Humayun Ahmed’s Gouripur Junction: A Saga of Unforgiving Realities and Perpetual Uncertainties of the Marginalized People

Humayun Ahmed in his novel Gouripur Junction attempts to portray the picture of a train station along with the lives of the people depending on it. His sincere efforts are directed mainly towards the marginal people who are fated to be there, somehow eke out a living there and are bound to face the uncertainties and complexities in the struggle for living an unstable life. While the writer has made a comprehensive delineation of their lives along with relationships of different types, love and hatred, strengths and shortcomings, the basic aspect of their life is uncertainty, sufferings and struggle. Humayun Ahmed though commonly considered as a writer having good understanding of and compassion for the middle class, he has another strong but less attended area and that is his unflinching endeavor to portray the marginal people in a comprehensive way. In this novel, his manifest intention is to portray life in totality by a balance attention on the realities as well as the psychosocial aspects of those people and make the readers empathetic towards them. This paper aims at studying this strong but less attended dimension of Humayun Ahmed's fictional works with special attention on his short novel Gouripur Junction. To make the study, the researcher will avail the works of the writer as primary source and major prevailing works on him as the secondary source and hopefully open up a new dimension. Keywords: station, struggle, uncertainty, marginal, dimension

Overcoming the Challenges for Multichip Integration: A Wireless Interconnect Approach

The physical limitations in the area, power density, and yield restrict the scalability of the single-chip multicore system to a relatively small number of cores. Instead of having a large chip, aggregating multiple smaller chips can overcome these physical limitations. Combining multiple dies can be done either by stacking vertically or by placing side-by-side on the same substrate within a single package. However, in order to be widely accepted, both multichip integration techniques need to overcome significant challenges. In the horizontally integrated multichip system, traditional inter-chip I/O does not scale well with technology scaling due to limitations of the pitch. Moreover, to transfer data between cores or memory components from one chip to another, state-of-the-art inter-chip communication over wireline channels require data signals to travel from internal nets to the peripheral I/O ports and then get routed over the inter-chip channels to the I/O port of the destination chip. Following this, the data is finally routed from the I/O to internal nets of the target chip over a wireline interconnect fabric. This multi-hop communication increases energy consumption while decreasing data bandwidth in a multichip system. On the other hand, in vertically integrated multichip system, the high power density resulting from the placement of computational components on top of each other aggravates the thermal issues of the chip leading to degraded performance and reduced reliability. Liquid cooling through microfluidic channels can provide cooling capabilities required for effective management of chip temperatures in vertical integration. However, to reduce the mechanical stresses and at the same time, to ensure temperature uniformity and adequate cooling competencies, the height and width of the microchannels need to be increased. This limits the area available to route Through-Silicon-Vias (TSVs) across the cooling layers and make the co-existence and co-design of TSVs and microchannels extreamly challenging. Research in recent years has demonstrated that on-chip and off-chip wireless interconnects are capable of establishing radio communications within as well as between multiple chips. The primary goal of this dissertation is to propose design principals targeting both horizontally and vertically integrated multichip system to provide high bandwidth, low latency, and energy efficient data communication by utilizing mm-wave wireless interconnects. The proposed solution has two parts: the first part proposes design methodology of a seamless hybrid wired and wireless interconnection network for the horizontally integrated multichip system to enable direct chip-to-chip communication between internal cores. Whereas the second part proposes a Wireless Network-on-Chip (WiNoC) architecture for the vertically integrated multichip system to realize data communication across interlayer microfluidic coolers eliminating the need to place and route signal TSVs through the cooling layers. The integration of wireless interconnect will significantly reduce the complexity of the co-design of TSV based interconnects and microchannel based interlayer cooling. Finally, this dissertation presents a combined trade-off evaluation of such wireless integration system in both horizontal and vertical sense and provides future directions for the design of the multichip system

