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Reading is a commandment from Allah. commanded through al-Qur'an Surah al-Alaq verse 1 which was revealed through the intermediary angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad. Which will be preached to all the human Ummah specifically to the Ummah who always follows the teachings of Islam. Therefore, we must read the Koran, both reading directly (written) and reading with signs of Allah's power. (implied). Which has a variety of discussions ranging from reading the Koran, mentadabburi, practice and practice so as to create a generation of Qur'ani. In this paper using library research with the method of using library data collection techniques (Library Research) that uses various kinds of existing literature such as books, books of hadith, books of interpretation and the Qur'an that will help in using methods, deductive, inductive and comparative. And it was concluded that the command to read in the Koran so that it can be seen that reading is not just a job, not a mere hobby but as a very important command that will underlie all our activities in this world, let alone a prosecutor of knowledge, reading also is a foundation to go to the path that is blessed by Allah.

In the wake of policy, technology, and ideological disruptions in Western higher education, it is in universities’ interests to improve the quality of their learning and teaching to meet changed expectations. In some countries, particularly anglophone countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, the medium for this improvement is often professional development of academic staff provided through a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (GCHE). This paper presents mixed methods research conducted at an Australian University. It addresses the questions of how a GCHE contributes to teaching quality and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) from the perspective of course participants and their educators in the context of a university wide strategy to promote a culture of excellence in learning and teaching. Data and analysis indicate significant benefits to academic staff, their students, and the host institution from completion of a GCHE. However, tensions around academic workloads, compulsion, and some contradictions in espoused educational values and managerialist impositions emerge in these advancements. The educators in the GCHE (academic developers) were sometimes caught in the crossfire. Their reflections on this experience are included in the data and analysis.

The conventional wisdom is that American universities transfer technologies more rapidly and more effectively than their European counterparts. While this appears to be true, it is important to note that there are substantial cultural, legal, and regulatory differences between the two regions, and even within Europe. We believe that European universities can enhance their effectiveness in technology transfer if this function is given more visibility and prestige, enhanced public support, and formal procedures are implemented to facilitate benchmarking. In this paper, we examine some of the differences in university technology transfer in Europe and the U.S., and discuss these new approaches, which have recently been fully supported by the European Commission.

Until very recently, the major focus of research in the field of consumer behavior has been on the selection of products, brands and decision choices primarily in the sphere of marketing. The purpose of this paper was to modify a model developed to measure market share to account for the variables that enter into the selection of a political candidate and predict voting behavior.

All education systems, to a greater or lesser extent, are marked by educational inequalities. Nearly all education systems, again to a greater or lesser extent, have put in place a variety of ‘compensatory’ strategies to help reduce these educational inequalities. These strategies have gone through different phases and enjoyed different degrees of support, but have generally been as much a part of the education system as the inequalities they are designed to address. This paper explores the continuing reinvention and failure of compensatory education strategies. It looks, in particular, at the emergence and limits of recent moves to implement a ‘politics of recognition’ for schools in disadvantaged areas. It argues that children in disadvantaged schools need a ‘politics of redistribution’, but that the mechanisms of distribution and the nature of what it is that is to be redistributed are problematic. Drawing on theory and empirical research, the paper concludes by arguing that, until we have a clearer idea of what it is that we are compensating, compensatory education policies will be doomed to fail.

This paper examines the relation between debt structure and investment, by exploiting differences in secured and unsecured debt holdings. In order to address endogeneity concerns, I exploit two sources of exogenous variation for identification. From the firms' side, the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 represents a negative shock to firms' creditworthiness. From the credit market's perspective, the asset-backed commercial paper market collapse of 2007 caused a temporary shortage of unsecured commercial paper. Each of these shocks to debt structure is analyzed combining a difference-in-differences approach with an instrumental variable estimation (Waldinger (2010)), which allows studying i) substitution patterns among debt types and ii) the impact on investment. Results show that greater access to unsecured debt leads to larger investment. When firms face more restricted access to the unsecured debt market, they substitute toward secured debt, and reduce investment. The reason behind this result is that unsecured debt is more cost-effective in terms of spreads and covenants. These findings suggest that collateral is not key to finance investment, as instead has often been claimed in the literature. Creditworthiness rather than collateral is key to access unsecured debt. Additionally, I shed light on how access to the unsecured debt market relates to the balance sheet and credit channels of monetary policy.

This paper investigated habitual drunk drivers` characteristics by grouping them by the number of DUI records, and customized countermeasures for each group. Theoretical models to accommodate underlying causes for drunk driving, which adopted the form of a path analysis, were developed based on psychological variables. According to the psychological paths to drunk driving, each group showed different defense mechanisms and different senses of guilty, shame and embarrassment. This provided a rationale for differentiating countermeasures for each group. Habitual drunk drivers were found to have a strong propensity of self-justification due to their defense mechanism. Thereby, it would be useless to simply discourage them from drinking and driving. Rather, more active measures such as locking devices, invalidation of driver license, and group counseling should be taken to stop habitual drunk driving. Furthermore, since habitual drunk drivers showed high projection propensity, it is necessary to force them to participate in a sensibility training program, which might entail the amendment of related laws or regulations.

In times of unpredictability and large-scale socioeconomic changes, we need to bring novel concepts and phenomena like solidarity and the act of giving under the focus of leadership, management, and spirituality studies. In this enclosed paper, we address how the interpretations and expectations of the act of giving evolve across the levels of consciousness, also referred as stages of adult development. We apply neo-Piagetian constructive view on the human development. To unpack these regularities, we use a mixed-method research design. The research findings reveal that the interpretations and expectations of the act of giving evolve across the stages of adult development. They exhibit the tendency to move to less conditional, self-serving, and transactional interpretations and expectations behind the act of giving. Because the movement of the adult across stages (levels of consciousness) is a slow pace process - the paper also explores possible interventions that could make people more prone to the less conditional, self-serving, and transactional act of giving regardless of the stage of development. Thus, we study the impact of contemplative prayer on the change in the interpretations and expectations of the act of giving. The impact of contemplative prayer is such that it seems that a person moves to one stage higher when it comes to the interpretations and expectations behind the act of giving.

