Islam and pluralism : does Quran approve religious pluralism?

As for the relation between Islam and pluralism, it seems a little bit complicated. There are some verses in The Koran for pluralism and at the same time we have some verses against. Among the sayings of Prophet Muhammad like the some Koranic verses, we came across with something good and bad for non-Muslims in special contexts. By another saying, we find both positive and negative statements for Jews and Christians in different circumstances. Muslim scholars the complexity still exists. We find both positive and negative stances. So it is difficult to see a standard or official view on this issue. However, we should point out that Islam recognizes all the sacred (Semitic) books and their messages. It accepts all prophets of that traditions. It defines itself as the last and perfect religion of Semitic tradition and states that no other religion will be accepted from anybody else other then itself. It criticizes both the Jews and Christians especially about their failure to uphold the Oneness of God, tawhid, and to preserve the authenticity of their scripture from interventions. This exclusivist aspect of Islam as many conservative scholars formed with putting together some evidences from the Koran is generally accepted by Muslims

Swami Vivekananda's idea of religious diversity and harmony

The origin of the religious experience, says Vivekananda, is man's instinctive urge to transcend the sensual world. He believes that man is a compound of two fundamental ele-ments: sense arid mind. While through the senses he receives impressions of the objective world, he cannot remain satisfied with his senses, simply because he wants to go beyond them. Therefore, through his mind, at certain moments he transcends the limitations of the senses. But he also transcends the power of reasoning. He then comes face to face with the facts which he could never have sensed, could never have reasoned out. According to Vivekananda, this fact is the main basis of all the religions of the world. ..

Preferential Polarization Measures

Given opinions of members of a society on a set of policies, as ordinal preferences; an approach to polarization is introduced. The concept here is considering polarization in a society as an aggregation of pairwise antagonisms, which depend on identi fication within groups as well as alienation among groups. Among measures which comply to this sort of conceptualization, a class of functions which satisfi es certain plausible properties is introduced for the case of three alternatives. This class coincides with the class characterized for unidimensional spaces in Esteban and Ray (1994)

Die Jungfrau Maria und ihr Haus bei Ephesus : eine religionsvergleichende mariologische Untersuchung

Die Abhandlung untersucht das christliche und muslimische Verständnis der Jungfrau Maria im allgemeinen und deren Haus in der Nähe von Ephesus im besonderen. Die Untersuchung besteht aus zwei Teilen. Zunächst wird im ersten Teil die Stellung des Islams zur Jungfrau Maria im allgemeinen behandelt und danach das Verständnis Mariens bei den türkischen Muslimen und deren Einstellung zu ihrem Haus bei Ephesus. Im Vergleich dazu werden dann im zweiten Teil die mariologischen Anschauungen der Katholiken, Protestanten und Orthodoxen zu diesem Thema dargestellt

L'Union européenne et la Turquie : les difficiles négociations

Entamées en octobre 2005, les négociations d’adhésion de la Turquie à l’Union européenne n’ont que très lentement et difficilement progressé depuis. Seuls quatre des trente-cinq chapitres de l’acquis communautaire n’ont été ouverts, quand, dans le même temps, douze l’ont été avec la Croatie. Cette situation ne s’explique pas seulement par l’attitude rigoureuse de l’Union européenne. Malgré les positions variées des pays membres sur l’adhésion de la Turquie, un consensus semble établi sur la poursuite des négociations.Alors que le 6 novembre, la Commission européenne doit rendre public son rapport annuel de suivi sur la Turquie, la Turquie, après la profonde crise politique de cet été, est aujourd’hui dotée d’un gouvernement proeuropéen. Bruxelles attend de ce gouvernement qu’il mette enfin en place les réformes attendues, telles que la suppression du très controversé article 301 du Code pénal, une condition sine qua nonpour remplir les citères communautaires. Dans ce Document de travail, Ali Ihsan Aydin établit un état des lieux de ces négociations longues et difficiles

The impact of international financial reporting standards on financial analysis: A study on IMKB (Istanbul Stock Exhange)

