141 research outputs found
Saddar Bazar Quarter in Karachi: A Case of British-Era Protected Heritage Based on the Literature Review and Fieldwork
No full textOn the international level, heritage is considered an essential element for the sustainable development of a country. In South Asian countries such as Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, historic cities struggle to preserve their built heritage, due to rapid urbanisation and changing contemporary urban and architectural requirements. This contribution elaborates on the effects of urbanisation, and city development on the protected heritage of Karachi, Pakistan. The city developed in the 19th century from a mud-fortified small town along the Lyari river to become one of the busiest ports of the Indian subcontinent under British rule. Karachi has now become a metropolitan city with more than sixteen million inhabitants. Due to the accelerated rate of urbanisation and trade activities, Karachi has become Pakistan’s economic capital, resulting in the oblivion of its historical sites. Most of the city’s historic sites are in a state of dereliction, from over- or under-programming, or even under the threat of demolition. The paper focuses on the present condition of a British-era protected-heritage site through a literature review and fieldwork (mapping, drawing, archival research, interviews, photographic surveys, etc.), carried out during 2019 and 2020. The first author conducted site visits to photograph buildings and interview their users to gather feedback on how they perceive the current state of these buildings. The data were analysed to investigate how many buildings from Karachi’s British era with protected status have been demolished or are at risk of demolition. At the heart of the article is the Saddar Bazar Quarter in Karachi and its historical, social, cultural, and economic importance in the city from the British period until the present. The analysis will lead the discussion on what potential these sites/buildings hold, and how to make their preservation possible and withstand the uncurbed urbanisation and the threat of land development. Through discussion, we will focus on the social, cultural and economic aspects which the area and the buildings from the British period hold, and which can be useful in the future for the continuation of the Saddar Bazaar Quarter (SBQ), the historic urban landscape (HUL) and the heritage buildings
Writer Identification Using Microblogging Texts for Social Media Forensics
No full textEstablishing authorship of online texts is fundamental to combat cybercrimes. Unfortunately, text length is limited on some platforms, making the challenge harder. We aim at identifying the authorship of Twitter messages limited to 140 characters. We evaluate popular stylometric features, widely used in literary analysis, and specific Twitter features like URLs, hashtags, replies or quotes. We use two databases with 93 and 3957 authors, respectively. We test varying sized author sets and varying amounts of training/test texts per author. Performance is further improved by feature combination via automatic selection. With a large amount of training Tweets (>500), a good accuracy (Rank-5>80%) is achievable with only a few dozens of test Tweets, even with several thousands of authors. With smaller sample sizes (10-20 training Tweets), the search space can be diminished by 9-15% while keeping a high chance that the correct author is retrieved among the candidates. In such cases, automatic attribution can provide significant time savings to experts in suspect search. For completeness, we report verification results. With few training/test Tweets, the EER is above 20-25%, which is reduced to < 15% if hundreds of training Tweets are available. We also quantify the computational complexity and time permanence of the employed features. © 2019 IEEE.Funding: This work was supported in part by the project 2016-03497 of the Swedish Research Council. Naveed Muhammad has been funded by European Social Fund via IT Academy programme. The authors also thank the CAISR Program of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.</p
S-box Security Analysis of NIST Lightweight Cryptography Candidates: A Critical Empirical Study
No full textIn the resource-constrained world of the digital landscape, lightweight cryptography plays a critical role in safeguarding information and ensuring the security of various systems, devices, and communication channels. Its efficient and resource-friendly nature makes it the ideal solution for applications where computational power is limited. In response to the growing need for platform-specific implementations, NIST issued a call for standardization of Lightweight cryptography algorithms in 2018. Ascon emerged as the winner of this competition. NIST initially established general evaluation criteria for a standard lightweight scheme including security strength, mitigation against side-channel and fault-injection attacks, and implementation efficiency. To verify the security claims, evaluating the individual components used in any cryptographic algorithm is a crucial step. The quality of a substitution box (S-box) significantly impacts the overall security of a cryptographic primitive. This paper analyzes the S-boxes of six finalists in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) standardization process. We evaluate them based on well-established cryptographic properties. Our analysis explores how these properties influence the S-boxes' resistance against known cryptanalytic attacks and potential implementation-specific vulnerabilities, thus reflecting on their compliance with NIST's security requirements