With the imminent digitalisation of the manufacturing processes of gas turbine components, a large volume of geometric data of as-manufactured parts is being generated. This geometric data can be used in aerodynamic simulations to predict component performance. Both the cost and accuracy of these simulations increase with their fidelity. To efficiently exploit Digital Twin technology, one must therefore understand how realistic the aerodynamic simulations need to be to give useful performance predictions. This paper considers this issue for a sample of scrapped high-pressure turbine rotor blades from a civil aero engine. The measured geometric data was used to build aerodynamic models of varying degrees of realism, ranging from quasi-three-dimensional blade sections for an Euler solver to three-dimensional, multi-passage and multi-stage Reynolds-Averaged-Navier-Stokes models. The flow near the tip of these shrouded blades is sensitive to manufacturing variability and can switch between two quasi-stable horseshoe vortex modes. In general, capacity and exit flow angle can be adequately predicted by three-dimensional, single-passage calculations: averaging single-passage calculations gives a good prediction of the multi-passage behaviour. For efficiency and stage loading, the approach of averaging single-passage calculations is less accurate as the multi-passage behaviour requires an accurate prediction of the horseshoe vortex modes.

This paper examines ethics in international trade from several different ethical perspectives, including consequentialism, utilitarianism, virtue ethics and deontology. The views of Aristotle, Plato, Adam Smith, Bentham, Kant, Pareto, Rawls, Flew, Nozick, Bastiat and others are discussed and contrasted. Flow charts are provided to reflect the utilitarian and rights approaches to trade. Utilitarianism is shown to be structurally deficient for several reasons that cannot be overcome. Antidumping laws and sanctions are shown to be negative-sum games. Antidumping laws are seen for what they are, tools of rent-seeking in which some influential minority seeks to use the powers of government to protect them from competition, which harms the vast majority of the population. Any trade restrictions must necessarily violate someone’s property, contract and/or association rights. The only way to achieve a just trade policy is to allow individuals, and the corporations that represent them, to trade what they have for what they want without government interference. The view that trade deficits are bad and trade surpluses are good is dismantled. The present paper also includes a bibliography on trade, including links to more than 100 studies on trade.

The aim of this paper is to present the category of golf in a new Historical Thesaurus of Scots (HTS). A new project to create a Pilot Historical Thesaurus of Scots (PHiTS) was based at the University of Glasgow. The Historical Thesaurus of Scots is a new resource of Scots containing vocabulary from the twelfth century to the present day, which is organised according to the relationship of synonymy and by semantic category. The thesaurus is based on the semantic information found in an existing digital resource, the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and is entirely digital. The HTS is modelled on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), the first historical thesaurus for any language, which was compiled at the University of Glasgow and published in 2009. In the pilot phase of the project, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and which lasted until September 2015, we explored domains which are lexically abundant in Scots. One such domain was...

Due to the high consumption of resources and energy in the construction sector, the development of resource-efficient and sustainable construction solutions is gaining increasing attention. The awareness of sustainability and resource conservation results in the interest of using natural and renewable materials in contemporary architecture. Timber construction methods offer both constructive and ecological potential for sustainable solutions. From a building physics perspective, the acoustic performance of lightweight buildings, such as those made of timber, presents a challenge. Even if standard requirements are met, the increased low-frequency sound transmission typical for light-weight construction can cause discomfort and is already the subject of questions in building physics, which are currently increasingly extending to timber construction. Within the framework of a holistic approach, this paper compares the problem of acoustic properties, design optimizations and the ecological properties of timber-frame and solid timber construction components. The comparison with heavy materials, such as concrete, shows the relation of acoustic optimization with the change of the environmental profile. In order to establish the interaction between acoustic quality of wooden ceiling constructions and their ecological characteristics, this article aims to demonstrate the potential of materials used in the building sector under ecological aspects considering a life cycle analysis., Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

It is still not well understood how the media affect anti-immigrant party voting. In this paper, we argue and demonstrate empirically that mere exposure to immigration- and crime-related news is positively related to the likelihood that a voter casts a vote for an anti-immigrant party. On the basis of a media content analysis (N = 20,084 news items) in combination with a voter panel survey (N = 17,014 respondents) conducted in 11 European countries we find for several anti-immigrant parties that – ceteris paribus – exposure to news about immigration or crime increases voters' probabilities to vote for these parties. We discuss our findings in light of prior research on issue ownership, and their implications for the role of the mass media in established democracies.

This paper refers to a teaching experiment based on sci-fi stories as teaching material in ESP courses for students of Biology, Microbiology, Geology, Mathematics and Computer Science at the Rio Cuarto National University, Argentina. After a description of the overall teaching situation, the aims and scope of the project as well as the rationale for choosing the genre of science-fiction are discussed. The modifications to the selected texts by shortening and/or simplifying long passages and by adding vocabulary and specific information from reliable scientific sources are illustrated. In a similar vein, some activities are included so as to show that they were intended not only to reinforce language skills but also to foster the development of affective and cognitive processes and promote the exchange of opinions about ethical and scientific issues. The results concerning impact on motivation, skills improvement, and integration of second language reading skills, science concepts and ethical concerns are discussed. Ce travail concerne une expérience éducative fondée sur la science-fiction en tant que matériel d’apprentissage dans des cours d’anglais de spécialité pour des étudiants en biologie, microbiologie, géologie, mathématiques et informatique, à l’Université Nationale de Rio Cuarto, en Argentine. Après une description du contexte éducatif, les objectifs et la portée du projet seront exposés, ainsi que les raisons du choix du genre de la science-fiction. Nous illustrerons ensuite les adaptations apportées aux textes choisis (simplification des passages longs et ajout de vocabulaire et de renseignements précis provenant de sources scientifiques). Nous donnerons l’exemple de quelques activités conçues non seulement pour renforcer les compétences linguistiques mais aussi pour encourager le développement des processus affectifs et cognitifs, et pour stimuler l’échange d’opinions sur des sujets éthiques et scientifiques. Enfin, nous commenterons les résultats de l’impact sur la motivation, l’amélioration et l’acquisition des compétences de lecture et des concepts scientifiques et éthiques dans une langue seconde.

