Introduction to Islamic finance

An increasing number of individuals and banks have become curious about Islamic finance and how it is conducted in America. The author provides helpful background and tells where services can be found in New England.Finance (Islamic law)

Rate-distance tradeoff for codes above graph capacity

The capacity of a graph is defined as the rate of exponential growth of independent sets in the strong powers of the graph. In the strong power an edge connects two sequences if at each position their letters are equal or adjacent. We consider a variation of the problem where edges in the power graphs are removed between sequences which differ in more than a fraction $\delta$ of coordinates. The proposed generalization can be interpreted as the problem of determining the highest rate of zero undetected-error communication over a link with adversarial noise, where only a fraction $\delta$ of symbols can be perturbed and only some substitutions are allowed. We derive lower bounds on achievable rates by combining graph homomorphisms with a graph-theoretic generalization of the Gilbert-Varshamov bound. We then give an upper bound, based on Delsarte's linear programming approach, which combines Lov\'asz' theta function with the construction used by McEliece et al. for bounding the minimum distance of codes in Hamming spaces.Comment: 5 pages. Presented at 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theor

Searching for Minimum Storage Regenerating Codes

Regenerating codes allow distributed storage systems to recover from the loss of a storage node while transmitting the minimum possible amount of data across the network. We present a systematic computer search for optimal systematic regenerating codes. To search the space of potential codes, we reduce the potential search space in several ways. We impose an additional symmetry condition on codes that we consider. We specify codes in a simple alternative way, using additional recovered coefficients rather than transmission coefficients and place codes into equivalence classes to avoid redundant checking. Our main finding is a few optimal systematic minimum storage regenerating codes for $n=5$ and $k=3$, over several finite fields. No such codes were previously known and the matching of the information theoretic cut-set bound was an open problem

Leadership development in Egypt : how indigenous managers construe Western leadership theories

This research examines the ways in which Egyptian managers make sense of the leadership theories they are exposed to in their work interactions and their in-house leadership development training. This empirical study utilizes Personal Construct Theory to uncover how the indigenous managers construe Western evolved leadership theories. The research strategy follows a phenomenological paradigm, based on a comparative case study centered on an international design consulting firm headquartered in the Middle East region. The data collection tools, i.e., the Repertory Grid Technique (RGT), Personal Value Statements and Storytelling are consistent with an inductive, constructivist approach. The findings illustrate differences in how leadership theories are construed by indigenous managers compared to their UK counterparts and consequently which theories are more and less favoured. An emergent finding that evolved from this enquiry was the differences between Egyptian managers’ espousals and actual day to day leadership practices. This finding raises greater awareness of the role that cultural values play in the cross-cultural arena of leadership. The ethnographic technique of Storytelling brought to light the influence of national culture when leadership is enacted. The findings and results of this thesis throws some much needed light onto a geographical area that recent political events have brought to prominence as well as making a contribution towards understanding the potential barriers of transferring knowledge between cultures that differ in several important ways. The results are also useful from the perspective of Training and Development. Western trainers working in the Middle East region in addition to indigenous trainers seeking to provide effective leadership development programs will be able to discern which Western leadership theories to focus on, adapt and or disregard