Exploring the Giving Practices in American Mosques: Why Do Muslims Give So Little to Their Mosques?

This article represents the first effort to explore the giving practices of Muslims in American mosques. The research for this article was based on two studies: (1) a previously published study, “The American Mosque 2011,” which consisted of 524 telephone interviews of mosque leaders; and (2) a previously unpublished 2013 study of 3 mosques and the 2016 follow-up interviews with donors from the three mosques. The results show that mosque attendees give much less than their counterparts in churches. Interviews with donors in the three mosques were conducted in order to draw some preliminary conclusions as to why the giving rate in mosques is low. The interviews indicate that one of the underlying factors for the low rate of giving is that mosque attendees do not have a clear theology for giving to mosques and that a culture of giving to mosques does not exist among immigrant Muslims. It must be emphasized that this article is exploratory. Broader and more in-depth studies are needed to develop definitive conclusions about giving practices in mosques

Islamic political identity in Turkey: rethinking the West and westernization

Ihsan D. Dag

Islam and pluralism : does Quran approve religious pluralism?

As for the relation between Islam and pluralism, it seems a little bit complicated. There are some verses in The Koran for pluralism and at the same time we have some verses against. Among the sayings of Prophet Muhammad like the some Koranic verses, we came across with something good and bad for non-Muslims in special contexts. By another saying, we find both positive and negative statements for Jews and Christians in different circumstances. Muslim scholars the complexity still exists. We find both positive and negative stances. So it is difficult to see a standard or official view on this issue. However, we should point out that Islam recognizes all the sacred (Semitic) books and their messages. It accepts all prophets of that traditions. It defines itself as the last and perfect religion of Semitic tradition and states that no other religion will be accepted from anybody else other then itself. It criticizes both the Jews and Christians especially about their failure to uphold the Oneness of God, tawhid, and to preserve the authenticity of their scripture from interventions. This exclusivist aspect of Islam as many conservative scholars formed with putting together some evidences from the Koran is generally accepted by Muslims

Swami Vivekananda's idea of religious diversity and harmony

The origin of the religious experience, says Vivekananda, is man's instinctive urge to transcend the sensual world. He believes that man is a compound of two fundamental ele-ments: sense arid mind. While through the senses he receives impressions of the objective world, he cannot remain satisfied with his senses, simply because he wants to go beyond them. Therefore, through his mind, at certain moments he transcends the limitations of the senses. But he also transcends the power of reasoning. He then comes face to face with the facts which he could never have sensed, could never have reasoned out. According to Vivekananda, this fact is the main basis of all the religions of the world. ..

Implications of the PPSMI policy for the performance of Malaysian secondary schools in mathematics and science subjects

The introduction of the Teaching and Learning Mathematics and Science Subjects in English (PPSMI) policy to change the medium of instruction in mathematics and science subjects from Bahasa Melayu to English has raised many debates on the effectiveness of the policy and the ability of the schools, teachers and pupils to adapt to the new medium of instruction. This study evaluates the implications of the PPSMI policy for the school performance in mathematics and science subjects. The school performances before and after the implementation of the policy were assessed and compared according to school types, states, and locations by developing an advanced technique in measuring school efficiency based on hybrid returns to scale (HRS) data envelopment analysis (DEA). A new methodology of measuring change in performance over time based on the Malmquist index was also developed to measure the difference in performance before and after the implementation of the policy. The aim of developing the methodologies is to provide an alternative assessment of the implications of the PPSMI policy for the school performance in mathematics and science subjects thus helping the Ministry of Education Malaysia to decide on the direction of the PPSMI policy. The HRS DEA model is a new extension in DEA based on the concept of selective proportionality in the relationship of input-output variables. It gives a better estimate compared to the original convex models, the constant returns to scale (CRS) and the variable returns to scale (VRS), when some of the inputs and outputs have proportional relationship while others do not. In this study, an HRS-based DEA model utilising 10 inputs and 8 outputs was developed to assess the efficiency of schools from three states i.e. Kedah, Penang, and Perlis. The schools comprise of three different types i.e. the national, fully residential, and religious school-types. The efficiency was also assessed by using the CRS and VRS models to compare the results. The Malmquist index is a popular productivity index for measuring efficiency over time. The Malmquist index can be calculated from the CRS-based or the VRS-based DEA efficiency scores. This study developed a new productivity index called the HRS-based Malmquist index. This is similar to the VRS-based Malmquist index but the calculation of the index is based on the efficiency scores from the HRS DEA model. The efficiency scores and Malmquist indices of schools in different categories (i.e. school-types, states, and locations) were tested for significant difference by using nonparametric statistical tests. Nonparametric statistical tests were used due to the nonparametric nature of DEA. The statistical tests used in this study are Mann-Whitney U Test and Kruskal-Wallis Test to look at independent samples such as samples from different school-types, and Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test and Friedman's Two-Way Analysis of Variance to examine dependent samples such as the difference in performance before and after the implementation of the policy

