Industrial effluents contain heavy metals. These are toxic. When released in environment these affect public health. When present in low concentration, conventional treatment technologies have limited capacity to remove them. In addition these are not cost effective. Microbial biosorbents may be used as an economical option. The objective of this research work was to study the potential of various biosorbents for the removal of heavy metals. The biomass of three bacterial strain of Bacillus sp. and three yeast strain of Candida sp was produced in laboratory. The biomass of each strain was then immobilized separately using calcium alginate. This process resulted in beads which were dried at 70 oC. This improved their mechanical properties. Three biosorbents were prepared from Bacillus sp. i.e. (1) immobilized Bacillus circulans beads (IBCB), (2) immobilzed Bacillus licheniformis beads (IBLB) and (3) immobilized Bacillus subtilis beads (IBSB). From Candida sp., the three biosorbent prepared were (1) immobilized Candida lypolytica beads (ICLB) (2) immobilized Candida tropical beads (ICTB) and (3) immobilized Candida utilus beads (ICUB). Removal of cadmium, lead, nickel and zinc ions was studied for batch and continuous flow process. The interaction between the biosorbent and metal ions was confirmed using FTIR and SEM analysis. FTIR analysis showed that the functional groups like hydroxyl, carboxyl, amines, amides and alcohol were mainly involved in the binding of metal ions on the biosorbent. The SEM micrographs revealed changes in the surface morphology of the biosorbents. After the biosorption of heavy metal ions cavities and fissions appeared showing adsorption of heavy metals ions. Cadmium biosorption process was investigated using the ICTB, ICUB, IBLB and IBSB. The optimum value of pH for the ICTB and ICUB was 5.17 whereas for IBLB and IBSB ranged from 5.18 to 5.92. Among these four biosorbents the IBSB showed the better performance for the removal of cadmium ions with maximum biosorption capacity of 225.56 mg g-1 at 25 oC, optimum pH and equilibrium time of 3 h. The significance of different parameters for the biosorption process of cadmium ions was analyzed using ANOVA (analysis of variance). It was found out that initial concentration of metal ions was most important parameter affecting biosorption ~ ii ~ Lead biosorption process was investigated using the ICTB, ICUB and IBSB. Batch studies showed that the optimum value of the pH for ICTB and ICUB was 4.85 whereas for IBSB it ranged from 4.85 to 5.78. Among the three biosorbents tested IBSB showed the highest efficiency with maximum biosorption capacity of 663.41 mg g-1 at 25 o C, optimum pH and equilibrium time of 2 h. Batch studies for nickel ions showed that the optimum pH value for the ICLB, ICTB and ICUB was 6.62 whereas for the IBCB, IBLB and IBLB was 6.04. Among these six biosorbents ICTB showed the best performance with maximum biosorption capacity of 160.49 mg g-1 at 25 oC, optimum pH and equilibrium time of 3 h. Zinc biosorption process was investigated using the ICLB, ICTB, ICUB and IBSB. The optimum value of the pH for ICLB, ICTB and ICUB was 5.17 and for IBSB was 6.35. Batch studies showed that among the four biosorbents ICUB showed best performance with biosorption capacity of 149.70 mg g-1 at 25 oC, optimum pH value and equilibrium time of 4 h. Removal of cadmium, lead, nickel and zinc, in continuous flow, was studied using three columns with internal diameter of 1.5, 2.4 and 3.0 cm. Depth of each column was varied from 20 to 50 cm. Best biosorbent for each metal, resulting from batch studies, was used for the dynamics studies. The dynamics biosorption data was investigated using the various column models. The uptake capacity for the cadmium ions, in column studies, was 48.93 mg g-1of IBSB. It was achieved in fixed bed with column having internal diameter of 2.4 cm, bed depth 20 cm, influent concentration 30 mg l-1 and flow rate of 20 ml min-1. Under similar operating parameters the uptake capacities for the lead ions was 178.57 mg g-1 of IBSB, for nickel ions was 31.28 mg g-1 of ICTB and for zinc ions was 29.50 mg g-1 of ICUB. The maximum uptake capacity of the biosorbents increased with the increase in the bed depth of the column, decrease in flow rate and decrease in internal column diameter for all the four heavy metal ions. In both the batch and continuous biosorption process the metal ions loaded biosorbents were successfully regenerated using the 0.1 M HCl solution. About 99 percent of the adsorbed metal ions were recovered in concentrated solution form. The regeneration proved successful for five consecutive cycles. This could be a major breakthrough in cyclic/commercial use of these immobilized biosorbents (IBs).
