177 research outputs found
Analysis of Issues on Micro Credit—The Case of Two Villages in Punjab
No full textThe phenomenon of poverty was felt and observed more during the decade of 1990s, as the overall growth slowed down. While the slowed economic growth and recessionary trends contributed to poverty, the trickle “down effect” once thought, to improve living conditions, did not reach the lowest level owing largely to lack of accessibility of institutions, unjust and non-poor policies. For these reasons, in Pakistan during the decades of 60s and 80s, when the country experienced high growth rates of 6-7 percent, 34 percent of people still lived below the poverty line. Socio-economic development, improving the quality of life in general and of rural poor in particular, welfare have been the prime stated goals of government. Therefore, rural development programmes, such as, Village-Aid, Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), Peoples Works Programme, Tameer-e-watan Programme, Prime Minister’s Five Points Programme etc. were introduced to improve farm productivity, which would consequently improve incomes and quality of life of rural poor. This was done through the Department of Local Government and Rural Development. Little impact on the life of the rural poor, however, was observed partly because these were administered through closed, immutable and cloistered institutions of government which are not accessible and responsive to the needs of poor. Also, the lack of focus on community participation and need for it was evident. As these programmes were managed through government departments these lacked flexibility and out-reach. The approach of administering was fixed, rigid and lacked professionalism.
Capacity Building in Public Sector Organisations
No full textDuring the last two decades the world has experienced a major transformation in thinking on the role of government in provision of services and socio-economic development. This change in thinking has come about as a result of the inability of two major philosophies of production—capitalism and socialism—to redistribute resources for the improvement in the living condition of the masses. Both the philosophies have shortcomings. Capitalism encourages entrepreneurship and growth, but it also creates extreme economic disparities leading to poverty. Socialism in its attempt to create an egalitarian society curbs and stifles entrepreneurship, leading to discontentment and economic inefficiencies. Developing countries have followed, by and large, a mix of these philosophies but the result has not been encouraging in most of the cases. Economic distortions and inefficiencies have been the common outcome. In addition, human development indicators and the quality of life in these countries has fallen far below the minimum acceptable standard. Inequitable distribution of resources is attributed to the absence of a participative and democratic political structure on the one hand, and mismanagement of resources and the absence of a facilitative administrative structure on the other. The latter attribute is now commonly termed as poor ‘governance’ of resources.
Cosmological parameters : discordance, new data and new physics
No full textAuthor: Waheed AhmadMasterarbeit Universität Innsbruck 2018Masterarbeit University of Goettingen 201
Cosmological parameters : discordance, new data and new physics
No full textAuthor: Waheed AhmadMasterarbeit Universität Innsbruck 2018Masterarbeit University of Goettingen 201
Cosmological parameters : discordance, new data and new physics
No full textAuthor: Waheed AhmadMasterarbeit Universität Innsbruck 2018Masterarbeit University of Goettingen 201
Human action attribute learning from video data using low-rank representations
No full textRepresentation of human actions as a sequence of human body movements or action attributes enables the development of models for human activity recognition and summarization. We present an extension of the low-rank representation (LRR) model, termed the clustering-aware structure-constrained low-rank representation (CS-LRR) model, for unsupervised learning of human action attributes from video data. Our model is based on the union-of-subspaces (UoS) framework, and integrates spectral clustering into the LRR optimization problem for better subspace clustering results. We lay out an efficient linear alternating direction method to solve the CS-LRR optimization problem. We also introduce a hierarchical subspace clustering approach, termed hierarchical CS-LRR, to learn the attributes without the need for a priori specification of their number. By visualizing and labeling these action attributes, the hierarchical model can be used to semantically summarize long video sequences of human actions at multiple resolutions. A human action or activity can also be uniquely represented as a sequence of transitions from one action attribute to another, which can then be used for human action recognition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for semantic summarization and action recognition through comprehensive experiments on five real-world human action datasets.Technical Report #2020-07-00
Sartaj Aziz. Between Dreams and Realities: Some Milestones in Pakistan’s History. Karachi: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pak. Rs 595.00.