This paper reviews reproduction and mating in ostracodes. Both sexual reproduction by copulation and parthenogenesis occur in ostracodes. The group is large and there is much variation in their reproductive patterns, especially between the two major groups: the podocopans and the myodocopans. The following features of ostracodes are reviewed: (1) life history patterns (egg production and protection, developmental patterns, longevity, seasonality of breeding, sex ratios), (2) reproductive system morphology (including gonads, sperm, seminal vesicles, spcrmatophores and copulatory apparatuses in males, and gonads and seminal receptacles in females), (3) secondary sexual characters (especially in the valves, limbs, and eyes), (4) mating positions and copulation, (5) courtship and precopulatory sexual behavior, and (6) bioluminescent displays.

This study examined patterns of service use and payment methods for HIV/AIDS treatment using evidence from two data sources. The paper also compares the convergence of evidence from a household and exit survey among persons living with HIV/AIDS. The study was undertaken in Akwa Ibom, Anambra and Adamawa states in south-south, south-east and north-east geopolitical zones of Nigeria respectively. Using a household survey and an exit interview, questionnaires were administered to persons living with HIV who were 18 years and above. The health seeking patterns and payment methods were analysed. The findings showed some differences and similarities. In the exit survey, elicited check-up appointments were predominantly three monthly (35.5%) while about half (49.2%) of respondents from the household survey were on two monthly visits. During actual hospital visits, almost all respondents from exit (96.9%) and household survey (95.1%) received routine drugs for HIV/AIDS as appropriate. Out-of-pocket spending was the main method of payment in the two surveys. Variations exist across states in the patterns of treatment seeking and payment methods for HIV/AIDS but the overall findings from household and exit survey yield similar patterns. Hence, either of the methods may be used in a similar setting to obtain valid responses. However, innovative interventions are needed to reduce the incidence of opportunistic infections to limit the additional burden of hospitalization to patients.&nbsp

Fabrication spaces (fab-spaces), such as TechShops or Fab Labs, provide access to sophisticated digital manufacturing technologies to individuals. They could be a new institutional context which influences entrepreneurial behaviour. To understand how this might happen, we used a grounded approach to examine the experience of eight individuals who have benefitted from fab-spaces to push forward their entrepreneurial ventures. This examination led to the development of new hypotheses regarding the potential role of fab-spaces in the entrepreneurial journey. In particular, it has emerged that fab-spaces might affect the entry phase of a new venture by lowering the 'perception of performance' threshold. Fab-spaces also affect post-entry barriers, as they provide an opportunity to entrepreneurs for fast learning, and consequently, to establish effective routines. However, this paper also shows how these positive effects might be moderated by fab-spaces' institutional setup, chiefly their location and cultural characteristics.

Perturbation theory in the three body problem has greatly advanced our ability to understand and model a variety of systems ranging from artificial satellites to stars and from extrasolar planets to asteroid-Jupiter interactions. In a series of papers, we developed an analytical technique for estimating the orbital eccentricity of the inner binary in hierarchical triple systems. The method combined the secular theory with calculations of short period terms. The derivation of the short term component was based on an expansion of the rate of change of the Runge-Lenz vector by using first order perturbation theory, while canonical perturbation theory was used to investigate the secular evolution of the system. In the present work we extend the calculation to the orbit of the outer binary. At the same time, we provide an improved version for some previous results. A post-Newtonian correction is included in our model. Our analytical estimates are compared with numerical and analytical results on the subject and applications to stellar triples and extrasolar planets are discussed.

This paper seeks to examine some of the perceptions and attitudes developed by Muslims in relation to the social conflict of Maluku. This paper argues that there were no single views among Muslims with regard to the conflict. Some Muslim hard-liners in general have demonstrated hostile perceptions and confrontational attitudes toward their perceived enemy. They constructed the conflict as a “religious war,” and demanded that the Indonesian Council of Religious Scholars (MUI) issue a fatwa that would allow Muslims outside Maluku to fight against the enemy in Maluku. The Muslim moderates, on the other hand, tended to avoid religious vocabularies, while attempting to work out peaceful solutions. The semi-official MUI, Nahdlatul Ulama, and Muhammadiyyah perceived the conflict as not religiously driven; they viewed the conflict in a more sophisticated way. They saw no need to wage a religious war and no need to issue a fatwa for a national jihad.

This paper quantitatively investigates the medium- and long-term macroeconomic and distributional consequences of school closures through intergenerational channels. The model economy is a dynastic overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which schools, in the form of public education investments, complement parental investments in producing children's human capital. We find that unexpected school closure shocks have long-lasting adverse effects on macroeconomic aggregates and reduce intergenerational mobility, especially among older children. Higher substitutability between public and private investments induces smaller damages in the aggregate economy and the affected children's lifetime income, while exacerbating negative impacts on intergenerational mobility and inequality.

In dense neutrino systems, such as found in the early Universe, or near a supernova core, neutrino flavor evolution is affected by coherent neutrino-neutrino scattering. It has been recently suggested that many-particle quantum entanglement effects may play an essential role in these systems, potentially invalidating the traditional description in terms of a set of single-particle evolution equations. We model the neutrino system by a system of interacting spins, following an earlier work which showed that such a spin system can in some cases be solved exactly. We extend this work by constructing an exact analytical solution to a more general spin system, including initial states with asymmetric spin distribution and, moreover, not necessarily aligned along the same axis. Our solution exhibits a rich set of behaviors, including coherent oscillations and dephasing and a transition from the classical to quantum regimes. We argue that the classical evolution of the spin system captures the entire coherent behavior of the neutrino system, while the quantum effects in the spin system capture some, but not all, of the neutrino incoherent evolution. By comparing the spin and neutrino systems, we find no evidence for the violation of the accepted one-body description, though the argument involves some subtleties not appreciated before. The analysis in this paper may apply to other two-state systems beyond the neutrino field., Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures

Purpose – Drawing upon the resource dependence theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the board capital diversity influences the explorative innovation of firms, attempting to resolve the inconsistent empirical findings of the effect of outside directors on firm’s R & D strategy. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of Korean manufacturing firms which consider R & D capability to be one of their core competencies, the study uses negative binomial model to test the influence of board capital diversity on explorative innovation. Findings – Results support the value of moderate level of board diversity hypothesis by demonstrating that board capital diversity shows an inverted U-shaped relationship with explorative innovation. The results also suggest that CEO ownership positively moderates the relationship between board capital diversity and firms’ innovative performance. Originality/value – Mainstream research has focussed on the directors’ monitoring role based on agency theory, overlooking the more positive resource provision role. Taking on the concepts of board capital and exploration, the study introduces the notion that outside directors should be selected with a view as vehicles for bringing in valuable expertise and social linkages for the firm’s explorative innovation.

