Hasil untuk "By religion"

Jia Liu, Jing Wang

This article reinterprets Yinguang’s (1861–1940) “Eight-Verse Guiding Principles” as a program that integrates worldly ethics with supramundane liberation in modern Chinese Buddhism. On the ethical level, Yinguang established “fulfilling one’s duties and preserving sincerity” as the fundamental code, insisting that moral responsibility and the guarding of right mindfulness revealed the innate luminosity of the mind. Building on this, the article looks at “eliminating selfish desires and manifesting illustrious virtue” (gewu zhizhi 格物致知) as a way to connect ontology to practice, highlighting the significance of “refraining from all evils and cultivating all virtues.” The practitioner made progress toward the ultimate objective of “purifying the mind” by following these steps. On the liberation level, the bodhi-mind functions as vow-power oriented toward Buddhahood for self and others. This dual aspiration functioned as the inner motivation for rebirth in the Pure Land and the attainment of Buddhahood. The triad of “faith, vows, and practice” furnishes an accessible soteriological pathway for ordinary beings who rely on Amitābha’s vow-power to achieve rebirth with karmic burdens. Methodologically, the study combines close reading of primary writings with modern theories of religious ethics and lived religion to show how name recitation (chiming nianfo 持名念佛) concentrates the mind and conduces to the samādhi of recitation, where “the whole mind is Buddha, and the whole Buddha is mind.” Framed within the broader dynamics of Republican-era moral reform and global Pure Land transmission, the article argues that Yinguang’s eight-verse guiding principles embodied the ideal of “reaching Buddhahood by way of the human path,” providing a historically grounded yet contemporary salient model for understanding Chinese religious culture today.

Hector Galindo-Silva

The European colonization of sub-Saharan Africa drove a massive shift from indigenous religions to Christianity, yet the channels through which this transformation occurred remain poorly understood. Using a geographic regression discontinuity design at colonial borders in sub-Saharan Africa, I find that Christian adherence is substantially higher under French and Portuguese direct rule than under British indirect rule -- a gap that implies a correspondingly greater persistence of traditional religions where indirect rule prevailed. Neither mission presence nor pre-colonial political centralization can account for the discontinuity. Instead, the evidence points to the disruption of the inherited social order as the key channel: where direct rule eroded rigid traditional social structures, Christianity -- which bypassed hereditary boundaries -- expanded to fill the void; where indirect rule preserved them, indigenous religions endured. These findings shed light on the dynamics of religious identity change and how it was shaped by colonialism.

Aarushi Wagh, Saniya Srivastava

Existing benchmarks evaluating biases in large language models (LLMs) primarily rely on explicit cues, declaring protected attributes like religion, race, gender by name. However, real-world interactions often contain implicit biases, inferred subtly through names, cultural cues, or traits. This critical oversight creates a significant blind spot in fairness evaluation. We introduce ImplicitBBQ, a benchmark extending the Bias Benchmark for QA (BBQ) with implicitly cued protected attributes across 6 categories. Our evaluation of GPT-4o on ImplicitBBQ illustrates troubling performance disparity from explicit BBQ prompts, with accuracy declining up to 7% in the "sexual orientation" subcategory and consistent decline located across most other categories. This indicates that current LLMs contain implicit biases undetected by explicit benchmarks. ImplicitBBQ offers a crucial tool for nuanced fairness evaluation in NLP.

Daniel Wang, Eli Brignac, Minjia Mao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely applied across diverse domains, raising concerns about their limitations and potential risks. In this study, we investigate two types of bias that LLMs may display: stereotype bias and deviation bias. Stereotype bias refers to when LLMs consistently associate specific traits with a particular demographic group. Deviation bias reflects the disparity between the demographic distributions extracted from LLM-generated content and real-world demographic distributions. By asking four advanced LLMs to generate profiles of individuals, we examine the associations between each demographic group and attributes such as political affiliation, religion, and sexual orientation. Our experimental results show that all examined LLMs exhibit both significant stereotype bias and deviation bias towards multiple groups. Our findings uncover the biases that occur when LLMs infer user attributes and shed light on the potential harms of LLM-generated outputs.

