1,360,680 research outputs found
Replication Data for: The Role of Withholding in the Self-Enforcement of a Value-Added Tax: Evidence from Pakistan
No full textWaseem, Mazhar, (2022) “The Role of Withholding in the Self-Enforcement of a Value-Added Tax: Evidence from Pakistan.” Review of Economics and Statistics 104:2, 336–354
Democracy in Pakistan: Value Change and Challenges of Institution Building
No full textDemocracy as a system of governance and interest representation demands respect for dissent and opposition. It recognises the principle of majority rule and guarantees protection of minorities. Democracy also builds faith in electoral contestation to gain public office and gives legitimacy to political parties as primary instruments for acquisition and transfer of power from one set of individuals to another. Unfortunately, despite the significance of the above elements, no serious studies have been undertaken on Pakistan’s experimentation with democracy. Given a history of weak party system and prolonged military rule, most of the studies focus on the military, political parties, constitutional history, or in a descriptive way, attribute the failure of democracy to the inadequacies of the politicians [Ahmed (1987); Rizvi (1987); Callard (1957) and Afzal (1976)]. It is only recently that some theoretically meaningful and rigorous empirical writings have appeared on elections, procedures and practices of electoral contestation and on problems of transition from authoritarian regimes towards democracy [Waseem (1989); Wilder (1995); Talyor (1992); Rais (1997) and Shafqat (1997)]. It merits attention and recognition that among the Muslim states and developing world, Pakistan is one of those few states, where people have shown vigour and some vitality to adopt a democratic parliamentary system and through popular mass movements demonstrated disapproval of military dictatorships. An enduring feature of Pakistani culture, history and politics has been an aspiration for democracy [Hugh and Rose (1997)]. The passion for democracy continues to resurge, despite ethnic, social class, religious cleavages, strong authoritarian tendencies and prolonged military rule.
Remembering A Mensch— Dr. Waseem A. Malick: In Memoriam
No full textDr. Waseem A. Malick, who spent over 30 years working for Swiss Pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche, was a mensch. He passed away in December 2022 in New Jersey. On February 5, 2023, about 150 of his friends, colleagues and family members gathered to remember him. Being by the side of Dr. Malick’s wife and his children, his Roche colleagues were a source of comfort for the family
TECHNICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS OF WASEEM SOOMRO’S POETRY
No full textThis paper delves into Waseem Soomro's poetry's technical and philosophical dimensions, an influential contemporary voice in modern literature. The study explores how Soomro's work navigates the intersection of tradition and modernity through a detailed analysis of his poetic structure, language use, and stylistic innovations. The technical analysis emphasizes the poet's mastery of form, meter, and rhyme, revealing how these elements enhance the thematic depth of his poetry. On the philosophical front, the paper examines the critical literary theories, trends, and movements, like the Progressivism, Cultural Heritage and Identity, Nationalism, Resistance, Romanticism Existentialism, Modernism, Feminism, Metaphysical, and Socio-Political themes that pervade Soomro's verses, offering insights into his reflections on the human condition, identity, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. By synthesizing these technical and philosophical perspectives, the study aims to comprehensively understand Waseem Soomro's poetic contribution and its significance in the broader context of contemporary Sindhi literature
Advancing neonatal respiratory distress syndrome diagnosis: A spectroscopic approach and disposable spectrometric silicon chip development
No full textFacilitating near-patient rapid diagnosis is vital for personalized precision medicine and improved patient outcomes. Unlike centralised analytical lab tests, which involve complex and laborious processes, rapid biological characterisation informing immediate clinical decisions is essential to improve care of critically ill patients. In cases like neonatal respiratory distress syndrome (nRDS) delays due to current diagnostic approaches, based on conventional lab analysis, exacerbate the disease and result in further harm to pre-term neonates. nRDS is caused by a deficiency in pulmonary surfactant, a mix of lipids and proteins that normally decrease the surface tension in lungs, making it easier to breathe. There is a requirement that nRDS can be detected early, at the point of care, so that effective and timely treatment can be provided. Despite knowing that nRDS can be diagnosed when the ratio of two biomarkers, lecithin(L)/sphingomyelin(S), is less than 2.2 there are no current point of care tests that can measure them within a clinically important two-hour time window. Optical methods such as Raman spectroscopy and attenuated total reflectance (ATR) coupled with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) can identify and quantify such biomarkers, but current technology is expensive and not conducive to clinical use. This project sought to develop a low-cost, disposable silicon chip that requires a minimal sample volume to measure the concentrations of L and S in a manner