The present paper aims for the most part to prove the fact that religious and spiritual places and above all, mosques play major roles within Islamic urban areas. They are in fact the basis of civil infrastructures. A historical analysis focusing on where mosques stand in Islamic urban areas reveals that mosques have always been the center of development and growth and that they must be studied...

this paper examines the historical development of operations research (or) and represents different or methods (methodologies) developed during its lifetime. then, considering thomas kuhn’s paradigm model of scientific development as a basis for our work, the former and current status of or are analyzed and the future trend is discussed.

Taking countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this paper analyzes factors affecting their software piracy rate (SPR) by taking into account several economic and technological variables. The empirical results show that per capita GDP (PerGDP), inflation, consumer prices (ICP), unemployment rate (UR), and high-technology exports (HTE) have positive correla...

0167-8655/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier B.V. A http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2013.04.007 ⇑ Corresponding author at: Institut für Nachrichten sität Braunschweig, Schleinitzstrae 22, 38106 Braunsc 531 3912483; fax: +49 (0) 531 3918218. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M.A. R ifn.ing.tu-bs.de (V. Märgner), [email protected] fu-berlin.de (R. Rojas). 1 Tel.: +49 (0) 30 83875130. I...

The article deals with the sacred groves of the Balts in Lithuania and presents the linguistic background, the historical documents from the 12th– 18th century, the key folklore motifs of the topic, as well as selected examples of groves. The article also discusses possible relationships between pre-Christian religious traditions connected with the sacred groves and the ones which have survived...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Document binarization is an active research area for many years. The choice of the most appropriate binarization algorithm for each case proved to be a very difficult procedure itself. In this paper, we propose a new technique for the validation of document binarization algorithms. Our method is simple in its implementation and can be performed on any binarization algorithm since it doesn’t req...