Social media usage in academic research

Recently researchers have used “conversation prism” and “social media prisma”, to consolidate social medias with respect to their use. Although both identified 25 types, having average five examples each, they did not identify contribution of each type in academic research. Moreover some of mentioned social services had been suspended or changed. In this paper we attempt to access each social media mentioned in conversation prism in order to first, identify services that are operational to date, services which have suspended and those which have changed during course of time. Second, we compare number of publications associated with each social media, in order to identify which social media has contributed most to academic research. Third, we attempt to find correlation between number of publications and development tools provided by respective social applications. Fourth, social medias are ranked with respect to number of times other social medias share content with respective social application. It was found that out of 168 social applications, 10% changed their service objective while 13% were suspended. Among all social application, AMAZON had highest i.e. 147,000 number of citations on Google scholar whereas 90.7% of total citations were contributed by top 30 social medias. For developers, 22 out of top 30 social medias provided developer options in form of either application programming interface (API) or software development kits (SDK) and Facebook was found to be most cross referred social media based on content sharing. Finally conclusion and future work of study is presented

RF MEMS Based Tunable Bowtie Shaped Substrate Integrated Waveguide Filter

A tunable bandpass filter based on a technique that utilizes substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) and double coupling is presented. The SIW based bandpass filter is implemented using a bowtie shaped resonator structure. The bowtie shaped filter exhibits similar performance as found in rectangular and circular shaped SIW based bandpass filters. This concept reduces the circuit foot print of SIW; along with miniaturization high quality factor is maintained by the structure. The design methodology for single-pole triangular resonator structure is presented. Two different inter-resonator couplings of the resonators are incorporated in the design of the two-pole bowtie shaped SIW bandpass filter, and switching between the two couplings using a packaged RF MEMS switch delivers the tunable filter. A tunning of 1 GHz is achieved for two frequency states of 6.3 and 7.3 GHz. The total size of the circuit is 70mm x 36mm x 0.787 mm (LxWxH)

Factors Effecting Corporate Cash Holding of Non-Financial Firms in Pakistan

The previous researches explore the question of why firms hold cash. But there are few researches done in developing countries like Pakistan. The need for cash is characterized by its policies of firms regarding capital structure, working capital requirements, cash flow management, dividend payments, and asset management. In this paper, the impact of these factors is normally analyzed under the framework of Tradeoff theory, Pecking Order Theory and Free Cash Flow Theory. This paper focuses on determining the level of corporate cash holdings of non-financial Pakistani firms, and cash holding requirement among different industries. The data is set for period of 2008-2012 by using the data of 40companies and 6 industries. The findings of the study support the theories. Which show that firm size, net working capital, leverage, Capital Expenditure and Dividend significantly affect the cash holdings of non-financial firms in Pakistan

Antibacterial and bioactive coatings based on electrophoretic deposition of chitosan/bioactive glas/lawsone on PEEK/bioactive glass layers

The electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is an attractive approach for development of Polyether ether ketone (PEEK) and 45S5 bio-active glass (BG®) composite coatings for biomedical applications. However, in order to establish the influence of the EPD parameters on the properties of the deposited coatings, a deeper investigation of the fundamental PEEK/BG co-EPD kinetics is required. Previous studies have reported hit and trial approach in order to optimize key EPD parameters, which is material and time consuming. Therefore, in this study, design of experiment approach was utilized to reach the optimized parameters economically. Accordingly, the PEEK/BG-EPD kinetics was established as a function of deposition time and voltage, accompanied by microscopic characterization of the deposited films. The experimental results showed that the deposition follows a linear growth law, in good agreement with the predictions of Hamaker’s law. The green coatings produced from the optimized set of parameters were sintered, in order to achieve substantial adhesion to the metallic substrate. Moreover, Chitosan/BG/Lawson composite was also deposited electrophoretically by optimized set of parameters on the sintered PEEK/BG composite coatings. Produced multilayer coatings attain multifunctional attributes; such as mechanical integrity and bioactivity from first layer, whereas, bioresorbable chitosan in top layer provided an effective platform to trigger the release of antibacterial drug (Lawson). The morphology of multilayer coatings was examined by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), elemental and compositional analysis was performed qualitatively with energy-dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and x-ray diffraction (XRD), respectively. Fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) was employed in order to identify the chemical structure of multilayer coatings. Moreover, wettability of the multilayer coatings was analyzed by static water contact angle measurements. Finally, in vitro bioactivity was assessed by immersing the multilayer coatings in simulated body fluid for 3, 7 and 14 days. The developed multilayer coatings were fairly homogenous, micro-porous and moderately hydrophobic. Furthermore, multilayer coatings were covered completely with apatite like layer after 3 days of immersion in SBF