Public sphere in Muslim societies; its reflection on social, political thought and law case study: Iran and Turkey

This comprehensive study aims to situate and contextualize the meaning of the public sphere in Muslim societies, especially Iran as compared with the experience of Turkey, utilizing diverse tools of inquiry in qualitative research methodology, such as critical textual analysis, early Islam historiography and historical analysis of Iran and Turkey, as well as in-depth, open-ended interviews. After setting the scene by rendering explicit certain aspects of Islamic thought and history, this study goes on to demonstrate various reflections and repercussions that such a free domain would have on the societal and, especially, legal structure of the aforementioned societies

Time-Domain Macromodeling of High Speed Distributed Networks

With the rapid growth in density, operating speeds and complexity of modern very-large-scale integration (VLSI) circuits, there is a growing demand on efficient and accurate modeling and simulation of high speed interconnects and packages in order to ensure the signal integrity, reliability and performance of electronic systems. Such models can be derived from the knowledge of the physical characteristics of the structure or based on the measured port-to-port response.In the first part of this thesis, a passive macromodeling technique based on Method of Characteristics (referred as Passive Method of Characteristics or PMoC) is described which is applicable for modeling of electrically long high-speed interconnect networks. This algorithm is based on extracting the propagation delay of the interconnect followed by a low order rational approximation to capture the attenuation effects. The key advantage of the algorithm is that the curve fitting to realize the macromodel depends only on per-unit-length (p.u.l.) parameters and not on the length of the transmission line. In this work, the PMoC is developed to model multiconductor transmission lines.Next, an efficient approach for time domain sensitivity analysis of lossy high speed interconnects in the presence of nonlinear terminations is presented based on PMoC. An important feature of the proposed method is that the sensitivities are obtained from the solution of the original network, leading to significant computational advantages. The sensitivity analysis is also used to optimize the physical parameters of the network to satisfy the required design constraints. A time-domain macromodel for lossy multiconductor transmission lines exposed to electromag¬netic interference is also described in this thesis based on PMoC. The algorithm provides an efficient mechanism to ensure the passivity of the macromodel for different line lengths. Numerical examples illustrate that when compared to other passive incident field coupling algorithms, the proposed method is efficient in modeling electrically long interconnects since delay extraction without segmentation is used to capture the frequency response.In addition, this thesis discusses macromodeling techniques for complex packaging structures based on the frequency-domain behavior of the system obtained from measurements or electromagnetic simulators. Such techniques approximate the transfer function of the interconnect network as a rational function which can be embedded with modern circuit simulators with integrated circuit emphasis (SPICE). One of the most popular tools for rational approximations of measured or simulated data is based on vector fitting (VF) algorithms. Nonetheless, the vector fitting algorithms usually suffer convergence issues and lack of accuracy when dealing with noisy measured data. As a part of this thesis, a methodology is presented to improve the convergence and accuracy issues of vector fitting algorithm based on instrumental variable technique. This methodology is based on obtaining the “instruments” in an iterative manner and do not increase the complexity of vector fitting to capture the frequency response and minimize the biasing

Some Physico-Mechanical Properties of Apricot Fruit, Pit and Kernel of Ordubad Variety

The physical and mechanical properties of apricot fruit, pit and kernel are the most important parameters for designing and development of harvesting, handling, grading, sizing, processing and packaging equipments. The objective of this study was to determine physical and mechanical properties of apricot fruit, pit and kernel of commercial cultivar of Ordubad. The physical and mechanical properties of the fruit, pit and kernel were determined at 82.29%, 22.12% and 22.65% (w.b.) moisture content, respectively. The pit was compressed along the length, width and thickness at 0.085, 0.20, 0.30 and 0.40 (d.b) moisture contents to determine required force, deformation and energy per volume (toughness) at rupture point. The results showed that average values of length, width, thickness, geometric mean diameter, mass, volume and sphericity for the fruit were 46.64 mm, 44.68 mm, 41.21 mm, 43.93 mm, 48.17 g, 45.84 cm3 and 94.35%, respectively. The average values of length, width, thickness, geometric mean diameter, mass, volume and sphericity for the pit were 29.74 mm, 20.84 mm, 13.07 mm, 20.01 mm, 2.69 g, 2.59 cm3 and 67.39%, respectively. The average values of coefficient of friction on different surfaces namely steel, galvanized steel and plywood sheets were determined 0.225 for the fruit, 0.415 for the pit and 0.538 for the kernel, respectively. The hardness at upper, middle and lower parts of the fruit were 3.03 N, 2.23 N and 2.93 N, respectively. The modulus of elasticity was 2.10 MPa for the fruit and 240.70 MPa for the pit. The maximum and minimum rupture forces of the pit were 847.70 N along the length at 0.085 (d.b) and 163.5 N along the width at 0.3 (d.b), respectively

A Low-Complexity Detector for Memoryless Polarization-Multiplexed Fiber-Optical Channels

A low-complexity detector is introduced for polarization-multiplexed M-ary phase shift keying modulation in a fiber-optical channel impaired by nonlinear phase noise, generalizing a previous result by Lau and Kahn for single-polarization signals. The proposed detector uses phase compensation based on both received signal amplitudes in conjunction with simple straight-line rather than four-dimensional maximum-likelihood decision boundaries.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Comm. Let