About Pyramid Structure in Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) brought revolution without any doubt to various challenging tasks, mainly in computer vision. However, their model designing still requires attention to reduce number of learnable parameters, with no meaningful reduction in performance. In this paper we investigate to what extend CNN may take advantage of pyramid structure typical of biological neurons. A generalized statement over convolutional layers from input till fully connected layer is introduced that helps further in understanding and designing a successful deep network. It reduces ambiguity, number of parameters, and their size on disk without degrading overall accuracy. Performance are shown on state-of-the-art models for MNIST, Cifar-10, Cifar-100, and ImageNet-12 datasets. Despite more than 80% reduction in parameters for Caffe_LENET, challenging results are obtained. Further, despite 10-20% reduction in training data along with 10-40% reduction in parameters for AlexNet model and its variations, competitive results are achieved when compared to similar well-engineered deeper architectures.Comment: Published in 2016 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN

Insights into the Design of Congestion Control Protocols for Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks

The widespread deployment of multi-hop wireless mesh networks will depend on the performance seen by the user. Unfortunately, the most predominant transport protocol, TCP, performs poorly over such networks, even leading to starvation in some topologies. In this work, we characterize the root causes of starvation in 802.11 scheduled multi-hop wireless networks via simulations. We analyze the performance of three categories of transport protocols. (1) end-to-end protocols that require implicit feedback (TCP SACK), (2) Explicit feedback based protocols (XCP and VCP) and (3) Open-loop protocol (UDP). We ask and answer the following questions in relation to these protocols: (a) Why does starvation occur in different topologies? Is it intrinsic to TCP or, in general, to feedback-based protocols? or does it also occur in the case of open-loop transfers such as CBR over UDP? (a) What is the role of application behavior on transport layer performance in multi-hop wireless mesh networks? (b) Is sharing congestion in the wireless neighborhood essential for avoiding starvation? (c) For explicit feedback based transport protocols, such as XCP and VCP, what performance can be expected when their capacity estimate is inaccurate? Based on the insights derived from the above analysis, we design a rate-based protocol called VRate that uses the two ECN bits for conveying load feedback information. VRate achieves near optimal rates when configured with the correct capacity estimate

Do economic crises lead to health and nutrition behavior responses?: analysis using longitudinal data from Russia

Using longitudinal data on more than 2,000 Russian families spanning the period between 2007 and 2010, this paper estimates the impact of the 2009 global financial crisis on food expenditures, health care expenditures, and doctor visits in Russia. The primary estimation strategy adopted is the semi-parametric difference-in-difference with propensity score matching technique. The analysis finds that household health and nutritional behavior indicators do not vary statistically between households that were crisis-affected and households that were not affected by the crisis. However the analysis finds that crisis-affected poor families curtailed their out-of-pocket health expenditures during and after the crisis more than poor families that were not affected by the crisis did. In addition, crisis-affected vulnerable groups changed their health behavior. In particular, households with low educational attainment of household heads and households with more elderly people changed their health and nutrition behavior response when affected by the crisis. The results are invariant to the propensity score matching techniques and parametric fixed effects estimation models

An Empirical Analysis of Productivity Developments in "Traditional Banks" : The Initial Post-Liberalization Experience

By utilizing a non-parametric Malmquist index approach, we investigate the initial changes in the productivity and efficiency of the “traditional” Turkish banks in an era of financial liberalization (1980-1990). We hypothesize that the new liberal environment along with heightened competition from new banks coming from internal and external markets will discipline the traditional banks that are coming from the pre-liberalization period in resource management to economize their production inputs and/or in looking for new ways to expand their financial outputs, resulting in higher productivity and efficiency in these banks. Consistent with the expectations, we found that there is a significant upward trend in the productivity and efficiency of the traditional Turkish banks over the period under study. On the other hand, the results also indicate that the production technology of these banks has not advanced as expected. It appears that productivity growth in traditional Turkish banks mainly stems from the efforts of inefficient banks to catch up with the leading banks (efficiency increase) rather than the expansion of production frontier by the leading banks (technological progress).Traditional Banks, Productivity, Efficiency, Liberalization, Malmquist Index