This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the effect of natural resources on under-five mortality in a sample of 50 African countries over the period 1996 to 2018. We also examine the extent to which governance shapes the relationship between natural resources and under-five mortality. Our results show that natural resources have increased under-five mortality. Resource rents also have detrimental effects on child mortality by age, gender, and the three major causes of infant mortality from infectious diseases. However, an extended analysis of different types of natural resources suggests that point resources (such as oil, natural gas and mineral rents) increase under-five mortality, in contrast to the diffuse resources (such as forest rent). We also find that governance mitigates the positive effect of natural resources on child mortality. Corresponding governance policy thresholds that should be attained in order to reverse the positive effects of natural resources on child mortality are provided. We thus suggest an increase in the funds allocated to the health sector from resource rents and encourage efforts to improve governance standards in sampled countries.

Employees’ safety climate perceptions dictate their safety behavior because individuals act based on their perceptions of reality. Extensive empirical research in applied psychology has confirmed this relationship. However, rare efforts have been made to investigate the factors contributing to a favorable safety climate in construction research. As an initial effort to address the knowledge gap, this paper examines factors contributing to a psychological safety climate, an operationalization of a safety climate at the individual level, and, hence, the basic element of a safety climate at higher levels. A multiperspective framework of contributors to a psychological safety climate is estimated by a structural equation modeling technique using individual questionnaire responses from a random sample of construction project personnel. The results inform management of three routes to psychological safety climate: a client’s proactive involvement in safety management, a workforce-friendly workplace created by the project team, and transformational supervisors’ communication about safety matters with the workforce. This paper contributes to the field of construction engineering and management by highlighting a broader contextual influence in a systematic formation of psychological safety climate perceptions.

This paper examines Julian of Norwich’s representation of the Passion of Christ in herRevelation of Love, proposing that Julian reads the body of Christ through a medical hermeneutic which echoes vernacular texts of the spiritual ‘remedy’ genre. The essay’s overarching argument is that Julian’s engagement with humoral theory positions her as a participant in an emerging collective imaginary of vernacular medicine, related to the translation and transmission of medical texts in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Comparing the Latin and Middle English versions of William Flete’sRemedies Against Temptationsand related works, I examine how this spiritual-medical discourse is expressed in vernacular texts contemporary to Julian’s life. I then consider Julian’s own sophisticated invocation of medical theory and practice in her description of the Passion, where she deploys diagnostic markers to depict an ‘ex-sanguination’ of Christ’s perfect disposition. These markers serve to reify the traditional figure of the ‘Man of Sorrows’ with a portrayal of Christ’s body as melancholic, a humoral affliction which reiterates both his suffering and his ‘love-longing’ for humanity. Finally, I show how this medical account functions in Julian’s optimistic theology, offering a reminder of the eternal presence of God’s love even in times of pain and disease.

The purpose of this paper is threefold: first to look at all the classifications of capacity, second to define and analyze subjectively a particular type of capacity to be called "psychometric capacity" and third, to quantify this new concept of capacity in order that it can be measured and analyzed objectively. Capacity is classified in a matrix form, first by its micro and macro aspects and then by type; statutory, optimum and psychometric. Psychometric capacity is that amount of risk to be measured in terms of premium dollars written which an underwriter is willing to take in exchange for the return which he expects to earn from the premium. To measure psychometric capacity, an equation, the hyperbolic tangent function, is used. This function has characteristics which are similar to the utility curve of an individual who is averse to risk. The inputs for this function are obtained from three simple questions rather than a series of complicated questions as in the case of a utility index. The primary use of psychometric capacity is to devise a supply curve for an insurance company so that its operation can be simulated for planning and decision making purposes. In recent years many people associated with the insurance industry have become increasingly concerned with the "capacity problem." Now that profits for the industry are up, this problem has been downgraded in importance. However, several important aspects of this situation remain unsolved. This includes the availability of convenient workable definitions and standard measures for all types of capacity. The purpose of this paper is threefold: first to look at all the classifications of capacity, second to define and analyze subjectively a particular type of capacity to be called "psychometric capacity" and third, to quantify this new concept of capacity in order that it can be measured and analyzed objectively. In order to accomplish the first objective, it is convenient to express capacity in a matrix form. This allows the relationship between various classifications of capacity to come into a clear perspective. Robert A. Hershbarger, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Finance in the University of Missouri-Columbia. From 1959-1966 he was Assistant Supervisor of Insurance at the University of Illinois and from 1966-1969 was Coordinator of Insurance at Northern Illinois University. Before going to his present position, Dr. Hershbarger was Assistant Professor of Finance and Insurance in the University of Rhode Island. This paper was presented at the 1973 Annual Meeting of ARIA. (51 ) This content downloaded from 157.55.39.136 on Thu, 19 May 2016 04:27:46 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 52 The Journal of Risk and Insurance To facilitate this manner of presentation, capacity is first subdivided between its micro and macro aspects. Then the micro subdivision is further broken down into the capacity available for (1) single exposure unit, (2) the line of insurance and (3) the insurer. The macro side is divided between the industry's capacity and alien reinsurance. The types of capacity considered are psychometric, optimum and statutory. These are described in detail in the following sections. Matrix The interrelationships between all the components of capacity become clearer when put in matrix form.' The column headings outline underwriting capacity from the systems point of view, building from the basic exposure unit up to and including alien reinsurance. Figure 1 Capacity Matrix for the Insurance Industry

Many immigrants face obstacles as they navigate through the lengthy and stressful immigration process and its procedures. This project is based on an investigation of an outline discussion forum through which successful immigrants and prospective immigrants exchange information regarding their immigration proceedings. The target groups that were chosen for my inquiry are prospective immigrants from Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data this paper generates valuable knowledge about the first-hand experiences of individuals applying to come to Canada through Quebec's Skilled Workers immigration program. The findings show that although there is plenty of official information offered to prospective immigrants, they still encounter difficulties as they navigate through the immigration process.

