The governance of religion and law: Insights from the prohibition of usury

Religion and law are often portrayed as belonging to different, isolated spheres and as conflicting with each other, especially with regard to the process of governing today's global economic and political affairs. The portrayal and handling of such conflicts are especially reflected in media reports and are ultimately part of the public debates that precede legislative action dealing with a great variety of legal issues, including, but not limited to, sumptuary laws, the wearing of the headscarf and other apparel in public, the acceptance and application of a cultural defense in criminal law, and the exclusion of various cultural products, such as food, beverages, or motion pictures, from international trade. This article argues against this dominant perception, positing that religion and law are instead complementary and merely operate at different levels of perception, effectively pursuing the same purpose. Therefore, it is advocated that greater caution or a so-called “precautionary principle of incomplete information” should be applied to various legislative proposals that are aimed at sanctioning various issues of religious relevance by strict positive laws. This argument is further supported by a brief reference to the prohibition of riba (usury and interest) in Islamic banking and its relevance in the world today

Global Governance and the Creative Economy: The Developing versus Developed Country Dichotomy Revisited

The past century has seen drastic changes, and the pace with which these changes occur still appears to be accelerating. It is not only us as individuals who have difficulties in following these perceptual processes and in finding the appropriate conceptual responses and actions. The international legal and institutional framework put in place by previous generations equally seems no longer to be capable of providing the efficient responses needed to tackle the imminent global challenges and to secure a sustainable development in the future. Put briefly and more generally, the gap between our perceptual processes and the corresponding conceptual responses is widening. As a result, it appears that the perennial paradoxical struggle between continuity and change, which underlies the fundamental problem of preserving the integrity of the law, has reached a new level. As a paradox, it is in view of the absence of a global platform on which a truly global debate on the future of our societies can unfold that we need first to find a commonly shared vocabulary of concepts. Such shared vocabulary helps both to establish a global forum and to frame the debate, because the procedural aspects and the substantive arguments are intrinsically linked. This also means a twofold task, namely to coin new concepts that better encompass our present perceptions, and to abandon those which no longer suit them. In positive terms, the present article therefore advocates the joint use of the novel concepts of “global governance” and the “creative economy” while, in negative terms, calls for the abandonment of the widely used “developed versus developing country” dichotomy. Global governance and the creative economy are chosen for their special features related to paradoxical modes of thinking, better to encompass change and the accelerating modes of the perception of that change. They both seem to be better suited to the complex realities that we draw up through the perceptions generated by our various sensory instruments. By contrast, the “developed versus developing country” dichotomy serves as an example of the outdated mode of exclusively binary thinking, both in terms of a statistical and factual analysis as well as in a survey of the most prominent international legal documents. It is argued that this conceptual distinction obstructs the basis for a broader global solidarity, by artificially dividing the world into so-called “developing countries”, on the one hand, and “developed countries”, on the other. In summary, the facts and data underlying both lines of arguments appear to be better suited to our striving for a more unitary and coherent approach to the solution of many urgent global problems. Finally, this line of argument is also supported by a meta-juridical consideration of change, which, ultimately, is believed to support the claim that ‘we all want to live in “developing countries”’.Key words: Global governance; Creative economy; Change; Sustainable development; International law; United Nations; Institutional reform; Comparative la

Electroweak superpartner production at 13.6 TeV with Resummino

Due to the greater experimental precision expected from the currently ongoing LHC Run 3, equally accurate theoretical predictions are essential. We update the documentation of the Resummino package, a program dedicated to precision cross section calculations for the production of a pair of sleptons, electroweakinos, and leptons in the presence of extra gauge bosons, and for the production of an associated electroweakino-squark or electroweakino-gluino pair. We detail different additions that have been released since the initial version of the program a decade ago, and then use the code to investigate the impact of threshold resummation corrections at the next-to-next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy. As an illustration of the code we consider the production of pairs of electroweakinos and sleptons at the LHC for centre-of-mass energies ranging up to 13.6 TeV and in simplified model scenarios. We find slightly increased total cross section values, accompanied by a significant decrease of the associated theoretical uncertainties. Furthermore, we explore the dependence of the results on the squark masses.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figure

The maximum modulus of a trigonometric trinomial

Let Lambda be a set of three integers and let C_Lambda be the space of 2pi-periodic functions with spectrum in Lambda endowed with the maximum modulus norm. We isolate the maximum modulus points x of trigonometric trinomials T in C_Lambda and prove that x is unique unless |T| has an axis of symmetry. This permits to compute the exposed and the extreme points of the unit ball of C_Lambda, to describe how the maximum modulus of T varies with respect to the arguments of its Fourier coefficients and to compute the norm of unimodular relative Fourier multipliers on C_Lambda. We obtain in particular the Sidon constant of Lambda

A 3D-printed nasopharyngeal swab for COVID-19 diagnostic testing.

The nasopharyngeal swab is a critical component of the COVID-19 testing kit. Supply chain remains greatly impacted by the pandemic. Teams from USF Health Radiology and Northwell Health System developed a 3D-printed stopgap alternative. This descriptive study details the workflow and provides guidance for hospital-based 3D printing labs to leverage the design to make a positive impact on the pandemic. Swab use is also outlined, and the early information regarding clinical use is described, including an ongoing multicenter trial methodology

Rural Children Experience Different Rates of Mental Health Diagnosis and Treatment

Research indicates that privately insured, rural adults have lower use of office-based mental health services, but higher use of prescription medicines than their urban counterparts. Patterns for rural children may be different from urban children because of the limited supply of pediatric mental health providers in rural areas, which may lead to reduced access and lower use of mental health services in rural areas versus urban. Using data on children ages 5-17 from the 2002-2008 of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, researchers from the Maine Rural Health Research Center find that rural children are significantly less likely to be diagnosed and treated for non-ADHD mental health problems than urban children and are less likely to receive mental health counseling. The rural-urban difference is greatest among those children scoring in the “possible impairment” range on the Columbia Impairment Scale

Patterns of Care for Rural and Urban Children with Mental Health Problems

Introduction Research indicates that privately insured, rural adults have lower use of office-based mental health services, but higher use of prescription medicines than their urban counterparts. Similar studies for rural children have been limited to specific populations, diagnoses, or to single states. Patterns for rural children may be different than those of urban children and adults generally because of their high enrollment in Medicaid and the State Children\u27s Health Insurance Program, which tend to have more generous behavioral health benefits than private coverage and may equalize rural-urban treatment patterns. On the other hand, the more limited supply of specialty mental health providers in rural areas, particularly for children, could lead to lack of access and lower utilization of some types of mental health services in rural areas versus urban. Methods Using data on children ages 5-17 from the 2002-2008 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, this study examines two research questions: 1) do patterns of children\u27s mental health diagnosis and service use (e.g., office visits and psychotropic medications) differ by rural-urban residence? and 2) what is the effect of income and insurance type on use of mental health services? Findings Controlling for demographic and risk factors, rural children are as likely as urban children to have an attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis and less likely to have any other type of psychiatric diagnosis. Initially observed higher prevalence of mental health diagnoses among rural children is explained by underlying differences in demographic characteristics and risk factors, such as higher rates of poverty, public coverage, mental health impairment, and lower prevalence of minorities. Rural children with the highest mental health need are no more or less likely to be diagnosed or treated for mental health conditions. However, among those with a possible impairment, rural children are less likely to be diagnosed with a psychiatric illness other than ADHD and are less likely to receive counseling