The primary education sector in Pakistan faces many challenges relating to access to education and quality of resources. This paper evaluates the Educational Voucher Scheme (EVS) in Lahore, Pakistan aimed at increasing access to primary schooling for low income families residing in the underdeveloped areas of Lahore by using the four criteria for evaluating privatization plans in education outl...

Since diffusion of particles as large as vesicles or organelles is constrained by the high viscosity of cytoplasm, directed translocation of these particles from one cytoplasmic site to another must be achieved by cytoskeletal intervention. In most cases, this is achieved by attaching the particle to a molecular motor which then navigates along a microtubule or an actin filament track (Fath and...

Bureaucracies often post staff to better or worse locations, ostensibly to provide incentives. Yet we know little about whether this works, with heterogeneity in preferences over postings impacting effectiveness. We propose a performance-ranked serial dictatorship mechanism, whereby bureaucrats sequentially choose desired locations in order of performance. We evaluate this using a two-year fiel...

the family of najaf ali isfahani were unique in safawid and qajar periods. no family has played a more prominent role in the painting of court life as more as najaf ali’s family. najaf ali in recognition of his work in lacquer painting was foremost among the lacquer painters. under afsharid and  zand  periods, lacquer works further developed and ali ashraf was one of prominent painters in this ...

In region-based image segmentation, two models dominate the field: the Mumford-Shah functional and statistical approaches based on Bayesian inference. Whereas the latter allow for numerous ways to describe the statistics of intensities in regions, the first includes spatially smooth approximations. In this paper, we show that the piecewise smooth Mumford-Shah functional is a first order approxi...

The Mumford-Shah model has been one of the most powerful models in image segmentation and denoising. The optimization of the multiphase Mumford-Shah energy functional has been performed using level sets methods that optimize the Mumford-Shah energy by evolving the level sets via the gradient descent. These methods are very slow and prone to getting stuck in local optima due to the use of the gr...

A diverse body of research has demonstrated that people update their beliefs to a greater extent when receiving good news compared to bad news. Recently, a paper by Shah et al. claimed that this asymmetry does not exist. Here we carefully examine the experiments and simulations described in Shah et al. and follow their analytic approach on our data sets. After correcting for confounds we identi...