Iram

Middle Eastern Studie

Protection granted by women: between law and literature

Grants of protection in pre‑Islamic Arabia were often connected to expressions of status and power. This paper evaluates the gendered aspects of protection to explore how Arabic literature viewed grants of protection by women. The issue was recorded in various guises: jurists debated the issue on a theoretical level, historians included relevant stories in the Prophet’s biography, and literature preserves other episodes from pre‑ and early‑Islamic‑era Arabia. While jurists generally permitted women to grant protection, literary works took an opposite track, and employed the trope of women’s acts of protecting to denigrate male characters. A cross‑genre analysis of women protectors reveals intriguing aspects about the status of women and the nature of fact and fiction in Arabic literature about the Arabian past.Middle Eastern Studie

Making war ethnic: Arab-Persian identities and conflict on the Euphrates frontier

Middle Eastern Studie

Fragmentation and integration: a response to the contributions of Hugh Kennedy and Walter Pohl

Middle Eastern Studie

Cry me a Jāhiliyya: muslim reconstructions of pre-Islamic Arabian culture - a case study

Middle Eastern Studie

A Probabilistic Environmental Decision Support Framework for Managing Risk and Resources

The ability to make cost effective, timely decisions associated with waste management and environmental remediation problems has been the subject of considerable debate in recent years. On one hand, environmental decision makers do not have unlimited resources that they can apply to come to resolution on outstanding and uncertain technical issues. On the other hand, because of the possible impending consequences associated with these types of systems, avoiding making a decision is usually not an alternative either. Therefore, a structured, quantitative process is necessary that will facilitate technically defensible decision making in light of both uncertainty and resource constraints. An environmental decision support framework has been developed to provide a logical structure that defines a cost-effective, traceable, and defensible path to closure on decision regarding compliance and resource allocation. The methodology has been applied effectively to waste disposal problems and is being adapted and implemented in subsurface environmental remediation problems

Developing an outsourcing questionnaire: validation study

Most developed countries have witnessed a sharp increase in outsourcing operations. These operations range from the service sector to manufacturing of various components such as automotive components. However, many organisations practicing outsourcing are failing to achieve their objectives for a number of reasons. In depth literature search has revealed that weaknesses in outsourcing operations are due to a large number of defects in aspects ranging from ‘order request’ to ‘invoice payment confirmation’. Analysis has shown that lack of quality in the outsourcing system is the predominant reason for weaknesses in the outsourcing operations. During the literature review, it was established that most of the data available on outsourcing was related to non-UK companies. In view of this information, it is crucial to develop a questionnaire to acquire information related to outsourcing from UK based companies. The Questionnaire is used to find out if any other newly generated problems are contributing to the poor quality of the outsourcing system resulting in failure. This paper presents an overview of outsourcing weaknesses/defects acquired through the literature search and a step by step process preparing a questionnaire to investigate the weaknesses in the outsourcing system and operations. The questionnaire is designed with a rational to measure the frequency of the quality defects in the outsourcing system. As such they are best aimed at collecting data to improve the framework

Orbital effect of in-plane magnetic field on quantum transport in chaotic lateral dots

We show how the in-plane magnetic field, which breaks time-reversal and rotational symmetries of the orbital motion of electrons in a heterostructure due to the momentum-dependent inter-subband mixing, affects weak localisation correction to conductance of a large-area chaotic lateral quantum dot and parameteric dependences of universal conductance fluctuations in it.Comment: 4 pages with a figur

Conductance fluctuations in a quantum dot under almost periodic ac pumping

It is shown that the variance of the linear dc conductance fluctuations in an open quantum dot under a high-frequency ac pumping depends significantly on the spectral content of the ac field. For a sufficiently strong ac field $\gamma\tau_{\phi}<< 1$, where $1/\tau_{\phi}$ is the dephasing rate induced by ac noise and $\gamma$ is the electron escape rate, the dc conductance fluctuations are much stronger for the harmonic pumping than in the case of the noise ac field of the same intensity. The reduction factor $r$ in a static magnetic field takes the universal value of 2 only for the white--noise pumping. For the strictly harmonic pumping $A(t)=A_{0}\cos\omega t$ of sufficiently large intensity the variance is almost insensitive to the static magnetic field $r-1= 2\sqrt{\tau_{\phi}\gamma} << 1$. For the quasi-periodic ac field of the form $A(t)=A_{0} [\cos(\omega_{1} t)+\cos(\omega_{2} t)]$ with $\omega_{1,2} >> \gamma$ and $\gamma\tau_{\phi} << 1$ we predict the novel effect of enchancement of conductance fluctuations at commensurate frequencies $\omega_{2}/\omega_{1}=P/Q$.Comment: 4 pages RevTex, 4 eps figures; the final version to appear in Phys.Rev.

Microscopic mechanisms of dephasing due to electron-electron interactions

We develop a non-perturbative numerical method to study tunneling of a single electron through an Aharonov-Bohm ring where several strongly interacting electrons are bound. Inelastic processes and spin-flip scattering are taken into account. The method is applied to study microscopic mechanisms of dephasing in a non-trivial model. We show that electron-electron interactions described by the Hubbard Hamiltonian lead to strong dephasing: the transmission probability at flux $\Phi=\pi$ is high even at small interaction strength. In addition to inelastic scattering, we identify two energy conserving mechanisms of dephasing: symmetry-changing and spin-flip scattering. The many-electron state on the ring determines which of these mechanisms will be at play: transmitted current can occur either in elastic or inelastic channels, with or without changing the spin of the scattering electron.Comment: 11 pages, 16 figures Submitted to Phys. Rev.