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Developing graduate students' academic writing has been a major concern for many scholars over the past few years. Existing literature on the challenges of thesis writing has not focused on master's students in English language teaching (ELT). Data on the challenges have been mainly gathered from the theses and focused on the structure and genre requirements. Few available studies have investigated such challenges through the lens of supervisors in an international context. Knowledge about the factors hindering the thesis writing process of non-native MA students in English from the supervisors' perspectives is scarce. This study attempts to fill these gaps by answering this question: From supervisors' perspectives, what factors hinder the thesis writing process of non-native MA students?

Thirty supervisors from state and private universities across Iran voluntarily participated in this qualitative study. Drawing upon teachers' diaries and semi-structured interviews, the authors identified major factors negatively influencing the thesis work of master's students. Data were transferred into NVivo 10 and analyzed thematically following Colaizzi's method.

The study found that factors constraining students' writing were (1) students' lack of effort, (2) students' lack of a strategy for writing, (3) students' lack of autonomy and (4) students' absence of voice.

The authors discuss the practical implications of these factors for different stakeholders. There is a growing interest in postgraduate students' thesis writing processes. Surprisingly, no research exists on supervisors' perceptions of factors that constrain the thesis writing process of non-native English master's students.

Many popular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques have low accuracy, especially when localizing environments containing dynamically moving objects since their presence can potentially cause inaccurate data associations. To address this issue, the proposed FADM-SLAM system aims to improve the accuracy of SLAM techniques in environments containing dynamically moving objects. It uses a pipeline of feature-based approaches accompanied by sparse optical flow and multi-view geometry as constraints to achieve this goal.

FADM-SLAM, which works with monocular, stereo and RGB-D sensors, combines an instance segmentation network incorporating an intelligent motion detection strategy (iM) with an optical flow technique to improve location accuracy. The proposed AS-SLAM system comprises four principal modules, which are the optical flow mask and iM, the ego motion estimation, dynamic point detection and the feature-based extraction framework.

Experiment results using the publicly available RGBD-Bonn data set indicate that FADM-SLAM outperforms established visual SLAM systems in highly dynamic conditions.

In summary, the first module generates the indication of dynamic objects by using the optical flow and iM with geometric-wise segmentation, which is then used by the second module to compute the starting point of a posture. The third module, meanwhile, first searches for the dynamic feature points in the environment, and second, eliminates them from further processing. An algorithm based on epipolar constraints is implemented to do this. In this way, only the static feature points are retained, which are then fed to the fourth module for extracting important features.

This study aims to review the psychosocial determinants of divorce and their effects on women for a social reform in Pakistan. Enigmatic societal standards vandalize social status of divorced women and stress them to experience psychological trauma that triggers psychosocial disorders.

The study is categorized into three major determinants: the human emotional, the formal legal and societal aspect(s) in association with the deferential social status of divorced women. Rapid evidence assessment methodology was used to search the all-inclusive literature, collate the available descriptive evidences, critically analyze and evaluate it, sieve out studies of penurious quality and provide an aperçu of the evidence.

The research evinces domestic violence and abuse as an endemic cause of divorce in Pakistan; emotional and psychological consequences of domestic abuse damage women’s self-worth and well-being. Literature reported that all these determinants impacted the mental health stability of the divorced women. Divorce rates are climbing at a faster pace in the country and Punjab has been identified as a province of rocketing divorce rate. Lamentably, in various villages of other provinces, women risk face mutilation if they show courage to seek divorce.

More research needs to be carried out on the issue nationwide. Fundamentally, cultural norms around women’s roles in society need to be addressed and challenged where this research may become an impetus for further research.

The paper contributes towards the redressal of the domestic abuse, social exclusion, marginalization and vilification of divorced women in Pakistan. The rising rates indicate an urgent need for social reforms to curtail offending behaviors toward them, to safeguard their mental health and well-being and to empower them with their legal rights to enjoy deferential social status in life.

