This tiny booklet is meant to highlight the nature of theological dialogue between two middle managers, one representing the Pakistani Taliban faction and the other representing the ISI (Pakistani Inter-services Intelligence). Pakistani Taliban are an offshoot of the Afghani Taliban which the ISI had armed and nurtured to take control of Afghanistan in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the Russian Army. The dialogue is my translation of a dialogue captured in two videos given below, in Urdu taken probably during the first operation against the Pakistani Taliban in the Tribal Areas. What makes the confrontation extremely engaging is because both protagonists are well versed in Islamic and national history of Pakistan. Constantly during the dialogue the ISI Handler seems to be reaching out to the rebellious Talibani leader by giving him an olive branch over and over again. The Talibani leader on his part comes across as mocking and deriding his former master, repeatedly rejecting all conciliatory efforts of the former partners. This dialogue should be listened by all Urdu listeners as the translation below cannot do complete justice to the very interesting and logical dialogue. I believe that the Talibani theology represents a very rigid form of Islamic thought which simply believes that all the world belongs to Allah as he is the absolute master, and that all creatures are His slaves, and that the Qur'an represents His law which is incumbent on all of His slaves. Actually, this definition is pretty common across most Islamic strands, the real difference with the Talibani theology is that they believe that anyone not following the letter of Qur'an, automatically becomes an apostate (Murtid) thus an enemy of Islam. They therefore thus justify their war against the 'Islamic Republic of Pakistan'. Another observation I made is that the particular Islamic historical events mentioned in the dialogue below are not well known among the majority popular brand of Sunni Islam. Talibans also consider themselves to be Sunni but they seem to use certain contentious aspects of Islamic history like the Masjid al-Dirar event as an analogy (dalil), which is rarely discussed almost unknown among most practising Sunni Muslims. The Taliban therefore, have been able to forge together a variant of Islamic theology without any known Ulema, or extensive literature of their own. Instead they tend to quote these neglected or greyed events from the Islamic history as proofs of their actions, justifying suicide bombings, arbitrary killing of their enemies whether Muslim or non-Muslim, to great effect. The Taliban seem to have embraced end-justifies-the-means strand employed within Islam right from the time of the Prophet and still used today by all current Islamic movements of today. Within Islam there is no real centralised canonical order akin to Catholics in Rome or Protestants with their Church of England, which leaves the field wide open for any Muslim scholar to start churning out fatwas (religious injunctions) in huge numbers. Just a cursory glance in some of the scholars mentioned in the dialogue below roughly reveal around 2000 fatwas per scholar, which is a pretty high number to control. Such a high amount of fatwa churn provides ample resource for anyone to justify their actions, which I hope will be pretty obvious for anyone reading the dialogue below. As the dialogue is accessible on the internet, I shall try and provide all references from the WWW by asking Sheikh Google in blue, details of link are given at the end of the dialogue.

Inferring three-dimensional (3D) shape of real objects from visual information belongs to the main domain of the computer vision applications. Shape From Focus (SFF) is one of the passive methods that uses focus as a cue to infer the 3D structure of the object. In SFF, the objective is to find out the depth by measuring the distance of well-focused position of each object point from the camera lens. A sequence of images is acquired either by displacing the object in small steps or by changing the focal length of the lens in the camera. First, a focus measure, which is a criterion that can effectively measure the focus quality, is applied on each image pixel of the sequence. An initial depth map is obtained by maximizing the focus measure along the optical axis. In order to refine the initial depth estimate, different approximation and machine learning techniques have been used. In this book, various focus measures and SFF techniques based on machine learning approaches are discussed.

Amin Ahsan Islahi (1904-1997) a renowned Pakistani scholar, author of nine-volume commentary on the Holy Qur'an, Tadabbur-e Qu'ran (Urdu), addresses fundamental questions on the Islamic political system. After a brief introduction to the concept of khilafah in Islam and a description of differences between the Islamic State and the conventional states, Islahi explains the basic principles of the Islamic State. He details conspicuous characteristics of the nation founded on Islam and explains the rights of Muslim and non-Muslim citizens of the state. He concludes his discussion on a detailed analysis of the duties and obligations of the rulers and the state officials in Islam. Islahi maintains that the traditional understanding of the rights of the non-Muslim citizens in the Islamic State, the so-called dhimmis, in erroneous. He believes that the Islamic State is not required by the divine law to subject all the non-Muslims to the payment of jizyah. Islahi's thoughts in this book represent the views of a great majority of the learned Pakistani Muslims regarding the Islamic Khilafah.

In the past, four crane species were recorded in Pakistan including demoiselle crane (Anthropoides virgo), Eurasian crane (Grus grus), Siberian crane (Grus leucogeranus) and the Sarus crane (Grus antigone). But more recently only two species (demoiselle and Siberian cranes) winter here while the other two are thought to be extinct from here. In Pakistan crane species face various threats including hunting, live trapping and habitat loss. River Indus around Dera Ismail Khan provides attractive sites to the migrating cranes and according to an estimate about 1,000 cranes are hunted on this particular site. In the past, usually 100-200 cranes were seen on river beds each day, staying for a short rest period during spring season. But now due to widespread disturbance along their migration route, they cannot find a chance to feed and rest here and so are compelled to take unusually long journeys to get out of Pakistan. Large populations of demoiselle crane, however, occur in captivity at Bannu, Lakki Marwat and adjacent tribal areas of northern Pakistan.

