The socio-legal implications of women’s work in the informal sector: A case study of women domestic workers in Pakistan

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website. Copyright @ 2009 The Author.The informal sector of economy is a major source of employment in Developing countries such as Pakistan.1Work opportunities in the informal sector play an important role in providing lively-hood to the poor, unskilled or semi-skilled, less educated and illiterate men and women workers in the society. There has been a significant change in the informal labour market with more women working for wages. However women remain amongst th lower earners of society, as despite performing the same tasks they are paid less compared to their male counterparts and are mostly engaged in part time jobs. Domestic service is one such category in the informal employment sector which provides jobs to women in large numbers. Yet of the eleven labour policies framed by various governments since the creation of Pakistan in 1947 none has addressed the issue of domestic workers, nor are domestic workers covered under the general labour laws of the country.2In the light of this situation thepaper attempts todeconstruct the role of law in empowering women domestic workers by exploring the relationship between law, gender and empowerment in a plural legal society

Post-divorce maintenance for Muslim women in Pakistan and Bangladesh: A comparative perspective

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website. Copyright @ The Author 2013.Islamic family law, more often referred to as Muslim personal law in the South Asian context, is influenced by formal and informal plural normative orders, as secular, religious, customary, and patriarchal norms (Menski, 1998; Ali, 2002; Mehdi, 2005; Shah, 2005).The presence of such plural normative orders has given rise to tensions and conflict between these norms, including various publicly stated commitments and goals of the states to promote gender equality. Islamic family law has thus become a highly contested and politicized issue making change in this area of law difficult. Post-divorce maintenance (Mata’a) for women is one such area where classical interpretation of Islamic law, restricting such maintenance to the Iddat only, continues to apply. Engaging with plural sources of the Islamic legal tradition, this article discusses the potential of employing these to make the case for awarding post-divorce maintenance to Muslim women

Resource Allocation in a MAC with and without security via Game Theoretic Learning

In this paper a $K$-user fading multiple access channel with and without security constraints is studied. First we consider a F-MAC without the security constraints. Under the assumption of individual CSI of users, we propose the problem of power allocation as a stochastic game when the receiver sends an ACK or a NACK depending on whether it was able to decode the message or not. We have used Multiplicative weight no-regret algorithm to obtain a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE). Then we consider the case when the users can decode ACK/NACK of each other. In this scenario we provide an algorithm to maximize the weighted sum-utility of all the users and obtain a Pareto optimal point. PP is socially optimal but may be unfair to individual users. Next we consider the case where the users can cooperate with each other so as to disagree with the policy which will be unfair to individual user. We then obtain a Nash bargaining solution, which in addition to being Pareto optimal, is also fair to each user. Next we study a $K$-user fading multiple access wiretap Channel with CSI of Eve available to the users. We use the previous algorithms to obtain a CCE, PP and a NBS. Next we consider the case where each user does not know the CSI of Eve but only its distribution. In that case we use secrecy outage as the criterion for the receiver to send an ACK or a NACK. Here also we use the previous algorithms to obtain a CCE, PP or a NBS. Finally we show that our algorithms can be extended to the case where a user can transmit at different rates. At the end we provide a few examples to compute different solutions and compare them under different CSI scenarios.Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures. Part of the paper was presented in 2016 IEEE Information theory and applicaitons (ITA) Workshop, San Diego, USA in Feb. 2016. Submitted to journa

Transformations: From Social Media Campaign to Scholarly Paper

This paper takes up the challenge given at the 2015 meeting of the Document Academy to explore relationships between the conference paper being presented and the social media campaign on which it was based. Using Genette’s notion of transtextuality, through which he shows that all published texts are networked to other texts, and Frohmann’s argument that our understanding of a document and the justification of that understanding are to be found in the “the stories we tell”, the report of the exploration describes the way that the relationships between the two emerge from the links created between the content of the published paper and the content of the social media campaign and from the technology of online publishing; from the transformations of the social media campaign as it is incorporated into the scholarly work; and from the stories we tell directly and indirectly through our practices of scholarship

Investor confidence and mutual fund performance in emerging markets: insights from India and Pakistan

Purpose: This paper investigates the impact of investor confidence on mutual fund performance in two relatively vulnerable but leading emerging markets, India and Pakistan. Design/methodology/approach: A pooled OLS model is used to look at two alternative measures of investor confidence and test for the relationship between investor confidence and mutual fund returns. To check the robustness of the findings, the authors also implement Two Stage Least Squares and Generalized Method of Moments techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity, simultaneity, and dynamic endogeneity problems in the regressors. Findings: The paper finds that the returns of mutual funds are positively associated with investor confidence and an interaction effect exists between investor confidence and persistence in performance. The paper also confirms that returns from mutual funds are associated with different fund characteristics such as fund size, turnover, expense, liquidity, performance persistence and the fund’s age. These findings remain robust to alternative model specifications and measures of investor confidence. Originality/value While the previous literature mainly focuses on mutual fund characteristics and the macroeconomic determinants of mutual fund returns, this paper demonstrates that investor confidence plays an important role in determining mutual fund performance. The authors attribute this finding to two relatively unique features of the emerging markets in our study. A lack of awareness of mutual funds as being a low-cost investment vehicle and the interplay of cultural and behavioural changes have prevented investor’s savings from being channelled into investment products, away from gold or property

Social media activism in Maldives; Information practices and civil society

Introduction. The study was designed to explore the information practices of a group of human rights activists in a campaign seeking to pressure the police service and government into investigating the disappearance of a journalist in the context of transnational advocacy networking. Method. The social media associated with a campaign in Maldives, Find Moyameehaa, were the basis for the case study. Tweets and Facebook posts and comments from the first 100 days of the campaign and from the 500th day were downloaded; the website was analysed. Analysis. Content analysis of tweets, posts and comments was carried out using a priori coding. Results. The tactics of transnational advocacy networking proposed by Keck and Sikkink were apparent in the campaign, however the everyday focus of the posts showed this to be a campaign of local concern. A second potential purpose for the campaign emerged, the modelling of civil engagement in a fledgling democracy. Conclusions. The information practices approach, emphasising continuity and habitualisation following Savolainen, brings additional perspectives to understanding social media activism, showing how it can represent the behaviour of civil society and create an archive of a campaign and emphasising the importance of social and cultural factors

50 Years of Spaceflight with Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS) Built at NASA GSFC

Over the past 50 years, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has been developing, building, testing and flying a series of Fourier Transform Spectrometers (FTS). This began with the IRIS instruments on the Earth-orbiting Nimbus satellites and progressed to more sophisticated designs optimized for interplanetary spacecraft sent to Mars and later to the outer solar system. Adaptions have been made over time, including progressively higher spectral resolution, sensitivity, numbers of detectors and complexity. Instrument operating temperatures have decreased to enable remote sensing of the cold giant planet systems. In this paper we describe the historical evolution of this instrument line, comparing and contrasting different aspects such as optical design and materials, detector types and data handling. We conclude by looking towards the future. At present the CIRS-Lite prototype is being tested at NASA GSFC for potential use on a future mission to the ice giants, Uranus and Neptune. Surpassing the previous performance of the Voyager IRIS instruments remains challenging, and new technologies that could enable these measurements are discussed