An Excerpt from al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar by Murtedha Gzar

The following is a translation of an excerpt from the novel Al-Sayyid Asghar Ak bar (Dar al-Tanwir, 2012) by Iraqi author Murtedha Gzar. This recent work by a young engineer from the southern city of Basra has received considerable attention in literary circles at home and abroad, significantly for the ways in which it departs from the mimetic norms of social realism that were found in the established narratological models of the pre-2003 U.S. occupation era, such as the varieties cultivated in the 1960s and 1970s in Iraq by seminal authors lik e Gha’ib Ṭu`mah Farman, Mahdi Isa al-Saqr, and Fu’ad al-Takarli. Al-Sayyid Asghar Akbar has been hailed as “unique in its magical realist narration,” and a “harbinger of a new style of narration that departs completely from the literary output of multiple generations of Iraqi narrators.” Part of this uniqueness comes from the ways in which the novel restructures iconic Iraqi places, mainly the Shrine city of Najaf, transgresses intradiegetic time, and reconstructs historical discourses. By so doing it defies our expectations and media- and government-cast collective images of twentieth-century Iraq. Instead, it negotiates a discursive space that lies on the peripheries of two hegemonic, official narratives of Iraqi culture: the national narrative of the Ba`th regime and the religious counter-narrative of the traditional Shi`i opposition. It exposes a discrepancy between two authoritative, normative processes of historicizing; the ‘Rewriting of Iraqi History Project’ and the Najafi ijtihad and taqlid traditions. Ultimately, in this complex work Gzar accomplishes a skeptical deconstruction of Iraq’s cultural formations and a new, post-Ba`thist reading of Shi`ism, Najaf, and Iraqi identity by telling the story of three generations of family genealogists from the Shi’i shrine city of Najaf. The narrative time spans the period between 1871, the year the grandfather Asghar Akbar arrived to Najaf aboard a ship that was transporting corpses from India to be buried in the holy grounds of Najaf’s cemetery; and 2005, the year his three childless granddaughters, Nadhmah, Mu`inah, and Wahidiyyah, conclude his lineage and are found buried in the vault of their grandfather’s house. These sisters jointly narrate the bulk of the novel’s events. Sometimes alternating and sometimes in unison, the unique narrative voice of these sisters tells the story of their grandfather by rearranging the letters on the lead sorts (pieces of type) that make up the remains of a decayed printing press that used to belong to the grandfather Asghar Akbar. Worried that they would run out of letter sorts before finishing their account, they feverishly type-narrate the story of their grandfather, an eccentric horse genealogist who arrived to Najaf on a dubious sea journey. They narrate, with countless digressions into their personal stories and the present, how the controversial Asghar Ak bar was to become the city’s most acclaimed family genealogist despite the suspicion of the city’s legal and political establishment. As they synchronously type-narrate the novel’s events, the sisters commit typos that affect the development of the plot and wreak havoc on the city. As they distort and deconstruct the established accounts of k ey political events such as the Najaf Revolt of 1916, the 1918 British siege of the city, the popular uprising against Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1991, and the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003, the sisters rewrite the modern social history of Najaf and reveal striking parallels between the political events of the turn of the previous century and the turn of the current century

Performance analysis of cooperative sugar factories in north-eastern Karnataka

The study was attempted to measure the economic performance of cooperative sugar factories in terms of total costs and returns, capacity utilization, physical and financial indicators and ratio analysis of the factories. In this study the three cooperative sugar factories are taken into consideration and the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) for all the physical and financial indicators are worked out wherein the results suggested that a significant variation in the total cost and returns, capacity utilization and both physical and financial indicators over years within the three sugar factories was found. Further, the study revealed enough evidence about the financial ratios, which in turn showed the economic potentiality of the respective sugar factories. For the better performance of the factories an efficient planning and automation well before the start of the season is necessary and the government should come forward to help the farmers in making the cane bill payment at an early stage by the factories, by extending the financial assistance

Beyond the Trauma of War: Iraqi Literature

A decade after the U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq, we cannot approach Iraqi literature today without recognizing the multiple shifts and varieties in its expression. In a matter of ten years, the post-Ba\u27thist era has witnessed the sudden fall of a long-lasting dictatorship, an encounter with Western occupation, and an unprecedented upsurge in sectarian discourses, to name only the most prominent events. In addition to these influences, the development of contemporary Iraqi literature is the product of several fluctuations in cultural expression that span the bulk of the twentieth century. The abrupt transitions from the Hashemite monarchy (1932–58) to \u27Abd al-Karim Qasim’s regime (1958–63), the dictatorship of the Ba\u27th Party (1968–2003), the embargo years (1991–2003), and finally the post-2003 occupation era punctuate the ideological schisms and fractious state-writer relationship. The literary shifts also highlight the emergence of civic society in Iraq, the dynamics within the public sphere, and the ideological makeup of the various state-controlled cultural projects

Effective Feature Selection for Feature Possessing Group Structure

Feature selection has become an interesting research topic in recent years. It is an effective method to tackle the data with high dimension. The underlying structure has been ignored by the previous feature selection method and it determines the feature individually. Considering this we focus on the problem where feature possess some group structure. To solve this problem we present group feature selection method at group level to execute feature selection. Its objective is to execute the feature selection in within the group and between the group of features that select discriminative features and remove redundant features to obtain optimal subset. We demonstrate our method on data sets and perform the task to achieve classification accuracy

