The Shi'a of Saudi Arabia: a minority in search of cultural authenticity

This article focuses on the transformation of Saudi Shi'a resistance from one which centred on military confrontation in the 1980s to one which invokes searching for cultural authenticity (al‐asala al‐shi'iyya) in the 1990s. Today the struggle of the Shi'a for equal status among the Sunni majority draws attention to the attempts of Shi'a intellectuals to write their own regional history. Shi'a intellectuals and opposition leaders deconstruct official representations of themselves and provide alternative historical narratives which anchor their community in Saudi history and society, thus dismissing suggestions that they are a non‐indigenous community. This article examines Shi'a historical narratives in an attempt to understand the transformation in their struggle against discrimination in Saudi Arabia.     

Trends and Opportunities in the Public Sector: A Critical Assessment

The public sector should be designed to work on behalf of government. Government, in turn, should be designed to work on behalf of a citizen community both to pursue its collective interests and to defend the citizen community against harmful effects of private market activities. At this time, the integrity of the public sector/government has been eroded because the established forms of regulation of the market are outmoded. This has permitted transnational corporations to argue that government should respond more to their agendas often at the expense of citizen needs and claims. At the same time, citizen movements have become more diverse and sophisticated. They represent an opportunity for revisioning the work of government and the public sector.     

教师职业道德浅谈

教师是人类文化、科学知识的传播者,是人类开发理性、奔向光明的引路人.教师的地位举足轻重,提高教师的素质,重视师德修养,具有极其深远的意义.     

Risk management for targeting customs controls in developing countries: a risky venture for revenue performance?

Customs authorities in developing countries are often reluctant to forget systematic inspections for fear of risking revenue loss. Such physical inspections however, impede rather than facilitate trade. Control selectivity is therefore a key issue in customs administration reform. This paper shows how a sophisticated risk management method can facilitate trade by automatically and rationally selecting transactions, with the end result of actually enhancing revenue performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Preventing Local Government Fiscal Crises: Emerging Best Practices

What type of oversight should states exercise over local units in order to prevent fiscal crises? This article discusses a sequence of three best practices that some states use to prevent fiscal emergencies. They first monitor local government finances to predict fiscal distress. After detecting signs of fiscal distress, states actively assist local units in ameliorating the problem. Finally, assistance notwithstanding, if a situation becomes grave, states require local units to take strong remedial measures, including increasing taxes and reducing expenditures.     

Portable high‐resolution automated 3D imaging for footwear and tire impression capture

The forensic science community raised the need for improved evidence recognition, collection, and visualization analytical instrumentation for field and laboratory use. While the 3D optical techniques for imaging static objects have been extensively studied, there is still a major gap between current knowledge and collecting high‐quality footwear and tire impression evidence. Among optical means for 3D imaging, digital fringe projection (DFP) techniques reconstruct 3D shape from phase information, achieving camera‐pixel spatial resolution. This paper presents a high‐resolution 3D imaging technology using DFP techniques dedicated to footwear and tire impression capture. We developed fully automated software algorithms and a graphical user interface (GUI) that allow anyone without training to operate for high‐quality 3D data capture. We performed accuracy evaluations and comparisons comparing with the commercial high‐end 3D scanner and carried out qualitative tests for various impressions comparing with the current practices. Overall, our technology achieves similar levels of accuracy and resolution with a high‐end commercially available 3D scanner, while having the merits of being (1) more affordable; (2) much easier to operate; and (3) more robust. Compared with the current practice of casting, our technology demonstrates its superiority because it (1) is non‐destructive; (2) collects more evidence detail than casts, especially when an impression is fragile; (3) requires less time and money to collect each piece of evidence; and (4) results in a digital file that can easily be shared with other examiners.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.