Educational Stratification and Nation Building Process in Pakistan

Abstract Pakistan has celebrated seven decades of independence but misfortunately the nation is still divided into several ideologies, believes, ethnicities, regionalism, provincialism, political and social classes. Throughout the world, education plays a significant role in nation building but the terrible upshot in Pakistan is the division of nation in the field of education and learning. There are numerous umbrellas under which our educational system is running. Therefore, current study objects to measure educational stratification and its effect on nation building process in Pakistan. In this regard, this research mainly focuses on four major prevailing educational systems such as; privately managed schools, public schools, army public schools and madarsa (religious educational institution). Data were collected through focus group discussions and analyzed by applying grounded approach theory. Four major themes emerged after data examination. These are uniformity of curricular, equal opportunities, political and bureaucratic involvement and lack of moral education. Study finds that education system is badly lacking in uniform ideology and moral learning. Furthermore, the poor system of education is negatively affecting nation building in Pakistan by enhancing public distrust, discrimination and regionalism. The results of the present study may be helpful in finding the way for uniform educational system which provide learning opportunities to every child without thinking of their caste, religion, language, economic class, political affiliation and ethnicity.

Digital Image Processing Using Soft Computing Techniques and Spline Representations

The work presented in this thesis is devoted to digital image processing techniques using soft computing techniques and spline representations. In particular, it emphasizes on the problems of image interpolation for finding the optimal digital images. In this thesis, four image interpolation schemes are developed which utilize one of the soft computing techniques, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and newly constructed rational Ball Cubic B-spline representation, the cubic trigonometric B-spline representation, the quadratic trigonometric B-spline representation along with the rational cubic B-spline representation to get the resulting interpolated images. Genetic algorithms are used to get the optimal values of shape parameters in the description of the proposed B-spline representations. The proposed schemes are demonstrated with both gray scale and color digital images. Numerical results are collected in terms of well-known image quality metrics including Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structure SIMilarity (SSIM), Multi-Scale Structure SIMilarity (MS-SSIM) and Feature SIMilarity (FSIM) indices to analyze and compare the proposed interpolation schemes with each other and existing ones.