My article has tried to present a deep study of the novel Amerika, written by the Prague born writer, Franz Kafka, this being the first of the three novels that this novelist, belonging to the period of the Hitler regime, wrote. Therefore being helplessly relegated to the margin was an idea that was extremely familiar for this Jewish writer who died early due to tuberculosis. The article takes up the issue of marginality and assimilation as it traces closely, the experiences (...) of a very young, and initially naïve protagonist, in the alien continent\country- America. Also examined in the article is the idea of menace which the protagonist sometimes encounters. I have also tried to probe into the psychology of a character, who has been thrown, unprepared, into a new world, that too by way of punishment. (shrink)

Punjabi language is most widely spoken language of Pakistan (Abbas, Chohan, Ahmed, & Kaleem, 2016). Punjabi is under developed language because of which, upcoming generations are shifting to other technically and digitally developed languages such as Urdu and English. In result of which, the sound shift is being observed in Punjabi language. Sounds which used to be present in the past in Punjabi language are found missing now. This leads to a problematic situation that this sound shift may result in (...) language extinction and sound loss. This study is about the sound change and it has been studied in Punjabi language. On the basis of observation of speech in surrounding, researcher made a hypothesis that those speakers of Punjabi language who acquired Punjabi as L1 are able to produce few distinctive sounds that are not produced by the speakers who acquired Urdu as a mother tongue. For this purpose, a corpus of 2 million words was collected and the words including the sounds |n|ن and |l| ل were particularly shortlisted from the corpus. The speakers from both origins were asked to pronounce these words, the hypothesis was proved and, in result, variations in the pronunciation of sounds were observed. Sociolinguists and Phonologists need to heed on this issue to save Punjabi language from extinction. -/- . (shrink)

To this day, a hundred and fifty years after Mendeleev's discovery, the overal structure of the periodic system remains unaccounted for in quantum-mechanical terms. Given this dire situation, a handful of scientists in the 1970s embarked on a quest for the symmetries that lie hidden in the periodic table. Their goal was to explain the table's structure in group-theoretical terms. We argue that this symmetry program required an important paradigm shift in the understanding of the nature of chemical elements. The (...) idea, in essence, consisted of treating the chemical elements, not as particles, but as states of a superparticle. We show that the inspiration for this came from elementary particle physics, and in particular from Heisenberg's suggestion to treat the proton and neutron as different states of the nucleon. We provide a careful study of Heisenberg's last paper on the nature of elementary particles, and explain why the Democritean picture of matter no longer applied in modern physics and a Platonic symmetry-based picture was called for instead. We show how Heisenberg's Platonic philosophy came to dominate the field of elementary particle physics, and how it found its culmination point in Gell-Mann's classification of the hadrons in the eightfold way. We argue that it was the success of Heisenberg's approach in elementary particle physics that sparked the group-theoretical approach to the periodic table. We explain how it was applied to the set of chemical elements via a critical examination of the work of the Russian mathematician Abram Ilyich Fet the Turkish-American physicist Asim Orhan Barut, before giving some final reflections. (shrink)

