Determinants of Rural-Urban Migration in South-Waziristan Agency, Pakistan

To identify the determinants of rural-urban migration in South Waziristan Agency (SWA) the present study was conducted during 2015. The major reasons of rural-urban migration identified during study were search for job, terrorism, children’s future, education and credit/capital shortage. Pearson’s correlation coefficient showed highly significant (P≤0.01) correlation of level of literacy at time of migration with education, health issues, credit/capital shortage and children`s future being a reason of migration. Furthermore the push factors played significant role in rural urban migration in contrast to pull factors. It is recommended that government should provide opportunities of employment in SWA and basic needs which can greatly reduce rural-urban migration. Keywords: Rural Urban Migration; Determinant; South Waziristan Agency; Basic Needs; Correlatio

Exploring the Field Assistant’s Activities for Sustainable Development in District Tank, Pakistan

To explore the Field Assistant’s (FA) activities for sustainable development in district Tank, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan the present study was conducted during year 2015. Based on guess variability 270 respondents were selected from nine sampled villages Viz. Abizar, Akbari, Amakhel, Gul Imam, Kaka Khel, Kari Shahnoor, Kot Azam, Kiri Haidar and Umar Ada. Data was collected through well structured, pre-tested interview schedule using personal interview method. It was found that that Field Assistants (FAs) provides new information (175 respondents). It was also found that FAs were available at their offices (164) and farmers were satisfied from the solution recommended by FAs, of the problem they reported (159). Chi-square test results showed highly significant (P≤0.01) association among land holding with FAs office visits by farmers and FAs visits to farmer’s fields. Similarly highly significant (P≤0.01) association of age was also observed with FAs visit to field. Highly significant (P≤0.01) positive correlation of provision of new knowledge by FAs was also observed with benefits from recommendation of FAs (0.586) and demonstrations (0.61) conducted by FAs. It is concluded that apart from non-availability of proper facilities for FAs they were indulge in performing their duties to their level best. Majority of respondents appreciate their work in improving their knowledge of agriculture, solving their problems, increasing their productivity, uplift of their life and thus results in sustainable development. Keywords: Field Assistants; Sustainable Development; Field Visit

INFLUENCE OF AGRICULTURE EXTENSION SERVICES AND FARMER’S SOCIO-ECONOMIC CHARACTERISTICS ON ADOPTION OF DATE PALM (Phoenix dactylifera L.) IN DISTRICT DERA ISMAIL KHAN, PAKISTAN

This study was conducted in the major date producing areas (Dakki, Mian Wada, Mathra Abad, Jhok Ghamy Wali, Habib Abad, Bilot Sharif, Himat, Jhok Moazam, Matwala Shah, Chura and Jhok Malkanri) of the district Dera Ismail Khan, by personal interview method from a sample of 51 respondents selected from these areas for quantitative data collection. Most of the respondents have a secondary and higher secondary level of education (39.2%, 33.3%) respectively. 51% respondents has more than 200 kanals land. It was also found that this category (having more than 200 kanals) have higher secondary level of education. Majority of the respondents have no other source of income (74.5%). The grower’s percentage increased gradually and at present 37.2% respondents were attached with date palm cultivation since last 5-10 years whereas 27% were growing date palm from last 20 years. 84% respondents cultivate the “Dakki” cultivar which is one of the most profitable date cultivar but majority of the respondents (74%) got knowledge about enhanced varieties from their fellow farmers and only 22% respondents were educated by extension workers. 77.3% respondents were facing the problems of insect/pest attack but only 54.9% of the selected respondents apply the plant protection measures.  Although, all the farmers were satisfied from their date palm production, still 41.5% were expecting to get help from extension department about insects/pest and rodent control while 17% respondents expect others type of help from extension department (inputs). Key words:            Date palm, extension services, socio-economic characters, personal interview

Prevalence and Factors of Non-Vaccination Of Covid-19 in District Peshawar,Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

OBJECTIVES The study aimed to compare the clinical outcome of transverse versus longitudinal incision for surgical release of the first dorsal compartment of the wrist to treat de Quervain’s disease. METHODOLOGY In this quasi-experimental study, all the patients with resistant de Quervain’s tenosynovitis who had the surgical release of the first dorsal compartment between January 2008 and  December 2020 were included. The surgeries were performed under local anaesthesia. The first dorsal compartment of the wrist was approached through either a longitudinal or transverse incision, and the tendons of the abductor pollicis longus and extensor pollicis brevis were released. Patients were followed for a minimum of three months, and the primary outcome measure was the Visual analogue score (VAS) for relief of pain and secondary outcome measures were any immediate or delayed complications. RESULTS98 patients were included in the study with a female-to-male ratio of 7:1. The cohort’s mean age was 44 years (Range 25-75). Most patients were housewives exposed to manual work with the involvement of the dominant hand. There were no major complications besides wound issues and transient paresthesia in few patients. The longitudinal incision was associated with less transient nerve palsies, less duration of surgery and easier identification of structure and anomalies. The only advantage of transverse incision was less scar formation. The clinical outcome was similar in both groups: 94% of patients had complete pain relief (VAS 0). CONCLUSION There was no difference in the outcome of de Quervain tenosynovitis when released with a transverse or longitudinal incision. The longitudinal incision had fewer complications as compared to the transverse incision

