Islam and disability : perspectives in islamic theology and jurisprudence

The main focus of this dissertation is exploring the position of people with disabilities within two Islamic sciences, namely, Islamic Theology and Islamic Jurisprudence as reflected in the early and modern writings of Muslim scholars. Within Islamic Theology, attention is paid to the opinions of early and modern Muslims theologians and philosophers on the existence of disability in this life, the wise purposes behind the existence of this phenomenon in addition to the efforts of these scholars in order to reconcile between the existence of this phenomenon on one hand and specific divine attributes such as the Mercy of God. Within Islamic Jurisprudence, the contentions of early and modern Muslim specialists in Islamic law have been probed into concerning a broad scope of topics with modern relevance such as the human dignity of people with disabilities, their employability, medical treatment, social life with main focus on marriage-related issues, financial life and means of living for this group of people.UBL - phd migration 201

Canvas: A fast and accurate geometric sentence alignment system using lexical cues within complex misalignment settings

In this paper, we present a new sentence alignment system (Canvas), which is a Python implementation of a geometric approach to sentence alignment, based on lexical cues. Canvas system is designed mainly to handle parallel texts exhibiting complex misalignment patterns, namely within English-Arabic pairs for United Nations documents. The system relies heavily on pre-indexing words/tokens in the source and target texts, and it creates correspondences between the token indexes. From this point onward, the alignment problem is reduced to a geometric problem of finding the path that runs through the True Correspondence Points (TCPs). The likelihood of a point being a TCP depends on the clustering of other points nearby; so, we collect the most likely points, and we identify the shortest path containing the maximum number of these points using a modified form of Dijkstra\u27s algorithm. The results of Canvas system are very promising, as they demonstrate that it can handle intricate misalignment patterns, with much better speed than other alignment approaches using lexical cues, and with good accuracy in general, in a completely automated fashion. The only drawback is that the system does not cover all the alignment segments and this coverage is generally lower than other systems, which can be a subject of future research

Computational Approaches to the Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody to Improve Parsing

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing. Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected in a previous study were reanalyzed using native speaker judgment and automatic methods (forced alignment). Results demonstrate similar prosodic splitting behavior as in English in contradiction to the original study’s findings. Chapter 3 presents a number of studies examining whether syntactic ambiguity can yield different prosodic patterns, allowing humans and/or computers to resolve the ambiguity. In an experimental study, humans disambiguated sentences with prepositional phrase- (PP)-attachment ambiguity with 49% accuracy presented as text, and 63% presented as audio. Machine learning on the same data yielded an accuracy of 63-73%. A corpus study on the Switchboard corpus used both prosodic breaks and phrase lengths to predict the attachment, with an accuracy of 63.5% for PP-attachment sentences, and 71.2% for relative clause attachment. Chapter 4 aims to identify aspects of syntax that relate to prosody and use these in combination with prosodic cues to improve parsing. The aspects identified (dependency configurations) are based on dependency structure, reflecting the relative head location of two consecutive words, and are used as syntactic features in an ensemble system based on Recurrent Neural Networks, to score parse hypotheses and select the most likely parse for a given sentence. Using syntactic features alone, the system achieved an improvement of 1.1% absolute in Unlabelled Attachment Score (UAS) on the test set, above the best parser in the ensemble, while using syntactic features combined with prosodic features (pauses and normalized duration) led to a further improvement of 0.4% absolute. The results achieved demonstrate the relationship between syntax, syntactic phrase length, and prosody, and indicate the ability and future potential of prosody to resolve ambiguity and improve parsing

Religio-ethical discussions on organ donation among Muslims in Europe: an example of transnational Islamic bioethics

This article analyzes the religio-ethical discussions of Muslim religious scholars, which took place in Europe specifically in the UK and the Netherlands, on organ donation. After introductory notes on fatwas (Islamic religious guidelines) relevant to biomedical ethics and the socio-political context in which discussions on organ donation took place, the article studies three specific fatwas issued in Europe whose analysis has escaped the attention of modern academic researchers. In 2000 the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) issued a fatwa on organ donation. Besides this “European” fatwa, two other fatwas were issued respectively in the UK by the Muslim Law (Shariah) Council in 1995 and in the Netherlands by the Moroccan religious scholar Muṣṭafā Ben Ḥamza during a conference on “Islam and Organ Donation” held in March 2006. The three fatwas show that a great number of Muslim religious scholars permit organ donation and this holds true for donating organs to non-Muslims as well. Further, they demonstrate that transnationalism is one of the main characteristics of contemporary Islamic bioethics. In a bid to develop their own standpoints towards organ donation, Muslims living in the West rely heavily on fatwas imported from the Muslim world

Pelvic support osteotomy by Ilizarov’s concept: Is it a valuable option in managing neglected hip problems in adolescents and young adults?

