Handling Default Risks in Microfinance: The Case of Bangladesh

Despite the current enthusiasms in applying the concept of microfinance as a poverty alleviation tool in many countries, the risk management aspects of microfinancing should not be overlooked. This paper highlights several incidences of default risks in microfinance and subsequently, provides a comprehensive exploratory study on the various ways to handle the default risks in microfinance. While there are social and religious objectives embedded in extending microfinancing, fact is that the financiers are business entities having the objectives of maximizing returns and minimizing losses. In this regard, this paper contributes towards a more effective recovery process, so that more people can benefit from the microfinancing facilities. Several suggestions are highlighted to maximize the benefits of microfinance to both the creditors and borrowers with the objective of realizing a win-win situation for both parties.Microfinance, default risks, recovery process, Bangladesh

Sensitivity to gamma radiation of Scots pine seedlings grown from seeds developed under elevated levels of ionizing radiation

As being sessile, plants are generally exposed to background levels of ionizing radiation in their natural environment due to cosmic radiation as well as alpha-, beta- or gamma- emitting radionuclides in naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM) including thorium, uranium and their progeny radionuclides in bedrocks, sediments and soils. Also, some areas have elevated, potentially harmful levels of radiation arising particularly from anthropogenic sources including fuel cycles and nuclear power plant accidents, tests and use of nuclear weapons as well as medical use. Such radiation at low and high doses can induce various physiological, biochemical and molecular responses in plants and can cause adverse effects such as reduction in growth and reproduction, and damage to DNA, proteins and lipids. Due to its high energy, gamma radiation has high penetration power in biological tissues and its effects on living organisms have accordingly been much studied. Long-term study results in plants have demonstrated detrimental effects and mutations even at low levels of ionizing radiation. Coniferous plants are suggested to be among the most radiosensitive plant species, and pine trees showed high-level of radiosensitivity after the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plant accidents. However, studies of sensitivity to gamma radiation of plant seedlings under controlled exposure conditions are scarce, especially for low to moderate dose rates. Also, there is limited information about how elevated levels of ionizing radiation during seed development affect the radiosensitivity in the plants grown from these seeds. The present study aimed to investigate the sensitivity to gamma radiation in seedlings of the ecologically and economically important gymnosperm Scots pine when grown from seeds from different areas in the Chernobyl region with background (CON), intermediate (INT) and high (TR22) levels of ionizing radiation. Such seedlings were exposed to gamma dose rates from 0-100 mGy h-1 from a 60Co (Cobalt-60) source for 144 h and studied across multiple levels of biological organization at the end of the gamma irradiation and up to 29 days postirradiation. In addition to growth and development, DNA damage, total antioxidant capacity and expression analysis of genes involved in control of cell division and DNA repair were assessed. In spite of significantly increased root and shoot lengths of TR22 seedlings at 10 mGy h-1 and 0-40 mGy h-1 , respectively, compared to the unexposed CON seedlings, at the end of the gamma irradiation, there was no clear dose-response relationship between the gamma dose rates and plant lengths for any of the plant types. Post-irradiation, the number of needles and shoot diameter were reduced at ≥ 40 mGy h-1 for all three plant types, but shoot elongation was not significantly affected. However, there was no overall significant difference in growth in response to the different gamma irradiation dose rates between the plant types. All the plant types showed a clear dose-rate dependent DNA damage as assessed by the COMET assay at the end of the 144 h gamma irradiation and at day 30 post-irradiation. At the end of the irradiation, the TR22 and INT plants showed significantly lower DNA damage than the CON plants at ≥ 40 mGy h-1 . Such differences were also observed day 30 postirradiation, but most pronounced so for TR22. Despite the differences in DNA damage, the different plant types did not show any significant differences in total antioxidant capacity measured by the FRAP assay after 144 h gamma irradiation. The relative transcript level of the cell division controlling gene CYCB1;1 was then significantly reduced in TR22 seedlings at 100 mGy h-1 compared to the unexposed CON seedlings, but the CDKB1;2 expression did not differ significantly between the different dose rates and plant types. The transcript level of the DNA repair-related RAD51 gene was significantly downregulated in TR22 seedlings at 10 mGy h-1 as compared to unexposed CON seedlings, whereas the SOG1 transcript level did not differ significantly between the plant types. Thus, except for a possible slight trend of a dose-rate dependent reduction in CYCB1;1 expression and more so in the TR22 than the CON plants, there was no clear, systematic dose-response relationship between the gamma dose rates or plant types and transcript levels of the analyzed genes. In conclusion, in spite of that, more DNA damage in the CON plants than the INT and TR22 plants after gamma irradiation at 40 and 100 mGy h-1 suggested lower radiosensitivity in the plants grown from seeds developed under elevated levels of ionizing radiation, this was not reflected in their growth, total antioxidant capacity or expression of selected cell divisionand DNA damage repair-related genes.CoE CERADM-P

