Migration and Islamic Ethics

Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship contains various cases of migration movements in the Muslim world from ethical and legal perspectives to argue that Muslim migration experiences can offer a new paradigm of how the religious and the moral can play a significant role in addressing forced migration and displacement Readership: All interested in migration movements including residence, naturalization, and citizenship; Islamic Ethics and Islamic legal debates on movements in and out of the Muslim world, including asylum seekers and refugees

Migration and Islamic Ethics

Migration and Islamic Ethics, Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship contains various cases of migration movements in the Muslim world from ethical and legal perspectives to argue that Muslim migration experiences can offer a new paradigm of how the religious and the moral can play a significant role in addressing forced migration and displacement Readership: All interested in migration movements including residence, naturalization, and citizenship; Islamic Ethics and Islamic legal debates on movements in and out of the Muslim world, including asylum seekers and refugees

A System for Deduction-based Formal Verification of Workflow-oriented Software Models

The work concerns formal verification of workflow-oriented software models using deductive approach. The formal correctness of a model's behaviour is considered. Manually building logical specifications, which are considered as a set of temporal logic formulas, seems to be the significant obstacle for an inexperienced user when applying the deductive approach. A system, and its architecture, for the deduction-based verification of workflow-oriented models is proposed. The process of inference is based on the semantic tableaux method which has some advantages when compared to traditional deduction strategies. The algorithm for an automatic generation of logical specifications is proposed. The generation procedure is based on the predefined workflow patterns for BPMN, which is a standard and dominant notation for the modeling of business processes. The main idea for the approach is to consider patterns, defined in terms of temporal logic,as a kind of (logical) primitives which enable the transformation of models to temporal logic formulas constituting a logical specification. Automation of the generation process is crucial for bridging the gap between intuitiveness of the deductive reasoning and the difficulty of its practical application in the case when logical specifications are built manually. This approach has gone some way towards supporting, hopefully enhancing our understanding of, the deduction-based formal verification of workflow-oriented models.Comment: International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Studies on the molecular regulation of nutrient supplementation in carnivorous Nepenthes

All organisms on earth are forced by environmental challenges for millions of years to either adapt, or escape from inhospitable habitats. Being sessile organisms, adaptation is the only alternative for plants. High plasticity in plant metabolism, biochemical and signaling pathways, and morphological variations promote the performance of plants under stressful environmental conditions. Plants also successfully co-exist with other organisms such as microbes or insects. As an adaptation mechanism for nutrient limited habitats and soil, carnivory has developed from plant-insect interactions. Most terrestrial carnivorous plants such as Nepenthes, Dionaea and Drosera use diverse trapping organs; however they all specialize in insect prey digestion to have access to prey-derived nutrients. Carnivorous plant of the genus Nepenthes with over 120 species uses so-called pitchers, which are metamorphosed leaf organs with digestive fluid inside. Identified protein compositions of the digestive fluid are categorized in the families of pathogenesis related (PR) proteins. Only few species of Nepenthes developed mutualistic relationships with mammals for nitrogen supplementation allowing further coprophagous specialization. Here, we show the following results: Insect prey as well as chitin is able to first induce jasmonate phytohormones, which in turn can induce genes of digestive enzymes such as a chitinase and a protease, nepenthesin. For the latter, prey- and chitin-induced activity was also detected in the pitcher fluid. Moreover, external jasmonic acid application was sufficient to induce proteolytic activity of the fluid, indicating the important role of jasmonate signaling in prey-digestion related gene expression. Putative cis-acting regulatory elements are observed on the promoter regions of selected PR genes of the digestive fluid proteins. Some of those potential promoter elements are known to be involved in plant defense regulations. Apart from prey-derived nutrient acquisition, Nepenthes was also capable to metabolize 15N-enriched urea and following which the nitrogen is distributed within the plant. Exactly this ability of the plant, which is facilitated by the enzyme urease, allowed further specialization, namely coprophagy. In such case, the plants benefit from animal defecation. Urease genes from coprophagous and carnivorous Nepenthes species were cloned and functionally expressed. A comprehensive phylogenetic analysis for eukaryotic ureases, including Nepenthes and five other carnivorous plants taxa, identified them as canonical ureases and reflects the plant phylogeny. Overall, the results of my thesis demonstrate the ability of Nepenthes plants to shape existing pathways in favor of carnivory or even coprophagy. It, furthermore, confirms the hypothesis that carnivory has evolved from plant defense strategies and that this lifestyle seems to have evolved convergently in the different taxa of carnivorous plants

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationChina’s retail sector has undertaken tremendous transformation since its opening to foreign investment in 1992. Retail transnational corporations have expanded rapidly in this emerging market. Yet relatively little is known about how they have embedded in the Chinese market and expanded spatially and temporally. China has experienced unprecedented urbanization since the onset of economic reform in 1978. Dramatic land use and land cover (LULC) change and urban expansion have taken place in the past three decades. Detailed time-series analysis of LULC change and urban growth in Chinese cities is still scant. This dissertation focuses on the expansion of foreign hypermarket retailers in China and the urban growth in one Chinese city, Suzhou. This research analyzes the penetration strategy and local embeddedness of foreign hypermarket retailers, examines their spatial inequality and dynamics at different geographical levels, and identifies their location determinants through binary logistic regression models. This study applies random forest classification to multitemporal Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images of Suzhou for LULC change analysis, employs landscape metrics and Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis to investigate urban growth patterns, and develops global and local logistic regression models to identify determinants of urban growth. The results indicate that spatiotemporal expansion of foreign hypermarket retailers has been largely dictated by the gradual liberalization policy of the Chinese government. Their local embeddedness has been impacted by both home and host economies. Relative gaps in foreign hypermarkets among three macro regions are narrowing while absolute gaps are widening. Provincial foreign hypermarket distribution has shown significant clustering in the Yangtze River Delta since 2005. Their distribution in Shanghai has changed from dispersion to intensified clustering and shown a clear trend of suburbanization. This study confirms that the random forest algorithm can effectively classify the heterogeneous landscape in Suzhou and LULC change has accelerated from 1986 to 2008. Three urban growth types, edge-expansion, infilling, and leapfrog are identified. Compared with the global model, the geographically weighted logistic regression model has overall better goodness-of-fit and provides more insights to spatial variations of the influence of underlying factors on urban growth

