فقہ اسلامی میں بیع سلم کاتصور اورمروجہ اسلامی مالیاتی نظام میں بیع سلم کے استعمال سے متعلق اشکالات:ایک فقہی مطالعہ

The sharī‘ah invalidates the sale of non-existing items, but salam sale was exceptionally permitted to avoid interest-based financing in commercial as well as non-commercial transactions. Salam sale is an Islamic forward sale contract, which authorizes selling something that is not present during the time of the contract. Salam is a sale agreement whereby the seller receives full price in advance and goods are delivered at a future date. Moreover, it is free from uncertainties and exploitation that is usually involved in interest-based financing. Besides the agriculture sector, currently, this instrument is also being used in the manufacturing sector where the manufacturer would need financing to produce products and/or to buy raw materials. Modern financial innovations introduced different uses of salam sale such as parallel salam, currency salam, salam sukūk etc. There are different fiqh issues related to such uses of salam in modern financial sectors. This article elaborates on the economic importance and conditions that are necessary and sufficient to makethe contract valid from the perspective of the sharī‘ahand also appraises some of the key issues related to modern practices regarding salam.

THE CHALLENGES OF MAJOR TANK COATING REFURBISHMENT PROJECTS FOR ON-STATION FLOATING ASSETS

The objective of this paper is to acknowledge that major tank coating refurbishment projects to FPSO’s and FSU’s are likely to be required during the life of these assets. It highlights the key challenges of achieving these major coating projects in an offshore environment, whilst the assets remain operational and in-production. As these floating assets age the original coatings applied to protect the internal (and external) hull, deteriorate. In an industry with a reluctance for extensive dry-dockings, there is an expectation that any coating refurbishment campaigns can be achieved safely and efficiently whilst the assets remain on-station and in-production, in preference to costly steel renewal’s which may be required at a future date if coatings are not maintained in good condition. With often complex, congested and hazardous topsides processing equipment and pipework directly above the hull tanks, there’s a need for systems, procedures, and specialist equipment to ensure the safety of the personnel entering confined spaces for extended periods. There’s also a need to plan and engineer the works appropriately, using best practice and emergent technologies to improve safety, reduce bedding impacts and to ensure the success of the coating campaign. This paper explores the challenges of major coating projects by discussing the importance of planning and preparation, the need to create a safe working environment within the confined space worksites, the role surface preparation plays in the success of coating projects, and finally the application of coatings and the challenges this operation can present. The key considerations are summarised in 10 specific conclusions as guidance to promote successful project outcomes.

Memory, National Identity Formation, and (Neo)Colonialism in Hannah Khalil’s A Museum in Baghdad

According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

How Did The Covid-19 Pandemic Effect Audience Attitudes in Webinars?

Introduction: Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the face-to-face meetings are delayed to a future date , which is still not clear. However, seminars, meetings, and conferences are necessary for updating our knowledge and skills. The web-based seminars (webinars) are the solutions to this issue. This study aimed to show the participant behavior when webinars present at the Covid-19 pandemic era. Methods: Between December 2017 – July 2020, 58 webinars were broadcasted via the Uropedia, electronic library of SUST. Data of all webinars were collected with the YouTube analytics and application of the Uropedia. Data of streaming webinars included participant behaviors such as content views, engagement time, total unique attendees, average engagement time, and the number of audience to leads. Data were split into two groups; group-1 is webinars before Covid-19 (before March 2020), group-2 is the webinars during Covid-19. Results: Total broadcast time and total page view number were found to be 112.6 hours (6761 min.) and 15919, respectively. The median participant age was 40.1 years. Median content view and median engagement time were found to be 261.0 min., and 12.2 min., respectively. Comparison of two groups revealed a significant increment in the content views (group 1;134.0 range=86.0-87.0 and group 2; 414.0 range=296.0-602.0, p<0.001) and the number of the unique attendees (group 1; 18.0 range=10.0-26.0 and group 2; 57.0 range=27.0-100.0, p<0.001) following Covid-19. However, the median engagement time of the audience did not seem to change with the Covid-19 pandemic (group 1; 11.5 range=10.0-13.3 min. and group 2; 13.2 range=9.4-18.1 min., p=0.12). Conclusion: The webinars are effective ways to share information and have many advantages, including low cost, reaching the high number of audiences. Audience number and page visits seemed to increase following the Covid-19 pandemic. However, The engagement time did not seem to affect a critical attitude of the audience