SMALL SIZE COUPLING FEED AND INDUCTIVE SHORTING ANTENNA FOR WIDE BANDWIDTH, INCREASED GAIN AND EFFICIENCY WITH LOW SPECIFIC ABSORPTION RATE (SAR) OPERATION

Day by day technology is changing our lives rapidly. With these radical changes, demands in communication industry are also increasing drastically. To cope up with these demands, 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE (Long Term Evolution) communication systems have been introduced. Modern cellular phone should be capable to operate in wide range of frequency spectrum for their global access to provide end user customers these communication services. Hence mobile antennas should be designed in such a way that they should generate wideband operation. But commercially available standalone mobile antennas aren’t capable to operate in all those communication systems, several antennas are used to get complete communication solution. Different ways have been proposed to obtain wide operation for cellular antennas. Antenna performance characteristics widely depends on the substrates characteristics and their dimensional specifications. The dielectric constant of the substrate along with the loss tangent greatly influence the antenna performance. Different antenna designs have been proposed with the conventional substrates but these conventional substrate in most cases introduces a cumbersome design specification. Polyimide aerogel with their extreme low dielectric constant and low loss tangent can be used as mobile phone circuit board. Capacitive coupled and inductive shorting monopole antenna can be considered as an RLC circuit that generates multiple resonances which enable wide operation in cellular communications. A simple planar slotted capacitive coupled and inductive shorting monopole antenna along with polyimide aerogel as substrate suitable for ten wideband mobile phone operations is presented. These low dielectric constant polyimide aerogel antennas offer wide bandwidth, higher gain and lower mass as compared to the conventional substrate. An ultra-wide band operation is obtained through slotted capacitive coupling feed and inductive shorting of the radiating plate to the ground plate. Capacitive coupling generates high frequency resonance at 1.84 GHz whereas inductive shorting to the ground plate generates low frequency resonance at 780 MHz with an additional resonance at 1.07 GHz due to the effect of higher resonance at 1.84 GHz. This proposed antenna covers a wide band 695 - 2845 MHz that includes ten LTE (LTE700/2300/2500), WWAN (GSM850/900, DCS1800, and PCS1900), GPS and WLAN bands at a 3:1 Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR). SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) of this proposed antenna is below the SAR standard is presented at the end with the phantom head model. Due to the low dielectric constant of the polyimide aerogel, gain and radiation efficiency are increased while SAR is significantly below the SAR standard for the entire ultra-wide band

Deep Interpretability Methods for Neuroimaging

Brain dynamics are highly complex and yet hold the key to understanding brain function and dysfunction. The dynamics captured by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data are noisy, high-dimensional, and not readily interpretable. The typical approach of reducing this data to low-dimensional features and focusing on the most predictive features comes with strong assumptions and can miss essential aspects of the underlying dynamics. In contrast, introspection of discriminatively trained deep learning models may uncover disorder-relevant elements of the signal at the level of individual time points and spatial locations. Nevertheless, the difficulty of reliable training on high-dimensional but small-sample datasets and the unclear relevance of the resulting predictive markers prevent the widespread use of deep learning in functional neuroimaging. In this dissertation, we address these challenges by proposing a deep learning framework to learn from high-dimensional dynamical data while maintaining stable, ecologically valid interpretations. The developed model is pre-trainable and alleviates the need to collect an enormous amount of neuroimaging samples to achieve optimal training. We also provide a quantitative validation module, Retain and Retrain (RAR), that can objectively verify the higher predictability of the dynamics learned by the model. Results successfully demonstrate that the proposed framework enables learning the fMRI dynamics directly from small data and capturing compact, stable interpretations of features predictive of function and dysfunction. We also comprehensively reviewed deep interpretability literature in the neuroimaging domain. Our analysis reveals the ongoing trend of interpretability practices in neuroimaging studies and identifies the gaps that should be addressed for effective human-machine collaboration in this domain. This dissertation also proposed a post hoc interpretability method, Geometrically Guided Integrated Gradients (GGIG), that leverages geometric properties of the functional space as learned by a deep learning model. With extensive experiments and quantitative validation on MNIST and ImageNet datasets, we demonstrate that GGIG outperforms integrated gradients (IG), which is considered to be a popular interpretability method in the literature. As GGIG is able to identify the contours of the discriminative regions in the input space, GGIG may be useful in various medical imaging tasks where fine-grained localization as an explanation is beneficial