Building partnerships for scaling access to justice for survivors of sexual violence in Pakistan
Full text linkGender-Based Violence (GBV) is a prevalent issue faced by vulnerable segments of the population and disproportionately impacts women in Pakistan. While legislative and policy reforms have been endorsed at the state level to protect women their activation and implementation remains in a limbo. Focus on legislation and policy reform remains greater than enforcement of such laws and the establishment of protection mechanisms contained within. This and other factors including lack of resources, lack of awareness and inter-departmental coordination and under trained staff directly contribute to the weak response and underreporting of GBV. Having a strong understanding of the key challenges and hurdles in survivors’ access to justice and protection through Dastak’s extensive work in the field, this project was designed to focus on promoting the activation and/or usage of existing services within the Punjab Women Protection System (PWPS), increase interplay between Dastak’s work and state mechanisms, develop tools that to aid responders in the field to use WPS more effectively and improve the quality of response given to survivors of GBV
A Quantitative Security Analysis of S-boxes in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Finalists
No full textLightweight cryptography was primarily inspired by the design criteria of symmetric cryptography. It plays a vital role in ensuring the security, privacy, and reliability of microelectronic devices without compromising the overall functionality and efficiency. However, the increasingly platform specific design requirements prompted the development of a standard lightweight algorithm. In 2017, NIST put forward security requirements for a standard lightweight scheme — security strength of at least 112 bits against known cryptanalysis attacks; mitigation against side channel and fault injection attacks; implementation efficiency. After three rounds of review, ASCON was crowned as the winner of the competition. Evaluating the individual components used in any cryptographic algorithm is an important step in the verification of security claims. A fundamental component used to ensure Shannon’s property of confusion in cryptographic primitives is an s-box. Hence, the quality of an s-box is a significant contributing factor in the security strength of a cipher. In this paper, we evaluate the s-boxes of 6 NIST LWC competition finalists based on well-known cryptographic properties, and comment on how the results reflect upon NIST security requirements. Our findings have revealed that these s-boxes do not comply with the basic notions of avalanche, making it vulnerable to high-order sophisticated cryptanalysis
Loneliness, Cognitive Functioning, and Quality of Life in Older Adults.: Mahnoor Naveed, Aleesha Riaz, and Nudra Malik
No full textLoneliness and cognitive impairment is a serious concern among the older adults and is a significant factor influencing elderly quality of life. The current study aimed to examine the associations among loneliness, cognitive functioning and quality of life in Pakistani older adults. The study is cross sectional study with a non-probability purposive sample comprising of 149 Pakistani older adults of ages 60 years and above. Internationally standardized scales have been used to collect online data. Multiple linear regression results indicate that loneliness (β= -0.23, p<.001) and cognitive functioning (β= 0.32, p<.001) are significant predictors of the quality of life in older adults. Furthermore, older men scored higher on loneliness and cognitive impairment than older women and the overall quality of life was better in women participants as compared to men. There is need for social and health interventions to promote the quality of life of elderly population, especially in times of pandemic, with specific focus on reducing loneliness and cognitive impairment
Book Reviews
No full textAuthor: BASSETT, THOMAS J.; The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Ivory Coast 1880-1995; Reviewer: Jerome Coll; Author: KONG, TAT YAN; The Politics of Economic Reform in South Korea: A Fragile Miracle; Reviewer: Chang Kyung-Sup; Author: LIE, JOHN; Han Unbound: The Political Economy of South Korea: Reviewer: Chang Kyung-Sup; Editors: EADE, DEBORAH and LIGTERINGEN, ERNST; Debating Development: NGOs and the Future; Reviewer: Barry Riddell; Editor: MALIK, HAFEEZ; Pakistan: Founders' Aspirations and Today's Realities; Reviewer: Naveed Naqvi; Editor: WYPLOSZ, CHARLES; The Impact of EMU on Europe and the Developing Countries; Reviewer: Juan Paez-Farrell; Author: TRIPP, AILI MARI; Women and Politics in Uganda; Reviewer: May Christine Sengendo; Editor: SCHUURMAN, FRANS J.; Globalization and Development Studies: Challenges for the 21st Century; Reviewer: Ray Kiely; Editors: BAULCH, BOB and HODDINOTT, JOHN; Economic Mobility and Poverty Dynamics in Developing Countries; Reviewer: Christopher B. BarrettReview Books,
Hydrothermal deposition of high strength biocompatible magnesium phosphate coating through in situ conversion of AZ91D-3Ca magnesium substrate