Finansal analiz açısından finansal tablolardaki bilgilerin, finansal bilgi kullanıcılarının ihtiyaçlarını karşılayacak düzeyde doğru, anlaşılabilir ve karşılaştırılabilir olması gerekir. Finansal tablo kullanıcılarının farklı amaçları dikkate alındığında, Türkiye Muhasebe Standartları (TMS) ve Türkiye Finansal Raporlama Standartları (TFRS) uygulamaları işletmelerin finansal tablolarında ve bu tabloların finansal analizinde önemli etkilere yol açmaktadır. Çalışmada, Uluslararası Finansal Raporlama Standartları’nın (IFRS) İstanbul Menkul Kıymetler Borsası’na (İMKB) kayıtlı işletmelerin finansal tablolar analizine etkisi incelenmiştir. Çalışmada, IFRS’nın İMKB’da faaliyet gösteren işletmeler üzerinde etkisi anket aracılığıyla SSPS 19 istatistik programında faktör analizi yapılmıştır.The information in financial statements should be correct, comprehensible and comparable enough, in terms of financial analysis, to fulfill the needs of financial information users. When different purposes of financial statement users are taken into consideration, Turkish Accounting Standards (TAS) and Turkish Financial Reporting Standards (TFRS) applications have important impacts on financial statements of enterprises and the analysis of these statements. In the actual study, the impact of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the financial statement analysis of enterprises registered in Istanbul Stock Exchange (IMKB) was examined. The study, the effect of IFRS on the enterprises registered in IMKB was examined thorough a questionnaire. Factor analysis was made on the SPSS 19 statistics program

CSSR: a 2For1 Compressive Sensing Software Receiver with Combined Correlation For GPS-CA and Galileo-OS Signals

This is a 2for1 receiver because it acquires both GPS and Galileo signals at less than 50% of the complexity and processing time required by a Matched Filter acquisition receiver. CSSR is a new implementation of a dual-GNSS-signal Software Receiver using, for the first time, the compressive sensing technique to process the two GNSS signals at the same time (in this implementation, GPS C/A code and Galileo OS code signals are used). This paper describes this CSSR implementation, focusing on: (a) how we remove the subcarrier frequency effect from the Galileo signal, and combine it with the GPS signal as a BPSK like signal; (b) the pre-processing stage of the resultant BPSK signal to generate the non-Doppler shift vectors that compensates for the matching measurements in the compressive sensing process; and finally (c) the compressive sensing process to acquire both signals simultaneously by combining their dictionaries, or correlators. CSSR has been simulated using various actual signal conditions/scenarios. The results are compared to those obtained from running the same tests on 3-other matched filter receivers. CSSR achieves similar probability of detection to the others, and has a higher frequency resolution of 10Hz for the same 4ms dwell time. With Application processors on-board Smartphones getting more powerful and cheaper, and with 60% of the 3.1 billion dual GNSS offering on-board current Smartphones are based on side-by-side implementations, we believe that CSSR is a good candidate to saving cost and valuable battery energy when implemented on-board Smartphones

SCCOF: smart cooperative computation offloading framework for mobile cloud computing services

Virtual reality games and image processing Apps are examples of mobile cloud computing services (MCCS) common on Smartphones (SPs) nowadays, requiring intensive processing and/or wireless networking. The consequences are slow execution and huge battery consumption. Offloading the intensive computations of such Apps to a cloud based server can overcome such consequences. However, such offloading will introduce time delay and communication overheads. This paper proposes to do the offloading to nearby computing resources in a cooperative computation sharing network via short-range wireless connectivity. The proposed SCCOF reduces offloading response time and energy consumption overheads. SCCOF is supported by an intelligent cloud located controller that will form the cooperative resource sharing network on the go when needed, based on available devices in the vicinity, and will use the cloud if necessary. Upon the initiation of the MCCS service via the App, our controller will devise the offloaded VMs as well as the offloading network. A study test scenario was performed to evaluate the performance of SCCOF, resulting in saving of up to 16.2x in execution time and 57.25% energy

Hyper-Stable Social Welfare Functions

We introduce a new consistency condition for neutral social welfare functions, called hyperstability. A social welfare function a selects a complete weak order from a profile PN of linear orders over any finite set of alternatives, given N individuals. Each linear order P in PN generates a linear order over orders of alternatives,called hyper-preference, by means of a preference extension. Hence each profile PN generates a hyper-profile ˙PN. We assume that all preference extensions are separable: the hyper-preference of some order P ranks order Q above order Q0 if the set of alternative pairs P and Q agree on contains the one P and Q0 agree on. A special sub-class of separable extensions contains all Kemeny extensions, which build hyper-preferences by using the Kemeny distance criterion. A social welfare function a is hyper-stable (resp. Kemeny-stable) if at any profile PN, at least one linearization of a(PN) is ranked first by a( ˙PN), where ˙PN is any separable (resp. Kemeny) hyper-profile induced from PN. We show that no scoring rule is hyper-stable, and that no unanimous scoring rule is Kemeny-stable, while there exists a hyper-stable Condorcet social welfare function