AN ASSESSMENT OF THE CROP WATER DEMAND AND IRRIGATION WATER SUPPLY AT PABBI MINOR OF WARSAK GRAVITY CANAL

The research study was conducted on irrigation water supply and demand at Pabbi minor of Warsak gravity canal from June to August 1998. Objectives of the research were to assess the actual supply of irrigation water, irrigation water demand of major crops, and comparison between water supply and demand for all the outlets of Pabbi minor. Actual irrigation supply was determined by cutthroam flumes. Cropping pattern was determined by interviewing the farmers by making use of proformas developed for that purpose.Cropping pattern, evapotranspiration, sanctioned discharge, fallow, water demand, water supply

Performance Analysis of LTE-Advanced Relay Node in Public Safety Communication

Relaying is emerging as one of promising radio access network techniques for LTE-Advanced networks that provide coverage extension gain with improved quality of service. It enables improved high data rate coverage for indoor environments or at the cell edge by deploying low power base station. The need for high-quality on-the-spot emergency care necessitates access to reliable broadband connectivity for emergency telemedicine services used by paramedics in the field. In a significant proportion of recorded cases, these medical emergencies would tend to occur in indoor locations. However, broadband wireless connectivity may be of low quality due to poor indoor coverage of macro-cellular public mobile networks, or may be unreliable and/or inaccessible in the case of private Wi-Fi networks. To that end, relaying is one of the optimal solution to provide required indoor coverage. This paper analyzes the use of nomadic relays that could be temporarily deployed close to a building as part of the medical emergency response. The objective is to provide improved indoor coverage for paramedics located within the building for enhanced downlink performance (throughput gain, lower outage probability). For that scenario, we propose a resource sharing algorithm based on static relay link with exclusive assigned sub-frames at the macro base station (MBS) coupled with access link prioritization for paramedic's terminals to achieve max-min fairness. Via a comprehensive system-level simulations, incorporating standard urban propagation models, the results indicate that paramedics are always able to obtain improved performance when connected via the relay enhanced cell (REC) networks rather than the MBS only

Segmentation Of Two Touching Handwritten Arabic Characters Using Overlapping Set Theory And Gradient Orientation

Image segmentation of offline Arabic handwritten documents is an active research area but requires efforts to segment image into regions compared to human vision, especially for degraded handwritten historical documents. Therefore, these valuable degraded handwritten documents attract researchers from all around the world but facing problems in segmentation of Arabic text because of overlapping and touching character. The overlapping and touching of character occurs by not following the standard rule of writing where, two or more characters share the same space and these touching characters are considered as one sub-word. At present many techniques are available for touching handwritten character segmentation by using the concept of connected components. These methods are easy to implement and provide high accuracy in some cases but they fail in many cases because some manual decision value is required to determine the correct segmentation path near junction point, which produce unstable character boundary. Besides, these methods are unstable when applied to handwritten characters having loops or circular path in both touching characters. In this case, the cut-point is located in incorrect place, which can lead to incorrect dividing path of a character boundary. The selection of path near junction point is one of the main challenge in segmentation of connected components. Currently, these methods contain many disadvantages usually implemented for only one layout and fonts types because of variation in writing. Apart from connected components methods, template based segmentation is another available method where several studies have been developed based on template creation for touching characters. The disadvantage is creating many templates for all possible touching types. Therefore, due to variation in writing connected components methods still unexplored especially for the cursive based handwriting like Arabic and Jawi. In this work, three objectives are highlighted, first is to identify junction point of touching image, second is to formulate direction near junction point and third is for segmentation of touching characters. The research methodology consists of three proposed ideas: junction point detection, formulate direction and segmentation stage. In junction point identification stage overlapping set theory is used to identify the segmentation point of the two touching characters. In formulate direction stage; gradient technique is used to formulate the right direction near junction point. In segmentation stage contour tracing technique is used to segment the two touching character into isolated characters. The three proposed methods were tested on IFN/ENIT, AHDB and IAM datasets. Experiments were conducted on finding of junction point where success rate is 93.3%, for the second proposed method, the success rate is 98% and last proposed segmentation method is 97.27%. In conclusion, the proposed segmentation method outperforms the existing research in term of accuracy. Proposed methods do not use any recognizer or template to control segmentation accuracy. Finally, the proposed segmentation method was again compared with state of the art methods, and it also gained better accuracy rate for degraded, non-degraded document images and the accuracy for the overall processes for AHDB is about 97.45% and 85.03% for IAM dataset