A study on the adaptive capacity of ecological system and the Sundarbans community in response to climate change in Bangladesh

The paper is regarding a community in Bangladesh, live by the Sundarbans Mangrove forest. The forest is facing challenges because of climate change. People’s lifestyle, socio ecological system is influenced by the forest elements, as it is also a source of their livelihood. At the same time, their life is also influenced by the social actors, change the adaptability in response to climate change. Here, I tried to find out, to what extent the socio ecology is responding to achieve adaptability subject to climate change and influence of social factor.M-D

A Theoretical Framework on Minority Rights under International Law: Regional Protection & Modern Initiatives

Rising incidents of oppression on the minority group is an increasing concern all around the world. State practice has been inconsistent and incoherent so far as protection of minority rights is concerned. Some States have adopted generous policies not only in recognising the existence of minorities but also in protecting their cultural and linguistic identity. International law has historically found it difficult to provide firm guidelines in defining 'minorities'. However this paper has offered a theoretical framework for defining the concept of ‘minority’ and here a comprehensive analysis has been shown on the substantive rights of the minorities which includes their right to life and physical existence, right to religious, cultural and linguistic autonomy etc. In this analysis it is seen that The Genocide Convention has not come into operation and a number of States have not adopted any specific measures and large scale violation of human rights highlights the need for a permanent international criminal court. This study focuses on the modern initiatives in International Law and regional protection of minority rights. Recognition and authorisation of such rights form an essential element of the concept of autonomy and the role of Working Group on Minorities to eradicate some of the criticisms regarding the weaknesses existent in the practical realisation and implementation of the Declaration. This study also shows some instances of violation of minority rights due to lack of balance between international law and domestic laws of Bangladesh which firmly put emphasis on to acknowledge the international commitments by the states

Strategic human resource management in facilitating the organizational performance: Birds-eye view from Bangladesh

Purpose: This study systematically explores and elaborates on strategic human resources management practices inside a company facilitating the intermediate variables of organization performance. Research methodology: Ten organizations with more or less similar yearly turnover and the same number of permanent employees have been used for this study. The analysis technique in this study uses data analysis developed by Miles et al. (2018) as follows; (a) data collection (b) data display and (c) concluding. Focus group discussions with the employees and management of those companies are being taken with the help of a semi-structured questionnaire. Results: The study's findings offered that the more strategic a company is with its human resource, the more turnover it can make, even if it has a similar number of human resources. Limitations: There are shortcomings in theoretical research on the process of strategic human resource management practices affecting organization performance. Contribution: This study offers a view to integrate and construct strategic human resource management activities affecting organization performance and provides a reasonable explanation and enlightenment for the understanding of further contribution

Political state and the dilemma of dignity, equality and freedom: Evidence from a sovereign state

Purpose: This study discusses the idea of political redefinition and its connection to dignity, freedom and equality in a sovereign state. This article concludes by briefly touching on some serious issues about sovereign communities that arise as a result of the fundamental dignity, freedom, and equality ideals of the sovereign state. Research methodology: The author decided to conduct theoretical research in a qualitative format using conceptual analysis as well as critical and rational argumentation. A deductive approach is used in reaching a prior opinion.  Results: The sovereign state itself became the judge and restricted human dignity, equality and the freedom to contract by forcing citizens to make transfers they did not consent to and prohibiting certain private transactions on the sole pretext. Limitations: There are shortcomings in theoretical research, as the author used a deductive approach to conclude. Contribution: This study conceptualizes the proponents of a sovereign state to be drawn into the dilemma of dignity, freedom and equality

The Impact of Learning Organization on the Performance of Organizations and Job Satisfaction of Employees: An Empirical Study on Some Public and Private Universities in Bangladesh

Learning organization is a growing concern that has become a widespread philosophy in contemporary society and business. This provides a platform to build capacity of human resources where people can learn continually, nurture new patterns of thinking and develop a culture of collective learning to produce desired results. Watkins & Marsick (1993) has proposed seven dimensions of learning organization that are useful to measure the performance of organizations and job satisfaction of employees. In order to create learning organization, organizations can use different techniques, such as: team learning, system connection, knowledge management, shared vision, and strategic leadership that are proposed by Peter Senge (1990). There is a significant research gap to measure the impact of learning organization on the public and private universities in Bangladesh. Thus, this research reveals the impact of learning organization on the overall performance of the universities and job satisfaction of their faculty members. The practice of effective learning organization can improve the performance of the universities and their employees’ jab satisfaction. Keywords: Learning Organization, Impact, Culture, Job satisfaction, Performance, and Universities