For evaluating pelvic support osteotomy as a salvage procedure in managing neglected hip problems in adolescents and young adults, PSO was performed for 20 hips in 20 patients (5 men and 15 women). The mean age was 21.5 years. The etiology was neglected developmental dysplasia of the hip in 9 patients, post-septic hip sequelae in 9 patients, and paralytic dislocation due to poliomyelitis in 2 patients. All patients were treated by two osteotomies: a proximal femoral osteotomy to support the pelvis and correct the flexion and rotational deformities of the hip and a distal varization and lengthening osteotomy. Final clinical evaluation was done 6 months after frame removal. The mean external fixation time was 6.4. Lengthening and mechanical axis parallelism was achieved in all patients. At the final follow-up and according to a predesigned scoring system, there were 7(35%) excellent results, 6(30%) good results, 7(35%) fair results, and no poor results. Hip reconstruction by Ilizarov’s concept can be technically demanding and involving lengthy period wearing the frame but found to be a valuable salvage procedure for numerous neglected hip problems particularly in young patients

Does the thermal spike affect low-energy ion-induced interfacial mixing?

Molecular dynamics simulations have been used to obtain the three-dimensional distribution of interfacial mixing and cascade defects in Ti/Pt multilayer system due to single 1 keV $Ar^+$ impacts at grazing angle of incidence. The Ti/Pt system was chosen because of its relatively high heat of mixing in the binary alloy and therefore a suitable candidate for testing the effect of heat of mixing on ion-beam mixing. However, the calculated mixing profile is not sensitive to the heat of mixing. Therefore the thermal spike model of mixing is not fully supported under these irradiation conditions. Instead we found that the majority of mixing occurs after the thermal spike during the relaxation process. These conclusions are supported by liquid, vacancy as well as adatom analysis. The interfacial mixing is in various aspects anomalous in this system: the time evolution of mixing is leading to a phase delay for Ti mixing, and Pt exhibits an unexpected double peaked mixing evolution. The reasons to these effects are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 12 figures, Nucl. Instr. Meth. B211, 524. (2003

A Model-Based Method for Assessment of Salivary Gland and Planning Target Volume Dosimetry in Volumetric-Modulated Arc Therapy Planning on Head-and-Neck Cancer.

This study examined the relationship of achievable mean dose and percent volumetric overlap of salivary gland with the planning target volume (PTV) in volumetric-modulated arc therapy (VMAT) plan in radiotherapy for a patient with head-and-neck cancer. The aim was to develop a model to predict the viability of planning objectives for both PTV coverage and organs-at-risk (OAR) sparing based on overlap volumes between PTVs and OARs, before the planning process. Forty patients with head-and-neck cancer were selected for this retrospective plan analysis. The patients were treated using 6 MV photons with 2-arc VMAT plan in prescriptions with simultaneous integrated boost in dose of 70 Gy, 63 Gy, and 58.1 Gy to primary tumor sites, high-risk nodal regions, and low-risk nodal regions, respectively, over 35 fractions. A VMAT plan was generated using Varian Eclipse (V13.6), in optimization with biological-based generalized equivalent uniform dose (gEUD) objective for OARs and targets. Target dose coverage

Cooperative mixing induced surface roughening in bilayer metals: a possible novel surface damage mechanism

Molecular dynamics simulations have been used to study a collective atomic transport phenomenon by repeated Ar$^+$ irradiations in the Ti/Pt interfacial system. The ion-induced injection of surface atoms to the bulk, the ejection of bulk atoms to the top layers together with surface erosion is strongly enhanced by interfacial mixing. This process leads to a dense interfacial material, and broadening of the interface region. The process scales with the relative difference of the atomic masses. We find that surface roughening and interfacial mixing is strongly coupled via an enhanced counterflow material transport normal to the surface which might be a novel surface damage mechanism. This cooperative phenomenon is active when the bilayer system is subjected to a high dose ion irradiation (multiple ion irradiations) and leads to surface cavity growth.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures. accepted in Nucl. Instrum. Meth.

MYRTUS SPECIES PREVENTS REPRODUCTIVE TOXICITY INDUCED BY DOXORUBICIN IN MALE MICE

Background: Myrtus sp is one of the natural products being used in Unani System of Medicine. Its leaves are frequently used for various ailments like diarrhoea, dysentery, vomiting and osmetic purposes. Objective: the main goal of the present work was to investigate protective effect of Myrtus sp extract against doxorubicin induced sperm abnormalities, genetic toxicity and gene expression alterations. Method: Plant samples were used to obtain plant extraction. Eighty male albino mice were allocated in several groups and treated with doxorubicin alone, doxorubicin plus Myrtus sp extracts for 30 days starting from 24 or 48h after doxorubicin treatment, or supplemented with Myrtus sp extracts for 30 days then treated with doxorubicin treatment. Results: The results revealed that treatment of male mice with doxorubicin then Myrtus sp for one month was the best treatment strategy for protection against doxorubicin induced toxicity. Whereas, Myrtus sp extract significantly preserved male mice from sperm abnormalities induced by doxorubicin treatment, genetic toxicity and gene expression alterations. Conclusion: The results suggested that phenolic compounds exist in the Myrtus sp extract might be contributed to prevention of the reproductive disorders and genotoxicity.Keywords: Myrtus sp, Doxorubicin, Sperm abnormalities, Genetic toxicity, Reproductive gene