Ej Zhou, Weiming Lu

Social bias in language models can potentially exacerbate social inequalities. Despite it having garnered wide attention, most research focuses on English data. In a low-resource scenario, the models often perform worse due to insufficient training data. This study aims to leverage high-resource language corpora to evaluate bias and experiment with debiasing methods in low-resource languages. We evaluated the performance of recent multilingual models in five languages: English, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian and Thai, and analyzed four bias dimensions: gender, religion, nationality, and race-color. By constructing multilingual bias evaluation datasets, this study allows fair comparisons between models across languages. We have further investigated three debiasing methods-CDA, Dropout, SenDeb-and demonstrated that debiasing methods from high-resource languages can be effectively transferred to low-resource ones, providing actionable insights for fairness research in multilingual NLP.

Esther-Maria Guggenmos

This article is a revised version of the inaugural lecture delivered on 5 October2023, on the occasion of the author's appointment as Professor of History of Religions at Lund University. It opens by depicting fundamental changes in the study of the history of religions in the twentieth century, followed by biographical notes, including her research on lay Buddhism in urban Taiwan, the emphasis on sensual dimensions of religious practice and the aesthetics of religion, and international academic networking in the analysis of practices of prognostication between Asia and Europe. Three areas are outlined that are central to the author's current research. It is pointed out that a focus on religion in contemporary society certainly includes a healthy awareness of current developments in the politics of religion, particularly in East Asia. In addition, the article addresses two fields of research that the author is currently engaged in: (1) The emergence of "Life Education" as a school subject in Greater China and the pedagogical shift that goes along with it. Particularly in Taiwan, this new subject is tailored to create a space for juveniles to develop self-reflection and life orientation in a success-oriented society while a new trust in religious organizations leads to the organizations' active engagement in these developments. The author is especially interested in how the transforming relationship between religion and public education gains special relevance in a comparative perspective between Asia and Europe. (2) Religious change in East Asia is evident in Buddhist ritual practices that are impacted by a consumer society that moulds emotionally profound experiences into marketable and distinct units that Eva Illouz has termed "emodities". Religious practices are subject to change in our contemporary world as they are reshaped by a growing global digitalized consumer culture. Tracing these changes leads to a deeper understanding of the underlying forces that distinctly reshape contemporary religious life.

Ruan Jianzhang

This study aims to explore whether secular nationalism can be considered as a type of religion. In the first section, the term “religious nationalism” is perceived as nationalism that generally demonstrates characteristics commonly associated with religion. In the second section, definitions of nationalism and religion are explained respectively. This study then draws parallels between the two, depicting religion as a good “metaphor” for nationalism, thereby describing basic concepts of religious nationalism with reference to some policies in Revolutionary France in 1790 as an instance. In section three, more specific overlapping characteristics possessed by both nationalism and religion are elaborated in which this study not only analyses similarities between the hierarchical structure of the government and the Church, but also compares the devotion of the “state” maintained by citizens to worship of “God” maintained by believers. Drawing inspiration by a variety of scholars ranging from Carlton Hayes to Friedrich Nietzsche, this study eventually reaches a conclusion that, despite variations in the intensity of national sentiments across different countries, secular nationalism is undoubtedly a type of religion supported by these similar characteristics described above.

Schrasing Tong, Eliott Zemour, Jessica Lu et al.

