Ramadan, the month of fasting

Socially, fasting is an expression of unity with the poor, the family, and the whole society. This is a period in which the rich have first-hand experience of what it is to be poor, the pains the needy suffers in normal living conditions. The discipline resulting from Islamic fasting instills in the rich the virtue of mercy, which is very important in terms of social well-being and production of harmony

Finding the Correct Language: Defining Fragmented Ethnic Identity in the Second Generation Iranian Americans

This research adds depth to current scholarship on second generation immigrant integration within American context and how children of immigrants continue to be ostracized through intergroup and outer group relations. Additionally, this paper brings another immigrant group into the conversation by incorporating concepts and methodologies from the social sciences (psychology, sociology, ethnic studies, and linguistic anthropology), serving as a reminder that language loss is prominent within all immigrant groups.

Decision-Theoretic Consequentialism and the Desire-Luck Problem

Jackson (1991) proposes an interpretation of consequentialism, namely, the Decision Theoretic Consequentialism (DTC), which provides a middle ground between internal and external criteria of rightness inspired by decision theory. According to DTC, a right decision either leads to the best outcomes (external element) or springs from right motivations (internal element). He raises an objection to fully external interpretations, like objective consequentialism (OC), which he claims that DTC can resolve. He argues that those interpretations are either too objective, which prevents them from giving guidance for action, or their guidance leads to wrong and blameworthy actions or decisions. I discuss how the emphasis on blameworthiness in DTC constraints its domain to merely the justification of decisions that relies on rationality to provide a justification criterion for moral decisions. I provide examples that support the possibility of rational but immoral decisions that are at odds with DTC’s prescription for right decisions. Moreover, I argue what I call the desire-luck problem for the external element of justification criterion leads to the same objection for DTC that Jackson raised for OC. Therefore, DTC, although successful in response to some objections, fails to provide a prescription for the right decision

Do budget deficits follow a linear or non-linear path?

One method to test whether any government's fiscal policy has been effective in dealing with budget deficits is to test for mean reverting properties of deficits. If deficits-GDP ratio reverts to their mean, or are stationary, that will be an indication of taking corrective measure. Previous studies using standard linear ADF test did not find much support for the stationarity of deficits/GDP ratio. However, when we employ non-linear ADF test and data from 28 countries, we find support for stationarity of the deficits/GDP ratio in 50% of the countries in the sample.28 Countries.

Transforming opacity verification to nonblocking verification in modular systems

We consider the verification of current-state and K-step opacity for systems modeled as interacting non-deterministic finite-state automata. We describe a new methodology for compositional opacity verification that employs abstraction, in the form of a notion called opaque observation equivalence, and that leverages existing compositional nonblocking verification algorithms. The compositional approach is based on a transformation of the system, where the transformed system is nonblocking if and only if the original one is current-state opaque. Furthermore, we prove that $K$-step opacity can also be inferred if the transformed system is nonblocking. We provide experimental results where current-state opacity is verified efficiently for a large scaled-up system

Optimal investment and consumption for pairs trading financial markets on small time interval

In this paper we consider a pairs trading financial market with the spread of risky assets defined by the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) process. We implement an optimal strategy for power utility functions for investment/consumption problem. Through the Feynman-Kac (FK) method, we study the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation for this problem. Moreover, the existence and uniqueness has been shown for classical solution for the HJB equation. In addition, the numeric approximation for the solution of the HJB equation has been studied and the convergence rate has been established and it is been found that the convergence rate is extremely explosive.Comment: 44 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1102.1186 by other author