Convergence of Corporate Governance and Islamic Financial Services Industry: Toward Islamic Financial Services Securities Market

This paper briefly discusses the significance of corporate governance for the Islamic financial services industry. Furthermore, it predicts that the Islamic financial services industry is likely to converge to modern governance practices. The paper also argues that the industry needs to have a homogenous and specialized regional securities market to realize its true potential

Search for identity in post-war Lebanon: Arab vs Phoenician

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019This study uses textual analysis and network mapping in order to understand the rhetoric surrounding Phoenicianism in modern day Lebanon, using 1,336 data points from a political discussion forum. The ability of rhetoric grounded in science to persuade others of genetically essentialist views is examined, as well as the ability of social constructionism to naturally resist such rhetoric. We identify common themes found in our data set, the use of science based ethos in Phoenicianist rhetoric, and the growth (or lack thereof) of the Phoenicianist network in order to answer this question. Our research indicates that science based rhetoric and science based proofs do not lead to the growth of a network through the persuasion of others. This also presents us with some interesting opportunities for future research, such as the reasons why Phoenicianism failed to create long lasting identity change in Lebanon. A study on the various environmental factors that resulted in this instance of failed rhetoric could shine a light on the importance of demographics when it comes to successfully creating social movements

Assessment of Students Performances in Biology: Implication for Measurements and Evaluation of Learning

Scienceeducation is believed to be a vital tool for individual and societal development at large. The persistent low levels of students' achievement in sciences at the various public examinations in Nigeria have continued to draw the attention of major stakeholders in education. This study examined academic achievement of Senior Secondary School students in biology and gender difference in students' achievement was examined. Ex-post facto design of descriptive research was adopted for the study. A proforma was used to collect data from a sample of two hundred (200) students, selected using stratified random sampling procedure from the Science secondary schools in Kano state Nigeria. The data collected were the students' performances in biology achievement tests. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and independent-sample t-test. Overall results showed that the test internal consistency reliability is low and unsatisfactory; the students performed below average (M=47.02, SD=16.493 (47%). Similarly, gender difference exists in biology performance with another significant difference between performance of urban and rural school students. The study concludes that, biology test used in Kano state qualifying examinations to assess students potential ability in biology is not a reliable measurement tool and that, academic performance of students in biology is unsatisfactory and evidence of differential performance between gender and schools locations. The implication for measurements and evaluation of learning as well as recommendations has been discussed

Space construction in media reporting: A study of the migrant space in the 'Jungles' of Calais

Media are intrinsically implicated in constructing and framing space as well as in the imagination of communities. This paper examines how media through the spatial construct of the ‘jungle’ premises the discourses of migration between the borders of UK and France. We argue that newspapers impose a cartography by invoking a social imaginary of a bounded community sustained through imagined boundaries. Metaphors such as the ‘jungle’ function as spatialisation techniques to not only renew the sacrosanct boundaries of a nation-state, but they also become instrumental tools in invoking fear, anxiety and the visceral in migrant discourses. Conceptually, the paper argues that media sustains ‘an imagined community’ by techniques of spatialisation which encode politics of space in migrant discourses. These discourses are central in sustaining and enacting a social imaginary, where space framing and construction become tools to imagine and locate communities and to exclude the ‘other’

The non-human interest story: De-personalising the migrant

We argue that newspapers deliberately employ techniques to dehumanise and depersonalise news stories in order to cultivate distance between the reader and human subject in newspaper accounts. We posit this as a dominant technique in discourses of immigration in newspaper discourses. In the process the migrant is narrated as the sub-human entrapped through socio-legal terminologies and deviance discourses that both silence and trivialise human suffering. We highlight the case study of the refugee settlement in Calais dubbed the ‘jungle’ to illuminate this phenomenon. We argue that the depersonalisation of immigration stories is a sustained technique in media to submerge the ethical and humanitarian paradigms presented by immigration

Sounds of the jungle: Re-humanizing the migrant

This article examines the cross-border tensions over migrant settlements dubbed ‘The Jungle’ in Calais. The Jungle, strongly associated with the unauthorized movement of migrants, became a physical entity enmeshed in discourses of illegality and violation of white suburbia. British mainstream media have either rendered the migrant voiceless or faceless, appropriating them into discourses of immigration policy and the violent transgression of borders. Through the case study, Calais Migrant Solidarity (CMS), we highlight how new media spaces can re-humanize the migrant, enabling them to tell their stories through narratives, images and vantage points not shown in the mainstream media. This reconstruction of the migrant is an important device in enabling proximity and reconstituting the migrant as real and human. This sharply contrasts with the distance framing techniques of mainstream media, which dehumanize and silence the migrant, locating the phenomenon of migration as a disruptive contaminant in civilized and ordered societies

Bit-level pipelined digit-serial array processors

A new architecture for high performance digit-serial vector inner product (VIP) which can be pipelined to the bit-level is introduced. The design of the digit-serial vector inner product is based on a new systematic design methodology using radix-2n arithmetic. The proposed architecture allows a high level of bit-level pipelining to increase the throughput rate with minimum initial delay and minimum area. This will give designers greater flexibility in finding the best tradeoff between hardware cost and throughput rate. It is shown that sub-digit pipelined digit-serial structure can achieve a higher throughput rate with much less area consumption than an equivalent bit-parallel structure. A twin-pipe architecture to double the throughput rate of digit-serial multipliers and consequently that of the digit-serial vector inner product is also presented. The effect of the number of pipelining levels and the twin-pipe architecture on the throughput rate and hardware cost are discussed. A two's complement digit-serial architecture which can operate on both negative and positive numbers is also presented