The present study was undertaken to develop oral sustained release tablets of metoprolol tartrate using natural hydrophilic matrix formers (xanthan gum and tragacanth). Sustained release matrix tablets of metoprolol tartrate were prepared by using different ratios of drug, xanthan gum and tragacanth. Microcrystalline cellulose (MCC) was used as diluent. The polymer was incorporated into a matrix system using direct compression technique. Different formulations were evaluated with respect to dissolution profile in 900 mL phosphate buffer (pH 6.8), 0.1 M HCl solution and distilled water for 12 h at 37 C. Increasing the amount of polymer (xanthan gum) in the formulation led to slow release of drug. The kinetic treatment showed the best fitted different mathematical models (Zero order, First order, Higuchiis and Hixson-Crowell). Most of the solid matrix formulations followed Higuchi or zero order kinetics. The formulations F1, F2, F3 and F7, F8, F9 showed maximum linearity. The results showed that the formulation F9 containing 30% xanthan gum and 10% gum tragacanth is the most similar to that of the reference marketed preparation.

MALIK TARIQ MAHMOOD is a young dynamic professional with ability to work in diverse managerial positions, a team member who can work with minimum supervision, a team leader who can lead to success with growth possessing analytical skills, convincing communicational abilities and desire to excel in the profession. He is a life member of SPELT Islamabad Chapter and a member of Mass Media Forum, Islamabad. He is doing MPhil leading to PhD in Mass Communication from Allama Iqbal Open Universality, Islamabad, Pakistan. His book entitled "NEWS-SEEKING PATTERNS OF ACADEMICIANS AND ADMINISTRATORS OF ALLAMA IQBAL OPEN UNIVERSITY" was published. He has also written 4-5 research articles which are published in Euro Journals, United Kingdom, Resource Information Centre (ERIC), and ArticlesBase (Free Online Articles Directory).

In this book you will find new approaches regarding skin care in which a most widely used green tea is explored for skin care. Green tea is used as beverage by millions of people but a little is know about its topical applications. Here in this book you will read about non-invasive bioengineering techniques and how green tea is benificial when applied topicaly to the skin. Every aspect in this book is elaborated scientifically.

The epidemiological association between migraine and mood disorders has been reported since mid-twentieth century. This monograph describes one of the first studies into migraine's association with bipolar disorder. Unlike other studies, this one looks beyond the superficial and attempts to understand the biological basis of the bipolar disorder, migraine co- morbidity. To achieve this aim, the role of central serotonergic system was investigated by carrying out neuropharmacological challenge studies in patients with bipolar disorder or migraine alone, in those who had both, and in healthy controls.

The main purpose of this research is to investigate the newspaper reader's liking for different news patterns by the academicians and administrators of Allama Iqbal Open University. Information is obtained by using a wide variety of both informal and formal sources; i.e. human sources, internet and Mass Media. Keeping in view its nature and requirement to explore and examine the difference in news-seeking patterns of academicians and administrators of AIOU. The news-seeking patterns studied with respect to the selected aspects, namely; educational development, national and international affairs, politics, health, and job hunting as well as articles and editorials in relation to the selected variables of occupation, age, and qualification.

Toxicity due to heavy metals is of major concern in Pakistan. Mercury, cadmium, chromium, arsenic, lead, zinc and copper concentrations have increased to alarming levels in the water, soil and air which have become large dumps of industrial effluents. Physiologically, heavy metals can profoundly affect the functioning of the endocrine system and in Pakistan, thyroid related diseases are also very common. Chromium in hexavalent form is highly toxic and a known carcinogen, however as opposed to the trivalent form, its toxic effects on the thyroid structure and function are relatively unexplored. Acute exposure to chromium (VI) can occur in the occupational set up. The present study, therefore, investigated the thyroid gland structure and function following intraperitoneal administration of potassium dichromate (Cr-VI) in laboratory rats.Diverse techniques were employed during the study. The results give an insight to the toxic effects of hexavalent chromium on the thyroid gland and describe how the metal interferes with the functioning of the gland; not only with its morphology but also at cellular and molecular levels.

This book introduces, describes and validates a novel technology for Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs). It is targeted for researchers, teachers and students related to the fields of Machine Learning and/or E-commerce. Specifically, CRSs are intelligent E-commerce applications that assist users by supporting an interactive recommendation process. To this end, CRSs employ some type of a recommendation strategy, i.e., a specification of the system behavior. Typically, this strategy is pre-determined in advance and hard-coded inside the system, thus making it possibly non-adapted to the dynamic needs of the users. The technology presented in this book allows CRSs to autonomously learn the optimal (best) strategy for a given recommendation context, from amongst a set of available ones. The optimal strategy is best adapted to the users' needs, and is learned using Reinforcement Learning techniques (a branch of Machine Learning). We have validated this technology through simulations as well as in an online evaluation involving several hundreds of real users. Our results justify the application of this technology in state-of-the-art E-commerce portals.