Doctrines of Shi'i Islam

Two radical neuron doctrines

Two radical neuron doctrines must be distinguished--strong and weak. G&S direct much of their attack at the former--but the Churchlands only hold the latter. The weak radical neuron doctrine remains a serious possibility. G&S describe the radical neuron doctrine in a number of slightly different ways, and we think this hides an important distinction. On the one hand, the radical neuron doctrine...

Challenging the doctrines of JPEG steganography

The design of both steganography and steganalysis methods for digital images heavily relies on empirically justified principles. In steganography, the domain in which the embedding changes are executed is usually the preferred domain in which to measure the statistical impact of embedding (to construct the distortion function). Another principle almost exclusively used in steganalysis states th...

Islam Almasri_TOCSJ

Recently, a number of methods have been proposed to improve image retrieval accuracy by capturing context information. These methods try to compensate for the fact that a visually less similar image might be more relevant because it depicts the same object. We propose a new quick method for refining any pairwise distance metric, it works by iteratively discovering the object in the image from t...

Islam in local contexts: Localised Islam in Northern Pakistan

As Clifford Geertz remarked in his Islam Observed (1968), the idea of a ‘changing’ religion is a contradiction in terms, as religion is fundamentally concerned with what is permanent and eternal. Still, one way to come to terms with religious change is to consider the many ways that religion is interpreted, by laymen and scholars alike. Social anthropologists like myself have naturally found a ...

Islam in the West: From Immigration to Global Islam