The relationship between the expansion of literacy in Judah and composition of biblical texts has attracted scholarly attention for over a century. Information on this issue can be deduced from Hebrew inscriptions from the final phase of the first Temple period. We report our investigation of 16 inscriptions from the Judahite desert fortress of Arad, dated ca 600 BCE-the eve of Nebuchadnezzar's...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the nature and changes of market concentration in the Malaysia’s Islamic banking due to the restructuring of Islamic banking industry within the liberalization wave in the banking market. A total of 17 Islamic banks operating over the period of 2000-2010 had been considered. The structural approach framework was used to evaluate the nature and changes of mar...

This paper investigates the ways in which terrorism is linked to education and poverty using data newly culled from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) documentary sources. The paper presents a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in terrorist activities by members of the Hamas and PIJ between the late 1980s and May 2002. The resulting evidence suggests that both high...

Evidence has shown that Islamic banking is experiencing tremendous development since the last three decades, especially in Malaysia. This study is aimed at investigating factors thatdetermine the Islamic banking performance in Malaysia, particularly in the period of 2006 to 2010. The predictors are loan loss provision to total assets, net loans to total assets, total overhead cost to total asse...

This study explores seventh graders’ use of inscriptions in a teacher-designed project-based science unit. To investigate students’ learning practices during the 8-month water quality unit, we collected multiple sources of data (e.g., classroom video recordings, student artifacts, and teacher interviews) and employed analytical methods that drew from a naturalistic approach. The findings showed...

Buddhistic stone inscriptions (8th-12th centuries) are important cultural assets of China which need to be documented, analyzed, interpreted and visualized archaeologically, art-historically and text-scientifically. On one hand such buddhistic stone inscriptions have to be conserved for future generations but on the other hand further possibilities for analyzing the data could be enabled when t...