794 research outputs found
Travel Behavior variations across urban and rural areas of Pakistan
This paper examines the 2007 Paksitan national time use survey to report the degree to which the national travel behaviour varies between urban and rural of Pakistan and how it is shaped by the socioeconomic and individual characteristics. Longitudnal anlaysis was performed on 37,830 time use diaries collected in the survey in Stata and the resulting tavel behvaior charactersitics have been examined through houshoeld and individual socioecnomic variables. At the national level, walking remains the dominant mode of daily mobility across the country. Nearly 90 percent of daily travel is done by walk However, the daily trip rate, mode choice and travel durations vary
significantly across urban and rural geographies. Urban residents are slightly less mobile and exhibits greater use of personal automobile than rural residents. Rural residents make 4.6 trips epr day as compared ot 4.4 trips per day of urban residents. Simlary rural population are found to otravel 101 minutes per day as comapred to significantly lower duration of 98 minutes among urban residents. While walking trips usually take same time, mean trip duration by automobiles is also much longer among rural population than urban (42.2 minutes vs 34.1 minutes) These differences become more pronounced across gender and urban women appear to be the least mobile while rural men appear most mobile as apparent form their daily trip rates of 2.6 and 5.7 per perosn, respectively. There exists slight local regional variation across provinces which are closely related to the local social and spatial drivers of mobility. The paper contends that the rural travel differences are mainly caused by difference in income levels. Urban built environment is more conducive to motorized mobility which results in greater automobile reliance in cities, particularly for women. Social and cultural environment also plays potentially significant and spatially explicit role which remains under addressed and calls for further research
The concept of understanding in Jaspers and contemporary epistemology
In the General Psychopathology Jaspers famously draws a distinction between the understandable and
explainable. Meaningful connections between psychic events, he argues, can only be understood empathetically and
cannot be explained causally. The idea behind this distinction, according to some interpreters at least, seems to be that
psychic events do not fall under any general causal rules whereas ordinary events do fall under such rules. Also Jaspers
distinguishes empathetic understanding of the connection between two psychic events from a mere interpretation of
it, which may turn out to be false. Hence, understanding seems to be able to give us the truth about the connection and
is factive as well as self-evident in nature. Contemporary epistemologists, such as Linda Zagzebsky, Duncan Pritchard,
and Jonathan Kvanvig, for example, distinguish three varieties: propositional, objectual or holistic, and atomistic
understanding. They do not agree on factivity and transparency of understanding. What then is the difference between
their views and that of Jaspers? This essay compares recent epistemological views of understanding with those of Jaspers
and critiques his claims about empathetic understanding as being both factive and self-evident or transparent; to show
that empathetic understanding of connections between psychic events needs a public criterion for its individuation
Modernity and Muslims: Towards a Selective Retrieval
This article is focused on some conditions in today’s world of
globalized media, which are producing either an uncritical acquiescence
or fright in Muslim societies as a result of the interaction
between these societies and the contemporary Western
powers that represent modernity and postmodernity on the
global stage. The rise of fundamentalism, a tendency toward
returning to the roots and stringently insisting upon some pure
and literal interpretation of them, in almost all the religions of
the world is a manifestation of this fright. The central concern
of this article is to suggest that fundamentalism is neither the
only nor the most reasonable response for Muslim societies in
the face of contemporary modernity. Muslims need to adopt an
independent and critical attitude toward modernity and reshape
their societies in the light of the ethics of the Qur’an, keeping in
view the historical link between Islam and science in as much as
Islamic culture paved the way for emergence of modern science
during European Renaissance. The necessity of a pluralistic or
contextualized modernization of Muslim societies is discussed
along with the need for the removal of cultural duplicity in the
role of the West in relation to Muslim societies. All this leads to
an overall proposal for modernization which is given towards
the end
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