Saturday, January 3, 2009

Globalized Islam or An Introduction to Management Science

Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah

Author: Olivier Roy

The spread of Islam around the globe has blurred the connection between a religion, a specific society, and a territory. One-third of the world's Muslims now live as members of a minority. At the heart of this development is, on the one hand, the voluntary settlement of Muslims in Western societies and, on the other, the pervasiveness and influence of Western cultural models and social norms. The revival of Islam among Muslim populations in the last twenty years is often wrongly perceived as a backlash against westernization rather than as one of its consequences. Neofundamentalism has been gaining ground among a rootless Muslim youth -- particularly among the second- and third-generation migrants in the West -- and this phenomenon is feeding new forms of radicalism, ranging from support for Al Qaeda to the outright rejection of integration into Western society.

In this brilliant exegesis of the movement of Islam beyond traditional borders and its unwitting westernization, Olivier Roy argues that Islamic revival, or "re-Islamization," results from the efforts of westernized Muslims to assert their identity in a non-Muslim context. A schism has emerged between mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world -- including Hamas of Palestine and Hezbollah of Lebanon -- and the uprooted militants who strive to establish an imaginary ummah, or Muslim community, not embedded in any particular society or territory. Roy provides a detailed comparison of these transnational movements, whether peaceful, like Tablighi Jama'at and the Islamic brotherhoods, or violent, like Al Qaeda. He shows how neofundamentalism acknowledges without nostalgia the loss of pristine cultures, constructinginstead a universal religious identity that transcends the very notion of culture. Thus contemporary Islamic fundamentalism is not a single-note reaction against westernization but a product and an agent of the complex forces of globalization.



Go to: Natural Lunchbox or Barbecue Road Trip

An Introduction to Management Science: Quantitative Approaches To Decision Making

Author: Anderson

ASW's Introduction to Management Science: A Quantitative Approach to Decision Making provides thorough, application-oriented coverage in a very readable writing style. This is the leading text on the market. Simply put, it's a classic! The problem-scenario approach introduces quantitative procedures through situations that include both problem formulation and technique application.

The extensive linear programming coverage includes problem formulation, computer solution, and practical application. The text covers transportation, assignment, and the integer programming extension of linear programming, as well as advanced topics like waiting line models, simulation, and decision analysis. A large selection of problems includes self-test problems with complete solutions and case problems. Excel spreadsheet appendices are included as well.



Table of Contents:
Preface. About the Authors. 1. Introduction. 2. An Introduction To Linear Programming. 3. Linear Programming: Sensitivity Analysis and Interpretation of Solution. 4. Linear Programming Applications. 5. Linear Programming: The Simplex Method. 6. Simplex-Based Sensitivity Analysis and Duality. 7. Transportation, Assignment, and Transshipment Problems. 8. Integer Linear Programming. 9. Network Models. 10. Project Scheduling: PERT/CPM. 11. Inventory Models. 12. Waiting Line Models. 13. Simulation. 14. Decision Analysis. 15. Multicriteria Decisions. 16. Forecasting. 17. Markov Processes. 18. Dynamic Programming. Appendix A. Areas For The Standard Normal Distribution. Appendix B. Values Of E-l. Appendix C. References And Bibliography. Appendix D. Solutions To Self-Test Problems and Answers To Even-Numbered Problems.

No comments: