A note on information theoretic measures

An axiomatic characterization of an information theoretic quantity is given using only two axioms. In particular, this quantity contain PEARSON'S chi-square statistic and some other useful measures     

Debating the Burqa in France: the Antipolitics of Islamic Revival

In 2009 a French national commission was created to issue recommendations against “the burqa” and raise the possibility of a ban on the practice in certain public settings. This paper explores the different normative stakes of politicizing the burqa and the form of Islamic Revival with which it is associated. Recent scholarship has sought to overturn orientalist depictions of Islamic movements but has insisted that bodily ethical practices, such as Muslim women’s veiling, constitute forms of politics. Based on ethnographic research in a women’s mosque community in a poor suburb of Lyon, France, I argue that these women are not engaged in a form of politics but rather, antipolitics, a movement originally conceptualized in the 1970s and 80s as a rejection of politics and a valorization of private life. Three components define their antipolitics: a reconfiguration of the private sphere against an intrusive state, a retreat into a moral community, and emphasis on spiritual conditions and achievement of serenity. In interrogating different meanings of politics and antipolitics, this paper suggests a rethinking of the relationship between “political Islam” and piety movements.     

entropy and internal inormation of printed urdu

This paper presents a systematic study for the entropy and coding of the printed Urdu language. Comparison with the study of printed Arabic and printed English is also given. We also find the alphabet entropy of the Urdu language using Bayesian estimator given by Gill and Joane (1979) and compare it with the entropy calculated through using the usual maximum likelihood estimator.     

Towards building an integrated perspective on e-democracy

This paper evaluates the dominant perspectives for understanding e-democracy in practice. It argues that although these, on their own, only provide static and partial accounts of the role and implications of e-democracy, nevertheless they should not be disregarded. The paper proposes an integration of their key positions to generate a more rounded and complete account of the role of e-democracy in practice. It suggests that Giddens's Structuration Theory provides a starting point in this direction. A structuration perspective is able to integrate many of the diverse perspectives whilst simultaneously avoiding technological and social determinism by focusing attention on the interplay of social structures and agency in e-democracy practices. This perspective assists in illuminating the underlying institutional arrangements and structures in which e-democracy practices are embedded, as well as the strategies employed by human actors. It focuses attention on structures of signification, domination and legitimation that surround e-democracy practices and also how individuals are both enabled and constrained in these practices. It is argued that more complete and balanced accounts which emerge from such an integrated perspective could assist in developing a more effective e-democracy policy.     

On The Question of Developing a Sociology of the Canadian Family: A Methodological Statement*

Recently I had the opportunity of attending a special session of the “Sociology of Family” at the national meetings of our association. The chairman had arranged this session in part to discuss the means through which a “Sociology of the Canadian Family” could be developed fruitfully. To this end a select group of teachers and researchers in this field had been invited. Those present included some of the best known sociologists in the area of the family in Canada. After the chairman suggested arranging a seminar of national scope a really enthusiastic discussion followed which, in the manner of many discussions in this part of the world, was focused more on the periphery of the problem than on its centre. As a result the session ended inconclusively and in confusion.     

Recurrence relations between product moments of order statistics

A general result for obtaining recurrence relations between product moments of order statistics is established and this result is used to determine the recurrence relations between product moments of some doubly truncated distributions. The examples considered are Weibull, exponential, Pareto, power function and Cauchy distributions.