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"Ali, Syed"
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Engineering siRNA therapeutics: challenges and strategies
Small interfering RNA (siRNA) is a potential method of gene silencing to target specific genes. Although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved multiple siRNA-based therapeutics, many biological barriers limit their use for treating diseases. Such limitations include challenges concerning systemic or local administration, short half-life, rapid clearance rates, nonspecific binding, cell membrane penetration inability, ineffective endosomal escape, pH sensitivity, endonuclease degradation, immunological responses, and intracellular trafficking. To overcome these barriers, various strategies have been developed to stabilize siRNA, ensuring their delivery to the target site. Chemical modifications implemented with nucleotides or the phosphate backbone can reduce off-target binding and immune stimulation. Encapsulation or formulation can protect siRNA from endonuclease degradation and enhance cellular uptake while promoting endosomal escape. Additionally, various techniques such as viral vectors, aptamers, cell-penetrating peptides, liposomes, and polymers have been developed for delivering siRNA, greatly improving their bioavailability and therapeutic potential.
Journal Article
Precision Agriculture Techniques and Practices: From Considerations to Applications
Internet of Things (IoT)-based automation of agricultural events can change the agriculture sector from being static and manual to dynamic and smart, leading to enhanced production with reduced human efforts. Precision Agriculture (PA) along with Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are the main drivers of automation in the agriculture domain. PA uses specific sensors and software to ensure that the crops receive exactly what they need to optimize productivity and sustainability. PA includes retrieving real data about the conditions of soil, crops and weather from the sensors deployed in the fields. High-resolution images of crops are obtained from satellite or air-borne platforms (manned or unmanned), which are further processed to extract information used to provide future decisions. In this paper, a review of near and remote sensor networks in the agriculture domain is presented along with several considerations and challenges. This survey includes wireless communication technologies, sensors, and wireless nodes used to assess the environmental behaviour, the platforms used to obtain spectral images of crops, the common vegetation indices used to analyse spectral images and applications of WSN in agriculture. As a proof of concept, we present a case study showing how WSN-based PA system can be implemented. We propose an IoT-based smart solution for crop health monitoring, which is comprised of two modules. The first module is a wireless sensor network-based system to monitor real-time crop health status. The second module uses a low altitude remote sensing platform to obtain multi-spectral imagery, which is further processed to classify healthy and unhealthy crops. We also highlight the results obtained using a case study and list the challenges and future directions based on our work.
Journal Article
Privilege-resistant policies in the Middle East and North Africa : measurement and operational implications
\"Renewing the social contract--one of the pillars of the new World Bank Group strategy for the Middle East and North Africa--requires a new development model built on greater trust; openness, transparency, inclusive and accountable service delivery; and a stronger private sector that can create jobs and opportunities for the youth of the region. Recent analytic work trying to explain weak job creation and insufficient private sector dynamism in the region point to formal and informal barriers to entry and competition. These barriers privilege a few (often unproductive) incumbents who enjoy a competition edge due to their connections or ability to influence policy making and delivery. Policy recommendations to date in the field of governance for private sector policymaking have been too general and too removed from concrete, actionable policy outcomes. This report proposes--for the first time--to fill this policy and operational gap by answering the following question: What good governance features should be instilled in the design of economic policies and institutions to help shield them from capture, discretion and arbitrary implementation? Privilege-Resisitant Policies in the Middle East and North Africa benchmarks eight countries on a number of policy areas with regard to their vulnerability to privilege-seeking. The book offers various operational and technical entry points to enhance privilege-resistant policy making in a concrete way that is politically tractable in different country contexts.\"--Page 4 of cover.
Book
Impact of green human resource practices on hotel environmental performance: the moderating effect of environmental knowledge and individual green values
Purpose
Green management initiatives are an influential factor for forward-thinking corporations across the globe. Human resource (HR) practitioners find incorporating sustainable development into HR practices a significant challenge, but green initiatives enhance environmental quality. This study aims to analyze the impact of green human resources management (GHRM) practices on hotel environmental performance (HEP) by incorporating environmental knowledge (EK) and individual green values (IGV) as a moderator.
Design/methodology/approach
The software Smart PLS has been used for data analysis, and partial least square-structural equation modeling has been used to assess measurement and structural models. Data was gathered from 329 white-collar employees of Pakistan’s guest service hotels.
Findings
The results reveal that GHRM practices positively correlate with employees’ affective commitment (EAC) and eco-friendly behavior. Also, employees’ eco-friendly behavior increases HEP, but EAC shows an insignificant association. Moreover, EK does not strengthen the relationship between GHRM practices and EAC and eco-friendly behavior. However, IGV strengthen the relationship between affective commitment and HEP.
Practical implications
The research suggests that management should embrace GHRM practices for better environmental performance. Hotels should ensure that all GHRM attributes, such as green recruitment, training and compensation, are rightly executed. They can help acquire and retain committed and eco-friendly employees whose environmental values and objectives are compatible with the organization.