No full textMagnesium and its alloys are biodegradable and biocompatible with elastic modulus close to the natural bone which makes them suitable as an orthopedic implant. Poor corrosion resistance and high hydrogen evolution rate are two factors hindering their use as commercial implants. To overcome these challenges, a biocompatible magnesium phosphate coating was deposited using a single step hydrothermal method. Scanning Electron Mi-croscopy (SEM/EDX) and X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) methods were used to analyze the structural and chemical compositions of these coatings. In addition, investigation on their adhesion, degradation, cellular proliferation, and gene expression were studied extensively. SEM analysis confirmed a uniform and defect-free deposition occurs in hydrothermal conditions. XRD validated the presence of Periclase (MgO), magnesium phosphate (Mg3(PO4)2) and Brucite (Mg(OH)2) phases. Degradation studies revealed the hydrogen evolution rate is remarkably decreased and corrosion properties were considerably improved as compared to the bare magnesium alloy. In-Vitro biocompatibility testing with pre-osteoblast (MC3T3-E1) via cell viability assay (Alamar blue reduction test) portrayed almost 100 % host cell proliferation both in coated and positive control samples after 8 days. Comparing coated and untreated magnesium alloy in SEM images, greater cell adhesion was seen to the coated surface. It is concluded that magnesium phosphate coatings can be used commercially as they are compact, highly crystalline, defect-free, bioresorbable, cytocompatibility, well-adhered, and protective in nature. Hence, phosphate-coated magnesium alloy is qualified to be used to protect biodegradable metallic implants
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Key Issues in Use of Social Networking in Hospitality Industry: 2009
No full textConsumer participation in social networks has increased exponentially since the beginning of the new millennium. The hospitality industry, as one of the most customer sensitive industries, has started to explore using social networking to grow their businesses. However, the medium presents new challenges and issues for lodging firms as to how social media fits in with their traditional marketing strategy. In a highly competitive environment for customers, managers should better understand the implications of their strategy when participating in social media environments. In this study the Delphi technique was used by author to compile a list of key issues in use of social networking in hospitality industry. The result is presented in a ranked order and top five key issues are discussed to clarify the terms and provide insight into the importance of the issues. These five issues are: 1. having enough resources, 2. Content and relevant, 3. Alignment of social networking trends and company's goals, 4. Promote to the customers and 5. How much is enough? The result of the study is useful for managers and employees who are involved in social networking in any service industry, especially hospitality. Turbulent periods of change in social networking demand fast responses and also careful decisions. So the managers should be aware of benefits of social networking and its issues and challenges as well
A facile, green fabrication of aqueous nanofluids containing hydrophilic functionalized carbon nanotubes toward improving heat transfer in a closed horizontal flow passage
No full textIn the present research, the synthesis of highly stable multiwalled carbon nanotubes in aqueous media is developed using a one-pot, covalent and green functionalization technique to improve the heat transfer and hydrodynamic behavior of a horizontal stainless-steel tube subjected to a uniform heat flow at its outer surface. Instead of using corrosive inorganic acids, the free radical grafting of gallic acids is used in this procedure. In this work, GA-functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes water-based colloidal suspensions (nanofluids) were prepared at three different weight concentrations. Various characterization techniques comprising Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, High resolution transmission Electron Microscopy, and zeta-potential measurements were performed and confirmed the success of MWCNT functionalization. The thermophysical properties were evaluated experimentally and validated using empirical correlations available in the literature. To prove the colloidal suspension stability, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy was used, and the results showed that nanofluid was stable for almost 60 days. When the GAMWCNT concentration was increased, there was a significant improvement in the thermal conductivity. Moreover, the nanofluids' dynamic viscosity experienced a slight increment up to 7.30% when the GAMWCNTs were loaded relative to distilled water. Following the confirmation of the experimental setup's analytical correlations, tests for the colloidal GAMWCNT suspension flowing through a heated horizontal tube were carried out in a fully developed turbulent state. A significant enhancement in the convective heat transfer coefficient was obtained, with only minor growth in the relative pumping power by 33.05 and 1.19%, respectively. More importantly, the reported positive performance index indicator for all the Reynolds numbers of ranges shows the possibility of using the synthesized GAMWCNT aqueous suspensions as an alternative working fluid in heat transfer systems.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Human-Robot InteractionEmerging Material
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