RETRACTED: Potential effects of elevated temperature on seasonal movements in slipper lobsters, Scyllarides latus (Latreille, 1803), in the eastern Mediterranean

Retraction of: Mediterranean Marine Science http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/mms.22074, published online 13 July 2020Editor note: The authors are retracting this article.In the article, Potential effects of elevated temperature on seasonal movements in slipper lobsters, Scyllarides latus (Latreille, 1803), in the eastern Mediterranean (Vol. 21, 2020, https://doi.org/10.12681/mms.22074), authors J. Goldstein and E. Spanier have made an honest error in the inaccurate interpretation of their special scientific permit that afforded them the opportunity to collect wild-caught animals in the field and release them in their study area, in the marine reserve where this work was conducted. More specifically, the study component that refers to the ‘field tagging study’, was carried out without the full scope of permitting guidance unbeknownst to the authors. Dr. R. Yahel and E. Miller, Marine Ecologists of the Israeli National Park Authority (INPA), have pointed this out and have since requested that the article be removed given that the application of the special use permit was misinterpreted and not exercised in an appropriate manner. The authors were also not able to forward the INPA with the field’s raw data that have been lost since this field study was carried out over eight years ago. The authors were not aware of this discrepancy at the time the field study was carried out, but they have agreed to remove the article out of respect and admiration of the INPA and the continued protection and conservation of the Mediterranean slipper lobster in coastal Israeli waters. However, this action of retraction does not change the overall outcome of the paper’s finding including the study design, analyses, scientific integrity, or overall conclusions. The authors will plan on publishing the laboratory-based portion of this study as a stand-alone manuscript at a future date.

Three Essays on the Economics of Philanthropy

This dissertation studies the economics of prosocial behavior. More specifically, I investigate experimentally how prosocial incentives, pledges, and altruistic self-concept affect individuals' prosocial behaviors in three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the role of self-chosen goals in shaping prosocial incentives' motivation on individuals' performance. The prosocial incentive is a way of motivation where workers' payments are associated with an additional reward to the charities. It is now widely accepted by the firms because it helps build the corporate culture, and boosts employee's morale, performance, and job satisfaction. However, recent studies have shown that a larger reward size does not necessarily increase workers' prosocial incentives. To solve this limitation, I implement a self-chosen goal scheme along with the incentives. I design an online experiment in which participants set goals for themselves engaging in real effort tasks. Participants obtain prosocial rewards only when they reach their goals. My results show that workers who receive prosocial incentives improve their performance by setting higher goals and achieving them. Moreover, when provided with the opportunity to receive large rewards, workers who are matched with the charity's mission will set higher goals to motivate themselves further to make additional efforts. My findings suggest prosocial incentives are comparable to monetary incentives in motivating workers within a self-chosen goal scheme. The preferred type of incentive depends on the firm's target and worker's heterogeneity. Chapter 2 investigates experimentally whether pledges with respect to when one volunteer increase volunteering. As shown in previous literature, the effect of pledging on volunteering is ambiguous. On one hand, pledges can boost volunteering as it offers volunteers the option to choose when to help others. On the other hand, pledges open the doors for individuals to find more ways to excuse themselves from having to volunteer. In this paper, we study how volunteering decisions are affected by pledges using an online experiment. We find that pledges increase reneging on promises to volunteer, but total effort donations do not change. We also develop a simple model that helps explain the ways in which relevant parameters affect behaviors in our experiment. In particular, our model predicts that when given the opportunity to pledge to volunteer, people with high altruism or high warm-glow prefer to volunteer sooner rather than later, while higher future expected participation costs and lower expected reneging costs result in lower rates of rejection immediately. Moreover, pledges increase reneging behaviors on the future date, because those who want to volunteer don't delay their volunteering; however, those whose costs of saying "no" are high, are driven to postpone their rejection and renege on the future date. Chapter 3 digs deeper to study the effect of personality traits on the willingness to make and keep a promise to volunteer. In our experiment, Amazon Mechanical Turk participants are given the option to volunteer by donating time and effort to a charity. They also answer a series of questionnaires, including the Big Five personality test and attitudinal questionsthat we use to construct an index representing altruistic self-concept. Self-concept refers to the way we describe and evaluate ourselves. We find that altruistic self-concept mediates how personality affects volunteering decisions. In particular, agreeableness has a strong influence on the probability of making and keeping promises to volunteer through its effect on altruistic self-concept. Our findings have useful implications for non-profit organizations. Agreeable individuals who evaluate and describe themselves as altruistic can be more helpful and dependable, so that the organizations can find ways to strengthen altruistic self-concept, thereby positively influencing prosociality in the workplace.

