To determine the knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding organ donation in a selected adult population in Pakistan.

In this essay, the authors analyze the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of inequalities and socio-economic vulnerabilities. We argue that the current pandemic has been looked at mainly through the lens of biology, leaving sociological blind spots in the response to this pandemic that have had adverse effects. We conclude with the suggestion that apart from recommendations from health sciences, policy makers must also take into account local societal structures in order to design effective policies to control the contagion.

This study employs the Porter hypothesis framework to test the moderating role of production cost in the relationship between resource-efficiency actions and financial performance for German small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). For this purpose, we employ the 2012, 2018, and 2021 Flash Eurobarometer surveys to analyze how consistently SMEs adopt resource-efficiency actions, and the impact of these actions on their performance and costs. We also conduct a generalized method of moments regression analysis (GMM). Among the seven resource-efficiency actions proposed, saving (...) water had a significant positive (negative) influence on financial performance in 2012, 2021, and (2018). Saving energy and using renewable energy had a positive and significant (insignificant) effect on financial performance in 2018, 2021, and (2012). Finally, selling scrap material to other companies had a positive and significant impact in all years. Furthermore, increased production costs negatively moderate the relationship between eco-efficiency action scores and financial performance. The results indicate that the “strong” version of the Porter hypothesis is not supported: It only holds when the implementation of eco-efficiency actions reduces production costs and increases financial performance. (shrink)

Half a million species of plants could be existing in the world. Classification of plants based on leaf features is a critical job as feature extraction from binary images of leaves may result in duplicate identification. However, leaves are an effective means of differentiating plant species because of their unique characteristics like area, diameter, perimeter, circularity, aspect ratio, solidity, eccentricity, and narrow factor. This paper presents the extraction of plant leaf gas alongside other features from the camera images or a (...) dataset of images by applying a convolutional neural network. The extraction of leaf gas enables identification of the actual level of chlorophyll and nitrogen which may help to interpret future predictions. Our contribution includes the study of texture and geometric features, analyzing ratio of Ch and N in both healthy and dead leaves, and the study of color-based methods via CNN. Several steps are included to obtain the results: image preprocessing, testing, training, enhancement, segmentation, feature extraction, and aggregation of results. A vital contrast of the results can be seen by considering the kind of image, whether a healthy or dead leaf. (shrink)

The premise of this study is to look at the intergenerational transferal of language and racial trauma of Asian immigrants in general and Korean–American immigrants in particular to a western country, the United States of America. This study investigates trauma from a psychological standpoint, based on Chang-Rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker. In describing a marker of citizenship, the novel’s title also points to who is the native language speaker and who is a native of a country, and why one who (...) is not may be excluded. The Korean immigrants’ vulnerability to the English language and racial differences highlights their status as minority “others,” and they suffer from transgenerational trauma. As a result of transgenerational traumatic effects, Henry has various traumatic side effects such as dysphasia, aphasia, and parasomnia and finally leaves no stone unturned to recuperate from trauma. The Trauma of the Unspeakable theory by Michelle Balaev is used in this article to show how trauma affects people’s minds. (shrink)