Optimal demand-supply energy management in smart grids

Everything goes down if you do not have power: the financial sector, refineries and water. The grid underlies the rest of the country’s critical infrastructure. This thesis focuses on four specific problems to balance demand-supply gap with higher reliability, efficiency and economical operation of the modern power grid. The first part investigates the economic dispatch problem with uncertain power sources. The classic economic dispatch problems seek thermal power generation to meet the demand most efficiently. However, this project exploits two different power sources such as wind and solar power generation into the standard optimal power flow framework. The stochastic nature of renewable energy sources (RES) is modeled using Weibull and Lognormal probability density functions. The system-wide economic aspect is examined with additional cost functions such as penalty and reserve costs for under and overestimating the imbalance of RES power outputs. Also, a carbon tax is imposed on carbon emissions as a separate objective function to enhance the contribution of green energy. The calculation of best power dispatch is proposed using a cost function. The second part investigates demand-side management (DSM) strategies to minimize energy wastage by changing the time pattern and magnitude of utility load at the consumer side. The main objective of DSM is to flatten the demand curve by encouraging end-users to shift energy consumption to off-peak hours or to consume less power during peak times. It is more appropriate to follow the generation pattern in many cases instead of flattening the demand curve. It becomes more challenging when the future grid accommodates the penetration of distributed energy resources in a greater manner. In both scenarios, there is an ultimate need to control energy consumption. Effective DSM strategies would help to get an accurate balance between both ends, i.e., the supply-side and demand-side, effectively reducing power demand peaks and more efficient operation of the whole system. The gap between power demand and supply can be balanced if power peak loads are minimized. The third part of the thesis then focuses on modeling the consumption behavior of end-users. For this purpose, a novel artificial intelligence and machine learning-based forecasting model is developed to analyze big data in the smart grid. Three modules namely feature selection, feature extraction and classification are proposed to solve big data problems such as feature redundancy and high dimensionality to generate quality data for classifier training and better prediction results. The last part of this thesis investigates the problem of electricity theft to minimize non technical losses and power disruptions in the power grid. Electricity theft with its many facets usually has an enormous cost to utilities compared to non-payment because of energy wastage and power quality problems. With the recognition of the internet of things (IoT) technologies and data-driven approaches, power utilities have enough tools to combat electricity theft and fraud. An integrated framework is proposed that combines three distinct modules such as data preprocessing, data class balancing and final classification to make accurate electrical consumption theft predictions in smart grids. The result of our solution to balance the electricity demand-supply gap can provide helpful information to grid planners seeking to improve the resilience of the power grid to outages and disturbances. All parts of this thesis include extensive experimental results on case studies, including realistic large-scale instances

The Impact of Religiosity and Spirituality on Academic Dishonesty of Students in Pakistan

Business ethics has become a very popular topic in recent decades and having news on media on a daily basis which is now increased in a number of high profile business scandals that shook the business world. That is the cause of academy dishonesty of students in many universities and colleges where student training of ethics are very low for such kind of business scandals emerged. There are two factors which are under research in this topic in academy dishonest and cheating behavior which are religiosity and spirituality. This study shed lights on the religious beliefs and unethical behaviors by focusing the students of Pakistan which are studying at Universities level having academic dishonesty and cheating behavior. The individual attitudes, views, decisions making and the behaviors according to the situation are influenced by religiosity and spirituality which are posited in this study. The objective of this research is to find out the relationship between religiosity and spirituality on cheating behavior with the help of cheating attitude as mediator. A cross-sectional study conducted on the postgraduate student in Pakistan and collected from four post-graduate institutes in Lahore, which are COMSATS, NCBA&E, UMT and Punjab University. So the result of this research shows that religiosity but not spirituality is a predictor of attitudes of the student toward cheating and cheating behavior

The Impact of Religiosity and Spirituality on Academic Dishonesty of Students in Pakistan

Business ethics has become a very popular topic in recent decades and having news on media on a daily basis which is now increased in a number of high profile business scandals that shook the business world. That is the cause of academy dishonesty of students in many universities and colleges where student training of ethics are very low for such kind of business scandals emerged. There are two factors which are under research in this topic in academy dishonest and cheating behavior which are religiosity and spirituality. This study shed lights on the religious beliefs and unethical behaviors by focusing the students of Pakistan which are studying at Universities level having academic dishonesty and cheating behavior. The individual attitudes, views, decisions making and the behaviors according to the situation are influenced by religiosity and spirituality which are posited in this study. The objective of this research is to find out the relationship between religiosity and spirituality on cheating behavior with the help of cheating attitude as mediator. A cross-sectional study conducted on the postgraduate student in Pakistan and collected from four post-graduate institutes in Lahore, which are COMSATS, NCBA&E, UMT and Punjab University. So the result of this research shows that religiosity but not spirituality is a predictor of attitudes of the student toward cheating and cheating behavior