Beyond Life and Death. Investigating Cryopreservation Practices in Contemporary Societies

Cryopreservation practices are an essential dimension of contemporary life sciences. They make possible the freezing and storage of cells, tissues and other organic materials at very low temperatures and the subsequent thawing of these at a future date without apparent loss of vitality. The article presents some initial ideas and central theses of a research project recently funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The CRYOSOCIETIES project is based on the thesis that in contemporary societies, cryopreservation practices bring into existence a new form of life: “suspended life”. “Suspended life” enables vital processes to be kept in a liminal state in which biological substances are neither fully alive nor dead. CRYOSOCIETIES examines the creation of “suspended life” through three ethnographic studies that investigate various sites of cryopreservation. The first deals with cord blood banking with the promise to store vitality and ensure health; the second addresses oocyte freezing to extend fertility and rearrange reproductive futures, while the third case study focusses on the emergence of “frozen zoos”, that is to say cryobanks which seek to preserve organic material of endangered or extinct animal species. The conclusion will rehearse the central aspects of the proposed project and point to further directions of research.

Assessment of Lead (Pb) in Soil at Various Distances and Depths at Pb and Zn Mining Site in Ishiagu, Ebonyi State, Nigeria

Pb in soil at various distance and depths was assessed at Pb and Zn mining site in Ishiagu Ebonyi State, Nigeria to determine the furthest distance travelled so far and the concentration at the distance. Pb ion in sampled soils at depth 0-10, 10-20, 20-30, 30-40 and 40-50 cm within pollution zones in 1 km x 1 km area of 100 m grid intervals were fitted with mathematical models for prediction using MATLAB. Pb ion change with distance was fitted into power model and linear polynomial models at distinct grid points. The models predictions showed decrease in Pb ion with distance. It revealed that the ion had travelled far into the soil with a furthest distance of 4760 cm but with no soil pollution signal because 64.54 mg/kg (concentration at 4760 cm) is less than 100 mg/kg specified as the maximum for soils. It showed a signal that the metal might threaten the ground water at some future date with an objectionable concentration above 0.01 mg/l specified for drinking water. Concentration at some intermediate distances is risk signal of food pollution through absorption of the metal by crops with root morphology and depth reaching these intermediate depths of objectionable concentration.

The Online Reservation Problem

Many sharing-economy platforms operate as follows. Owners list the availability of resources, prices, and contract-length limits. Customers propose contract start times and lengths. The owners decide immediately whether to accept or decline each proposal, even if the contract is for a future date. Accepted proposals generate revenue. Declined proposals are lost. At any decision epoch, the owner has no information regarding future proposals. The owner seeks easy-to-implement algorithms that achieve the best competitive ratio (CR). We first derive a lower bound on the CR of any algorithm. We then analyze CRs of all intuitive “greedy” algorithms. We propose two new algorithms that have significantly better CRs than that of any greedy algorithm for certain parameter-value ranges. The key idea behind these algorithms is that owners may reserve some amount of capacity for late-arriving higher-value proposals in an attempt to improve revenue. Our contribution lies in operationalizing this idea with the help of algorithms that utilize thresholds. Moreover, we show that if non-optimal thresholds are chosen, then those may lead to poor CRs. We provide a rigorous method by which an owner can decide the best approach in their context by analyzing the CRs of greedy algorithms and those proposed by us.