No full textThe geo-strategic location of a country gives it advantage or
disadvantage in its relation with the comity of nations and addressing
its domestic challenges. The vision, acumen and capacity of political
leadership, however, determine the maximisation of advantages from
geo-strategic location in attaining the national interests. Interplay of
domestic political power, geo-strategic location and global power
dynamics are aptly reflected in the political history of Pakistan as
narrated in “Between Dreams and Realities”. “Between Dreams and
Realities” is both an autobiography and dispassionate account of
Pakistan’s chequered history as the author puts it “watched the
political drama as ring side observer.” The author was actively engaged
in roles, confronting formidable challenges to improve policy
coordination and implementation. A sequenced political, economic, and
foreign relations history of Pakistan is described illustrating turning
points, milestones, and debacles in her existence as a country. The
political scenario of Pakistan, marred by intermittent military
takeovers, with disregard, and mutilation of the constitution, mainly
served personal interests. The rulers, irrespective of whether elected
or otherwise, conjoined survival of their rule with that of the country.
Thereupon, usurpation of power is legitimised by engineered elections or
putting in place pliable judiciary. The indiscipline in political
parties, absence of vision, political inexperience, self-centered, and
headlong political leaders, increased the vulnerability of parliament to
complete its tenure. Weak organisation of political parties is, thus
easily maneuverable to the wheeling, dealings, and gaming of
‘establishment’. This is amply visible in all military takeovers of
elected governments, right from throwing of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s
government to dissolution of Nawaz Sharif’s government in
1999
Prediction of regime transitions in bubble columns using acoustic and differential pressure signals
No full textThis paper addresses the identification of the transition points of the flow regimes in bubble columns. For this purpose, statistical and spectral analysis of the acoustic sound signals and differential pressure signals were employed over several values of the gas velocity. Both analysis tools were able to extract useful qualitative and quantitative information about the flow patterns. In addition, applying the two methods to both types of signals presented comparable results about the quantitative values of the critical velocities. These values agree well with those reported in the literature. Moreover, the implementation of the auto-correlation function on the differential pressure signal was found helpful in determining period of the macro-structure fluctuation.Corresponding Author:
Professor Waheed A. Al-Masry, Department of Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering
PO Box 800, Riyadh-11421, Saudi Arabia
Email: [email protected]
Diminishing Returns and Deep Learning for Adaptive CPU Resource Allocation of Containers
No full textContainers provide a lightweight runtime environment for microservices applications while enabling better server utilization. Automatic optimal allocation of CPU pins to the containers serving specific workloads can help to minimize the completion time of jobs. Most of the existing state-of-the-art focused on building new efficient scheduling algorithms for placing the containers on the infrastructure, and the resources to the containers are allocated manually and statically. An automatic method to identify and allocate optimal CPU resources to the containers can help to improve the efficiency of the scheduling algorithms. In this article, we introduce a new deep learning-based approach to allocate optimal CPU resources to the containers automatically. Our approach uses the law of diminishing marginal returns to determine the optimal number of CPU pins for containers to gain maximum performance while maximizing the number of concurrent jobs. The proposed method is evaluated using real workloads on a Docker-based containerized infrastructure. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in reducing the completion time of the jobs by 23% to 74% compared to commonly used static CPU allocation methods. 2004-2012 IEEE.Manuscript received April 30, 2020; revised September 28, 2020; accepted October 19, 2020. Date of publication October 22, 2020; date of current version December 9, 2020. This publication was made possible by NPRP Grant # NPRP9-224-1-049 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of Qatar Foundation) and a graduate fellowship from the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan to MA. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was T. Inoue. (Corresponding author: Waheed Iqbal.) Muhammad Abdullah, Waheed Iqbal, and Faisal Bukhari are with the Punjab University College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore 54590, Pakistan (e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]).Scopu
The Bureaucratic disconnect in collaborative institutions: A Case of Rural Water Supply in Punjab, Pakistan
No full textThe collaborative model for rural water supply (RWS), introduced at the behest of international funders in the 1990s, experienced only partial success owing to the low accept- ability of public managers and the slow process of community development (CD). This article goes into the empirical findings of a study that is based on in-depth interviews with 20 staff and line public managers of the four RWS in different regions as well as on content analysis of policy documents and funding organizations’ reports. The results indicate that appropriate CD, reforms in internal organization arrangements, and understanding of context-specific social, economic, and political diversity remain necessary in collaborative compliance with institutions for RWS sustainability. The study aims at making a contribution to the theory of collaborative governance and the practice of collaborative implementation in developing countries
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