Perceptions of Sindhi Muslims Towards Exogamous Marriages: An Exploratory Study

It has been said that exogamous marriages tend to lead to language shift (Igboanus & Wolf, 2009 & Dumanig, David & Shanmuganathan, 2013). In an early study Gal (1978) found that Hungarian women marrying German men in the city of Oberwat had shifted to German to negate their peasant Hungarian ancestry and to move up the socio-economic ladder. Similarly, David and Dealwis (2011) found in their study of Malaysian Sindhi Hindus that exogamous marriages tend to lead to language shift but is not the only reason for the shift away from the heritage language. Therefore, before mixed marriages take place one should study perceptions of the speech community towards such marriages. In this exploratory study, the perceptions of Sindhi Muslims-men and women and from different socio-economic groups towards exogamous marriages are studied. With this objective, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten Sindhi Muslim participants (four male adults and six female adults) who live in Karachi. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded and themes were generated after formal consent was obtained. The findings show that language choice in the home domain is shifting because of intercultural marriages. Also, such marriages are frequent among Sindhi community members with a high socio-economic status who live in cities. Gender plays an equal role too, as the women respondents showed mixed responses towards exogamous marriages while the male respondents had a more positive perception. Such views and perceptions may affect choice of marital partners and language choice in the home domain.

Energy Awareapproach to Increase Network Lifetime in Continuous Sensing Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) continuously monitor different activities in given circumstances. Monitoring criteria of WSNs is event driven, time based, inquire query and continuous sensing. WSNs consist of many cheap Sensor Nodes (SNs) which have limited battery power. Minimizing energy consumption is an important requirement in WSNs to increase network life-span during continuous sensing. In WSNs, the energy is consumed in sensing, processing and transmission. This research aimed to enhance network lifetime by minimizing energy consumption at transmission and re-clustering phase. The proposed solution categorizes SNs into Super Nodes (SUN), Advanced Nodes (ADN) and Normal Nodes (NON). Each cluster is composed of a Cluster Head (CH) and Cluster Members (CMs). CH is always selected from the SUN. Both, ADN and NON become CMs. WSN field is divided into levels and each level is subdivided into clusters. In each level, at least one cluster performs sensing and communication tasks which gives coverage to the whole sensitive area, therefore, the phenomena do not lose communication. ADN and NON adjusted its time schedule for active, sleep and idle modes. CH consisted of active, sleep and idle states and forwarded packets to Base Station (BS) following best route among various available paths. Energy consumption was minimized during continuous sensing by active, sleep and idle mechanism and by eliminated re-clustering in each network round. The proposed solution, LEACH-ELT (LEACH with Enhanced Life Time), successfully increased WSNs life-span by minimized transmission time energy consumption and circumvented wide-range re-clustering in WSNs. The LEACH-ELT was simulated in MATLAB and the results were compared with traditional LEACH protocol. The demonstration showed that LEACH-ELTperformance is better than LEACH protocol.