Teaching from the Tent: Muslim Women\u27s Leadership in Digital Religion

Muslim women’s accounts of their own religious leadership have been consistently absent from historical documents and present-day reporting. The absence of narrations does not necessarily indicate the absence of women, however, and today more and more women are leading and becoming public figures using new platforms provided by the Internet. In order to understand the essence of their leadership, this study sought to discover and describe the religious leadership lives of Muslim women, to disentangle the relationship between feminism and feminist work per Muslim women religious leaders, and to understand how digital religion influences their leadership. This qualitative study is a feminist phenomenology of seven Muslim women who are public figures and religious leaders. Using long interviews, document analysis of their publications, public teaching observations, and netnographies. I gathered data about the essence of their leadership. I further triangulated the data with a six-week study of a WhatsApp chat that happened between 75 Muslim women religious leaders who remain anonymous in this study. The feminist theories of bell hooks (2000), Nell Noddings (1985), and feminist theologians, along with Aristotle’s theory of knowledge as expressed by al Farābi, and Chaos theory as applied to social systems as described by Fritjof Capra (2002) came together to form the theoretical underpinnings of this study. Careful analysis of the data resulted in a model of Muslim women’s religious leadership that can be used to both appreciate the unique aspects of their leadership and improve education and training for Muslim women who wish to enter into the field

Volatility swaps and their use in currency risk management

The paradox of international investing is that, although foreign investments deliver diversification benefits that help to decrease the asset risk of a portfolio, they also introduce foreign exchange risk. Classic hedging instruments used to hedge this risk have the drawback of hedging not only the risk but the foreign exchange returns as well. Volatility swaps are financial instruments that allow the user pure exposure to the volatility of an asset. While most of the published works on volatility swaps have focused on their use as a speculative instrument, this thesis will attempt to show how portfolio managers can use foreign exchange volatility swaps to manage the currency risk from international equity investments

AGREE to disagree: critical appraisal and the publication of practice guidelines

Faced by an explosion in available evidence for multiple new treatments, busy clinicians value guidelines that are clear, reliable, unbiased and locally applicable. Finding them can be difficult, however. The science of guideline development has moved rapidly in the past decade, resulting in a more robust and systematic process. However, just as the language of evidence-based medicine can be subverted to sound convincing while hiding errors and biases, so too guidelines may look convincing but lack many of the elements needed to ensure quality of care. In particular, the pharmaceutical and health technology industries are intensely aware of the marketing potential offered by widely disseminated and ostensibly neutral documents that ultimately influence medical practice

Optimizing an emperical scoring function for transmembrane protein structure determination.

We examine the problem of transmembrane protein structure determination. Like many other questions that arise in biological research, this problem cannot be addressed by traditional laboratory experimentation alone. An approach that integrates experiment and computation is required. We investigate a procedure which states the transmembrane protein structure determination problem as a bound constrained optimization problem using a special empirical scoring function, called Bundler, as the objective function. In this paper, we describe the optimization problem and some of its mathematical properties. We compare and contrast results obtained using two different derivative free optimization algorithms

Preclinical models of myocardial infarction: from mechanism to translation

Approximately 7 million people are affected by acute myocardial infarction (MI) each year, and despite significant therapeutic and diagnostic advancements, MI remains a leading cause of mortality worldwide. Pre-clinical animal models have significantly advanced our understanding of MI and enable the development of therapeutic strategies to combat this debilitating disease. Notably, some drugs currently used to treat MI and heart failure (HF) in patients had initially been studied in pre-clinical animal models. Despite this, pre-clinical models are limited in their ability to fully recapitulate the complexity of MI in humans. The pre-clinical model must be carefully selected to maximise the translational potential of experimental findings. This review describes current experimental models of MI and considers how they have been used to understand drug mechanisms of action (MOA) and support translational medicine development

Nitrogen Enrichment in Atmospheres of A- and F- Type Supergiants

Using new accurate fundamental parameters of 30 Galactic A and F supergiants, namely their effective temperatures Teff and surface gravities log g, we implemented a non-LTE analysis of the nitrogen abundance in their atmospheres. It is shown that the non-LTE corrections to the N abundances increase with Teff. The nitrogen overabundance as a general feature of this type of stars is confirmed. A majority of the stars has a nitrogen excess [N/Fe] between 0.2 and 0.9 dex with the maximum position of the star's distribution on [N/Fe] between 0.4 and 0.7 dex. The N excesses are discussed in light of predictions for B-type main sequence (MS) stars with rotationally induced mixing and for their next evolutionary phase, i.e. A- and F-type supergiants that have experienced the first dredge-up. Rotationally induced mixing in the MS progenitors of the supergiants may be a significant cause of the nitrogen excesses. When comparing our results with predictions of the theory developed for stars with the mixing, we find that the bulk of the supergiants (28 of 30) show the N enrichment that can be expected (i) either after the MS phase for stars with the initial rotational velocities v0 = 200-400 km s-1, (ii) or after the first dredge-up for stars with v0 = 50-400 km s-1. The latter possibility is preferred on account of the longer lifetime for stars on red-blue loops following the first dredge-up. Two supergiants without a discernible N enrichment, namely HR 825 and HR 7876, may be post-MS objects with the relatively low initial rotational velocity of about 100 km s-1. The suggested range for v0 is approximately consistent with inferences from the observed projected rotational velocities of B-type MS stars, progenitors of A and F supergiants.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure