Presently, any development initiatives without considering sustainability can barely be imagined. There has been a paradigm shift in the focus of the development partners from the mere development to sustainable development. However, the role of development partners in bringing sustainability in livelihood assets of the rural community has long been questioned. Hence, this study aims to explore the sustainability in the form of changes in livelihood assets of a local community in Bangladesh. This study considers the changes in livelihood assets of the community over the three-time frames - before, during, and after a project implemented by a national NGO called ‘UST’ and subsequently identifies the community’s capacity to sustain the project outcomes after the completion of the project. ‘Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF)’ developed by Department for International Development (DFID) was utilized in this study to analyse the vulnerability and livelihood issues of the community members. Data has been collected through focus group discussions, household survey and key informants’ interviews from three distinct villages of ‘Khutamara’ union in the ‘Nilphamari’ district of Bangladesh. The finding of the study states that all the livelihood assets such as the social capital, human capital, natural capital, financial capital, physical capital have positively changed due to the interference of the development partners. This study further finds that even after the completion of project tenure, such positive trends continue to exist among the community members indicating sustainable development. Moreover, political capital- a new type of livelihood has also emerged because of the project implementation which was not quite evident before the inception of the project. In addition, this study explored the unique phenomenon of the Shabolombee Gram, where the transformation altering farmers’, livelihoods does not come from the government or the private sector but originates from a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). Therefore, the government and its development partners may adopt and incorporate the Modified Sustainable Livelihood Framework (MSLF) to ensure the sustainable development.
This paper aims to explore the issue of human actions in Islamic thought, focusing on the various stances regarding determinism, free will, and the intermediate position between them. This topic is linked to an ontological question: What are the limits of human responsibility for their actions? Our view is that the different positions on human actions reflect the presence of pluralism within Islamic thought, specifically through the discipline of Islamic theology (kalām). The difference in positions about the human actions within the science of theology expresses the vitality of Islamic thought and its appreciation of the right to differ between theological schools such as the Mu’tazila, Shi’a, and Sunnis, especially in an era dominated by the rationalism of Mu’tazila thought influenced by the methodology of Greek philosophical thought. This difference was recognized, especially in the third and fourth centuries AH/ninth and tenth centuries AD. We consider this difference in discussing the subject of the human actions as evidence of the principle of pluralism in Islam, which allows us to speak of the existence of a significant degree of intellectual tolerance, a subject that has not been studied to date. The prevailing view in studies today on this subject is that the theological groups accuse each other of unbelief, which is a mistaken position, because the saying of unbelief did not appear until after the fourth century AH/tenth century AD when transmission, reliability, and conservatism prevailed in Islamic thought. In addressing this issue, we examine three major stances on human actions as represented by three theological schools: The Mu’tazila (who advocated free will in human actions), the Jabriya (who advocated determinism in human actions), and the Ash’ariyya (who upheld the theory of acquisition). Once this is accomplished, we will explore the philosophy of pluralism in Islam through the lens of kalām. The most important conclusion we reached is that the debate on human actions opened, by the mid-4th century AH/10th century CE, an intellectual horizon that laid the foundations for pluralism in Islamic theological discussions. However, this horizon was soon closed due to various factors, which we have discussed throughout the paper.
Indonesia has ratified United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 (UNCLOS 1982) through Law No. 17 of 1985 concerning the ratification of the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention, thus binding Indonesia to the rights and obligations to implement the provisions of the 1982 convention, including the establishment of the three Northern-Southern Indonesia’s Archipelagic Sea Lane (ALKI). The existence of the three ALKI routes, including ALKI II, has led to various potential threats. These violations not only cause material losses but, if left unchecked and unresolved, can also affect maritime security stability, both nationally and regionally. The maritime security and resilience challenges in ALKI II have increased with the relocation of the capital, which has become the center of gravity, to East Kalimantan. The research in this article aims to identify and analyze the factors influencing the success of maritime security and resilience strategies in ALKI II. The factors used in this research include conceptual components, physical components, moral components, command and control center capabilities, operational effectiveness, command and control effectiveness, and the moderating variables of resource multiplier management and risk management to achieve maritime security and resilience. This study employed a mixed-method research approach. The factors are modeled using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) with WarpPLS 8.0 software. Qualitative data analysis used the Soft System Methodology (SSM). The results of the study indicate that the aforementioned factors significantly influence the success of achieving maritime security and resilience in ALKI II.
This study investigates the performance assessment of methanol and water as working fluid in a solar-powered vapour absorption refrigeration system. This research clarifies the system’s performance across a spectrum of operating conditions. Furthermore, the HAP software was utilized to determine and scrutinize the cooling load, facilitating a comparative analysis between software-based results and theoretical calculations. To empirically substantiate the findings, this research investigates methanol-water as a superior refrigerant compared to traditional ammonia- water and LiBr-water systems. Through experimental analysis and its comparison with previous research, the methanol-water refrigeration system demonstrated higher cooling efficiency and better environmental compatibility. The system’s performance was evaluated under varying conditions, showing that methanol-water has a 1% higher coefficient of performance (COP) compared to ammonia-water systems, proving its superior effectiveness in solar-powered applications. This empirical model acts as a pivotal tool for understanding the dynamic relationship between methanol concentration (40%, 50%, 60%) and system performance. The results show that temperature of the evaporator (5–15 ℃), condenser (30 ℃–50 ℃), and absorber (25 ℃–50 ℃) are constant, the coefficient of performance (COP) increases with increase in generator temperature. Furthermore, increasing the evaporator temperature while keeping constant temperatures for the generator (70 ℃–100 ℃), condenser, and absorber improves the COP. The resulting data provides profound insights into optimizing refrigerant concentrations for improved efficiency.
In this paper, we assess the results of experiment with different machine learning algorithms for the data classification on the basis of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-Score metrics. We collected metrics like Accuracy, F1-Score, Precision, and Recall: From the Neural Network model, it produced the highest Accuracy of 0.129526 also highest F1-Score of 0.118785, showing that it has the correct balance of precision and recall ratio that can pick up important patterns from the dataset. Random Forest was not much behind with an accuracy of 0.128119 and highest precision score of 0.118553 knit a great ability for handling relations in large dataset but with slightly lower recall in comparison with Neural Network. This ranked the Decision Tree model at number three with a 0.111792, Accuracy Score while its Recall score showed it can predict true positives better than Support Vector Machine (SVM), although it predicts more of the positives than it actually is a majority of the times. SVM ranked fourth, with accuracy of 0.095465 and F1-Score of 0.067861, the figure showing difficulty in classification of associated classes. Finally, the K-Neighbors model took the 6th place, with the predetermined accuracy of 0.065531 and the unsatisfactory results with the precision and recall indicating the problems of this algorithm in classification. We found out that Neural Networks and Random Forests are the best algorithms for this classification task, while K-Neighbors is far much inferior than the other classifiers.
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