Search results

The study is an endeavour to find out the preservation status of rare documents in Srinagar. The rare documents, here, mean the manuscripts and rare books, journals, reports, magazines, archival documents, etc. These resources are available in private libraries of individuals and religious institutions in Srinagar. This study aims to find these private libraries of individuals/families and religious institutions, which are unknown to the scholarly world and observe the preservation status of rare documents. The main focus is to document their present preservation status to give an opportunity to the stakeholders, particularly the government organizations, to take appropriate action before they are lost forever.

Before conducting the survey, the investigator interviewed 114 persons including literary persons, faith leaders, librarians, faculty members from various prominent institutions in Srinagar to get leads regarding the persons/families and religious institutions in possession of rare documents. The investigator gathered data through two different schedules and later analyzed the same in this study after carrying out a pilot study to make necessary changes to the schedules compiled for the study. The investigator visited personally each family/individual and religious institution to gather the data for months together.

An arduous job was carried out in which around 111 individuals/families and religious institutions were found to be having such rare resources. However, the data gathered reveals a dismal picture of private libraries and religious institutions, in possession of rare documents, as almost all caretakers/ families are devoid of any knowledge regarding the maintenance of these important sources of knowledge. Further, the traditional methods of preservation are still in vogue in some private libraries. These traditional methods have opened new areas of research while at the same time can prove detrimental to the collection if they are useless.

The study is the first of its kind in the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir i.e. Srinagar. The study gives an idea of preservation status of manuscripts and rare documents including books, magazines, journals, archival documents, etc. so that the same are taken care of for posterity. The study is an eye-opener for the policymakers, conservators, archivists and others interested in historical documents. The study will help in furthering the research process as it needs to be ascertained whether the traditional methods of preservation are fruitful. In short, the study is quite helpful in understanding the nature of collection in Srinagar so that appropriate steps are taken by all particularly the Government in J&K. The paper will surely help in the policy formulation in the future.

Pakistan's present war against extremists has many folds and sheds. The country's initial participation in the Afghan War in 1979 later gave birth to different extremist trends in the country. State patronage of the extremist Wahabi Islamists during the Afghan jihad opened another conflict in Pakistan, and things became more complicated. The combination of external and internal factors gave birth to the worst kind of conflict, which now has not only become dangerous for the country's own existence but also a major threat for global peace. The Afghan jihad initially started as a war against Soviet occupation and later became the hub of global jihad-war against infidels.

This chapter analyzes how external factors promoted internal contradictions in Pakistan due to which the country became not only an exporter of jihadis for the world but also the worst kind of sectarian conflicts, including. Shia–Sunni, Deobandi–Wahabi clashes, entered into in the past two decades. Such a strong link exists with Pakistan's official support to global jihad. Draft sectarian groups now head to head with their opponents have killed thousands of members of rival sectors, have strong support from external sympathizers, and have spread in the country. The well planned terrorist activities of these groups reflect the fact that support to these groups in the past is now leading to a severe crisis in Pakistan. The nexuses of these indigenous extremists like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen with external terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan of Tahir Yuldasher Chechen Guerilla War has led to several bloody clashes in the country and outside.

This paper aims to assesses impacts of perceived weather changes (i.e. temperature, wind and rainfall) at the farm household level on income, poverty, wheat yield and use of timber and non-timber forest products in Pakistan’s Himalayan region. Mountains are fragile ecosystems – particularly for farming and in the context of climate change. Yet for many such geographies, there is limited empirical understanding of the potential impacts of climate change.

It uses a comprehensive field survey of 500 farmers from the Gilgit-Baltistan territory (comprising seven districts Ghizer, Gilgit, Diamer, Astore, Skardu, Ghance and Hunza-Nagar). A multivariate probit model first assesses the factors associated with perceived weather changes by farm households and a propensity score matching (PSM) approach then estimates the impacts of the perceived changes in temperature, wind and rainfall.

The empirical results show that an overwhelming majority of the farmers experience climate change, which primarily has adverse impacts on household income, poverty levels and wheat yields and increases dependence on both timber and non-timber forest products.

This paper contributes to the scanty literature on the climate change in the Himalayan region of Pakistan.

Malaysia has shifted from a labor-intensive, agriculture-based economy since its independence in 1957 to a knowledge and innovation-based economy. Human capital development (HCD) is a key enabler for driving and sustaining Malaysia's socioeconomic growth. The education and training system is the main platform for HCD intervention. To sustain and achieve goals, long-term survival, competitive advantage, and sustainability, the workforce is optimized through comprehensive HCD interventions to provide the necessary knowledge, skills, and competencies needed to work effectively in a rapidly changing and complex environment. Numerous efforts have been made by the government to ensure that the education and training system has the capacity to enhance the quality and availability of intellectual and skilled human capital to support the transition toward knowledge-intensive activities, sustain economic growth, and compete in the global market. The country's development plans and policies as well as the economic development which lead toward a knowledge-based economy with a knowledge-based workforce have charted out clear transformation journeys for the development of the human capital ecosystem. This chapter presents an overview of the landscape of HCD in Malaysia. Relevant reports, plans, policies, and strategies to strengthen human capital through education and training is reviewed. Finally, a few issues and challenges that Malaysia experiences are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to measure the service quality provided by a public health-care service provider using the lean manufacturing concept. The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as a measure for efficiency. The relative efficiency measure concept is introduced.

The inpatient and outpatient pharmacies providing medicines to the public at a large regional hospital in the southern part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia were the focus of this study. The lean manufacturing concept is used as a method to improve the service quality and reduce the time needed to deliver the medicine by comparing the efficiency between these two pharmacies based on a metric used in lean manufacturing called takt time. A team was formed to study the current situation, and recommendations based on lean manufacturing were suggested for implementations.