consistent with bedside delivery of care. The silicon chip made use of surface enhancement features to increase the observed absorbance signal, permitting the measurement of smaller concentrations than possible with current methods. First, mid infrared spectra of millimolar concentrations of binary mixtures of synthetic pulmonary surfactant lipids were measured in dichloromethane. This measurement approach the baseline measurement and data processing pathway to develop partial least squares regression (PLSR) models with quantified uncertainty around the critical L/S 2.2 region of +0.26,-0.34 moles/mole. This informed a second study which generated a pulmonary surfactant lipids model and took a design of experiments (DoE) approach to generate lipid mixture samples that mapped the physiological space. The ATR-FTIR spectra collected were used to train PLSR models with a quantified uncertainty. Models for sphingomyelin and total phosphatidylcholine were used to predict the L/S ratio with an uncertainty of ±0.3 moles/mole. Shapely additive explanations (SHAP values) were reported and identified key spectral regions for which the enhanced optical platform should be targeted. Third, binary liposomes of L and S were measured using Raman and ATR-FTIR spectroscopies and PLSR models of their spectra were compared with models generated using high- and low-level fused data. It was demonstrated that the fused models were more accurate and precise than those from a single modality. The fourth study developed the design, fabrication and characterisation of the enhanced optical platform using sodium acetate. This demonstrated an absorption peak enhancement of 4.6 times in the target 1000 cm^(-1) to 1800 cm^(-1) region thus validating the design. The fifth study measured dried surfactant lipids extracted from adult humans using ATR-FTIR and verified the similarity of the spectra to synthetic samples previously tested. The sixth study developed a method to correct FTIR spectra that suffer from environmental interference by water and carbon dioxide. The correction was applied to spectra and used to generate a PLSR model which required 3 fewer latent variables when compared to uncorrected data, for models with similar performance, establishing that a more parsimonious model could be generated from applying the environmental correction and still maintain the required model performance. The contributions from this thesis achieve the goals of developing the measurement of analytes using vibrational spectroscopy and promises their application to point of care contexts for better patient healthcare
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Flexibility assessment indicator for aggregate residential demand
No full textIn the modern power system, characterization of customer's demand plays a vital role for Demand Side Management. Demand flexibility information, extracted from the aggregate demand behaviour of customers, presents more comprehensive picture for the aggregator or system operator. There is an existence of diverse flexible time slots during a day in different time periods. Due to the diverse energy consumption behaviour of the residential customers, extraction of flexibility and its associated potential time durations is a challenging task. To extract flexibility information from aggregate residential customers, a flexibility indicator is formulated in this paper. Information presented gives an indication about flexible time slots in terms of numerical value that is useful for a system operator or an aggregator for demand side flexibility assessment and this will lead to design and initiate DSM programs
Variations on the Author
No full text“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Sorted Consecutive Occurrence Queries in Substrings
No full textThe string indexing problem is a fundamental computational problem with numerous applications, including information retrieval and bioinformatics. It aims to efficiently solve the pattern matching problem: given a text T of length n for preprocessing and a pattern P of length m as a query, the goal is to report all occurrences of P as substrings of T. Navarro and Thankachan [CPM 2015, Theor. Comput. Sci. 2016] introduced a variant of this problem called the gap-bounded consecutive occurrence query, which reports pairs of consecutive occurrences of P in T such that their gaps (i.e., the distances between them) lie within a query-specified range [g₁, g₂]. Recently, Bille et al. [FSTTCS 2020, Theor. Comput. Sci. 2022] proposed the top-k close consecutive occurrence query, which reports the k closest consecutive occurrences of P in T, sorted in non-decreasing order of distance. Both problems are optimally solved in query time with O(n log n)-space data structures.
In this paper, we generalize these problems to the range query model, which focuses only on occurrences of P in a specified substring T[a.. b] of T. Our contributions are as follows:
- We propose an O(n log² n)-space data structure that answers the range top-k consecutive occurrence query in O(|P| + log log n + k) time.
- We propose an O(n log^{2+ε} n)-space data structure that answers the range gap-bounded consecutive occurrence query in O(|P| + log log n + output) time, where ε is a positive constant and output denotes the number of outputs. Additionally, as by-products, we present algorithms for geometric problems involving weighted horizontal segments in a 2D plane, which are of independent interest
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