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in a wide range of applications, they have also been observed to perpetuate unwanted biases present in the training data, potentially leading to harm for marginalized communities. In this paper, we mitigate bias by leveraging small biased and anti-biased expert models to obtain a debiasing signal that is added to the LLM output at decoding-time. This approach combines computational efficiency - fine-tuning a small model versus re-training a large model and interpretability - one can examine the probability shift from debiasing. The framework can also be tailored to specific contexts by switching the choice of the fine-tuning dataset. Experiments on mitigating gender, race, and religion biases on different architectures show a reduction in bias on several local and global bias metrics while preserving language model performance.

seyyedhossein athari, Zahra Mohamadpour

Introduction The heart of any state or government's stability is its legitimacy, which confirms the validity of governmental decrees and ensures the continuity of governance. The Sassanid era is one historical period where the very foundations of the state's authority and political ideology were called into question in Iran. Challenges to the religious values, which were the mainstay of the government's legitimacy, led to both social and political upheaval. This was particularly evident following the emergence of new religions and rituals, which posed a threat and underscored the urgent need for the restoration of legitimacy. In response to this crisis, the ideological apparatus of the Sassanid state employed various strategies. Among these, the 'Ardavirafnameh' stands out as a cultural mechanism that articulated the principles, values, and ideals embodying the political ideology meant to reaffirm the state's legitimacy and ensure the survival of Sassanid rule. The research posits, through the application of Skinner's intentionalism hermeneutic framework, that the 'Ardavirafnameh' was written under specific conditions, within a particular context and intellectual milieu, with a definitive purpose. The hypothesis suggests that the text was crafted as an ideological instrument aimed at addressing the legitimacy crisis faced by the Sassanid government. The primary objective of the author in composing this text appears to have been to influence the political culture of the time, thereby reconstructing the foundational legitimacy of the Sassanid state. Methodology The research employs Quentin Skinner's internationalist interpretive methodology to delve into the underlying messages of the text. Skinner's approach underscores the importance of understanding the text's examination in conjunction with the author's intentions and the objective and intellectual circumstances under which it was produced. In the initial phase of applying Skinner's method, efforts are made to grasp the political issues and debates of the Ardaviraf era, as well as the responses and solutions that were proposed at the time. By reconstructing the socio-political climate and the intellectual milieu in which the 'Ardavirafnameh' was composed, we can illuminate the challenges that confronted the Zoroastrian Monads, under Ardaviraf leadership, allowing for a more accurate comprehension of how these issues influenced the author's thinking. Following this, the analysis aims to discern the unique language, meanings, concepts, and prevailing propositions employed in the 'Ardavirafnameh.' This step involves examining the traditions, norms, principles, and conventional rules that shaped the political arguments and discourse of the time. Suchan exploration is crucial for understanding the societal context of the period and the author's intent behind creating the text. Discussion The Sassanid government, during its four-century rule (224 to 651 AD), sought to establish legitimacy through various means to maintain public support. Their legitimacy was built on tradition by associating themselves with Parthian and Achaemenid kings. Additionally, the charismatic personality of the kings and the support of the people formed the basis of their authority. However, the most significant foundation of Sassanid legitimacy was Zoroastrianism. The king derived power from God, and Zoroastrian decrees became the official law of the state, shaping Iranian culture, politics, and ideological legitimacy. The authority of Sassanid clerics, the Mobdans, unified society around religion, unprecedented in pre-Islamic Iran. However, the collision of Zoroastrianism with other religions led to the emergence of religious heresies. Mani's religion, a blend of beliefs, aimed to end conflicts and class divides, subtly guiding followers to oppose the government. Similarly, Mazdak Bamadan's reinterpretation of the Avesta protested Sassanid laws and structures, advocating for equality and sparking socialist changes that led to the collapse of the state system and upheaval in the country. Mani's religion marked the first instance of sedition and religious heresy arising from conflicting beliefs. His teachings combined popular beliefs and religions of the time, aiming to end wars and social injustices by uniting different religions. He offered followers a path of peace and mystical isolation in response to nobles and pious individuals. Mani's religious doctrines concealed a political agenda, subtly guiding people's beliefs towards opposition to the government. Mazdak Bamadan, a prominent cleric of the Qobad era, initiated a social uprising by reinterpreting the Avesta in protest against Sassanian structures and laws. His movement sought to rectify the deviations caused by religious leaders, representing a protest against the Sassanid social and political system. Emphasizing the equality of all individuals, his teachings garnered numerous followers and led to revolutionary socialist changes in Iran. Those advocating fundamental societal changes pushed to extremes, resulting in the collapse of the state system and pushing the country to the brink of ruin.      In this way, the emergence of new religions led to people`s suspicion towards the country`s official religion and the threat of political power, which ultimately led to severe repression and the brutal killing of Mani and Mazdak and their followers. However, these religions did not disappear and even after the fall of the Sassanids, they also opposed the muslim religion in the form of social movements. The Sassanid era, which was the era of prosperity and influx of religious opinions and new thoughts, forsed the Zoroastrain rulers and priests as agents of the religious institution to take a stand and react against these new religions and religious opponents, and writing the Ardavirafnameh book as an ideological tool of confrontation. It is with these religions that he trais to define the framework of condition of political conflict and draw the legitimacy clamis of those in power according to the type of political regime and power structures based on cultural contexts. Conclusion Based on the explanation provided in this research, the Ardaviraf era's timeframe, transformations, and historical developments underscore the restoration of political legitimacy as the central concern of Zoroastrianism. The text Ardavirafnameh, portraying heaven and hell, serves as an exposition of Mobdans' thoughts led by Ardaviraf, aiming to influence the political culture of society. It is evident that the societal transformation is linked to changes in the ruling political culture, emphasizing the text's role in shaping this culture and sustaining the state's political legitimacy. Despite being a religious text, Ardavirafnameh reflects the ideology of the Sasanian government and Zoroastrian priests. The Mobdans, as the primary decision-makers and influencers in vital cultural aspects, established the idea that the perpetuation of the royal line depends on their resourcefulness and persistence, taking advantage of the kings' weaknesses for their own benefit. As the most influential class in Sassanid society, the Mobdans sought strategies for integrating and legitimizing political values, norms, and structures with a focus on the campaign. Consequently, this text, as a strategic choice by the political elite, underscores religious ideology's aspects, aiming to foster a sense of political unity, common values, norms, and shared political goals among society members. It serves to capture the minds of individuals and emphasizes the importance of religious and moral beliefs in accepting and obeying the king, religious values, and governmental requirements. Recognizing that political legitimacy hinges on societal beliefs and perceptions, religious leaders aim to leverage Ardavirafnameh as a political instrument to cultivate legitimacy among the people. Therefore, the document's purpose was to return to religious foundations, signifying a return to the basis of Sasanian state legitimacy.