In this paper, two methods for fusion of mine detection sensors are presented, based on belief functions and on voting procedures, respectively. Their application is illustrated and compared on a real multisensor data set collected at the TNO test facilities under the HOM 2000 project. This set contains data acquired by metal detector, infrared camera and ground penetrating radar. The data acquisition and preprocessing are briefly described. For some typical cases presented in this data set, the characteristics extracted and used by both methods are discussed, as well as the answers given by each method and possible causes of potential differences in results. Also, it is shown how the different voting schemes compare to belief functions modeling in various situations, based on the knowledge that is put into the belief functions. Since the roots of the two methods are different, i.e. belief functions involve expert knowledge while voting is a simple approach, the explanations involve these differences. Problems that arise when comparing and evaluating different methods are also addressed. Finally, it is shown that both of the methods have their advantages and drawbacks, depending on the measurement and operational conditions. This paper is a result of a joint work at three European institutions towards a common goal: humanitarian demining.

Environmental awareness consists in the way human beings understand the environment. We observe that relation between humans and the natural environment is a concern related to the currently environmental and social. Thus, this paper aims to identify what we call as environmental perception in students from a 6th grade elementary state school in Sorriso, Mato Grosso. For this case study, we used a semi structured questionnaire with open and closed questions for a group of 63 students. After the answer’s analysis phase, for some previously selected questions, were created categories and tabulated, for other questions, data’s were analyzed and demonstrated in charts. As results, as quoted by several authors, we observed that the environmental and sight perception of the students are coherent for schoolchildren in this age, however, the authors reinforce that the development of projects concerning environmental education are still needed., A percepção ambiental consiste na forma como o ser humano compreende o meio ambiente. Observando a relação do homem com o ambiente natural é uma preocupação pertinente ao quadro ambiental e social, o presente trabalho tem como objetivo identificar aquilo que chamamos de percepção ambiental de alunos de 6° ano do ensino fundamental de uma escola estadual de Sorriso, Mato Grosso. Para este estudo de caso, foi utilizado um questionário semiestruturado com perguntas fechadas e abertas, para um grupo de 63 estudantes. Após a análise do conteúdo das respostas, para algumas questões previamente selecionadas, foram criadas categorias e tabeladas, para outras, os dados foram analisados e demonstrados em tabelas. Foi possível observar que a percepção ambiental dos alunos e a visão de meio ambiente é coerente com o citado por diversos autores para estudantes dessa idade, no entanto, reforçam que ainda há uma necessidade de desenvolvimento de projetos voltados à educação ambiental.

In the nineteenth century, temperance movements provided the occasion for a transnational discourse. These conversations possessed an intensity throughout Britain and the United States. In America temperance often became associated with strongly nationalistic Euro-American forms of identity and internal purity. Nonetheless, African American reformers and abolitionists bound themselves to temperance ideals in forming civil societies that would heal persons and provide communal modes of democratic freedom in the aftermath and recovery from chattel slavery. This paper explores the possibilities of temperance as a transnational discourse by considering its meaning in the life and work of the African American author and activist, William Wells Brown. Brown expressed a “creole civilization” that employed the stylistics of the trickster as a unique mode of restraint that revealed a peculiar power of passivity that was able to claim efficacy over one’s life and community. This meaning of temperance diverges from and dovetails with certain European meanings of civilization that were being forged in the nineteenth century. Brown was in conversation with temperance reformers in America, Britain, and Europe. He imagined the possible meaning of temperance in African, Egyptian, Christian, and Islamic civilizations. He speculated upon the possibility of temperance as a defining characteristic of a transnational civilization and culture that would provide spaces for the expression of democratic freedom. Brown reimagined temperance as a form of corporeal restraint that offered a direct and sacred relation to the land, space, people that appeared in between an ethnic nationalist ethos and the European imperialistic civilization.

Despite the numerous economic works on the nature of the firm, only a few studies have clearly taken into account the legal and institutional contexts of the employer-employee relationship. This paper aims at comparing the regulation rules of the employment relationship advocated by contract economic theories to the American and French labor laws in both a positive and normative perspective. From a positive perspective, the contract approaches to the firm – transaction cost economics, the nexus of contracts theory and the modern theory of property rights – are similar to the tradition of American labor law. However, from a normative point of view, it appears that if contract economic theories seem to be partially in line with certain principles of the French labor law, there is a strong inconsistency between these approaches and the role that the French legal system gives to the State and to the law courts (and judges).

This paper presents a new discrete time approach to pricing contingent claims on a risky asset and stochastic interest rates. The term structure of interest rates is modeled so that arbitrage-free bond prices depend on an observable initial forward rate curve rather than an exogenously specified market price of risk. A restricted binomial process is employed to model both interest rates and an asset price. As a result, a complete market valuation formula obtains. By choosing the parameters of the discrete joint distribution such that, in the limit, the discrete model converges to the continuous one, a model is obtained that requires the estimation of only three parameters. The approach is parsimonious with respect to alternative models in the literature and can be used to price contingent claims on any two state variables. The procedure is used to numerically analyze the effects of the volatility of interest rates on the determination of mortgage contract rates.

