Article

A comparative study of architectural discourse in Western and Arab-Islamic thought

February 2001

Authors:

This paper aims at comparing the essence of architectural discourse in Western and Arab-Islamic thought. It starts by arguing the problematic challenges that have faced intellectuals when defining architecture from the viewpoints of theory and practice. This leads to a discussion of the current contemporary Western architectural discourse which is found to be of a dual nature: the prescriptive and the operational. This is followed by a parallel analysis of contemporary Arab-Islamic architectural discourse which is also found to take two strands: a contemplative and a productive one. Western and Arab-Islamic values of aesthetics are also briefly compared and are found to conform to the argument put forth in the paper. Finally, the paper concludes that contemporary Arab-Islamic architecture discourse is found to lack a comprehensive theory of architecture that is capable of implementation. Its problematics resemble to a great extent those of Western architectural discourse, but its nature is different due to its specific Islamic communal framework.

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Modeling repulsive forces on fibres via knot energies

December 2014 · Computational and Mathematical Biophysics

Modeling of repulsive forces is essential to the understanding of certain bio-physical processes, especially for the motion of DNA molecules. These kinds of phenomena seem to be driven by some sort of “energy” which especially prevents the molecules from strongly bending and forming self-intersections. Inspired by a physical toy model, numerous functionals have been defined during the past ... [Show full abstract] twenty-five years that aim at modeling self-avoidance. The general idea is to produce “detangled” curves having particularly large distances between distant strands. In this survey we present several families of these so-called knot energies. It turns out that they are quite similar from an analytical viewpoint. We focus on proving self-avoidance and existence of minimizers in every knot class. For a suitable subfamily of these energies we show how to prove that these minimizers are even infinitely differentiable

Chapter

Conclusion: the Politics of Genealogy

January 1985

Jeffrey Minson

To parody Nietzsche, could it be useful for one’s political activity to interpret Foucault falsely? From the first, this book has to an extent tried to evade the stance and attendant obligations of a commentary on Foucault and his fellow genealogists. It has sought instead to redirect the genealogical project in an anti-libertarian direction. No doubt this has entailed reading certain ... [Show full abstract] genealogical arguments against the grain. The object of both our rewritings of existing genealogies and outlines of new ones has been not only to expunge the libertarian-oppositional strand in genealogy, by writing out its overarching conception of power; but also, and perhaps more problematically, to reappropriate it as a handmaiden of a reformed — but avowedly reformist — socialist politics. The question animating the book, albeit indirectly, is whether the gadfly genealogy can be pressed into this unlikely role.

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China Under Western Gaze: Representing China in the British Television Documentaries 1980–2000

July 2014

Qing Cao

This book presents a critical analysis of the images of China portrayed in British television documentaries between 1980 and 2000. The examination is contextualized within the profound transformations of the post-reform China and global political structures in the last two decades of the 20th century. Using an innovative analytical framework based on Vladimir Propp, the book focuses on how ... [Show full abstract] different images of China are constructed through an effective use of TV narrative strategies. In particular it details how various strands of (Western) modernity underpin major discourses about China. The book will be valuable to the understanding of how China was perceived in the West during one of the most dramatic moments in modern history. © 2014 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Keywords Re-Oriented

January 2009

Joachim Alexander Gentz

This publication reflects from within the perspective of Western cultural studies upon the following inherent problems. Western cultural studies claim to be universal but nevertheless have developed their theories almost exclusively with Western source material and concerns. Yet, even within the Western academic discourse, a multiplicity of strands have emerged within the discipline and the ... [Show full abstract] significant divergence between national cultural studies therefore shows no unified body of cultural studies. With its enormous impact on Western academia cultural studies are now being adapted to non-Western academic traditions, generating an even greater diversity of cultural studies approaches. While acknowledging that multiplicity is inherent to the nature of cultural studies, it is our contention that Chinese cultural studies cannot easily be subsumed under the umbrella of Western cultural studies. The Keywords Re-Oriented course critically reflects upon Western theoretical approaches towards culture through an examination of the application of Western analytical keywords to the non-Western culture of China, testing theories and notions of culture generated in the West in their application to the Chinese field.

