The research aims to harness spatial interpolation techniques to produce maps with a high level of perceptual accuracy in representing the population data of the study area. This is achieved after exploring the statistical and spatial nature of the databases used, analyzing them, and determining their distribution using a variety of spatial data exploration tools available within the GIS (Geographic Information Systems) environment. These tools contribute to evaluating the characteristics, distribution, and analysis of data, including testing data distribution, identifying its (...) direction, and uncovering its spatial correlations. This highlights the importance of the study and understanding the distribution pattern of the population data in the study area, thereby facilitating the preparation of future that serve spatial organization by building spatial models for the numerical distribution of the data for age groups: young, middle-aged, and elderly, at the level of administrative units of the study area by relying on the inductive approach and the quantitative analysis approach. This is done using Geostatistical Analysis methods within the concept of spatial interpolation in GIS. The research also seeks to predict the population maps for Thi Qar Governorate by comparing spatial interpolation methods, namely Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) and Simple Kriging (SK). The study concluded, after verifying the accuracy of the results using the Cross-Validation curve, that the Simple Kriging (SK) method is the most accurate model in spatial prediction of population data for representing the data of the young age group in the study area, as it had the lowest Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 10.012. It was followed by the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) method for representing the data of the elderly age group with an RMSE of 350.48. This indicates that the use of statistical criteria improves the accuracy of spatial interpolation and that the spatial prediction of the population data for the study area using the Simple Kriging (SK) method was more accurate than the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) method based on statistical indicators. (shrink)

The professions have focused considerable attention on developing codes of conduct. Despite their efforts there is considerable controversy regarding the propriety of professional codes of ethics. Many provisions of professional codes seem to exacerbate disputes between the profession and the public rather than providing a framework that satisfies the public''s desire for moral behavior.After examining three professional codes, we divide the provisions of professional codes into those provisions which urge professionals to avoid moral hazard, maintain professional courtesy and serve the (...) public interest. We note that whereas provisions urging the avoidance of moral hazard are uncontroversial, the public is suspicious of provisions protecting professional courtesy. Public interest provisions are controversial when the public and the profession disagree as to what is in the public interest. Based on these observations, we conclude with recommendations regarding the content of professional codes. (shrink)

Phenomenal Conservatism is an approach to epistemological justification that, based on "appearances" and "seemings" and in line with the theory of common sense epistemology, attempt to set up an internal and non-inferential justification, at least for some kind of beliefs. According to this view, justification and non-justification have a direct relationship with the mental state of the agent. Based on this assumption that “Things are as they seem”, phenomenal conservatism offers its central idea that if, for an agent, something seems (...) to be true -and there is no defeater for that until doubting in - that agent thereby has at least some justification for believing that. In this article, we will interpret this new approach with an empathetic attitude and, in addition to explaining its main components, we will effort to answer the most important objections of phenomenal conservatism and show that this view is a significant approach to the justification and rationality of human beliefs. (shrink)

The influence of popular management gurus derives from two factors: the willingness of their management audience to outsource or subcontract thinking and the ability of gurus to deliver apparently relatively simple messages to an audience that probably does not want or need to think deeply, while retaining their leadership status. As managers look to management gurus to provide them only with reasons to be, to behave or act as opposed to reasons to think, per se, the nature of a popular (...) guru’s output can never address the unseen innovating process which true leadership demands. As a result, popular management gurus are not in a position to promote insights, awakening or higher consciousness in others and cannot fulfil the traditional raison d’être of a guru as an enlightened being. The output of popular management gurus probably communicates more about their audience than it usefully communicates about the guru’s thinking. (shrink)