In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring prices by capping rents: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The German Constitutional Court revoked the policy only one year later. Although successful in lowering rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and close-by markets are per se not clear. This article evaluates the short-term causal supply-side effects in terms of prices, quantities, and landlords’ strategic behavior. We develop a theoretical framework capturing the key features of first-generation rent control policies and Berlin-specific aspects. Using a rich pool of detailed rent advertisements, predictions are tested, and further empirical causal inference techniques are applied for comparing price trajectories of dwellings inside and outside the policy’s scope. Mechanically, advertised rents drop significantly upon the policy’s enactment. A substantial rent gap along Berlin’s administrative border emerges, and rapidly growing rents in Berlin’s (unregulated) adjacent municipalities are observed. Landlords started adopting a hedging strategy insuring themselves against the risk of contractually long-term fixed low rents following a potentially unconstitutional law. Whereas this hedge was beneficial for landlords, the risk was completely borne by tenants. Moreover, the number of available properties for rent dropped significantly, a share of which appears to be permanently lost for the rental sector. This hampers a successful housing search for first-time renters and people moving within the city. Overall, negative consequences for renters appear to outweigh positive ones. This paper was accepted by Victoria Ivashina, finance. Funding: This research benefits from funding by the FNR Luxembourg National Research Fund [CORE Grant 3886] (ASSESS) and the OeNB Anniversary Fund [Grant 18767] (LocHouse). M. Fongoni further thanks the Department of Economics at the University of Strathclyde for support and acknowledges funding from the French government under the “France 2030” investment plan managed by the French National Research Agency [Reference ANR-17-EURE-0020] and from the Excellence Initiative of Aix-Marseille University - A*MIDEX. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4775 .

Immigration has proven to be a major force driving entrepreneurial dynamics. In this paper I investigate how the geographical distribution of immigrants within a given country, and in particular the presence of “enclaves,” affects the relationship between immigration and entrepreneurship. I examine the impact of Polish immigration to Great Britain following the unprecedented migration wave caused by the European Union enlargement in 2004. I address omitted variable concerns by using information on the location of historical Polish military settlements and the occupational composition and growth of Polish immigration in Ireland to construct instruments for enclaves and location choices of immigrants. The econometric results indicate, on the one hand, that immigration does increase immigrant entrepreneurship, but not in existing immigrant enclaves. On the other hand, immigrant entrepreneurs outside enclaves tend to achieve worse growth outcomes than those in enclaves. Further analyses provide an explanation to these findings due to blocked labor markets and to the higher prevalence of “necessity entrepreneurship” outside of enclaves. These results offer new insights to understand the influence of geography on entrepreneurship in the presence of immigration. This paper was accepted by Toby Stuart, entrepreneurship and innovation. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4776 .

In this paper, we have considered Over Design (OD) and Under Design (UD) as two basic forms of negative variability construction that lead to both functional incompleteness and unexpected software quality degradation during design time and run time. To make our approach economically practical to the quality assurance at the whole life cycle of software production process, we aim to ensure that OD and UD are minimized in terms of values under economical goals. These requirements are concretized with the functionality implementation and the quality management of a quality lifecycle.

What a genius, building a home for more than 10 centuries in the Sahara desert with all the necessary amenities to withstand a hyper-arid climate like that of Timimoun and Tiout. During our work missions during the period: 2000-2019 in the south-west of the Sahara, we were interested in the feeding of Timimoun ksours by the foggaras. This study shows that feeding ksar water remains an unresolved problem for the ksouriens of the Sahara. Two success stories in this area of water have been cited in this paper. These are the ksours of Timimoun which are fed by the foggaras. The ksar of Tiout was supplied with water by an ancestral dam. These are the two cases of the Sahara that have benefited from water with zero energy. These two examples demonstrate the ingenuity of the ksours population. If after ten centuries, the oasis have managed to master the architecture of the ksours, against the supply of ksar in water has shortcomings.

This paper examines some positive and normative aspects of the inflation indexation of public and private pensions. The analysis showsthat alternative indexing arrangements may have far less impact on actual patterns of risk bearing than is usually thought to be the case. In so far as inflation indexing has real effects, there is no presumption that they are beneficial. In particular, the pre-commitment aspects of publicindexing may not be efficient. There are sound reasons to believe that voluntarily agreed on, non-indexed private pensions may well be efficient.Non-indexed pensions may result in an efficient allocation of risks given the other assets and liabilities of pension issuers and beneficiaries. In this case, indexation would impede the efficient allocation of risks. In this paper is also developed an ICOLI (interteinporal cost of living index) which is superior to conventional price indices as a way of evaluating the changes in real well being,associated with changes in wealth. The use of this measure has significant implications for the indexation of pensions, and for the question of what assets should be held in pension portfolios.

 Abstract—Boycott effectiveness is highly reliant upon consumer willingness to engage or disengage in the boycott activities. Little research investigates possible strategies that can be applied to positively influence individuals' perspectives about the boycotted brands and perhaps increase their willingness to disengage in boycott activities. This paper theoretically discusses a main relationship between brand credibility and willingness to dis/engagement in brand boycott movements. I propose that when consumers perceive a brand at higher level of credibility, they are less inclined to engage in boycott activities against that brand. Furthermore, this paper discusses the idea that brand endorsement of local events and consumers' perception of brand globalness may moderate the relationship between brand credibility and consumer willingness to dis/engage in boycotts.

Alexander Gebharter (2017) has proposed to use one of the best known Bayesian network (BN) causal discovery algorithms, PC, to identify the constitutive dependencies underwriting mechanistic explanations. His proposal assumes that mechanistic constitution behaves like deterministic direct causation, such that PC is directly applicable to mixed variable sets featuring both causal and constitutive dependencies. Gebharter claims that such mixed sets, under certain restrictions, comply with PC’s background assumptions. The aim of this paper is to show that Gebharter’s proposal incurs severe problems, ultimately rooted in the widespread non-compliance of mechanistic systems with PC’s assumptions. This casts severe doubts on the attempt to implicitly define constitution as a form of deterministic direct causation complying with PC’s assumptions.