Originality/value
It will provide insight into the role of the GHRM in fostering EAC and eco-friendly behavior that, in turn, influence environmental performance. Also, the theory of social identity has been incorporated to inspect employees’ behavior along with the moderating role of EK and IGV. It is crucial to understand two essential aspects in a developing country like Pakistan so that the hospitality sector can implement them efficiently in the future: how hotels protect the environment through their green practices and whether employees of a developing country depict eco-friendly behavior and affective commitment on the basis of GHRM.
Journal Article
روح الإسلام
يتحدث هذا الكتاب عن تاريخ ظهور الإسلام وتطوره كدين عالمي وتاريخ انتشاره السريع وما تهيأ له من سلطان كبير على أفئدة الملايين من الخلق وعقولهم في خلال فترة وجيزة من الزمن ومن المسلم به أن الإسلام كان حافزا كبيرا لحركة التطور العقلي بين الجنس البشري ولكن يتجاهلون أو لا يقدرون ما كان له من أثر جليل في نهضة العقول والنفوس.
BOOK
Flex Sensor Compensator via Hammerstein–Wiener Modeling Approach for Improved Dynamic Goniometry and Constrained Control of a Bionic Hand
In this paper, a new control-centric approach is introduced to model the characteristics of flex sensors on a goniometric glove, which is designed to capture the user hand gesture that can be used to wirelessly control a bionic hand. The main technique employs the inverse dynamic model strategy along with a black-box identification for the compensator design, which is aimed to provide an approximate linear mapping between the raw sensor output and the dynamic finger goniometry. To smoothly recover the goniometry on the bionic hand’s side during the wireless transmission, the compensator is restructured into a Hammerstein–Wiener model, which consists of a linear dynamic system and two static nonlinearities. A series of real-time experiments involving several hand gestures have been conducted to analyze the performance of the proposed method. The associated temporal and spatial gesture data from both the glove and the bionic hand are recorded, and the performance is evaluated in terms of the integral of absolute error between the glove’s and the bionic hand’s dynamic goniometry. The proposed method is also compared with the raw sensor data, which has been preliminarily calibrated with the finger goniometry, and the Wiener model, which is based on the initial inverse dynamic design strategy. Experimental results with several trials for each gesture show that a great improvement is obtained via the Hammerstein–Wiener compensator approach where the resulting average errors are significantly smaller than the other two methods. This concludes that the proposed strategy can remarkably improve the dynamic goniometry of the glove, and thus provides a smooth human–robot collaboration with the bionic hand.
Journal Article
A guide to convolutional neural networks for computer vision
Computer vision has become increasingly important and effective in recent years due to its wide-ranging applications in areas as diverse as smart surveillance and monitoring, health and medicine, sports and recreation, robotics, drones, and self-driving cars. Visual recognition tasks, such as image classification, localization, and detection, are the core building blocks of many of these applications, and recent developments in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have led to outstanding performance in these state-of-the-art visual recognition tasks and systems. As a result, CNNs now form the crux of deep learning algorithms in computer vision. This self-contained guide will benefit those who seek to both understand the theory behind CNNs and to gain hands-on experience on the application of CNNs in computer vision. It provides a comprehensive introduction to CNNs starting with the essential concepts behind neural networks: training, regularization, and optimization of CNNs. The book also discusses a wide range of loss functions, network layers, and popular CNN architectures, reviews the different techniques for the evaluation of CNNs, and presents some popular CNN tools and libraries that are commonly used in computer vision. Further, this text describes and discusses case studies that are related to the application of CNN in computer vision, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, scene understanding, and image generation. This book is ideal for undergraduate and graduate students, as no prior background knowledge in the field is required to follow the material, as well as new researchers, developers, engineers, and practitioners who are interested in gaining a quick understanding of CNN models.
Book
Signaling theory and its relevance in international marketing: a systematic review and future research agenda
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze to what extent and in what ways signaling theory has been explored within the field of international marketing. This paper systematically reviews the use of signaling theory in the field of international marketing. Communication is a core aspect of the international marketing process. Research in this field has explored effective and unique ways of improving the communication flow to reduce the asymmetry of information between international consumers and the firm. This notion is adopted, enhanced and strengthened by signaling theory. Signaling theory has recently received the attention of international marketing scholars.Design/methodology/approachThe systematic review methodology was applied for the purpose of identifying the relevant studies. We extracted academic articles over the last 23 years from the domain of international marketing that directly contribute to signaling theory based on 57 journal articles extracted through the systematic review process.FindingsBased on systematic research the results reveal that the topic has grown and continues to expand within the broader international marketing field. We offer a theoretical conceptual framework to better understand signaling theory in the context of international marketing.Originality/valueThe authors map and critically evaluate the use of signaling theory in international marketing. Relevance of signaling theory in international marketing is growing and authors present an integrative framework that organizes the existing literature, and provides scholars to further expand on emerging themes of the domain. The paper offers some useful future research directions.
Journal Article