A major feature of the rise of Islamism in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and parts of the West is the rapid growth of a starkly repressive version of Islamic shari'a law, often fueled by funds and support from Saudi Arabia. The central purpose of Islamists, including terrorists, is to impose such law in all Muslim lands, and then throughout the world in a new Caliphate. Despite its importance, this worldwide growth of extreme shari'a is under-documented and little understood. By a comparative study over the last twenty-five years of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Indonesia, this book shows its terrible effects on human rights, especially the status of women and religious freedom, of Muslims as well as religious minorities, and on democracy itself. It also shows that such laws are a direct threat to the American interest of advancing democracy and human rights, that the United States lacks a policy for dealing with the spread of extreme shari'a, and concludes with policy recommendations for the United States regarding specific countries confronting extreme shari'a.

Cost analysts must predict-sometimes very far-into the future how much money the military will spend on weapon systems. But these analysts do not have perfect knowledge about tomorrow's technology, economic conditions, or any other future event. This book looks at how estimates for future weapon systems can be more realistic than in the past and how cost uncertainty analyses can be more comprehensive and informative.

High quality child care is especially important for child development. In this report, we examine child care in Los Angeles County in 2000-2001. Non-parental child care was used by 37 percent of children ages 0 to 5 who were not yet in kindergarten or school. Our results suggest that universal preschool and high-quality child care programs may be especially important for children from poorer families.

Across a wide variety of endeavors, failure to anticipate disaster has been ascribed to the inability to "connect the dots." But to "connect the dots," one must first "collect the dots." The authors investigate the barriers to circulating important information and describes approaches for bringing information together in a meaningful way and describe a formal process for collecting the dots.

This study identifies key potential users of high-performance computing within the Army science and technology community and develops a strategy to build an initiative that will help the Army compete effectively for Department of Defense computing resources. Particular attention was given to applications of HPC in biotechnology and biomedicine and modeling and simulation of complex battlefield wireless network communication systems.