The impacts of human trafficking are currently high across the world albeit different policies are designed to combat it. Yet, governments are not working hard practically and jointly as they write strategies and programs on the paper to reduce the impacts of women trafficking. Even though men are victims of human trafficking, scholars agree that women are the most vulnerable to human trafficking. This study describes the socio-economic impacts of human trafficking among the west Asia returnee young women in Ethiopia by taking Oromia Region’s West Shewa zone as a case study. The study used the mixed-method approach. A descriptive case study research design was applied for a detailed description of the socio-economic impacts of human trafficking among west Asia returnee young women. Feminism theory was employed to scrutinize the oppression of young women. The finding reveals that human trafficking caused the divorce of marriage and exposed children to the street because of unwise savings and disagreement of spouses; psychological and physical threats of young women on the way to work, at the workplace and after return; wastage of income as a result of saving money in the wrong place; economic crisis because young women had to pay back the loan to brokers – traffickers – and could not repay the money for lenders; and school dropout. From the finding, it is concluded that although young women exposed to human trafficking by the vision of having their job in the future and the income they could generate in West Asia. They had a dream to improve their lives, they could not realize their dream since they were unable to save the money thereby leading them to social and economic crises. Hence, it is recommended that issues of human trafficking should be incorporated into the school curriculum, at least at the elementary level, so that young women get better awareness about the negative consequences of human trafficking and abstain from traffickers. It is also recommended that young women who work abroad legally should open their formal bank account to save their wages to escape social and economic crises when they return.&nbsp

Gamal Abdel Nasser established the praetorian regime in 1952. Nasser ruled Egypt with the ‘party-state’ system to maintain the ‘social contract’ between the state and the Egyptians. The government thrived on the patrimonial relationship and de-politicization of the population. The ‘Egyptian upheaval’ in 2011 sought the protection of individuals’ rights, equality, and freedom against the military-led praetorian regime. A short-democratic experiment led to the arrival of Islamist majority rule in Egypt under the leadership of President Mohammed Morsi. The liberal-secular oppositions and the military removed President Morsi because Islamists failed to achieve the protesters’ aspirations. Egyptians supported the military’s rule that led to the election of General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi as President of Egypt. Fatah al-Sisi shifted the dynamics of government from ‘party-state’ to ‘ruler-arbiter’ praetorian rule that centralized the authority and power under his leadership through military domination to counter the Islamists and revolutionary aspirations. The research explains the causality behind the Egyptian military's intervention in politics, structuring of the praetorian regime in Egypt; the return of military praetorianism after the removal of President Hosni Mubarak; the rise of the Sisi as ‘ruler-arbiter’ and its implications on the democratization process. The paper’s method is explanatory to study the ‘structural’ (military) and ‘agential’ (Sisi’s rule) factors to determine the causes of establishing the praetorian ‘ruler-arbiter’ type Sisi’s regime. The approach to examine the ruler-arbiter phenomenon is the ‘actor-centric’ instead of the ‘mechanistic’ to understand the praetorian rule in Egypt. The research finds that the rise of the ‘ruler-arbiter’ regime under the leadership of the Sisi, caused by the military-established praetorian authority and President Sisi's choices and decisions, led to the failure of the democratization in Egypt.

Millions of smart contracts have been deployed onto Ethereum for providing various services, which can be invoked through their functions. For this purpose, the caller needs to know the function signature of a callee, which includes its function id and parameter types. Such signatures are critical to many applications focusing on smart contracts, e.g., reverse engineering, fuzzing, attack detection, and profiling. Unfortunately, it is challenging to recover the function signatures from contract bytecode, since neither debug information nor type information is present in the bytecode. To address this issue, prior approaches rely on source code, or a collection of known signatures from incomplete databases or incomplete heuristic rules, which, however, are far from adequate and cannot cope with the rapid growth of new contracts. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that leverages how functions are handled by Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) to automatically recover function signatures. In particular, we exploit how smart contracts determine the functions to be invoked to locate and extract function ids, and propose a new approach named type-aware symbolic execution (TASE) that utilizes the semantics of EVM operations on parameters to identify the number and the types of parameters.Moreover, we develop SigRec, a new tool for recovering function signatures from contract bytecode without the need of source code and function signature databases. The extensive experimental results show that SigRec outperforms all existing tools, achieving an unprecedented 98.9% accuracy within 0.07 seconds. We further demonstrate that the recovered function signatures are useful in attack detection, fuzzing and reverse engineering of EVM bytecode.

In 1520, Segovia's rebel city council besieged the impregnable royal fortress located on a narrow stone outcrop at the far west of the city. The cathedral stood just in front of the fortress, and the rebels demolished part of the church's structure to use it as a secure stronghold. Beyond the physical damage, the revolt demonstrated the peril posed by the proximity of cathedral and castle. Unsurprisingly, it was soon decided that the cathedral would be relocated to the city's main square. Deserted by its canons and chaplains, the old church was a ruin by 1562, while its younger counterpart was slowly reaching completion. Neglect coexisted with preservation: the first step in the construction of a new cathedral was the decision to move the building's cloister—stone by stone—from the old to the new site. This paper discusses the relocation, exploring its denouement and contextualizing it within pre-modern perspectives on heritage and architecture.

Architecture exists in time. This statement may appear to be a truism but this is not the way in which architecture is typically conceived. It is not acceptable to conceive of architecture within the abstract context of stasis, nor to consider the architectural project ‘finished’ upon the completion of construction. Praxis must engage deeply with the dynamic conception of architecture within an evolving context, throughout the life of a building in time, and as animated through occupation and constructive perception. This paper provides a theoretical overview of time as it relates to architecture and philosophy. An architecture of time designs the conditions for interaction between user and environment, resists the crutch of formal autonomy, and finds novelty through engagement and the faith in the ability of the user to appropriate the space in unexpected and serendipitous ways. In this way architecture becomes a medium for the creative agency of time.