Mikołaj Sławkowski-Rode

Preview: Science and religion are complex cultural phenomena, which bear on our understanding of the world, life, consciousness, agency, morality, as well as all other fundamental issues human beings puzzle over. There exists a longstanding question about whether science and religion, and the responses they offer to these issues, are complementary or in conflict. The conflict narrative, championed for example by the New Atheists, emphasizes discrepancies between scientific and religious explanations and typically advances methodological, ethical, and ontological naturalism as providing us with the only adequate means of addressing the big questions humanity faces. The complementarity narrative, without denying the advances of the natural sciences, tends to take the view that it is possible to retain elements of a religious worldview alongside the discoveries of natural science. A traditional focus in the European context has been on the viability of certain ethical ideas whose original justification was arguably based in Christianity, such as human dignity, moral equality, and the centrality of humility, compassion and sacrifice.

Babak Hemmatian, Razan Baltaji, Lav R. Varshney

Abid et al. (2021) showed a tendency in GPT-3 to generate mostly violent completions when prompted about Muslims, compared with other religions. Two pre-registered replication attempts found few violent completions and only a weak anti-Muslim bias in the more recent InstructGPT, fine-tuned to eliminate biased and toxic outputs. However, more pre-registered experiments showed that using common names associated with the religions in prompts increases several-fold the rate of violent completions, revealing a significant second-order anti-Muslim bias. ChatGPT showed a bias many times stronger regardless of prompt format, suggesting that the effects of debiasing were reduced with continued model development. Our content analysis revealed religion-specific themes containing offensive stereotypes across all experiments. Our results show the need for continual de-biasing of models in ways that address both explicit and higher-order associations.

