In vitro fertilisation and even newer assisted reproductive technologies are part of everyday life in the contemporary Middle East. There, IVF is practised according to local Islamic norms, which have been reinforced by fatwas from leading religious authorities. As this article will show, ideological differences between dominant Sunni and minority Shi’ite forms of Islam are currently shaping th...

This article introduces and explains some of the most relevant features of the free software philosophy formulated by Richard M. Stallman in the 1980s. The free software philosophy and the free software movement built on it historically preceded the open source movement by a decade and provided some of the key technological, legal and ideological foundations of the open source movement. Thus, i...

august of 1941 coincided with the reza shah’s exile and opening of the cultural and political environment in iran. the tudeh party gained more power, albeit it owed its power to the presence of former soviet :union:s troops in iran during world war ii. after withdrawal of soviet troops from iran, members and supporters of the party wondered what would happen to the party and its members and sup...

Attitudes towards foreign policy have typically been explained by ideological and demographic factors. We approach this study from a different perspective and ex amine the extent to which foreign policy preferences correspond to genetic variation. Using data from the Minnesota Twin Family Study, we show that a moderate share of individual differences in the degree to which one's foreign policy ...

In this paper I extend the scope of the Cognitive Linguistic Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by incorporating Langacker’s model of Cognitive Grammar in a critical analysis of press reports of violence in two political protests. In doing so, I address issues recently raised against CDA concerning cognitive equivalence. The paper presents an analysis of the alternative conceptualisa...

This work explores the utility of sentiment and arguing opinions for classifying stances in ideological debates. In order to capture arguing opinions in ideological stance taking, we construct an arguing lexicon automatically from a manually annotated corpus. We build supervised systems employing sentiment and arguing opinions and their targets as features. Our systems perform substantially bet...

The article analyzes the humanistic basis of expo-design in conjunction with the ideological problems of modern design and the causes of their occurrence. It reveals the potential of mobile exhibition for social transformation in terms of its structural and ideological aesthetic content. It substantiates the effectiveness of expo-design expression’s artistic and aesthetic means in viewer person...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We sho...