Este ensayo aborda el curioso desdén que muchos originalistas muestran respecto de la Enmienda Decimocuarta a la Constitución estadounidense. De acuerdo a las premisas teóricas originalistas, el análisis del texto, la historia y la estructura de esta Enmienda deberían ocupar un lugar central en las discusiones sobre derechos incorporados, acción afirmativa y federalismo; sin embargo, en estas discusiones los originalistas la minimizan, como lo hacen, en general, con el período de la Reconstrucción. El artículo sugiere que tanto la Enmienda como (...) la Reconstrucción representan para ellos una historia poco útil, en comparación con la del momento de la Fundación, por varias razones: las enmiendas de la Reconstrucción fueron en gran parte fracasos en su tiempo; el lenguaje abstracto de la Enmienda XIV no facilita la resolución de las controversias actuales sobre su significado, y la Reconstrucción se asocia en la memoria nacional con un momento doloroso de división y guerra civil. Estas limitaciones, observa el autor, sugieren que el originalismo en la práctica es un proyecto moral, tanto o más que un proyecto hermenéutico. (shrink)

Islam; doctrines; Islamic ethics; Islamic preaching.

Feminist scholarship on women in religious and right-wing social and political movements has moved from a reductive focus on causal or motivational factors to more sophisticated analyses explicating processes of agency and subject formation. With the aim of expanding and deepening this conceptual space, I will discuss some of my interactions with a group of women in the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan, as we attempted to explore the complex meanings of ‘the modern’ that informed the self-understanding of my interviewees. My work (...) corroborates some of the contemporary scholarship on what is referred to as Political Islam in arguing that Islamist movements in Muslim societies are also the catalysts of modernization, rather than simply its interlocutors. This article argues that these processes of social and political organizing entail particular interrogations and the reconstituting of identities in ways that blur the line between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’. On the one hand, we need to understand Jamaat women's self-construction as religious or pious women; on the other hand, we must grasp the specificity of their claims to act as modern subjects situated in the time of political and cultural modernity. (shrink)

In regards to the international response to the situation in Libya, the NATO response can be regarded as a potential good.

Accurate and reliable prediction of Perfobond Rib Shear Strength Connector is considered as a major issue in the structural engineering sector. Besides, selecting the most significant variables that have a major influence on PRSC in every important step for attaining economic and more accurate predictive models, this study investigates the capacity of deep learning neural network for shear strength prediction of PRSC. The proposed DLNN model is validated against support vector regression, artificial neural network, and M5 tree model. In the (...) second scenario, a comparable AI model hybridized with genetic algorithm as a robust bioinspired optimization approach for optimizing the related predictors for the PRSC is proposed. Hybridizing AI models with GA as a selector tool is an attempt to acquire the best accuracy of predictions with the fewest possible related parameters. In accordance with quantitative analysis, it can be observed that the GA-DLNN models required only 7 input parameters and yielded the best prediction accuracy with highest correlation coefficient and lowest value root mean square error. However, the other comparable models such as GA-M5Tree, GA-ANN, and GA-SVR required 10 input parameters to obtain a relatively acceptable level of accuracy. Employing GA as a feature parameter selection technique improves the precision of almost all hybrid models by optimally removing redundant variables which decrease the efficiency of the model. (shrink)

Taking the Hagar story as the central biblical resource to address the particular plight of Black women—a plight that reckons with patriarchal and White supremacist forces that desire its enclosure—Delores Williams challenges both the traditional understanding of atonement theory which embraces the Cross as salvific and Black liberation theologies’ apocalyptical conceptions of a mighty liberating God. This article seeks to read Delores Williams closely to take seriously her theological development through literature more broadly and her soteriological critiques of the Cross (...) specifically. A rereading of Williams will provide the grounds for continuing the debate of the Cross’s significance within Black theological thought at large. Analyzing Williams’ soteriological critiques will allow me to offer a reading of the Cross that ultimately relies on Williams’ emphatic rejection. Such a rejection of the Cross is necessary for understanding how Black Christianity centers the Cross in order to reject it, as it is intended to be. (shrink)