The research shows that the adoption of lean manufacturing principles and methodologies may be used as an efficiency measure to compare between different departments working under the same managerial system.

The results presented in this paper are reliable, objective and may be generalized for measuring the relative performance efficiency between several departments providing the same type of services.

The study aims to analyze the role of coronavirus testing capacity to possibly reduce the case fatality ratio (CFR) in a large cross-section of countries. The study controlled health-care expenditures, logistics performance index (LPI), carbon damages, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) to understand the nature of causation between the CFR and stated factors.

The study used a cross-sectional regression apparatus for coefficient estimates and variance decomposition analysis (VDA) for forecasting relationships between the variables over time.

The results confirmed the W-shaped relationship between CFR and case-to-test ratio (CTR) in the presence of a LPI that exacerbates the CFR cases across countries. The VDA estimates suggest that carbon damages, logistics activities, and CSR are likely to influence CFR over time.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is believed to be the first study that assesses the W-shaped relationship between the CFR and CTR in the presence of dynamic variables, which helps to formulate long-term sustainable health-care policies worldwide.

This study aims to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically impacts the maturity of all industrial sectors globally. This paper analyses the general patterns of managing maturity in terms of performance and risk-taking of S&P 500 industrial sectors while determining their association with COVID-19.

To analyse the immediate response of COVID-19 on maturity management, the authors gather time-series daily index data of S&P sectors from October 2019 until June 2020 from Bloomberg. The authors select this study period to show the immediate effect of COVID-19 on industrial sector maturity management. The performance and volatility of stock are proxies for managing the maturity of each sector. The authors use vector auto-regression (VAR) methodology to determine the impact of global coronavirus.

This study’s findings suggest that the information technology sectors outperform the other sectors; in contrast, the utility sector exhibits the worst performance during a pandemic. Furthermore, the real estate sector depicts a higher level of systematic risk pattern than other sectors. Interestingly, the empirical result of VAR shows that almost every sector is significantly negatively affected by this pandemic; however, the consumer discretionary sector is immune to it.

Overall, this study’s findings for individual economic sectors demonstrate that the managing maturity of each sector acts differently to the coronavirus outbreak. This study offers insights to researchers, policymakers, regulators, financial report users, investors, employees, clients and society.

This paper contributes to the existing literature on managing the maturity of industry sectors in terms of observing their trends during the financial crisis.

Money laundering (ML) is the process used to convert the proceeds of crimes into lawful form. This global problem promotes social ills, corruption and organized crimes. Various instruments are used to counter individual illicit behavior. However, in low-income countries, these regulations are not common because of weak institutions, poor governance and a lack of awareness about the negative consequences of ML. In these countries, multinational corporations take advantage of poor law and order, lower environmental regulations and corruption and shift their domestic operations into foreign countries.

This study uses a multiple mediator model to investigate the link between foreign direct investment (FDI), environmental degradation measured as CO₂ emissions (CE), exports and ML for 118 countries between 2008 to 2018.

Results indicate that FDI promotes exports and CE, leading to illicit financial flows.

Policymakers should enforce checks on foreign funds flow and adopt illicit flow mitigation measures to minimize ML globally.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of both positive and negative corporate cultures on employee performance in Saudi Arabia, in the presence of performance reviews and factors leading to positive work culture, in an environment that underwent serious modification with COVID-19. The changing work methods (online, remote, etc.) have left their mark necessitating revisiting the needs and capabilities of employees in the work environment.

This quantitative study uses primary data from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), non-profit organizations, and transnational organizations, in their transient role and influence on organizational culture change. The data set includes 311 usable responses from 50 randomly selected organizations and is analysed using structural equation modelling to test the proposed model.

A healthy corporate culture serves as the basis for increased employee performance in the workplace. The three independent variables, availability of negative culture, availability of positive culture and employee perceived performance, have a positive impact on the dependent variable employee perceived effectiveness of performance reviews; however, factors leading to the development of a positive organizational has a negative influence.

This study faced a limitation with the potential similarity of responses due to the large number of same-background respondents (engineers). However, the results are indicative of a trend. Moreover, the responses did not allow for cross comparison between responding organizational types (SMEs, non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations) as was planned.

Managers should motivate their respective employees, through ensuring the diffusion and sustainability of the right culture work environment. This should allow their teams to complete tasks with little or no supervision. Moreover, as the Saudi economy is gearing up for global competitiveness, this performance culture becomes a key for the success of the strategic plans, thus the high importance of the positive culture at work today.

Understanding the importance of positive and negative culture at the managerial level would affect the relationship with employees and improve work environment and job satisfaction.

This study pinpoints the need to revisit a dimming topic, proving that with the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, managers need to go back to square one. The introduction of the many novel work systems, online, remote work, etc. have changed the work setting and environment. This is requiring a new look at the employees’ perceptions on factors influencing corporate culture and performance.

This paper aims to present a review of the design and development of the turbidimeter for measuring the turbidity level in water. Monitoring the turbidity level of water is important because it is related to public health.

A precise and reliable turbidimeter can provide vital data that reveals the water condition level. Several turbidimeter units are discussed briefly. Three types of turbidimeter design – single beam, ratio and modulated four beams – are elaborated with some illustrations of the design concept. Various improvements and innovations for upgrading turbidimeter design are also discussed.

This paper elaborated on a new method of estimating the water turbidity level in water samples using an optical tomography system based on the independent component analysis method. The results showed that a tomography-based turbidimeter can measure slight changes in the level of turbidity when the volume of contaminants is changed slightly. The turbidimeter can also provide a profile of the distribution of the turbidity in the water sample.

A turbidimeter based on the optical tomography concept can be a valuable tool in determining the level of pollution in rivers, sea, etc.