Job Satisfaction of Bank Employees in Bangladesh

This study attempts to evaluate job satisfaction of bank employees in Bangladesh.  It focuses on the relative importance of job satisfaction factors and their impacts on the overall job satisfaction of employees. In this study the targeted population is employees of Bank. The Banks include private and public Bank. The data was collected and administered by means of a structured questionnaire. The study showed that organizational factors such as work conditions, pay, fairness, and promotion significantly influenced employee job satisfaction in Bank. However, individual factors such as age and gender did not significantly influence employee job satisfaction in Banks. The overall job satisfaction of the bank officers is at the positive level appeal to their customers. In such situation, job satisfaction of bank officers becomes an important issue that has to be taken care of in order to achieve ultimate goals of the banking sector in Bangladesh. Keywords:Job Satisfaction, Work Condition, Pay, Fairness, Promotion, Age, Gender

Effects of the U.S. Veterinary Feed Directive Final Rule on the Prevalence of Violative Antibiotic Residues and Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria in Animal Products

Antibiotic-resistant is a public health concern. The dissertation objective was to assess the effect of the implementation of the Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD) rule changes on the prevalence of violative antibiotic residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria in food-animal tissues, retail meats, and cecal samples from food animals compared to the pre-VFD rule change period in the U.S. To understand the effect of implemented VFD rule changes on violative antibiotic residues in food-animal tissues, inspector-generated sampling (IGS) data from the U.S. National Residue Surveillance Program (NRP) was analyzed. An important observation was that implementing VFD rule changes was associated with the decreased prevalence of violative sulfonamide and penicillin residues in food-animal tissues. However, implementing VFD rule changes did not significantly affect the prevalence of violative tetracycline residues in tissues. To further understand the effect of the VFD rule changes, retail meat surveillance data from the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) was analyzed. The results indicated that implementing VFD rule changes significantly reduced the prevalence of tetracycline-resistant Campylobacter and Escherichia in chicken and turkey meats. However, the study did not observe a significant effect on tetracycline-resistant Salmonella and Escherichia prevalence in beef and pork. To expand understandings of the effects of the VFD rule changes, cecal samples collected from food animals’ surveillance data in NARMS were analyzed. The results indicated that implementing VFD rule changes significantly reduced the prevalence of tetracycline-resistant Escherichia in cecal samples of chickens and turkey, and erythromycin-resistant Campylobacter in cecal samples of chickens. However, the study revealed that implementing VFD rule changes significantly increased tetracycline-resistant Escherichia in cecal samples of swine and erythromycin-resistant Campylobacter in cecal samples of cattle. In conclusion, implementing VFD rule changes significantly related to reducing the prevalence of tetracycline-resistant bacteria in meats and cecal samples of chickens and turkeys. Conversely, the implementation of VFD rule changes did not impact the prevalence of tetracycline-resistant bacteria in meats and cecal samples of cattle and swine, suggesting a potential surge in usage of injectable tetracycline, which is evident from the lack of reduction in the violative tetracycline residues in food animal tissues that should be further investigated

Mid-infrared chiral metsurface coupling with molecular vibration

“The mid-infrared design of chiral metamaterial shows a tremendous absorption capability of infrared rays, and it has the significant application of circular dichroism based device development. Plasmon-phonon coupling is one of the application of metamaterial that provides a new path for tailoring the surface in the nanoscale, which is also applicable in molecules detection. It is possible to change the Plasmon-Phonon coupling strength not only through the chemical change of molecules but also by changing the metamaterial light-matter interaction property. So far, linearly polarized light shows the strong coupling between metamaterial and molecules. However, it is possible to observe strong coupling in circularly polarized light by fabricating the chiral metasurface. In this research, we introduce two types of new chiral metasurface that has strong interaction with the molecules in different circular polarization of light, which exhibits over 58% and 65% circular dichroism (CD) in the mid-infrared region (5- 6 μm). By adjusting the geometric parameters of the new chiral structure of single-sized unit cells, it is possible to shift the absorption peak in the various midinfrared range. Besides that, we design the broadband resonator by combining the multiple chiral structures. For the molecule’s detection, It also shows a higher splitting gap in the right circularly polarized light in compare to Left circular polarized light. Our numerical and experimental result of the C=0 bands signals which emits from polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) film using chiral metasurface unveils the effective way for tuning the coupling strength of molecules in circular polarization of light”--Abstract, page iii