Leonardo Ranaldi, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Davide Venditti et al.

Cheap-to-Build Very Large-Language Models (CtB-LLMs) with affordable training are emerging as the next big revolution in natural language processing and understanding. These CtB-LLMs are democratizing access to trainable Very Large-Language Models (VLLMs) and, thus, may represent the building blocks of many NLP systems solving downstream tasks. Hence, a little or a large bias in CtB-LLMs may cause huge harm. In this paper, we performed a large investigation of the bias of three families of CtB-LLMs, and we showed that debiasing techniques are effective and usable. Indeed, according to current tests, the LLaMA and the OPT families have an important bias in gender, race, religion, and profession. In contrast to the analysis for other LLMs, we discovered that bias depends not on the number of parameters but on the perplexity. Finally, the debiasing of OPT using LoRA reduces bias up to 4.12 points in the normalized stereotype score.

Elaheh Jafarigol, William Keely, Tess Hartog et al.

This paper is a quantitative analysis of the data collected globally by the World Value Survey. The data is used to study the trajectories of change in individuals' religious beliefs, values, and behaviors in societies. Utilizing random forest, we aim to identify the key factors of religiosity and classify respondents of the survey as religious and non religious using country level data. We use resampling techniques to balance the data and improve imbalanced learning performance metrics. The results of the variable importance analysis suggest that Age and Income are the most important variables in the majority of countries. The results are discussed with fundamental sociological theories regarding religion and human behavior. This study is an application of machine learning in identifying the underlying patterns in the data of 30 countries participating in the World Value Survey. The results from variable importance analysis and classification of imbalanced data provide valuable insights beneficial to theoreticians and researchers of social sciences.

Ilkka Huhta

This article examines how religious freedom has been implemented and interpreted in Finland over the last hundred years. Moving chronologically, I explore the most crucial developmental phases in religious freedom legislation and public discussion. The Act on the Freedom of Religion was only introduced after Finland’s independence in 1917 and entered into force at the beginning of 1923. The article shows themes that provoked much discussion in the 1920s and were interestingly repeated in the debate in the 1960s. The question of the relationship between the church and state was at the core of the Finnish public debate on freedom of religion from the outset. A similar discussion again became visible at the turn of the twenty-first century in connection with the basic rights reform and processing of the new Act on the Freedom of Religion. The strength of the Finnish state church system in society is still illustrated by the fact that the Act on the Freedom of Religion of 2003 did not really change the basic premise regarding the Lutheran and Orthodox churches, which hold a special position. Opinion remains divided on whether such a system is problematic for the realization of religious freedom.

Raunak Joshi, Abhishek Gupta, Nandan Kanvinde

Mental Health Disturbance has many reasons and cyberbullying is one of the major causes that does exploitation using social media as an instrument. The cyberbullying is done on the basis of Religion, Ethnicity, Age and Gender which is a sensitive psychological issue. This can be addressed using Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, since social media is the medium and it generates massive form of data in textual form. Such data can be leveraged to find the semantics and derive what type of cyberbullying is done and who are the people involved for early measures. Since deriving semantics is essential we proposed a Hybrid Deep Learning Model named 1-Dimensional CNN-Bidirectional-LSTMs with Residuals shortly known as Res-CNN-BiLSTM. In this paper we have proposed the architecture and compared its performance with different approaches of Embedding Deep Learning Algorithms.