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Building upon Present Practice

January 1993

In the first two chapters we commented upon the shift from residential care to community care, identifying this, alongside many other developments, as one of the precursors to care management. In doing so we acknowledged that the concerns of social workers about care management were threefold. The first concern, that it is dominated by budgetary and resource matters, has been addressed and will ... [Show full abstract] be returned to at various points in the text. The second, that although the language has changed there is nothing new in care management, will be explored in the next two chapters. There is a counter argument which is that care management will undermine basic social work values and practices, and this will also be explored in the next two chapters. The aim of this chapter is to identify some common strands between the principles and practices of care management and current social work practice. In this we will seek to identify whether care management constitutes a major challenge or change in direction for social work, or whether it can be seen as part of a continuum of flexible and developing practice.

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Rule of Law Lineages: Heroes, Coffins, and Custom

May 2015 · Law Culture and the Humanities

Jothie Rajah

What does rule of law look like from beyond an Anglo-American perspective? This Commentary excavates a subterranean strand of Singapore’s rule of law discourse – rule of law as the necessary subordination of ‘the people’ – to argue that colonial ideologies are inevitably perpetuated and revitalized when the postcolony adopts rule of law as a pillar of the nation-making project.

Article

Reply to 'Comment on "The smallest clock"'

April 2013 · European Journal of Physics

Peter Pesic

Readers of the European Journal Of Physics have replied to the comment on the smallest bacterial clock. The reply states that the of the bacterial clock should be denoted by l, while the result of the fourth equation and its ensuing implications remain the same as that of the first equation. Some cautionary comments are also given on the treatment of the rate of error correction in DNA polymerase ... [Show full abstract] action by some researchers. These researchers consider the action of a DNA polymerase as a clocklike nanomachine that moves along a DNA strand while replicating it at a certain rate. They have treated the accuracy of the clock as being synonymous with the error rate of the polymerase. The arguments between these researchers also need to be reconsidered in the larger context of the conflicting demands of polymerase movement along the DNA strand, base replication, and error correction.

Chapter

Trail Smelter in Contemporary International Environmental Law: Its Relevance in the Nuclear Energy C...

August 2006

Günther Handl

INTRODUCTION Although the Trail Smelter arbitration has often and justifiably been referred to as the fons et origo of international law on transboundary environmental harm and has over the years attracted considerable attention in the literature, significant differences of opinion, as well as basic misperceptions continue to exist among commentators and experts with respect of the arbitration's ... [Show full abstract] true international legal import. Critical views range from outright dismissals of Trail Smelter as of “limited precedential value,” to the belief that, while Trail Smelter recognizes international liability for transboundary damage, it does not impose an obligation to prevent such damage. Similarly, the fact that the Tribunal took a nuanced approach in assessing Canada's liability – setting out the grounds for both a due diligence-based and strict liability argument – appears often to have gone unnoticed. This collection of essays, which seeks to assess for the first time the overall legacy of Trail Smelter and in this process to redress some of the underappreciation of the arbitration's scope and complexity, is thus particularly welcome and relevant. This paper will not seek to track all the various strands of the Trail Smelter arbitration that have had a discernible impact on the evolution of international environmental law. Rather, its objective is necessarily more modest. Given the assigned topic – the relevance and applicability of Trail Smelter in the context of nuclear energy – this chapter will focus on Trail Smelter's most relevant implication for nuclear power-related activities: A state's obligation to prevent or minimize the risk of transboundary harm. © Cambridge University Press 2006 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Article

The Struggle is Beautiful: On the Aesthetics of Leftist Politics

July 2014 · Nordic Journal of Aesthetics

Johan Hartle

Aesthetic discourse has always openly or secretly been linked to political projects. According to some main strands of aesthetic discourse modern aesthetics mirrors the structure of social and political emancipation and key elements of aesthetic discourse coincide with the political ontology of the left. Marxist and Post-Marxist critics have emphasized that the struggle for emancipation is ... [Show full abstract] indirectly present in the historical constitution of aesthetics as a discipline - although in a merely imaginary and displaced form. Therefore, however, it is also partly of the same structure as what is normally described as "aesthetic". Against this background aesthetic attributes ('beauty') can be ascribed to forms of emancipatory politics as well.

