Islamic economics, banking and finance.

The normal operations of commercial banks in Western economies do not conform to the religious requirements of the Islamic faith. In this article, Shabbir Dastgir explores the differences and outlines how the worldwide industry in Islamic banking has developed new banking practices

Prototype Model Agent-Based Search Engine for Researchers and Scientists

Now days, the Word Wide Web (WWW) covers most of the information channels across the world and is the cheapest resource to publish the corporate as well as individual information. The key advantage of WWW is that the published information instantly becomes available around the globe. Since the information load on the Internet is increasing day by day, therefore, it is causing serious troubles for the researchers and scientists to retrieve the targeted and relevant information from the huge bulk of data. While surfing the Internet, precious time of researchers and scientists is wasted due to browsing of the irrelevant and unnecessary material. Such an approach of information retrieval results in overlooking the important contents. In this paper, we look into the elementary components of a customized search engine in order to develop an agent-based search engine tool that may help researchers and scientists to find their desired information in an efficient manner and with minimal clicks of pointer. Through this tool, the researchers and scientists will be able to find a summarized report against their search phrase along with the search details, which will provide them a solid background to their research subject based on history available on the WWW. The important aspect of this search engine is that it retrieves the subject-specific material from the designated websites in accordance with the user-defined criteria

How the Gulf states are coping with the new normal of low oil prices

The falling price of oil is beginning to have a real impact on the energy-fuelled economies of the Gulf. In 2014, after almost a decade of record highs, the price of a barrel of Brent crude began to collapse from a peak of US$140 to less than US$30. Saudi Arabia is lining up a US$2 trillion sovereign wealth fund to see it through the twilight years of the oil era

Diversification and corporate social performance in manufacturing companies

The effects of diversification on financial performance are well-established, less so the way in which diversification influences company behaviour towards stakeholder demand and social concern. This paper investigates the relationship between business diversification and corporate social performance (CSP) in an industrial setting, in Indonesia. CSP is measured with an index constructed from content and disclosure analysis of annual company reports in line with global reporting initiative standards. A sample of 107 listed manufacturing companies from the Indonesian Stock Exchange is used to estimate a lagged multiple regression model to show that industry-level diversification does not have an effect on CSP. However, distinguishing between related and unrelated diversification produces a different outcome whereby, related diversification is negatively and statistically significantly correlated with CSP. Unrelated diversification, on the other hand, shows a positive and statistically significant relationship. It means the relationship between unrelated diversification and CSP is more positive than the relationship between related diversification and CSP. The findings offer a unique insight into industrial diversification and CSP in Indonesia’s expanding manufacturing sector

Shaft crack detection during shut-down using continuous wavelet transform

Shaft cracks in a rotor system may lead to destructive failure, if not detected at right time. The transient vibrations of a rotor system with a transverse breathing crack during rotor shut-down has been analyzed using Finite Element Method (FEM) for flexural vibrations. Since the vibration signals during shut-down are non-stationary, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) has been used to extract the crack feature when the rotor is decelerating through critical speed during shut-down. A parametric study for different crack depths has been studied for different decelerations and it is found that CWT can be effectively used to detect the crack during rotor shut-down

Corporate Diversification and Corporate Social Performance in Indonesia

The relationship between corporate diversification and corporate social performance (CSP) is under-investigated, especially in emerging countries. This study examines the relationship between corporate diversification and CSP in Indonesia setting. Occurrence disclosure analysis has been applied to measure CSP based on 80 indicators of the Global Report Initiative (GRI). This study used multiple regressions with one-year lag dependent variables as the data analysis. The results show that the related diversification is negatively and significantly related to CSP, while, the unrelated diversification reveals a positive relationship with CSP. Besides that, unrelated diversification more correlated to CSP rather than related diversification. Furthermore, international diversification has a positive and significant relationship with CSP. Therefore, this study found that corporate diversification is a significant antecedent of CSP.JEL Classification: L25, M1

A Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network Model for Automatic Diabetic Retinopathy Classification From Fundus Images

Objective: Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a retinal disease that can cause damage to blood vessels in the eye, that is the major cause of impaired vision or blindness, if not treated early. Manual detection of diabetic retinopathy is time-consuming and prone to human error due to the complex structure of the eye. Methods & Results: various automatic techniques have been proposed to detect diabetic retinopathy from fundus images. However, these techniques are limited in their ability to capture the complex features underlying diabetic retinopathy, particularly in the early stages. In this study, we propose a novel approach to detect diabetic retinopathy using a convolutional neural network (CNN) model. The proposed model extracts features using two different deep learning (DL) models, Resnet50 and Inceptionv3, and concatenates them before feeding them into the CNN for classification. The proposed model is evaluated on a publicly available dataset of fundus images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CNN model achieves higher accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, and f1 score compared to state-of-the-art methods, with respective scores of 96.85%, 99.28%, 98.92%, 96.46%, and 98.65%.©2023 The Authors. Published by IEEE. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Electron capture by multiply charged ions

The differential electron capture probabilities were measured for the processes 0++ + Ne --+ 0+ + Ne+ and 0++ + He -b 0+ + He+ at impact energies of 1200 and 2600 eV. The mass analysed 0++ beam was injected into a single collision reaction region and scattered 0+ and 0++ ion intensities measured as a function of angle. This angular data was reduced in terms of the differential electron capture probabilities as a function of impact parameter. The results are qualitatively compared with the theoretical predictions of the semi-classical impact parameter treatment and those based on the pseudo-crossing of potential energy curves. The form of the oscillations in the 1200 eV data for the (0++,Ne) reaction is similar to those encountered in singly charged ion-atom collisions in the absence of curve crossing. However the oscillations in the 2600 eV impact energy data for (0++,Ne) and the 1200 eV data for (04-1-,He) indicate that curve crossing takes place. It is possible that experiments of this type could be used to provide, by inspection of the probability functions, a test for whether curve crossing takes place although there is as yet no corroborative body of experimental evidence