Amal Yousef Omar Alqawasmi

This paper studies Muslim marriages and divorces in Islamic centers in Italy, which are influenced by religion, and conducted outside the scope of Italian laws. The paper is basically empirical research, based on interviews with imāms in various Islamic centers, Muslim women and men who have chosen to refer to Islamic centers for their marriage or divorce, and family counselors following different cases. It investigates the motivations behind these practices by analyzing the fieldwork data, and demonstrates the related socio-legal consequences, specifically in relation to the role of Islamic centers and imāms in these marriages and divorces. The current state of religious rights for Muslims in Italy, and the lack of knowledge about the circumstances and reasons for these practices at national level are taken into consideration.

Ebrahim Ranjbar

1.IntroductionAlthough the title name of "Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan" juxtaposes with the name of James Morier, the original work belongs to an Iranian. Imitating the westerns, an Iranian immigrant had created his memoirs abroad and handed it in to Morier "to be published in the West" (Modarres Sadeghi, 2001, pp. 11-12). He had likely not added his name on the work to secure his life from the regime.     Mirza Fathali Akhoundzadeh lived in Iran until his 15, then moved to Kafkaz, and all his life tried to inform the Iranian about the globe through literary narration. These two authors had some similarities and differences. The first was the thought school. The author of "The Adventures of Hajji Baba"was acquainted with the social and political life of Istanbule’s population and the Western nations and at the same time the cultural and civilization patterns of Iran. Akhoundzadeh; however, was under the influence of Russian poets, writers, and intellectuals and learned about the Western opinions through Russian language. He was not familiar with cultural and civilization patterns of the Iranian as much as the author of "The Adventures of Hajji Baba". Second, both of them believed in a change in the intellectualism of the Iranian despite they saw it from a different angle and gave different suggestions since they looked at Iran from different perspectives. Third, they both preferred humor and fiction to other styles in creating a change in Iran. And forth, for both of them the King is more of a nature than nurture; that is: a social premise at the head of an organization. 2.MethodologyIn this article, I have surveyed the similarities and differences between the two authors in thought, perspective, and the way of looking at Iran as well as reflecting the method of social, cultural, and religious situation in the nation. The methodology of surveying focuses on the details of the novels, analyzing them, and inferring the related conceptualizations. 3.DiscussionIn spite of differences, there are some typical similarities between the two works. Some of the most outstanding similarities are: 1. The description of the King: the Author of the Adventures of Hajji Baba looks at King from the perspective of ruling the nation, piety, and ethics. The king appeals to religion as a means to conserve the power. He considers for himself a position of divinity and suggests the lives and properties of his people his own belongings (see. Morier, 2001, PP. 130, 133-137, 139, 229-233, 263, 340, 349). Akhoundzadeh; however, does not realizes the king as much as the author of The Adventures of Hajji Baba; he only condemns the king’s divinity by describing him in clothing and the palace (see. Akhoundzadeh, 1977, PP. 426, 438). 2. Both of the authors give a variety of samples to illustrate the incompetency of government agents (see. Morier, 2001, PP. 20, 21, 25, 52, 188, 302-303, 340, 342; Akhoundzadeh, 1977, PP. 413-415, 445-446). 3. The authors both complain about the negligence of the law by the religious and state intellectuals. 4. Both of the authors realize maltreatment of religion and kinship ruling as the result of the king’s dictatorship and incompetency of his relatives (see. Morier, 2001, pp. 93, 355; Akhoundzadeh 1977; pp. 416, 450). Abusing the religion to accomplish nonreligious goals has been mentioned, in a bitter humor, several times in The Adventures of Hajji Baba. The author does not take religion as a social realm; he has rather a feeling for it and sympathizes for the real religious values. It is the same in the Deceived Stars; the real religious and conscientious people have no way to power pyramid. On the contrary, people who are aware of the position of religion in the community with the least knowledge may take the most advantages of it in achieving property and power. 5. For both of the authors, ethics diminishes as a result of dictatorship. They both have represented the downfall of ethical values because of widespread pretend, flattery, and libel. The frequency of ethical downfalls in the Deceived Stars is lesser than The Adventures of Hajji Baba. 6. Prevalence superstitions: in The Adventures of Hajji Baba, the regime’s members are negligent of their negligence. They do not expect developing schools as useful for the regime, and in religious learning they know nothing important except reading Koran. Medical science is only limited to which doctors. The Deceived Stars is mainly founded on a misbelief and then it is condemned. 