbersome process of feature engineering. Designing representative features require expert domain knowledge. There is a need for minimizing human experts' intervention by circumventing handcrafted feature engineering. Deep learning could be exploited by extracting deep features automatically. Previous work has shown that operational codes (opcodes) of executables provide key information to be used with deep learning models for detection process of malicious applications. The only challenge is to feed opcodes information to deep learning models. Existing techniques use one-hot encoding to tackle the challenge. However, the one-hot encoding scheme has severe limitations. In this paper, we introduce; (1) a novel technique for opcodes embedding, which we name Op2Vec, (2) based on the learned Op2Vec we have developed a dataset for end-to-end detection of android malware. Introducing the end-to-end Android malware detection technique avoids expert-intensive handcrafted features extraction, and ensures automation. Some of the recent deep learning-based techniques showed significantly improved results when tested with the proposed approach and achieved an average detection accuracy of 97.47%, precision of 0.976 and F1 score of 0.979

A Deterministic Construction for Jointly Designed Quasicyclic LDPC Coded-Relay Cooperation

This correspondence presents a jointly designed quasicyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded-relay cooperation with joint-iterative decoding in the destination node. Firstly, a design-theoretic construction of QC-LDPC codes based on a combinatoric design approach known as optical orthogonal codes (OOC) is presented. Proposed OOC-based construction gives three classes of binary QC-LDPC codes with no length-4 cycles by utilizing some known ingredients including binary matrix dispersion of elements of finite field, incidence matrices, and circulant decomposition. Secondly, the proposed OOC-based construction gives an effective method to jointly design length-4 cycles free QC-LDPC codes for coded-relay cooperation, where sum-product algorithm- (SPA-) based joint-iterative decoding is used to decode the corrupted sequences coming from the source or relay nodes in different time frames over constituent Rayleigh fading channels. Based on the theoretical analysis and simulation results, proposed QC-LDPC coded-relay cooperations outperform their competitors under same conditions over the Rayleigh fading channel with additive white Gaussian noise