This paper aims to examine the impact of corruption and money laundering (ML) on the profitability and stability of Islamic banks.

This study used the data of 53 conventional and 19 Islamic banks of Pakistan and Malaysia to have comparative insights. The empirical methods include the fixed effect and random effect regression and generalized methods of moment for robust results.

The results indicate that Islamic banks gain from corruption and ML. Corruption and ML affect bank profitability and stability positively in a less corrupt environment, i.e. Malaysia; however, corruption hurts Islamic banks’ performance, and ML favours Islamic banking profitability and stability in a more corrupt environment, i.e. Pakistan.

The present study pioneers the debate on corruption and ML related to Islamic banking profitability and stability. This study provides important insights to regulators and Shariah advisors to build a real model of Islamic banking.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) combined with multi-user massive MIMO has been a well-known approach for high spectral efficiency in wideband systems, and it was targeted to detect the MIMO signals. The increasing data rates with multiple antennas and multiple users that share the communication channel simultaneously lead to higher capacity requirements and increased complexity. Thus, different detection algorithms were developed for the Massive MIMO.

This paper focuses on the various literature analyzes on various detection algorithms and techniques for MIMO detectors. Here, it reviews several research papers and exhibits the significance of each detection method.

This paper provides the details of the performance analysis of the MIMO detectors and reveals the best value in the case of each performance measure. Finally, it widens the research issues that can be useful for future researchers to be accomplished in MIMO massive detectors

This paper has presented a detailed review of the detection of massive MIMO on different algorithms and techniques. The survey mainly focuses on different types of channels used in MIMO detections, the number of antennas used in transmitting signals from the source to destination, and vice-versa. The performance measures and the best performance of each of the detectors are described.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the prevalence and antibiograms of bacteria isolated from various fresh fruit juices at a local market in Faisalabad.

Fresh fruit juice samples (n=125) were randomly collected using aseptic technique. Each sample (10 mL) was serially diluted with 90 mL of sterile peptone water, from 1×10⁻¹ to 1×10⁻⁵. Each dilution was then used to inoculate nutrient agar by surface spread plating. Aerobic colony counts (ACCs) were determined by colony counting. The isolates were sub-cultured on blood and MacConkey agar. Preliminary identification was achieved on the basis of colony morphology and culture characteristic, and confirmed by API® 20E, 20NE, and API® Staph testing. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was carried out using the Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion assay, per CLSI 2015 guidelines.

The mean ACC ranged from 2.0×10⁶ CFU/mL to 4.93×10⁶ CFU/mL, with the highest ACC determined for orange juice. Overall, 153 polymicrobial were identified in 125 samples; 103 of these were Gram-negative rods (GNR) and 28 were Gram-positive cocci (GPC). Escherichia coli (n=38), Klebsiella pneumoniae (n=32) and Pseudomonas aeruginosa (n=24) were the predominant GNR; Staphylococcus aureus (n=28) was the predominant GPC. Antibiogram analysis revealed that all GNR were resistant to ampicillin. However, most E. coli isolates were resistant to ceftazidime (72.4 percent of isolates), and ceftriaxone and cefepime (68.9 percent), while most K. pneumoniae isolates were resistant to cefepime (72 percent) and ceftriaxone (64 percent). All S. aureus isolates were resistant to penicillin, while most (64 percent) were resistant to piperacillin; the most effective drugs against bacteria were vancomycin and imipenem.

The findings suggest that the local government regulatory food and public health authorities should take immediate emergency measures. Appropriate surveillance studies and periodic monitoring of food items should be regularly performed to safeguard public health.

The current study revealed the prevalence of multidrug-resistant bacteria in freshly prepared fruit juices sold by local street vendors.

The objective of this study was to look closely at how domestic violence is represented in Pakistani drama serials to see if portrayals are reinforcing stereotypical and/or patriarchal values, or breaking the rigid norms.

