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...

Traditional credit card payment is not secure against credit card frauds because an attacker can easily know a semisecret credit card number that is repetitively used. Recently one-time transaction number has been proposed by some researchers and credit card companies to enhance the security in credit card payment. Following this idea, we present a practical security enhancement scheme for one-...

This article presents a simple environment giving rise to banks that create and lend out money. We define money to be any object that circulates widely as a means of payment. In our model, this object takes the form of a fully secured and redeemable bearer bond. This monetary instrument is issued by an agent that can credibly commit to monitoring a pool of real investments; that is, this capita...

We study a perishable inventory system that requires to maintain a fresh and large quantity of inventory at all times. For example, certain pharmaceuticals are kept for emergency preparedness and response operations. We aim to maximize the profit by optimizing the joint problem of the ordering and issuing policies while maintaining a minimum amount of perishable inventory. First, we consider a ...

background: carpal tunnel syndrome (cts) is one of the most common musculoskeletal disorders among computer users. computer users exhibit various wrist angles while typing. dynamic changes of wrist angle may cause different degrees of median nerve compression. the objective of this study was thus to investigate the effects of the combination of wrist flexion-extension with wrist deviation on me...

Given the unique structural and electronic properties of C60 , metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) containing C60 linkers are expected to exhibit interesting characteristics. A new hexakisfullerene derivative possessing two pairs of phenyl pyridine groups attached to two methano-carbon atoms located at the trans-1 positions was designed and synthesized. The four pyridyl nitrogen atoms define a perf...