7. Among the various traditions in Iran, both of the authors mention "Payandaz" (welcome reward) and condemn it (see. Morier, 2001, PP. 130, 140; Akhoundzadeh, 1977, p. 414). 8. Overcharging people: the author of The Adventures of Hajji Baba directly demonstrates samples of people’s oppression; in the Deceived Stars the samples are not presented as directly as The Adventures of Hajji Baba. The reader is to infer oppressions from the expressions and covert behaviors. 9. Portraying the women’s terrible condition: the author of The Adventures of Hajji Baba illustrates some examples of female conditions such as bigamy, involuntary marriage, purchasing and selling as servants, exchanging with stock, and opening Seegheh Khaneh (religious sex houses). To portray these terrible conditions, the Deceived Stars mentions involuntary marriage and divorce for women (see. Akhoundzadeh, 1977, pp. 429-430). 10. Both authors repeatedly talk about the people’s addiction to coffee, hubble bubble, and drugs (see. Morier, 2001, pp. 256, 277, 308, …; Akhoundzadeh, 1977, pp. 58, 433, 440).Regardless of the similarities between the two works, there are some cultural affairs and traditions in The Adventures of Hajji Baba attributed to Iranians through humor and exaggeration that are not stated in Deceived Stars. A few of them are being discussed as follows:the general prevalence of betrayal and lies: among every social class, there are people who are great liars and are quick at raising properties belonging to others.  2.Fear and supplication: when facing with regime’s officers unreasonably reprimanding them, people usually have no choice except for supplication.Habit of discrimination: discrimination is so widespread among occupation communities that even a barber can discriminate among his customers.  4.Status appreciation: people appreciate status. They give big titles to those who occupy the position by stealing and lying and then bend in front of them accordingly.  5.Extortion, bargaining, false swearing, theft and fainting in goods: exaggerating the price of the items and then discounting several times above the real price, swearing to deceive the customer, stealing and cheating in dealing are social habits in the community (see. Morier, 2001, pp. 89-90).On the contrary, there are details in the Deceived Stars that are not present in The Adventures of Hajji Baba such as 1. the welfare needs of the community: constructing streets, bridges, caravanserai, hospital, school, well, welfare for the widow and orphans; 2. Economical, ethical, and scientific needs: distinguishing the knowledgeable from the pretending flattering knowledgeable, stopping the unreasonable interference of the custodians in religious affairs in the lives of the people, providing tuition fees for religious students, developing competent courts, providing support centers for the poor, closing the unlawful ways of extorting money from people, the necessity of employing Sadats (Children of the Prophet) in decent jobs to keep the face of the prophet’s children, focusing on capability in appointments, setting correct and transparent rules for the Court expenses, setting rules for tax collection, timely payment of the Army salaries, prohibiting usury, and so on. 4.Conclusion    The author of "The Adventures of Hajji Baba" is most likely an Iranian, not Morier. This author has a relatively comprehensive knowledge of Iranian intellectual conditions and customs, culture, beliefs, psychological needs, occupations, economic situation, history, literature, relations of government institutions with the people, social oppression, lack of law and the like. He also became acquainted with the social life of the people of Istanbul and Europe, and especially their Pekarsk novels such as Gilles Blass. Comparing Iran, Istanbul, and Europe, he has written a Pekarsk novel, using humor and exaggeration to identify the flaws in the lives of Iranians. Akhundzadeh did not know as much about Iran as he did. Therefore, the works of these two have similarities and differences with each other, including: both identify incompetency of employees, kinship ruling in the power system, lack of law, lack of will to legislate the country in the ruling system, astonishing abuses of the glory of religion in society, prevalence of pretense , flattery, slander to others, superstitions, all kinds of injustices to the general public, addiction to Bang and vice versa, lack of production and will to change the status quo and lack of effort for public awareness and development of the country as the reasons for the differences between Iran and other countries . The author of "The Adventures of Hajji Baba" believes that there are magicians in Iran who penetrate the minds and psyche of the public and conquer their intellect. These magicians intensify vices such as betrayal, lies, fear of those in power, discrimination, etc., and worse, they prevent public awakening and, as a result, perpetuate the tyrannical system. Therefore, changing the current situation is a difficult task. This thinking has caused the satire of "The adventures of Hajji Baba" to be sharp and exaggerated, but Akhundzadeh is not so aware of Iranian society.

