Conceptualizing Poverty in Capitalism and Islam

This study investigates poverty in Capitalism and Islam in terms of both; as an economic ism and as a living ideology. Capitalism as a living ideology, based on its’ philosophical foundations, eventually yields class conflict, deprivation, discrimination and accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few capitalists. Capitalism as an economic ism has become unpopular in the world not only because of socioeconomic injustices but also due to environmental degradation and losses in biodiversity. Theoretical analysis reveals that the built in mechanism (Demand-Supply) of capitalism is incapable to resolve the issue of poverty effectively. Poverty in Islamic context is a pure economic concept which does not affect the social class system and social values of humans. Furthermore, the measurement concept of poverty in Islam is different from the Capitalism. Poverty has been measured based on the minimum prescribed amount (Nisab) postulated by Islam. Various categories of the poor have been identified while benchmarking the minimum prescribed amount. Keeping into consideration the philosophical foundation of the Capitalism and Islamic Economic System (IES) the study reveals that IES has more potential to resolve the issue of poverty on more fair and equitable basis than the Capitalism.

Formal Dependability Analysis Using Higher-Order-Logic Theorem Proving

Dependability is an umbrella concept that subsumes many key properties about a system, including reliability, maintainability, safety, availability, con- dentiality, and integrity. Various dependability modeling techniques have been developed to e ectively capture the failure characteristics of systems over time. Traditionally, dependability models are analyzed using paperand- pencil proof methods and computer based simulation tools but their results cannot be trusted due to their inherent inaccuracy limitations. To overcome these limitations, we propose to leverage upon the recent developments in probabilistic analysis support in higher-order-logic theorem proving to conduct accurate and rigorous dependability analysis. This thesis provides a semantic language embedding of the dependability concept that relies on a theory for probabilistic reasoning to develop a framework for formal dependability analysis within the sound environment of higher-order-logic theorem proving. In this thesis, we mainly focus on the formalization of two widely used dependability modeling techniques: (i) Reliability Block Diagrams - a graphical technique used to determine the reliability of overall system by utilizing the failure characteristics of individual system components; and (ii) Fault Trees - used for graphically analyzing the conditions and the factors causing an undesired top event, i.e., a critical event, which can cause the whole system iv v failure upon its occurrence. In particular, we present a RBD and FT-based formal dependability analysis framework that has the ability to accurately and rigorously determine the formal reliability, failure, availability and un- availability of safety-critical systems with arbitrary number of components. To illustrate the practical e ectiveness of our proposed infrastructure, we present the formal dependability analysis of several real-world safety-critical systems, including smart grids, WSN data transport protocols, satellite solar arrays, virtual data centers, oil and gas pipeline systems and an air tra c management system using the HOL4 theorem prover.