The Contestation of Contemporary Islam: Conservative Islam versus Progressive Islam

This article analyzes the articulation of Islamic thought in the 2014 and 2019 General Elections in Indonesia, both of which were marked by efforts by progressive and conservative Muslims to dominate public spaces. Contestation was evident in these political discourses, with progressive Muslims advocating for moderatism, political ethics, and tolerance in narratives of inclusivism, pluralism, and tolerance while conservative Muslims disseminating extremism, the formalization of sharia law, and intolerance in narratives of exclusivism and homogenization. The analysis questions the continuity-discontinuity, motives, and actors of both progressive and conservative Muslim movements and investigates the challenges for progressive Muslims in disseminating their narratives in Indonesia. The result argues that massive religious organizations in Indonesia articulate, internalize, and institutionalize progressive thought within their organizations and educational institutions. This article encourages progressive Muslims to reckon with and countermeasure conservativism among religious and political elites whose narratives exploit religious sentiments for practical purposes

Estimation of C II and C II* column densities along Galactic sight-lines

We present interstellar C II (1334.5323 \AA) and C II* (1335.7077 \AA) column density measurements along 14 Galactic sight-lines. These sight-lines sample a variety of Galactic disk environments and include paths that range nearly two orders of magnitude in average hydrogen densities () along the lines of sight. Five of the sight-lines show super-Solar gas phase abundances of carbon. Our results show that the excess carbon along these sight-lines may result from different mechanisms taking place in the regions associated with these stars.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures; Accepted for publication in BAS

Line-of-sight percolation

Given $\omega\ge 1$, let $Z^2_{(\omega)}$ be the graph with vertex set $Z^2$ in which two vertices are joined if they agree in one coordinate and differ by at most $\omega$ in the other. (Thus $Z^2_{(1)}$ is precisely $Z^2$.) Let $p_c(\omega)$ be the critical probability for site percolation in $Z^2_{(\omega)}$. Extending recent results of Frieze, Kleinberg, Ravi and Debany, we show that \lim_{\omega\to\infty} \omega\pc(\omega)=\log(3/2). We also prove analogues of this result on the $n$-by-$n$ grid and in higher dimensions, the latter involving interesting connections to Gilbert's continuum percolation model. To prove our results, we explore the component of the origin in a certain non-standard way, and show that this exploration is well approximated by a certain branching random walk.Comment: Revised and expanded (section 2.3 added). To appear in Combinatorics, Probability and Computing. 27 pages, 4 figure

Vanishing in Plain Sight

Playfully negotiating the historical constructs of theatrical vanishing and its disturbingly female trappings this paper centers on the creation of Bautier de Kolta’s l’Escamotage D’une Dame, an illusion used to screen the anxieties of the male British populous, irked by a buoyant surplus in unmarried, white, middle class women, in the late 1880s. Introducing texts such as W. R Greg’s Why are women Redundant? This paper makes ever more apparent the political, violent and sexual connotations of the female body in magical feats of performative disappearance. From the photographic curios of hidden mothers to the dark room of the séance, the conversation unfurls around the many forms of female vanishing, culminating in a discussion of the contemporary artwork Escamotage (Grace A Williams, 2015) that takes the Persian rug as both a motif of magical vanishing and a tool for the exposure of form. This paper was originally delivered as a performance from within a ‘Zig-Zag’ illusion box, in collaboration with artist David Cheeseman. The first critical analysis of women’s role within magical illusions, delivered by a female artist from within a magical prop that continues to dismember female bodies for entertainment in the contemporary magic market

Optimal Constrained Wireless Emergency Network Antennae Placement

With increasing number of mobile devices, newly introduced smart devices, and the Internet of things (IoT) sensors, the current microwave frequency spectrum is getting rapidly congested. The obvious solution to this frequency spectrum congestion is to use millimeter wave spectrum ranging from 6 GHz to 300 GHz. With the use of millimeter waves, we can enjoy very high communication speeds and very low latency. But, this technology also introduces some challenges that we hardly faced before. The most important one among these challenges is the Line of Sight (LOS) requirement. In the emergent concept of smart cities, the wireless emergency network is set to use millimeter waves. We have worked on the problem of efficiently finding a line of sight for such wireless emergency network antennae in minimal time. We devised two algorithms, Sequential Line of Sight (SLOS) and Tiled Line of Sight (TLOS), both perform better than traditional algorithms in terms of execution time. The tiled line of sight algorithm reduces the time required for a single line of sight query from 200 ms for traditional algorithms to mere 1.7 ms on average

Large Interstellar Polarisation Survey II. UV/optical study of cloud-to-cloud variations of dust in the diffuse ISM

It is well known that the dust properties of the diffuse interstellar medium exhibit variations towards different sight-lines on a large scale. We have investigated the variability of the dust characteristics on a small scale, and from cloud-to-cloud. We use low-resolution spectro-polarimetric data obtained in the context of the Large Interstellar Polarisation Survey (LIPS) towards 59 sight-lines in the Southern Hemisphere, and we fit these data using a dust model composed of silicate and carbon particles with sizes from the molecular to the sub-micrometre domain. Large (> 6 nm) silicates of prolate shape account for the observed polarisation. For 32 sight-lines we complement our data set with UVES archive high-resolution spectra, which enable us to establish the presence of single-cloud or multiple-clouds towards individual sight-lines. We find that the majority of these 35 sight-lines intersect two or more clouds, while eight of them are dominated by a single absorbing cloud. We confirm several correlations between extinction and parameters of the Serkowski law with dust parameters, but we also find previously undetected correlations between these parameters that are valid only in single-cloud sight-lines. We find that interstellar polarisation from multiple-clouds is smaller than from single-cloud sight-lines, showing that the presence of a second or more clouds depolarises the incoming radiation. We find large variations of the dust characteristics from cloud-to-cloud. However, when we average a sufficiently large number of clouds in single-cloud or multiple-cloud sight-lines, we always retrieve similar mean dust parameters. The typical dust abundances of the single-cloud cases are [C]/[H] = 92 ppm and [Si]/[H] = 20 ppm.Comment: A&A accepte