One of the ṣaḥābīs of Prophet Muḥammad is ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd from the Ṭāʾif tribe of Thaqīf. He belongs to the Ahlâf part of the Thaqīf tribe and he is the ruler of this part. ʿUrwa’s ancestry is known without any controversy until Kasî (Thaqīf). According to a narrative his epithet was Abū Yaʿfur and another of his epithet was Abū Masʿūd. Father of ʿUrwa an important person too. He is one of the leaders of his tribe and he commanded (...) his part (Aḥlāf) in wars of Fijār. Mother of ʿUrwa is Subay’a bt. ʿAbd Shams from Banū Umayya. In this way ʿUrwa has kinship both with Banū Umayya and Prophet Muḥammad. So ʿUrwa has a very important position because of his lineage, his mother and father. Thefore, his connections with Mecca and Quraysh strengthens his position. In our sources there is no information about his dates of birth and death. It is likely to be over middle age when he became a muslim, considering that he was the leader of his tribe and his son become a muslim after he died. There is too little information about weddings of ʿUrwa. According to narratives, he had ten wives before becoming Muslim. After becoming a Muslim Prophet Muḥammad warned from him to prefer four out of ten wives. One of his four wives is the daughter of Abū Sufyān. Howev-er, there is no information about the names of his wives. Names of his sons: ʿĀṣim, Abū Murra, Abū Mulayḥ, Dāwūd, Hammām and Hishām and names of his daughters: Umm Saʿīd (married with Ḥaẓrat ʿAlī) and Ḥalīma. We could see he served as embassy before the treaty of Hudaybiyah. His embassy duty shows us the superiority of his position. Also, this embassy duty was very effective at peace negotiations. He mentioned kinship relations which connects about Mecca. He said that it could be beneficial to talk to Prophet Muḥammad himself. The Meccans mentioned about their trust in ʿUrwa. During the time of his embassy, he expressed that both sides should be away from war. In this context, he told the Meccans: The people around Prophet Muḥammad are very loyal to him and he told to Prophet Muḥammad: People around him could disintegrate easily. This mission shows us he is intelligent, respectable and had high persuasion skills. ʿUrwa, observed loyalty of ṣaḥābīs to Prophet Muḥammad. He confessed this loyalty can not be for any ruler. This observa-tion probably affected ʿUrwa’s conversion to Islam. Because of the conquest of Meccah and the events that followed, the people of Ṭāʾif were very worried. Because of this reason people of Ṭāʾif took part in the side of Hawāzin’s and they bat-tled with Muslims. In this time they sent ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd and Ghaylān b. Salama to the city of D̲j̲aras̲h̲ of Yemen, to learn about some war machines and techniques. Therefore they did not join wars of Hunayn and Ṭāʾif. Prophet Muḥammad ended the siege of Ṭāʾif and went to Medina. Meanwhile, ʿUrwa and his friend returned from Yemen. According to narratives when the Prophet Muḥammad returned Medina or he was way in Medina ʿUrwa visited him and became Muslim. Some people tell about the date of ʿUrwa’s being Muslim at before or after Abū Bakr’s emirate of Hadj. However, when the narrations are examined, it can be said he became Muslim after four or five months from Prophet’s siege of Ṭāʾif and before three or four months from Tabūk expedition of Rabīʿ al-awwal or “Rabīʿ al-ākhir” (July or August) in the year 9/630. As for the conversion of ʿUrwa, basic sources report that “Allah, inspired Islam to the heart of ʿUrwa and he changed his situation. He went to the Messenger of Allah and he became Muslim.” They do not give a specific reason. But after this period the narratives tell the reason for ʿUrwa’s becoming a Muslim as due to an experience he had while travelling to Najrān for trade. In this travel, two mysterious young girls and the priest in Najrān said the last prophet came and ʿUrwa must be subject to him and ʿUrwa became Muslim after he returned. But this narrative is prob-lematic with regard to evidence and text. After being Muslim, ʿUrwa wanted permission from the Prophet to invite his tribe to accept Islam. The prophet did not want to accept this at first. Because the people of Ṭāʾif had an arro-gant stance against Islam, and he said that the people of Thaqīf could kill ʿUrwa. Eventually ʿUrwa went to his hometown with permission of Prophet and invited people to Islam and they did not accept this invitation and cursed ʿUrwa. The next morning ʿUrwa read adhan of fajr and people of Ṭāʾif killed him. ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd was likened to Prophet Jesus by the Prophet Muḥammad. It is generally accept-ed that ʿUrwa b. Masʿūd el-Thaqafī is “one of the biggest from two cities” expressed in sūra Zukhruf. Only two weak narrations were reported of Urwa who could live as a Muslim for a few days and was matyred by his tribe. (shrink)

Three recent research reports by Topping and Trickey, by Fair and colleagues, and by Gorard, Siddiqui and Huat See have produced data that support the conclusion that a Philosophy for Children program of one-hour-per-week structured discussions has a marked positive impact on students. This article presents data from a follow up study done three years after the completion of the study reported in Fair et al.. The data show that the positive gains in scores on the Cognitive Abilities Test (...) were still present and had not faded after three years. Given the strength of these confirmations of the positive durable impact of the P4C program of structured discussions and given the relatively low cost of implementing the P4C program, it is recommended that it become a standard part of the school curriculum. (shrink)