The view of Islam from the monasteries of Palestine in the early cAbbasid period: Theodore Abū Qurrah and the Summa theologiae arabica

Christians in the Holy Land, and particularly members of the monastic communities in the Judean desert, were the first to compose original works of theology in Arabic. These writers presented the doctrines of the church in an idiom which was calculated to appeal to the understanding of any speaker of Arabic who was familiar with the Qur'an and with the thought of the early Muslim mutakallimin. From these texts there emerges a view of Islam which makes it dear that the writers very much consider themselves to be doing theology in dialogue. The article discusses the earliest Christian apology in Arabic; two works of Theodore Abu Qurrah; an early Summa Theologiae Arabica; and an essay in apologetics, provocatively entitled Kitab al‐burhan.     

S&T indicators for strategic planning and assessment of public research institutions

This article presents an approach we have developed for the assessment of public research institutions in the natural sciences and engineering. The method consists in the exploitation of available S&T databases and indicators, including bibliometrics (databases of scientific as well as technical literature), patents, and internal data. Results are therefore derived through multiple databases. The objective is to profile a specific national R&D community in order to assess the positioning of a public institution or program within the community to which it belongs. It involves obtaining the profile of the evolution of an R&D area, the R&D performers, the financing and support institutions, the users of R&D results, and the interactions between all these actors. A case-study of Canadian research in polymers is presented. Part of this research was financed by the National Research Council of Canada, and by a strategic grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The research benefited from the expertise of Robert Letellier, Robert H. Marchessault, Jacques Martel, and Marielle Piché, and from the technical assistance of Maryse Prud’homme, Marcel Parent, and Benoit Longpré.     

Rehabilitating care

The feminist ethic of care has often been criticized for its inability to address four problems--the problem of exploitation as it threatens care givers, the problem of sustaining care-giver integrity, the dangers of conceiving the mother-child dyad normatively as a paradigm for human relationships, and the problem of security social justice on a broad scale among relative strangers. We argue that there are resources within the ethic of care for addressing each of these problems, and we sketch strategies for developing the ethic more fully.     

Feminism, law, and bioethics

Feminist legal theory provides a healthy skepticism toward legal doctrine and insists that we reexamine even formally gender-neutral rules to uncover problematic assumptions behind them. The article first outlines feminist legal theory from the perspectives of liberal, cultural, and radical feminism. Examples of how each theory influences legal practice, case law, and legislation are highlighted. Each perspective is then applied to a contemporary bioethical issue, egg donation. Following a brief discussion of the common themes shared by feminist jurisprudence, the article incorporates a narrative reflecting on the integration of the common feminist themes in the context of the passage of the Maryland Health Care Decisions Act. The article concludes that gender does matter and that an understanding of feminist legal theory and practice will enrich the analysis of contemporary bioethical issues.     

The effects of task demands on the equivalence of visual and auditory representations of periodic numerical data

The equivalence of visual and auditory graphical displays was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, multidimensional scaling techniques were applied to paired comparison similarity judgments of both auditory and visual displays of simple periodic wave forms. In Experiment 2, a subset of perceptually similar pairs of wave forms was selected as the stimulus set for an AB-X discrimination task in both auditory and visual modalities. Results suggest much greater apparent visual-auditory equivalence for the similarity rating task than for the more difficult discrimination task, implying that one should consider the demands of the task when deciding whether auditory graphic displays are suitable alternatives to more traditional visual displays.     

An automated bisection device for assessing attentional neglect in clinical populations

An automated bisection device (ABD) is described that is designed for use in assessing the direction of three-dimensional neglect in various clinical populations. This device features an apparatus containing two base sections and a connecting rod, on which is located a bisection indicator assemblage that can be moved either by hand or by a calibrated motor-drive system. The indicator assemblage is, in turn, connected to a motor-control box with variable speed settings and a digital readout. The ABD can be used to measure bisection estimations along all three linear axes (lateral, vertical, and depth) by providing visual cues alone, tactile cues alone, or a combination of visual and tactile cues.