Egyptian Islamists and the status of Muslim women question

This paper will explore the gender discourse of contemporary Egyptian Islamists and argue that their gender discourse is not merely a religious and traditional discourse, but that this politico-religious Islamic ideology articulates a quite modern construct of gender equality. The gender discourse of a number of important Egyptian Islamists, al-Banna', Qutb, al-Ghazali, al-Qaradawi and Ezzat will provide illustrations of these modern developments. Modern elements incorporated in today's Islamist revivalist approaches create new understandings, neither purely traditional, nor purely modern, that are 'modern constructs' that attempt to remain traditional, while integrating specifically modern components. The presence of these two seemingly opposing and contradictory elements may account for the present popularity that Islamist discourses enjoy in many Muslims countries

Unstable Spiral Waves and Local Euclidean Symmetry in a Model of Cardiac Tissue

This paper investigates the properties of unstable single-spiral wave solutions arising in the Karma model of two-dimensional cardiac tissue. In particular, we discuss how such solutions can be computed numerically on domains of arbitrary shape and study how their stability, rotational frequency, and spatial drift depend on the size of the domain as well as the position of the spiral core with respect to the boundaries. We also discuss how the breaking of local Euclidean symmetry due to finite size effects as well as the spatial discretization of the model is reflected in the structure and dynamics of spiral waves. This analysis allows identification of a self-sustaining process responsible for maintaining the state of spiral chaos featuring multiple interacting spirals.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure

Transiently Transfected Purine Biosynthetic Enzymes Form Stress Bodies

It has been hypothesized that components of enzymatic pathways might organize into intracellular assemblies to improve their catalytic efficiency or lead to coordinate regulation. Accordingly, de novo purine biosynthesis enzymes may form a purinosome in the absence of purines, and a punctate intracellular body has been identified as the purinosome. We investigated the mechanism by which human de novo purine biosynthetic enzymes might be organized into purinosomes, especially under differing cellular conditions. Irregardless of the activity of bodies formed by endogenous enzymes, we demonstrate that intracellular bodies formed by transiently transfected, fluorescently tagged human purine biosynthesis proteins are best explained as protein aggregation.This work was supported by grants from the United States National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and Welch (F1515) and Packard Foundations to EMM. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Cellular and Molecular Biolog

Preliminary Notes on the Life and Work of Abū al-‘Abbās al-Lawkarī (d. after 503/ 1109)

Abū al-‘Abbās al-Lawkarī (m. ca. 517/1123) es transmisor de segunda generación de la tradición avicénica. Los historiógrafos le atribuyen la difusión de la tradición filosófica en el Jūrāsān. Poco se sabe sobre su vida y obra. En este artículo reconstruyo tanto la biografía como la bibliografía de al-Lawkarī a partir de la escasa información que nos ha llegado a través de las noticias sobre sus profesores y alumnos así como sus escritos en árabe y en persa. Posteriormente, trato de las principales obras de al-Lawkarī: la árabe Bayān al-Haqq bi-Damān al-Sidq y la persa Sharh-i Qasīdah-yi Asrār al-Hikmah, un comentario sobre su propia obra Qasīdah-yi Asrār al-Hikmah. Y finalmente, intento mostrar cómo el espíritu filosófico que se desprendia de los temas tratados por al-Lawkarī en su obra fue un elemento fundamental para la pervivencia del conocimiento científico y filosófico –principalmente avicénico- que fue prosperando en las regiones orientales del mundo islámico

A new perturbative approach to the adiabatic approximation

A new and intuitive perturbative approach to time-dependent quantum mechanics problems is presented, which is useful in situations where the evolution of the Hamiltonian is slow. The state of a system which starts in an instantaneous eigenstate of the initial Hamiltonian is written as a power series which has a straightforward diagrammatic representation. Each term of the series corresponds to a sequence of "adiabatic" evolutions, during which the system remains in an instantaneous eigenstate of the Hamiltonian, punctuated by transitions from one state to another. The first term of this series is the standard adiabatic evolution, the next is the well-known first correction to it, and subsequent terms can be written down essentially by inspection. Although the final result is perhaps not terribly surprising, it seems to be not widely known, and the interpretation is new, as far as we know. Application of the method to the adiabatic approximation is given, and some discussion of the validity of this approximation is presented.Comment: 9 pages. Added references, discussion of previous results, expanded upon discussion of main result and application of i

Modulation of en-route charges to redistribute traffic in the European airspace

Peak-load pricing (PLP), a two-tariffs charging scheme commonly used in public transport and utilities, is tested on the European Air Traffic Management (ATM) system as a means for reducing capacity-demand imbalances. In particular, a centralised approach to PLP (CPLP) where a Central Planner (CP) sets en-route charges on the network is presented. CPLP consists of two phases: in the first, congested airspace sectors and their peak and off-peak hours are identified; in the second, CP assesses and sets en-route charges in order to reduce overall shift on the network. Such charges should guarantee that Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) are able to recover their operational costs while inducing the Airspace Users (AUs) to route their flights in a way that respects airspace capacity. The interaction between CP and AUs is modelled as a Stackelberg game and formulated by means of bilevel linear programming. Two heuristic approaches, based on Coordinate-wise Descent and Genetic Algorithms are implemented to solve the CPLP model on a data set obtained from historical data for an entire day of traffic on European airspace. Results show that significant improvements in traffic distribution in terms of shift and sector load can be achieved through this simple en-route charges modulation scheme