فلسفہ تعزیرات وہ جرائم جو ہر انسانی معاشرے میں نہیں ہوتے بلکہ کسی معاشرے میں ہوتے ہیں اور کسی میں نہیں ہوتے۔ ان جرائم کی روک تھام اور سزاؤں کے حوالے سے شریعت مطہرہ نے بنیادی اصول وضع کردیے ہیں۔ ان بنیادی اصولوں کو مدِ نظر رکھتے ہوئے اس دور ، اس علاقے کے ارباب حل وعقد اور اولی الامر جو مناسب سزا مقرر کرنا چاہیں ، مقررکرسکتے ہیں ۔ نیز ان جرائم پر دین ، جان ، عقل ، نسل اور مال کی حفاظت کابھی انحصار نہیں۔ تعزیر کی سزا کے تقرر کے اصول مندرجہ ذیل ہیں: 1. سب سے پہلا اصول یہ ہے کہ اس سزا کا بنیادی مقصد امت مسلمہ اور عوام کے جان و مال کا تحفظ ہو ، محض کسی ایک گروہ یا کسی ایک فرد کے مفاد کی حفاظت نہ ہو۔ 2. دوسر ا اصول یہ ہے کہ وہ مصالح جن کو شریعت نے تسلیم کیا ہے اور جو شریعت میں قابل قبول ہیں ، ان میں سے کسی مقصد کا تحفظ اس سزا سے پورا ہوتا ہو ۔ 3. تیسرا اصول یہ ہے کہ اس سزا کے نتیجے میں اس برائی کے کم ہونے کا امکان ہو، زیادہ پھیلنے کا اندیشہ نہ ہو ۔ سزا دینااصل میں ایک آپریشن کرنا ہے۔ بعض بیماریاں آپریشن سے ختم ہوجاتی ہیں اور بعض آپر یشن سے پھیل بھی سکتی ہیں ۔ اب یہ ڈاکٹر کا فرض ہے کہ آپریشن کرنے سے پہلے وہ اطمینان کرے کہ یہ بیماری آپریشن کرنے سے پھیل تو نہیں جائے گی ۔ اسی طرح سزا دینے سے پہلے حاکم یاجج کو دیکھنا چاہیے کہ اس سزا کے نتیجے میں برائی ختم ہوجائے گی یا مزید بڑھے گی۔ 4. چوتھا اصول یہ ہے کہ جرم اور سزا کے درمیان تناسب ہو ۔ یہ نہ ہو کہ...
Work-family conflict is a conflict between societal expectations and the interaction of interrelated work and family domains. It is essential to understand the impact of COVID-19 on working women's physical and mental health in Pakistan to advise better health policy. This research aims to determine work-family conflict’s impact on working women’s physical and mental health. Through non-probability sampling, 100 working women were sampled online across different cities of Pakistan. The participants were selected from different working fields. Only women above the age of 20 years were eligible for participation in this study. The study found that work-family conflict positively correlates with the fear of COVID19, blood pressure, depression, and anxiety symptoms. Psychologists, counselors, and general physicians for primary and preventive care in Pakistan need to work towards counselling and supporting the health needs of working women to prevent biopsychosocial problems related to work-family conflict and fear of COVID-19. Keywords: anxiety, blood pressure, depression, fear of covid-19, work-family conflict.
The advent of portable smart devices like smart phones, digital cameras, personal digital assistants and tablets resulted in emanation of immense visual data that people wish to view and share among each other. But the small screen of such devices poses a limitation on sharing of visual contents. However, the pervasive technology of handheld or pico projectors overcome this limitation of content sharing by allowing projection of media content on a shared medium. Traditional projection environments make use of projectors in conjunction with custom-built projection screens. Such scenarios typically employ a static setting and thus projectors and projection surfaces are immobile. However, with the availability of pocket-able pico-projectors, the mode of usage of such hand-held projection devices is evolving. Users are now using such devices to project in random environments that may be cluttered and not built for projection. This poses a serious challenge since the entire surface may not be suitable for projection. The users have to search for a suitable surface on which the projection is to be made. This sometimes requires the physical movement of the arm or the person itself to have a confined projection over the surface. Therefore, there is a need to develop a system that will enable pico-projector users to automatically restrict the projection content within a suitable surface in casual indoor settings. The relevant schemes for traditional projectors are not applicable in the context of pico projectors because pico projectors have low resolution and luminosity values. To the best of my knowledge this research is the first work in the field of camera-projector systems aiming to the select the suitable surface for projection and then confining the projection to the selected surface using a binary coded pattern. In particular, there are the following major contributions of this work: Firstly, a novel scheme that allows the projection system to be intelligent enough to confine the projection on a suitable surface that falls within the projector’s field of view. The projection confinement on a suitable surface is performed in two major steps; selecting a suitable surface for projection that lie within the camera-projector view and then confining the projection on a selected surface through homography estimation using the binary coded pattern. For the initial phase, the color image segmentation is performed for the selection of the appropriate surface for projection. The homogenous color segment that is larger in size is selected as a candidate surface for projection. The next step is to confine the projection over the selected surface or the subregion of a surface through homography estimation using binary coded pattern. Secondly, development of a binary coded pattern which enables reliable selection of projection surface by avoiding clutter in the projected area. The developed binary coded pattern outperforms the existing binary coded patterns for the scenario of low resolution cameraprojector pair and hence is particularly suited for pico-projectors that have low resolution and luminosity values. Experiments confirm that the proposed pattern is more immune to detection errors as compared to the state of the art binary coded patterns in the context of mobile grade low resolution pico projectors. A formative study has also been conducted to get an insight regarding the user centric attributes for projection surface selection through a survey based approach. The respondents were asked about the five parameters related to the projection surface that comprises of two attributes each. These attributes are related to the surface size, color, reflectance property, geometry and texture. The simple statistical analysis of the gathered data reveal that users preferred the planar large surfaces for projection that are of the bright color and matte and textureless in nature. Weights are assigned to the surface attributes as suggested by the respondents in the order of (from high to low); size, color, texture, reflectance property and geometry of the surface.