Isaac Bogoch, Kumanan Wilson, Vivian A Welch et al.

Objective The main objectives of this study were to synthesise and compare pandemic preparedness strategies issued by the federal and provincial/territorial (P/T) governments in Canada and to assess whether COVID-19 public health (PH) measures were tailored towards priority populations, as defined by relevant social determinants of health.Methods This scoping review searched federal and P/T websites on daily COVID-19 pandemic preparedness strategies between 30 January and 30 April 2020. The PROGRESS-Plus equity-lens framework was used to define priority populations. All definitions, policies and guidelines of PH strategies implemented by the federal and P/T governments to reduce risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission were included. PH measures were classified using a modified Public Health Agency of Canada Framework for Canadian Pandemic Influenza Preparedness.Results A total of 722 COVID-19 PH measures were issued during the study period. Of these, home quarantine (voluntary) (n=13.0%; 94/722) and retail/commerce restrictions (10.9%; n=79/722) were the most common measures introduced. Many of the PH orders, including physical distancing, cancellation of mass gatherings, school closures or retail/commerce restrictions began to be introduced after 11 March 2020. Lifting of some of the PH orders in phases to reopen the economy began in April 2020 (6.5%; n=47/722). The majority (68%, n=491/722) of COVID-19 PH announcements were deemed mandatory, while 32% (n=231/722) were recommendations. Several PH measures (28.0%, n=202/722) targeted a variety of groups at risk of socially produced health inequalities, such as age, religion, occupation and migration status.Conclusions Most PH measures centred on limiting contact between people who were not from the same household. PH measures were evolutionary in nature, reflecting new evidence that emerged throughout the pandemic. Although ~30% of all implemented COVID-19 PH measures were tailored towards priority groups, there were still unintended consequences on these populations.

Jia-Jia Chin, Hong-Wai Tham

Genetic testing aids patients in making important decisions in the prevention, treatment, or early detection of hereditary disorders. Low awareness of the importance of genetic testing contributes to the increase in the incidence of hereditary disorders. This study aims to explore the knowledge, awareness, and perception of genetic testing for hereditary disorders among local residents of the Klang Valley, Malaysia, and the potential variables that influence their understanding of genetic testing. A survey was conducted in different municipalities of the Klang Valley through self-administered questionnaire assessing the public's knowledge, awareness, and perception of genetic testing. Overall, the results revealed adequate knowledge and positive awareness of genetic testing, in which both were influenced by the respondent's educational level (P < 0.001), field of study (P < 0.001), and status of heard or unheard of genetic testing (P < 0.001). The perception of genetic testing was generally positive and influenced by the respondent's differences in age (P < 0.016), educational level (P < 0.001), field of study (P < 0.001), and status of heard or unheard of genetic testing (P < 0.001). Although positive responses were obtained, ~20.2% of the respondents had never heard of genetic testing. Of the respondents, 24.5% were unwilling to undergo genetic testing, with 25.1% believing that genetic testing tampers with nature and 18% believing that it opposes religion and their beliefs. Such attitude calls for the need to conduct programs to eliminate any misconception, as well as to educate the public to lessen any perceived misunderstanding of the concepts of genetic testing.