Screening mammograms is the gold standard for detecting breast cancer early. While a good amount of work has been performed on mammography image classification, especially with deep neural networks, there has not been much exploration into the confidence or uncertainty measurement of the classification. In this paper, we propose a confidence measure-based evaluation metric for breast cancer screening. We propose a modular network architecture, where a traditional neural network is used as a feature extractor with transfer learning, followed by a simple Bayesian neural network. Utilizing a two-stage approach helps reducing the computational complexity, making the proposed framework attractive for wider deployment. We show that by providing the medical practitioners with a tool to tune two hyperparameters of the Bayesian neural network, namely, fraction of sampled number of networks and minimum probability, the framework can be adapted as needed by the domain expert. Finally, we argue that instead of just a single number such as accuracy, a tuple (accuracy, coverage, sampled number of networks, and minimum probability) can be utilized as an evaluation metric of our framework. We provide experimental results on the CBIS-DDSM dataset, where we show the trends in accuracy-coverage tradeoff while tuning the two hyperparameters. We also show that our confidence tuning results in increased accuracy with a reduced set of images with high confidence when compared to the baseline transfer learning. To make the proposed framework readily deployable, we provide (anonymized) source code with reproducible results at https://git.io/JvRqE., Comment: To be presented at the IEEE ICHI 2020

In this paper, we highlight three issues that limit performance of machine learning on biomedical images, and tackle them through 3 case studies: 1) Interactive Machine Learning (IML): we show how IML can drastically improve exploration time and quality of direct volume rendering. 2) transfer learning: we show how transfer learning along with intelligent pre-processing can result in better Alzheimer's diagnosis using a much smaller training set 3) data imbalance: we show how our novel focal Tversky loss function can provide better segmentation results taking into account the imbalanced nature of segmentation datasets. The case studies are accompanied by in-depth analytical discussion of results with possible future directions.

The Canadian Federation of Municipalities has declared cities the “unofficial welcome wagon” for new Canadians. Research suggests, however, that they embrace settlement and integration policies to varying degrees. While scholarly examinations of municipal policies include analyses of corporate communications strategies, efforts by city governments to reach residents through ethnocultural news media have received little attention. To address that gap, this study investigates why the suburban community of Brampton, Canada adopted one of the most proactive ethnic media strategies in the country in 2015 when, just a decade earlier, it was for the most part unresponsive to the needs of its burgeoning immigrant population. As a starting point, the case study uses the determinants of municipal responsiveness identified by Kristin R. Good (2009) in Municipalities and Multiculturalism: The Politics of Immigration in Toronto and Vancouver. Employing a mixed methods approach, it concludes that rapid demographic change, the emergence of an activist political leadership, and efforts to reduce friction between newcomers and other residents influenced Brampton’s communications policy over time. The case study identifies challenges associated with adopting an ethnic media strategy, including issues related to translation and the relative lack of sophistication of some ethnic media outlets. Furthermore, it demonstrates that reaching out to ethnocultural communities via ethnic media requires more than just distributing news releases in English. Translation of these releases has the potential to increase municipal news coverage in ethnic media, the paper suggests, if only because it makes it easier for smaller news organizations to report on such matters

Transnationality and Modes of Production in Theatre Studies - This paper presents an argument in favor of a transnational approach which also examines modes of production within theatre studies in Brazil. Drawing on discussions that took place in July, 2018, at the Philanthropy, Development and the Arts international conference in Munich, we point to new possibilities that may enrich various fields of theatre research. In several cases discussed at the conference and summarized in this article, seemingly local issues and practices revealed their recurrence in other parts of the world (Brazil included), thus demonstrating their interconnection within transnational networks and circuits. In conclusion, it is suggested that the study of theatre from the perspective of transnationality and modes of production may also constitute an action in defense of research, and of the cultural milieu itself, particularly in countries that are living through reactionary periods, as is the case for Brazil today. RÉSUMÉ Transnationalité et Modes de Production dans les Études Théâtrales - Cet article examine l’importance d’une vision qui est transnationale et englobe en même temps les modes de production du théâtre dans les études théâtrales au Brésil. Basé sur un compte rendu des discussions qui ont eu lieu en juillet 2018 lors de la conférence internationale Philanthropy, Development and the Arts à Munich, l’article présente de nouvelles possibilités pour les différents domaines de la recherche théâtrale. Dans plusieurs exemples discutés lors de la conférence et résumés dans cet article, les problèmes et pratiques qui semblaient locaux se sont présentés comme récurrents dans plusieurs pays, parmi lesquels le Brésil, démontrant leur connexion avec les réseaux et les flux transnationaux. Enfin, il est suggéré que l’étude du théâtre sous l’angle de la transnationalité et des modes de production peut constituer une action de défense de la recherche et du milieu culturel, en particulier dans des pays en proie à des processus réactionnaires comme le Brésil. RESUMO Este artigo investiga a importância de um olhar que seja transnacional e ao mesmo tempo inclua os modos de produção nos estudos teatrais no Brasil. A partir do relato das discussões que ocorreram em julho de 2018 na conferência internacional Philanthropy, Development and the Arts, em Munique, o artigo levanta novas possibilidades para os diversos campos da pesquisa teatral. Em vários exemplos apresentados na conferência e sintetizados no presente artigo, questões e práticas que pareciam locais se mostraram como recorrentes em distintos países, inclusive no Brasil, evidenciando sua conexão com redes e fluxos transnacionais. Por fim, é sugerido que o estudo do teatro pela perspectiva da transnacionalidade e dos modos de produção pode constituir uma ação de defesa à pesquisa e ao meio cultural, principalmente em países que passam por processos reacionários como o Brasil.

This paper explores what it means to live together in the city through a focus on home and urban public space in East London. It develops a conceptual framework for understanding home as a site of dis/connection – both connected to and disconnected from – the wider estate, street, neighbourhood and city. Drawing on a series of home-city biographies with residents living on different housing estates, we explore what makes a city ‘liveable’ for its diverse residents within and across domestic and public spaces; how home-city dis/connections shape ideas and experiences of living together; and the importance of sensory, material and social contexts of home in shaping residents’ dis/connections with neighbours and the wider neighbourhood. By taking seriously the practices, experiences and imaginings of home as a site of urban dis/connection, we argue that urban scholars can gain a fuller picture of what it means to live together in the city, and understand and challenge inequalities, exclusions and prejudices that shape urban lives.

While Canada has long criminalized aspects of sex work, the specific act of purchasing sexual services was not against the lawper se.In 2014, however, the then Conservative government implemented new legislation targeting sex work clients. Given the criminalization and persistent stigmatization of their activities, assessing clients’ changing actions, perceptions, and knowledge of the new legislation is challenging. We thus turned to a major Canadian online sex work review forum to examine postings on forum threads. This paper examines the risk knowledge practices in which clients engage as they try to make sense of the modified legal regime and avoid new legal risks. Our findings illuminate clients’ varied understandings of their own criminalization.