This study examines the contestability of “relevance” as an abstract construction with no fixed meaning when applied, and questions its usage in the research quality debate. It finds that different research agendas and approaches have their own idiosyncratic logic and that any logic has its own criteria for assessing quality which cannot be applied to assess the quality of others. This is illustrated by delineating practitioner-led research from academic-led research and by comparing and contrasting research perspectives as examples. The research (...) quality debate becomes meaningless when it is limited to a singular research agenda or approach as in practice these are invariably combined. Having said this, however, every agenda and approach can be argued to be legitimate as potentially each can find what otherwise cannot be noticed. As a result, this study challenges the conventional unitarist wisdom that conceptualises knowledge as commodity, and suggests instead that heterogeneity, linked to tolerance and relative independence of means and mind, free from the control or influence of others to enable critical distance from context and status quo and facilitate judgement, is the key to those seeking a meaningful research quality debate that acknowledges tolerance of the diversity of knowledge, difference, contestation and struggle. Although such heterogeneity may at first appear to add confusion rather than clarity, without first looking at this heterogeneity it is not possible to develop a dialogue, in the context of the present neo-liberal post-political drift that emphasises consensus, the annulment of dissensus and diverts attention from relationships of power, through which a positive contribution can be made to the research quality debate. (shrink)

Organisations are socially constructed in that their members are socialised in a world of language that enables them to understand, communicate and share. They use language to create patterns that help them make choices and relate their actions to the patterns they create and the choices they make. The world of organisations and their management is, therefore, a matter of language. In this world, rationality plays a fundamental role in legitimising choices together with the actions that express them. This study (...) suggests that the limited expressive resources of a dominant version of rationality limit the world of management in a way that undermines its legitimacy and that it is possible for management to break free from this limited world by learning to think in other languages that express contrasting versions of rationality. (shrink)

Moving beyond poetry’s affective and semantic powers, south Indian rubrics of poetic analysis often examined poetry’s metaphysical dimensions. The poeticians of the Telugu country developed an especially rich body of work in this field, elaborating an analysis of auspiciousness in poetry and classifying minor genres of praise poetry called cāṭuprabandha wherein auspiciousness was particularly important. This article focuses on one witness to that tradition, the Lakṣaṇadīpikā of Gaurana. Previous scholars have cited the Lakṣaṇadīpikā as exemplifying this particular strand of thinking (...) in poetics in Andhra and contiguous regions. This paper concentrates on the metaphysical evaluation of poetry offered in the Lakṣaṇadīpikā as a way of detailing its sources and its place in the history of Sanskrit poetics more generally. Gaurana’s work is shown here to constitute an attempt at revising and reinforcing this analytical method by linking it to wider Sanskritic traditions of scholarship and ritual, specifically tantra and astrology. Ultimately, the paper argues that Gaurana’s project was meant to support a larger social argument for brahmanical prerogatives in the domain of poetic work. (shrink)

Drawing on the historical insight of Emer de Vattel to build on the contemporary arguments of Michael Walzer and David Luban, this article develops a model of sufficient risk as a necessary condition for anticipatory war to be deemed self-defence. This model holds that an anticipatory war may constitute legitimate self-defence (as opposed to aggression) when it aims to forestall a threat that poses a sufficient risk to the anticipating state. This is the point where a threat is both sufficiently (...) likely to materialise and sufficiently large to pose a grave risk. Due to crucial problems with the imminence condition for self-defence, I propose that the sufficient risk condition subsume that of imminence. The power of this model lies in its ability to encapsulate all factors raised by previous authors that are morally relevant specifically for anticipatory wars and categorise them as contributing to the judgement of the likelihood of the threat materialising and/or the magnitude of the potential threat. This parsimonious categorisation increases the accuracy and clarity of the moral theory on anticipatory war, making it more robust to change in the types of threats faced by states, and less ripe for manipulation to justify immoral wars. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the normative teachings of Islam. Justice, honesty, and public welfare are the pillars of Islamic business ethics. These values have two major roots: (1) belief in and devotion to Allah (God), and (2) the earthly trusteeship that grounds moral accountability. The business values of productivity, hard work, and excellence are encouraged. However, at the heart of various injunctions relating to business transactions are the imperatives of lawfulness, honesty, and fair play. Products or services must be lawful, (...) and produced in lawful ways causing no undue harm to others or to the environment. Competition, distribution, and consumption must be lawful as well. Lawful behavior is enforced by consciousness of Allah, supportive social norms, and government control. Islamic norms may not be uniformly or strictly followed, yet they provide a helpful background to practitioners andresearchers. (shrink)