The UCI Math Circle: Building an online community of young math researchers

Transitioning the UCI Math Circle (UCIMC) to an online format has forced us to pivot our pedagogical goals from teaching specific mathematical concepts to building an online mathematical community of young scholars. Each academic quarter, we recruit math Ph.D. students, undergraduate math majors, and faculty to serve as UCIMC mentors and run small breakout rooms during each meeting. Mentors are asked to volunteer for an entire quarter, so that they have time to build bonds with participants. The curriculum, created by the Julia Robinson Math Festival, and the accompanying digital applications, allows students of all ages to engage in online mathematical explorations. Prior to each UCIMC meeting, we run a “mentor training” session where we train the mentors on how to use an inquiry-based approach to guide their students on the week’s online mathematical game or puzzle. Students are encouraged to come up with their own observations and hypotheses, as young mathematical researchers, towards understanding a mathematical investigation. With 23 sessions offered throughout the school year, and an average attendance of 50 students and 10 mentors, UCIMC is making an impact on students’ math skills, while also bringing solace and stability to youths in the pandemic, by offering a dependable once-a-week scheduled online visit with peers and college mentors. In this paper, we detail the benefits of this approach towards fostering community between and among the students and mentors, and the benefits gained by the mentors towards developing their own teaching skills. Using comparison data collected from the past several years, we describe how our novel approach has been a resounding success. The geographical reach of UCIMC has expanded, our attendance has increased, and we have been able to better retain female UCIMC students

Women as Citizens in Australia

The debates surrounding the theory and practice of citizenship have gained increased prominence in the last decade. They have been partially prompted by an increasing awareness of the role played by the civil society and its relationship to state apparatus. But the emergence of cross-border migration as a major feature of the post-Cold War era has also aided this phenomenon

Sparsity-based autoencoders for denoising cluttered radar signatures

Narrowband and broadband indoor radar images significantly deteriorate in the presence of target-dependent and target-independent static and dynamic clutter arising from walls. A stacked and sparse denoising autoencoder (StackedSDAE) is proposed for mitigating the wall clutter in indoor radar images. The algorithm relies on the availability of clean images and the corresponding noisy images during training and requires no additional information regarding the wall characteristics. The algorithm is evaluated on simulated Doppler-time spectrograms and high-range resolution profiles generated for diverse radar frequencies and wall characteristics in around-the-corner radar (ACR) scenarios. Additional experiments are performed on range-enhanced frontal images generated from measurements gathered from a wideband radio frequency imaging sensor. The results from the experiments show that the StackedSDAE successfully reconstructs images that closely resemble those that would be obtained in free space conditions. Furthermore, the incorporation of sparsity and depth in the hidden layer representations within the autoencoder makes the algorithm more robust to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and label mismatch between clean and corrupt data during training than the conventional single-layer DAE. For example, the denoised ACR signatures show a structural similarity above 0.75 to clean free space images at SNR of −10 dB and label mismatch error of 50%

A RANDOMISED CONTROL TRIAL ON CEREBRO VASCULAR ACCIDENT PATIENTS WITH REFERENCE TO AETIOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT: 24 WEEKS, SINGLE-CENTER, PROSPECTIVE OBSERVATIONAL PILOT STUDY

Objectives: Stroke is one of the leading causes of death and long-term disability in world. Stroke is an important cause of premature death and disability in low-income and middle-income countries like India, largely driven by demographic changes and enhanced by the increasing prevalence of key modifiable risk factors. The main aim of our study was to assess the clinical profile with special reference to the etiology of the condition, the management, and drug utilization review. Methods: This is a hospital-based prospective observational randomized control trial which was conducted for a period of 6 months at Government General Hospital, Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Kadapa. Seventy-five patients were recruited based on study criteria. The data were analyzed and summarized as frequency and percentage by GraphPad Prism software using Microsoft Excel. Results: In a total of 75 patients, it was found that 45 and 30 patients were female. Maximum number of patients (i.e. 36 patients) belonged to 51–60 years age group. We observed that 52 patients were suffering from ischemic stroke, 21 patients were suffering from transient ischemic stroke, and only 2 patients were suffering from ischemic stroke and transient ischemic stroke. Among 75 patients studied, hypertension (62%), diabetes mellitus (28%), smoking (33%), and alcohol (33%) were the risk factors. Conclusion: In this study, ischemic stroke was most prevalent. Hypertension, that is, increase of blood pressure considered as one of the important and major risk factors for stroke occurrence and recurrence. Proper management includes non-pharmacological (physiotherapy) along with pharmacological treatment that included cardiovascular system drugs such as hypolipidemics, cognition enhancers, anticoagulants, and antihypertensive therapy

Polyvinylidene Difluoride Piezoelectric Electrospun Nanofibers: Review in Synthesis, Fabrication, Characterizations, and Applications

This review article highlights the methods and principles used for PVDF nanofiber creation and the use of these nanofibers in different fields by utilizing its piezoelectric performance, etc. The studies include different techniques to improve the alignment and piezoelectric behavior of nanofibers. The pressure versus sensitivity behavior of PVDF substrate is thoroughly analyzed. The optimum conditions (of experimental parameters) of the electrospinning technique are carefully studied to improve the structure, alignment, and performance of the generated nanofiber mats. In addition to experimental methods, the preparation of nanocomposites with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) also can improve the structure, alignment, and piezoelectric performance. The characterization tools used for the analyses of fabricated nanofibers are also discussed, in addition, to analyze the piezoelectric results of the targeted nanocomposite