Causes of Time and Cost Overrun: A Case Study of Health Sector Projects in Peshawar, KP

Public sector projects in KP suffers time delays leading to years of delay and cost overrun of over Rs25 billion, surprisingly close to half of this amount i.e. 11.2 billion is reported in the health sector projects in KP. This paper therefore, explores factors leading to time and cost overrun in the construction and IT projects of Health Department Peshawar, Government of KPK, Pakistan. To explore the causes of cost and time overrun, the study utilized Yin’s case study model thus collecting data through qualitative semi-structured interviews. The study used Miles and Huberman (1994) approach of thematic modelling for data analysis. The finding reveals that factors leading to time and cost overrun are administrative issues, delays in fund release, political Issues, monitoring &control, work site issues, inflationary effects, poor cost estimation, issues from contractor’s side, stakeholders and IT issues. While, certain factors causing overrun in specific to IT projects are resistance by the stakeholders for change, lack of understanding on the part of consumer about the benefit of the project and rapid changes in technology

Molecular Markers and Cotton Genetic Improvement: Current Status and Future Prospects

Narrow genetic base and complex allotetraploid genome of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) is stimulating efforts to avail required polymorphism for marker based breeding. The availability of draft genome sequence of G. raimondii and G. arboreum and next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies facilitated the development of high-throughput marker technologies in cotton. The concepts of genetic diversity, QTL mapping, and marker assisted selection (MAS) are evolving into more efficient concepts of linkage disequilibrium, association mapping, and genomic selection, respectively. The objective of the current review is to analyze the pace of evolution in the molecular marker technologies in cotton during the last ten years into the following four areas: (i) comparative analysis of low- and high-throughput marker technologies available in cotton, (ii) genetic diversity in the available wild and improved gene pools of cotton, (iii) identification of the genomic regions within cotton genome underlying economic traits, and (iv) marker based selection methodologies. Moreover, the applications of marker technologies to enhance the breeding efficiency in cotton are also summarized. Aforementioned genomic technologies and the integration of several other omics resources are expected to enhance the cotton productivity and meet the global fiber quantity and quality demands

Causes of Time and Cost Overrun: A Case Study of Health Sector Projects in Peshawar, KP

Public sector projects in KP suffers time delays leading to years of delay and cost overrun of over Rs25 billion, surprisingly close to half of this amount i.e. 11.2 billion is reported in the health sector projects in KP. This paper therefore, explores factors leading to time and cost overrun in the construction and IT projects of Health Department Peshawar, Government of KPK, Pakistan. To explore the causes of cost and time overrun, the study utilized Yin’s case study model thus collecting data through qualitative semi-structured interviews. The study used Miles and Huberman (1994) approach of thematic modelling for data analysis. The finding reveals that factors leading to time and cost overrun are administrative issues, delays in fund release, political Issues, monitoring &control, work site issues, inflationary effects, poor cost estimation, issues from contractor’s side, stakeholders and IT issues. While, certain factors causing overrun in specific to IT projects are resistance by the stakeholders for change, lack of understanding on the part of consumer about the benefit of the project and rapid changes in technology

Decision-tree inspired classification algorithm to detect Tuberculosis (TB)

Pakistan has the fifth highest incidence of Tuberculosis (TB) in the world. The current tests for TB diagnosis are smear and culture tests which have accuracies of about 40% and 70% respectively. They are inefficient, complicated and relatively expensive to perform in developing countries. In this paper, we present a novel computational predictive algorithm by modifying the standard decision tree that allows us to efficiently detect TB with high accuracy. It employs supervised learning to classify the samples into patients and healthy groups based on MFI values of different antibodies with an accuracy of about 94%, outperforming the traditional classifiers including decision trees, kNN, random forests and support vector machines (SVM). Our algorithm allows simultaneous, bench-top analysis of thousands of samples per day, does not rely on highly skilled or technical staff and provides easily interpretable results. Our work strongly suggests that developing, testing and implementing automated diagnostic algorithms such as ours can be helpful in overcoming infrastructural and human-resource constraints in poorly resourced countries

Eco-friendly management of wheat stripe rust through application of Bacillus subtilis in combination with plant defense activators

Stripe rust (SR) caused by Puccinia striiformis Westend. f. sp. tritici Erikss (Pst) is one of the most important and destructive disease of wheat worldwide. In Pakistan, stipe rust appeared as epidemic and is causing huge losses to wheat production. However, wheat breeding programs are not sufficiently advanced to cope with the recently emerged Puccinia striiformis strains. Under this scenario, current research was carried out for safe, effective and sustainable management of stripe rust of wheat. Seven wheat varieties include Sehar-06, Galaxy-13, Abdul Sattar-02, Faisalabad-08, Johar-16, TD-1 and Ujala-16 were planted at research farm of Muhammad Nawaz Shareef University of Agriculture, Multan, Pakistan during November 2019–20 and 2020–21 to determine their response toward Puccinia striiformis. The fungicide Tilt®, propiconazole, (T2) at the rate of 3 mL per 1500 mL water was used while the Bacillus subtilis (T1) was added at rate of 0.25 mL/1500 mL water with 15 g of dextrose, 0.25 g of chitosan and 0.25 g of salicylic acid in 1500 mL water to make a fine suspension. Our results showed that T1 reduced the disease effectively up to (8.18%) followed by T2 (10.7%) as compared to T0 (23.8%). The correlation between minimum air temperature, relative humidity and disease severity was highly significant while with maximum air temperature it was negatively non-significant. Also, wind speed, solar radiation and rainfall showed non-significant correlation with disease severity. After treatment, application of T1 and T2, minimum air temperature expressed a significant correlation with disease severity on varieties Sehar-2006, Galaxy-13 and Abdul Sattar-02 while non-significant correlation with disease severity on varieties Faisalabad-08, Johar-16, TD-1 and Ujala-16. Similarly, maximum air temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and solar radiation showed non-significant correlation with disease severity while rain fall was negatively non-significant. The current study showed that Bacillus subtilis is an ecofriendly management of stripe rust and its combination with plant defense activators enhance the efficacy and suppress disease. This management strategy is an innovative, and the results obtained will be helpful for better, ecofriendly and effective management of disease

Sharp bounds for partition dimension of generalized Möbius ladders

The concept of minimal resolving partition and resolving set plays a pivotal role in diverse areas such as robot navigation, networking, optimization, mastermind games and coin weighing. It is hard to compute exact values of partition dimension for a graphic metric space, (G, dG) and networks. In this article, we give the sharp upper bounds and lower bounds for the partition dimension of generalized Möbius ladders, Mm, n, for all n≥3 and m≥2

Potential of nano-emulsions as phytochemical delivery system for food preservation

Nature is a rich source of bioactive phytochemicals. These plant based compounds have rich scope as antioxidants, antimicrobial compounds and food preservatives and so for long time to be used in meat, fruits, vegetables and processed food items, either as added preservative or as coating material in various food applications, but the major limitation is their limited solubility in a food grade medium. Nano-emulsion is a best choice as a medium having vast area of application. The major advantage of nano-emulsion would be the solubility of a vast group of compounds, due to the presence of water and lipid phases. In this way, nano-emulsions can be proved to be the most suitable candidate as phytochemical delivery system for food preservation. In present article, the use of phytochemicals as potent food preservatives has been reviewed, in context of solubility of phytochemicals in nano-emulsion and applications of food grade nano-emulsions to food systems