Tourism is a complex phenomenon in scale and scope. Interrelated with other systems from the local to the global, its impacts and effects transcend borders, making coordination and regulation highly challenging. Global mobilities and neoliberal globalization further complicate enabling just and sustainable tourism. New forms of governance are needed to address global threats like climate change and pandemics. This paper explores Immanuel Kant’s transcendental perspective on “perpetual peace” and traces his evolving cosmopolitanism over a decade of essays. We then turn (...) towards what appears to be a contradictory, immanent posthumanist approach from Gilles Deleuze. Radicalizing Kant using Deleuze leads to a different concept of ‘normativity’, grounded in an ideal of perpetual self-critique and self-creation. Such a critical, affirmative ethic opens possibilities for situated approaches to cosmopolitan rights and global justice, rather than global regulatory structures to coordinate effective and proactive actions. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court’s approach to human rights is a global outlier. In conceiving of rights adjudication in categorical terms rather than embracing proportionality analysis, the Court limits its ability to make the kinds of qualitative judgments about rights application required to adjudicate claims of disparate impact, social and economic rights, and horizontal effects, among others. This approach, derivative of a private-law model of dispute resolution, sits in tension with the rights claims typical of a pluralistic jurisdiction with a mature (...) rights culture, in which litigants more often disagree, reasonably, about the scope of rights rather than deny that others have them at all. In order to overcome the mismatch between the nature of the rights claims the Court faces and its anachronistic technology of adjudication, it will need not only to adopt a form of proportionality analysis but it will also need to adjust the ways in which it receives and assesses empirical social facts and it will need to broaden its remedial toolkit to include, for example, suspensions of invalidity. While proportionality is far from perfect, its flaws are anticipated by the challenges of constitutional democracy itself under conditions of pluralism. (shrink)

This article explores a phenomenon found in Berber whereby the extraction of dative arguments (of verbs, nouns and prepositions) gives rise to two occurrences of wh. One is a wh-word located in Spec,C and the other a wh-clitic in the dative form located in C (wh-clitic-doubling). Close examination reveals that the wh-word in Spec,C functions as an operator base-generated in its scope position and the dative wh-clitic in C provides it with a derivational link to the variable in the dative (...) position it binds (wh-Cliticisation). Wh-clitic-doubling and wh-Cliticisation amount to direct evidence for Cliticisation as a derivational interpretive mechanism of Grammar that obviates the need for indexing (Lebeaux 1983, Chomsky 1986, 1995). They also provide evidence for the conclusion in Kayne (1989) that Cliticisation is an instance of Head-Movement, more precisely, feature-based Head-Movement. (shrink)

This paper aims at elaborating a very special topic relative to the medieval philosophy; particularly, the question of noetic as was dealt with by a philosopher of the Islamic occident. Although the article is but the first part of the whole work, it still reveals the originality and the innovative tendency brought about this philosopher. What is most essential in Ibn Bajja’s noetic is the absence of intellect in power and the presence of intellect in act, in the design of (...) intellects, in addition the substance of the cogitative faculty is the intermediate spiritual forms. It is here where shows up the most important aspect of his originality; the forms which are closer to the nature of the intelligible, by virtue of the division into two parts: 1. By anteriority with regard to who/what resembles the sensible. 2. By posteriority with regard to who/what resembles the species/the kind. (shrink)

These have been passed down from generation to generation. This book invites readers of any religion or none to drink from the wellspring of Islamic spirituality and use its wisdom to nourish their own spiritual path.