With the help of dispositive analysis within the critical discourse approach, the prominent and non-dominant discourses about domestic violence were identified and discussed. Episodes from two popular drama serials, Kaisa Yeh Naseeban and Khaas, released in 2019, were watched with special focus on texts on domestic violence alongside objects and actions.

Analysis showed that both drama serials gave importance to socio-systemic and liberal humanist instrumentalism discourses, which describe domestic violence as a result of social structures and that abuse is used to assert control, respectively. However, some instances were noted where patriarchal values were encouraged.

As media has become a powerful tool of influence and awareness in the recent times, it is imperative that the content watched on it by millions of people be studied and analyzed. It is claimed that Pakistani drama serials with wide following and that are made on social issues around women aim to raise awareness and empower them. Domestic violence is a prevalent issue in Pakistan, and no research till date has examined representation of domestic violence on Pakistani popular media, which may influence response to domestic violence, which this paper aims to do.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the excecution of various leadership styles, namely, transactional, transformational and laissez-faire that are being practiced among the government organizations in the Kingdom of Bahrain. The study compares and differentiates these three leadership styles with that of the major Islamic leadership concepts.

The study used a descriptive analytical method. A number of 100 government employees participated in the survey which has been selected as the sample of the study using the snowball sampling technique.

The study detects that the transactional leadership is the most highly applied leadership style in the government organizations of Bahrain. The finding is identified on the basis of the employees’ attributes based on their gender (male and female); current positions (employee and manager); work experience (less than a year, from one to five years, from 6 to 10 years); and age (less than 20 years, from 20 to 35 years, from 36 to 50 years, more than 50 years). Meanwhile, the second style mostly applied among the employees is the transformational leadership style. It is perceived that this style has been applied by employees with 10 years of work experience and are in the age group of more than 50 years. The least applied leadership style is the laissez-faire.

The study can be used by the Government of Bahrain to set up policies on how to improve efficiency within the government organizations in the Kingdom. This study also fills up the gap in the leadership styles literature, as no prior studies of this manner involving the government organizations of the Island have ever been conducted.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to examine the relationship between temporal leadership (TL) and employees’ thriving at work (TW) by focusing on the positive mediating role of perception of work-goal progress (PWP), the negative mediating roles of job-based psychological ownership (JPO) and the moderating role of synchrony preference (SP).

We employed a dedicated data collection platform called Credamo for two waves of online questionnaires in China between March 2022 and April 2022. A total of 326 questionnaires were collected and analyzed to test the hypotheses.

(1) TL directly and positively affects TW. (2) TL indirectly and positively affects TW via PWP. (3) TL indirectly and negatively affects TW via JPO. (4) SP positively moderates the positive mediating effect of PWP on the relationship between TL and TW. (5) SP negatively moderates the negative mediating effect of JPO on the relationship between TL and TW.

Supervisors in organizations ought to discreetly practice TL and try to maximize the positive role of PWP and minimize the negative role of JPO.

The findings simultaneously discuss the effects of TL on TW from dark and bright perspectives. The influence of interaction between contextual and individual features on TW is also specified.

The present study enriches the person-situation debate by developing and testing a theoretical model on the nexus between empowering leadership (EL) and intrapreneurial behaviour (IB) in the presence of a strong organisational situation of perceived organisational support (POS).

Cross-sectional survey data collected from 237 engineers working for Pakistani automakers were used to evaluate the suggested theoretical framework. The survey results were analysed using the partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) method.

The results from the analysed data revealed a significant and positive relationship between EL and IB. POS significantly moderate the relationship between EL and IB as per the conceptualisation of situation strength theory (SST) and is established as a strong organisational situation that generates situational cues for IB outcomes from employees.

The present study provides new insights into determining employees' workplace behaviour as viewed from the organisational situations. Hence, top management in organisations can create a conducive environment by improving employees' POS for valued work behaviours like IB.