The dominant approach developed in academy and industry has largely focused on the development of internationally recognized perspectives, frameworks and instruments. And there are different methods (scales, indices, databases and content analysis) to measure several corporate social responsibility (CSR) perspectives (including unidimensional concept, stakeholder theory, triple bottom line, Carroll’s CSR pyramid, and corporate sustainability) but all of them have some limitations. An instrument measuring different dimensions and factors of CSR that incorporates almost all major perspectives through theoretically and industrially viable method is still missing. Therefore, the study explores and measures the broader, applicable and viable perspective of corporate (life) sustainability through scale based index by providing theoretical base to industry practice. 300 senior managers and directors of 90 companies from Petroleum, Telecom, Banking, Media and Fertilizers & Chemicals industries are surveyed. CLS index is developed through identification of three major dimensions which include business sustainability, environment sustainability and humane sustainability. Constituents of business sustainability include marketing practices, business code of conduct, corruption & bribery, sustainable business performance and corporate governance. Environmental sustainability comprises of eco-efficiency, environmental priorities, health & safety and environmental reporting. Whereas, community welfare, employee rights, work-life balance, human capital development, discrimination & grievance are constructs of humane sustainability. Exploratory factor analysis is applied and 53 items are extracted in scale development process. Furthermore, principal component analysis is also applied for assigning weights to 14 factors in index development. This scale based index is used to rank companies and track their multi-facet performance in various industries. It also provides relief to industry from academic criticism on one side and provides alternative to being measured on several indices for different aspects of CSR on the other. This study serves as paradigm shift in consolidating CSR contemporary theories, perspectives and measurements with its global viability and ubiquitous applicability through establishing theory, scale and index of corporate life sustainability. Key words: Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Life Sustainability, Corporate Sustainability, Business Sustainability, Environment Sustainability, Humane Sustainability, Theory Development, Scale Development, Index Development
اقبال، محمد، ڈاکٹر ماتم اقبال وَقَعَتِ الْوَاقِعَۃُ [الواقعۃ:۱]آخر موت اور حیات کی چند ہفتوں کی کشمکش کے بعد ڈاکٹر اقبال نے دنیائے فانی کو الوداع کہا، صفر کی انیسویں اور اپریل کی اکیسویں کی صبح کو عمر کی اکسٹھ بہاریں دیکھ کر اور شاعری کی دنیا میں چالیس برس چہچہا کر یہ بلبل ہزار داستان اب ہمیشہ کے لیے خاموش ہوگیا، وہ ہندوستان کی آبرو، مشرق کی عزت، اور اسلام کا فخرتھا، آج دنیا ان ساری عزتوں سے محروم ہوگئی، ایسا عارف فلسفی، عاشقِ رسول شاعر، فلسفہ اسلام کا ترجمان اور کاروانِ ملت کا حدی خواں صدیوں کے بعد پیدا ہوا تھا، اور شاید صدیوں کے بعد پیدا ہو، اس کے دہن کا ہر ترانہ بانگِ دار، اس کی جانِ حزیں کی ہر آواز زبورِ عجم، اس کے دل کی ہر فریاد پیامِ مشرق، اس کے شعر کا ہر پرواز بال جبریل تھا، اس کی فانی عمر گو ختم ہوگئی، لیکن اس کی زندگی کا ہر کارنامہ ، جاوید نامہ بن کر انشاء اﷲ باقی رہے گا، امید ہے کہ ملت کا یہ غمخوار شاعر اب عرشِ الٰہی کے سایہ میں ہوگا، اور قبول و مغفرت کے پھول اس پر برسائے جارہے ہوں گے، خداوند! اس کے دلِ شکستہ کی جو ملت کے غم سے رنجور تھا، غمخواری فرما! اور اپنی ربانی نوازشوں سے اس کے قلبِ حزیں کو مسرور کر۔ مرحوم کی زندگی کا ہر لمحہ ملت کی زندگی کے لیے ایک نیا پیام لاتا تھا، وہ توحید خالص کا پرستار، دین کامل کا علمبردار، اور تجدید ملت کا طلبگار تھا، اس کے رونگٹے رونگٹے میں رسول انام علیہ السلام کا عشق پیوست تھا، اور اس کی انکھیں جسمِ اسلام کے ہر ناسور پر اشکبار رہتی تھیں، اس نے مستقبلِ اسلام کا ایک خواب دیکھا تھا، اسی خواب کی تعبیر میں اس کی ساری عمر...
Foreign Exchange trading is when you buy and sell foreign currencies to generate profit. In our age of advance technology even the virtual or digital currencies have now emerged. This entire business however is mostly based upon speculation and prediction. Even the most skilled and experienced traders face difficulty in predicting movements in currencies. Further, the value of not well established currencies can fluctuate or its exchange rate value can change any time. In view of occupying central place in the economic systems down the ages, Muslim scholars have also vehemently discussed currency, its significanc and matters relating to it in transactions. The present article reviews trading of foreign currencies from Islamic perspective in a situation when no cash is involved in the transaction. The article concludes that as the currencies in such transactions are different commodities, therefore their trade is legal.
This dissertation addresses the problem of building collaboration in a team of autonomous agents and presents imitation learning as an effective mechanism to build this collaboration. Imitation learning involves learning from an expert by observing her demonstrating a task and then mimicking her. This mechanism requires less time and technical expertise on behalf of domain experts/ knowledge engineers and makes it convenient for them to transfer knowledge to a software agent. The research extends the idea of a demonstration to multi-human demonstrations and presents a framework of Team Learning from Demonstration (TLfD) that allows a group of human experts to train a team of agents via demonstrations. A major challenge faced by the research is to cope with the overhead of demonstrations and inconsistencies in human demonstrations. To reduce the demonstration overhead, the dissertation emphasizes on a modular approach and enables the framework to train a team of a large number of agents via smaller numbers of demonstrators. The framework learns the collaborative strategy in the form of weighted naïve Bayes model where the parameters of the model are learned from the demonstration data and its weights are optimized using Artificial Immune Systems. The framework is thoroughly evaluated in the domain of RoboCup Soccer Simulation 3D which is a promising platform for a multi-agent domain and addresses many complex real-world problems. A series of experiments were conducted using RoboCup Soccer in which the agents were trained to perform different types of tasks through TLfD framework. The experiments were started with training a single agent how to score a goal in an empty soccer field. The later experiments increased the complexity of the task and the number of agents involved. The final experiment eventually trained a full-fledged team of nine soccer players and enabled them to play soccer against other competition quality teams. A number of test matches were played against different opponent teams, and the results of the matches were evaluated on the basis of different performance and behavioral metrics. The performance metrics described how well the imitating team played in the field whereas the behavioral metrics assessed how closely they had imitated the human demonstrations. Our soccer simulation 3D team KarachiKoalas served as a benchmark to evaluate the quality of the imitating team, and the dissertation closely compared the two teams and found that the team that was trained via imitation gave comparable performance to KarachiKoalas. The results showed the effectiveness of TLfD framework and supported the idea of using imitation to build collaboration among multiple agents. However, the framework, in its current form, does not support strategy building in an incremental manner in which a naïve strategy is learned via imitation and is refined in stages. The ability to build strategies incrementally can be a crucial requirement in complex systems. In future, the framework can be extended to incorporate the ability to refine an already learned strategy via human expert's feedback