China’s shifting role and motives in East Asian economic integration : a Chinese perspective on China-ASEAN economic cooperation in the 1990s and 2000s

East Asian regionalism substantially intensified after the 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis (AFC), which was a significant case and an increasingly emerging issue of new regionalism after the Cold War ended in the early 1990s. In contrast with business-led regionalization, government-led regionalism was the key way leading to East Asian economic integration, of which bilateral governmental economic cooperation between China and ASEAN was the substance. The thesis explores China’s shifting role in economic cooperation with ASEAN before and after its WTO accession in 2001 within a theoretical framework of complex interdependence. In the bilateral interdependent economic relations, China became a mutual complementary partner of ASEAN from a natural competitor; and became a foreign direct investment (FDI) source of ASEAN from a net recipient after the WTO accession. This laid a sound basis for China to be well placed as the leader in East Asian economic integration. The thesis investigates the motives that prompted China to shift its attitude towards economic cooperation with ASEAN (clearly illustrated by China’s initiative of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) proposal in 2001) from a Chinese perspective. China’s grand strategy, which highlighted the neighbours’ stability and prosperity in political sense and exploration of regional markets in neighbour countries in economic sense, was the radical motives. In addition, Beijing desired to diminish the two domestic problems: the disparity between East and West China and the gap between the urban and rural areas by enhancing economic cooperation with ASEAN. This, as the key motive, induced China’s shifting attitude towards economic cooperation with ASEAN and towards economic integration in East Asia. This thesis contributed to the second wave of regionalism studies after the 1997-8 AFC by examining the implications of China’s domestic politics on regionalism in East Asian case from a Chinese inward-looking perspective

Πλαίσιο Υποστήριξης Αποφάσεων για την Αξιολόγηση και Προώθηση Δυναμικών Δικτύων Επιχειρήσεων

Η παρούσα διδακτορική διατριβή με τίτλο «Πλαίσιο Υποστήριξης Αποφάσεων για την Αξιολόγηση και Προώθηση Δυναμικών Δικτύων Επιχειρήσεων» εστιάζει στο πεδίο των δικτύων παραγωγής, η εγκαθίδρυση των οποίων κερδίζει διαρκώς έδαφος, ως μετεξέλιξη των παραδοσιακών αλυσίδων εφοδιασμού. Αντικείμενο της διατριβής αποτελεί πιο συγκεκριμένα η μελέτη και διερεύνηση της έννοιας των Δυναμικών Δικτύων Παραγωγής, ενός νέου τύπου σχηματισμών παραγωγής που βασίζεται στη συνεργασία και τη διαφάνεια, με απώτερο στόχο την αξιολόγηση και προώθηση της αποδοχής και υιοθέτησής τους από τις επιχειρήσεις παραγωγής ως απόκριση στις απαιτήσεις του σύγχρονου επιχειρηματικού περιβάλλοντος. Η συμβολή της διατριβής της διατριβής εντοπίζεται σε δύο επίπεδα, εκείνα: •Tης θεώρησης και ποιοτικής διερεύνησης ως προς τα οφέλη και τους κινδύνους μιας πρωτοποριακής και πολλά υποσχόμενης προσέγγισης οργάνωσης και λειτουργίας σχηματισμών συνεργατικών δικτύων παραγωγής. Η εν λόγω προσέγγιση μοντελοποιεί όλες τις φάσεις του κύκλου ζωής τους και επιτρέπει την από άκρο σε άκρο και σε πραγματικό χρόνο διαχείριση αυτών στη βάση ενός παραμετροποιήσιμου μοντέλου μεταδεδομένων και αρχιτεκτονικών λύσεων, προσανατολισμένων στις υπηρεσίες που καθιστούν δυνατή τη διασφάλιση διαλειτουργικότητας και αυξημένων επιπέδων συνεργασίας μεταξύ των εμπλεκόμενων εταίρων. •Της ανάλυσης, μοντελοποίησης και αξιολόγησης του αντίκτυπου της υιοθέτησης του μοντέλου παραγωγής που αντιπροσωπεύουν οι εν λόγω σχηματισμοί σε όρους επίδοσης και ρίσκου με τη βοήθεια των Ασαφών Γνωστικών Δικτύων και κατ’ επέκταση τη συμμετοχή εμπειρογνωμόνων. Συνολικά, η διατριβή θέτει τα θεμέλια για την εισαγωγή ενός νέου, εύρωστου μοντέλου παραγωγής και παρέχει το πλαίσιο για την τεκμηρίωση των αποτελεσμάτων της λειτουργίας του, συμβάλλοντας ως εκ τούτου στη δημιουργία ενός αισθήματος εμπιστοσύνης, προτού μια επιχείρηση επενδύσει και προβεί ουσιαστικά στην υιοθέτησή του στην πράξη