Archives-October 2013

The term enforced disappearance has been derived from the Spanish word “Desaparicion forzada ”which was coined in 1960s to signify a practice of abduction and secret detention used by security forces of Guatemala in furtherance of their counter insurgency measures. The idea of enforced disappearances was later applied by a lot of countries to deny the right of free speech to its citizens. According to the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) in the period between 1974 and 1995 more than 100 cases of forced disappearances were recorded in countries such as India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Pakistan etc. Enforced Disappearances not only leads to a violation of the basic human rights of the victim but also leads to emotional abuse and economic marginalization of the family members. It also makes women and children vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation at the hands of the officials of the state. The Convention For The Protection of All Persons From Enforced Disappearances enjoins the state parties to make a special law on enforced disappearances in order to provide for such an offence in their penal code and also to provide a special mechanism for investigation, prosecution etc. However, a lot of state parties are yet to make a special law on it. The objective of this paper is to offer a critical insight into the developments in the International Plane for curbing this ghastly practice. The paper also conducts an analysis of the Convention and examines the loopholes present therein. In the end it attempts to suggest safeguards to prevent such a practice.

This article discusses about the preliminary study of the social cohesion level among ethnics in Penang. The purpose of this study is to explore the extent of social cohesion that exists among the Malays, Chinese and Indians, through their daily interactions. A total of 90 respondents were surveyed in this study. The study found that the level of social cohesion between these three ethnic groups; Malays, Chinese and Indians are less satisfactory. The Chinese respondents have full daily interaction (100 percent) with other Malays but only 83 percent of Indian respondents and 60 percent of Malay respondents have daily interaction with other Chinese. However, for the location of the interaction, all three ethnic groups studied recorded the highest number of daily interactions in their workplace. More than 30 percent of respondents found among the Indians and Chinese had never interacted with other ethnic groups in school. Overall, the findings showed an alarming level of social cohesion because more than 20 percent of Indians have bad relationship with other Chinese and Malays and 49 percent of the Chinese have very bad relationship with other Indians and Malays.

This study was conducted to investigate the factors that contribute towards the turnover intention of teachers of private sector schools of Sargodha division. For this purpose several factors of satisfaction i.e. security, nature of work, working condition, colleagues (integration), principal, students, recognition, social status and promotion are considered because these are the main factors which increase or decrease the turnover intention of teachers. Data was collected through paper and pencil technique from various private schools of Sargodha division. Pearson correlation and zero order correlation were used to test the hypotheses. Only four factors i.e. principal, promotion, pay and working conditions were proved to have a strong negative relationship with turnover intention.

This paper estimated Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) poverty indices from the generalized burr density function to further justify the wide flexibility and applicability of the function in fitting many life datasets. It computed estimates of the parameters of the selected density and the goodness of fit statistic from the 2010 Harmonized Nigeria Living Standard Survey (HNLSS) dataset conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of Nigeria. The goodness of fit test indicated that the selected density was appropriate and estimates of the indices obtained from the density were approximately close to the ones obtained through the traditional approach.

This study considered a method of selecting discrete distributions based on the Katz criterion in fitting an appropriate probability distribution function to available crime data in Nigeria after reasonable transformation. The criterion selected the Negative Binomial distribution for the data under consideration. The adopted distribution provided good fit as evidenced by the Anderson Darling goodness of fit test. This study has therefore applied the Katz criterion to real life data.

The purpose of this paper is to critically examine corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a capitalist society. Its special focus is to investigate CSR as a trend as well as the role of law using different initiatives and dimensions at different level of governance; i.e. national, regional and international levels. This paper employs qualitative method of research, drawing on observation, semi-structured interviews and the use of statistical data from different body of United Nations. Most importantly were observations made at CSR module lectures during my LLM. In CSR movement today, the law is taken shape, although in different form of legal norm which might either be prescriptive or regulatory. The study also found that CSR is a trend and not a passing social fad or a threat to corporate capitalism. That the legal norm definitely has a role to play in any social group without which conflict is rife and that firm’s responsibility to the society is continuous. As the society develops, so also is the need for sustainable economic development expected from corporate industries. This research paper adds to myriads of literature on CSR and capitalism. It suggests the need for legal dimensions and initiative for better ‘performance ‘rather than ticking the boxes. It concludes that the firm, society and the law cannot function effectively in a water tight compartment, the society cannot do without the firm, and the firm needs the law for its existence. Thus the firm needs to balance responsibility to the law and the society for it to achieve its aims.

Two phase closed thermosyphon are often used in heat exchanger equipments because of their high heat transfer capabilities without external power requirements. In the current study, the heat transfer characteristics of two phase closed thermosyphon is analysed experimentally for various angle of inclinations and heat inputs. To carry out the experiment, two copper thermosyphons of length 1000 mm, inner diameter 17 mm and outer diameter 19 mm are taken and charged with 60 ml of working fluid with an evaporator length of 400 mm and condenser length of 450 mm. One of the thermosyphon is charged with de-ionized water (DI) whereas the other is charged with aqueous solution of n-hexanol. The heat transfer coefficient of thermosyphon filled with aqueous solution of n-hexanol shows a better result when compared to thermosyphon filled with de-ionized water.

Now-a-days employees become the most important assets of the organizations. Organizations spend millions of rupees for their employee’s trainings and developments. But after certain time they quit because of many factors. In present study, we focus on two factors that contribute in this problem i.e. pay and supervisor. This study investigates the relationship of employee’s satisfaction of supervisor and pay with organizational commitment. Data was collected from 157 employees of banking sector. The results show that if employees are satisfied with their pay as well as their supervisor then their commitment towards their organization is strong.

Thermal performance of shell-and-heat-pipe heat exchanger (S-HPHE) and shell-and baffled heat-pipe heat exchanger (S-BHPHE) have been experimentally investigated. Methanol (CH3OH) has been used as working fluid of heat pipe. The mass flow rate of water on the shell side was varied from 30 lph to 60 lph, while on the condenser side it has been varied from 10 lph to 60 lph for all mass flow rate of hot water on the shell side of the heat pipe heat exchanger with baffles and without baffles. Heat input to the heat exchanger has been varied by varying the power input in the range of 1kW to 4kW. The results showed that, based on the shell-side flow rate and temperature of hot water, the effectiveness of heat-pipe heat exchanger with rectangular baffles is higher than that of the heat exchanger without baffles. The performance of heat-pipe heat exchanger with rectangular baffles with 1:1 ratio of mass flow rate of hot and cold water has shown minimum effectiveness. The shell and baffled heat-pipe heat exchanger (S-BHPHE) with 1:0.5 ratio of mass flow of hot and cold water shows the best performance.

In Classical Hypothesis testing volumes of data is to be collected and then the conclusions are drawn, which may need more time. But, Sequential Analysis of Statistical science could be adopted in order to decide upon the reliability / unreliability of the developed software very quickly. The procedure adopted for this is, Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT). It is designed for continuous monitoring. The likelihood based SPRT proposed by Wald is very general and it can be used for many different probability distributions. In the present paper we propose the performance of SPRT on 5 data sets of ungrouped using delayed S-shaped model and analyzed the results. The parameters are estimated using Maximum Likelihood Estimation method.