This article analyzes the unpublished dialogue between James Baldwin and Reinhold Niebuhr where they discussed the role of the Christian church in the wake of six child murders in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. On that catastrophic day—one that is impossible to forget—the Ku Klux Klan bombed The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and two black boys were subsequently shot and killed. In the wake of that violence, this article will show that for Baldwin, the dynamite that exploded the face (...) of the “alabaster Christ” from the stained-glass window presents an opportunity for not only a new depiction of Jesus in terms of presentation—but more significantly—a brand-new Christology rooted in black liberation. Such a reading provides us with an unusual constructive theological position offered by Baldwin, especially once it is read alongside a public essay written by the Association of Artists for Freedom advocating for Black Christmas. (shrink)

Respect for patient autonomy has served as the dominant ethical principle of genetic counselling, but as we move into a genomic era, it is time to actively re-examine the role that this principle plays in genetic counselling practice. In this paper, we argue that the field of genetic counselling should move away from its emphasis on patient autonomy and toward the incorporation of a more balanced set of principles that allows counsellors to offer clear guidance about how best to obtain (...) or use genetic information. We begin with a brief history of how respect for patient autonomy gained such emphasis in the field and how it has taken on various manifestations over time, including the problematic concept of nondirectiveness. After acknowledging the field's preliminary move away from nondirectiveness, we turn to a series of arguments about why the continued dominance of patient autonomy has become untenable given the arrival of the genomic era. To conclude, we describe how a more complete set of bioethical principles can be adapted and used by genetic counsellors to strengthen their practice without undermining patient autonomy. (shrink)

Some aspects of the Schrödinger equation in quantum field theory are considered in this article. The emphasis is on the Schrödinger functional equation for Yang-Mills theory, arising mainly out of Feynman's work on (2+1)-dimensional Yang-Mills theory, which he studied with a view to explaining the confinement of gluons. The author extended Feynman's work in two earlier papers, and the present article is partly a review of Feynman's and the author's work and some further extension of the latter. The primary motivation (...) of this article is to suggest that considering the Schrödinger functional equation in the context of Yang-Mills theory may contribute significantly to the solution of the confinement and related problems, an aspect which, in the author's opinion, has not received the attention it deserves. The relation of this problem with certain others such as those of quarks, superconductivity, and quantum gravity is considered briefly, together with certain basic aspects of the formalism that may be of interest in their own right, especially for the beginner. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Islam is one of the major religions, the frameworks of this faith are yet to be fully understood. As a consequence, it is being confused with activities contrary to its teachings. Islam has an elaborate treatment for almost every aspect of life including the affairs of business. Business is an acceptable and dignified occupation, which has to be conducted within the given frameworks. Islam encourages the creation, acquisition and consumption of wealth, and the fulfilling of certain (...) conditions in so doing. Wealth is held in trust as a gift from God. The terms of reference of this trust are to be complied with. Ethical principles do play a major role in shaping the behavior of a Muslim, in or out of business. In an era of globalization, the need for a better understanding of the premises of Islamic faith cannot be overemphasized. (shrink)

In Pakistan, as in many other societies, politico-religious movements or so-called Islamist fundamentalist movements are becoming an important site for women's activism as well as the harnessing of such activism to promote agendas that seem to undermine women's autonomy. This has become a concern for a growing feminist literature which from a variety of political and theoretical positions seeks to understand and explain the subject-position of Muslim women as politico-religious activists. This paper attempts a deconstructive reading of texts by leading (...) Pakistani feminist scholars as they attempt the difficult process of steering between fundamentalism and Orientalism in their accounts of ‘fundamentalist’ women in the political ideological space of Pakistan. (shrink)