Travel Behavior variations across urban and rural areas of Pakistan

This paper examines the 2007 Paksitan national time use survey to report the degree to which the national travel behaviour varies between urban and rural of Pakistan and how it is shaped by the socioeconomic and individual characteristics. Longitudnal anlaysis was performed on 37,830 time use diaries collected in the survey in Stata and the resulting tavel behvaior charactersitics have been examined through houshoeld and individual socioecnomic variables. At the national level, walking remains the dominant mode of daily mobility across the country. Nearly 90 percent of daily travel is done by walk However, the daily trip rate, mode choice and travel durations vary significantly across urban and rural geographies. Urban residents are slightly less mobile and exhibits greater use of personal automobile than rural residents. Rural residents make 4.6 trips epr day as compared ot 4.4 trips per day of urban residents. Simlary rural population are found to otravel 101 minutes per day as comapred to significantly lower duration of 98 minutes among urban residents. While walking trips usually take same time, mean trip duration by automobiles is also much longer among rural population than urban (42.2 minutes vs 34.1 minutes) These differences become more pronounced across gender and urban women appear to be the least mobile while rural men appear most mobile as apparent form their daily trip rates of 2.6 and 5.7 per perosn, respectively. There exists slight local regional variation across provinces which are closely related to the local social and spatial drivers of mobility. The paper contends that the rural travel differences are mainly caused by difference in income levels. Urban built environment is more conducive to motorized mobility which results in greater automobile reliance in cities, particularly for women. Social and cultural environment also plays potentially significant and spatially explicit role which remains under addressed and calls for further research

The concept of understanding in Jaspers and contemporary epistemology

In the General Psychopathology Jaspers famously draws a distinction between the understandable and explainable. Meaningful connections between psychic events, he argues, can only be understood empathetically and cannot be explained causally. The idea behind this distinction, according to some interpreters at least, seems to be that psychic events do not fall under any general causal rules whereas ordinary events do fall under such rules. Also Jaspers distinguishes empathetic understanding of the connection between two psychic events from a mere interpretation of it, which may turn out to be false. Hence, understanding seems to be able to give us the truth about the connection and is factive as well as self-evident in nature. Contemporary epistemologists, such as Linda Zagzebsky, Duncan Pritchard, and Jonathan Kvanvig, for example, distinguish three varieties: propositional, objectual or holistic, and atomistic understanding. They do not agree on factivity and transparency of understanding. What then is the difference between their views and that of Jaspers? This essay compares recent epistemological views of understanding with those of Jaspers and critiques his claims about empathetic understanding as being both factive and self-evident or transparent; to show that empathetic understanding of connections between psychic events needs a public criterion for its individuation

Modernity and Muslims: Towards a Selective Retrieval

This article is focused on some conditions in today’s world of globalized media, which are producing either an uncritical acquiescence or fright in Muslim societies as a result of the interaction between these societies and the contemporary Western powers that represent modernity and postmodernity on the global stage. The rise of fundamentalism, a tendency toward returning to the roots and stringently insisting upon some pure and literal interpretation of them, in almost all the religions of the world is a manifestation of this fright. The central concern of this article is to suggest that fundamentalism is neither the only nor the most reasonable response for Muslim societies in the face of contemporary modernity. Muslims need to adopt an independent and critical attitude toward modernity and reshape their societies in the light of the ethics of the Qur’an, keeping in view the historical link between Islam and science in as much as Islamic culture paved the way for emergence of modern science during European Renaissance. The necessity of a pluralistic or contextualized modernization of Muslim societies is discussed along with the need for the removal of cultural duplicity in the role of the West in relation to Muslim societies. All this leads to an overall proposal for modernization which is given towards the end