Article

Why a Particle Physicist is Interested in DNA Branch Migration

August 1996 · Nuclear Physics B - Proceedings Supplements

We describe an explicitly discrete model of the process of DNA branch migration. The model matches the existing data well, but we find that branch migration along long strands of DNA ($N \simge 40$~bp) is also well modeled by continuum diffusion. The discrete model is still useful for guiding future experiments. Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE96(theoretical developments); 3 pages, TeXsis w/ ... [Show full abstract] LAT96.txs (available from ftp://lifshitz.ph.utexas.edu/texsis/styles/LAT96.txs and will be a part of the next Elsevier.txs) and TXSdcol.tex

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Casablanca Unbound: The New Urban Cinema in Morocco

July 2013

Jamal Bahmad

This article examines the emergence of what I call the New Urban Cinema (NUC) in Morocco around the early 1990s. This term is suggested to replace the so-called New Moroccan Cinema (in capital letters), an exclusive and unsubstantial label which was invented by local journalists and international festival promoters. NUC will be analysed against the backdrop of the socio-economic and political ... [Show full abstract] climates of Morocco following the neoliberal market reforms of the 1980s. I will also explore the distinctive features of this new urban cinema by drawing on a few representative films. This task is carried out by identifying three strands within this cinema. The article concludes with a look at the crucial role of youth in the aesthetics and reception of this cinema. Cet article examine l'avènement de ce que j'appellerai le Nouveau Cinéma Urbain au Maroc au début des années 1990. Ce terme est proposé pour remplacer celui du soi-disant Nouveau Cinéma Marocain (en majuscules), une étiquette exclusive et sans aucune substance critique qui a été inventée par les journalistes locaux et les promoteurs de festivals internationaux. Le Nouveau Cinéma Urbain sera analysé dans le contexte historique des climats socio-économiques et politiques du Maroc à la suite des réformes néolibérales des années 1980. Je vais ensuite explorer les particularités de ce nouveau cinéma urbain en s'appuyant sur quelques films représentatifs. Cette tâche est effectuée en identifiant trois volets dans ce cinéma. L'article se termine avec un regard sur le rôle essentiel de la jeunesse dans l'esthétique et la réception de ce cinéma populaire.

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The Effects of a Model-Based Physics Curriculum Program with a Physics First Approach: A Causal-Comp...

February 2012 · Journal of Science Education and Technology

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a model-based introductory physics curriculum on conceptual learning in a Physics First (PF) Initiative. This is the first comparative study in physics education that applies the Rasch modeling approach to examine the effects of a model-based curriculum program combined with PF in the United States. Five teachers and 301 students (in grades 9 ... [Show full abstract] through 12) in two mid-Atlantic high schools participated in the study. The students’ conceptual learning was measured by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). It was found that the ninth-graders enrolled in the model-based program in a PF initiative achieved substantially greater conceptual understanding of the physics content than those 11th-/12th-graders enrolled in the conventional non-modeling, non-PF program (Honors strand). For the 11th-/12th-graders enrolled in the non-PF, non-honors strands, the modeling classes also outperformed the conventional non-modeling classes. The instructional activity reports by students indicated that the model-based approach was generally implemented in modeling classrooms. A closer examination of the field notes and the classroom observation profiles revealed that the greatest inconsistencies in model-based teaching practices observed were related to classroom interactions or discourse. Implications and recommendations for future studies are also discussed. KeywordsPhysics education–Model-based physics curriculum–Introductory physics courses–Conceptual learning–Physics first–Rasch measurement