Role of Religion in Mate Selection Among Educated Working Women in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

The present study was conducted to probe the role of religion in mate selection among educated females of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Data for the study was collected through a pre-tested questionnaire from 278 working women from three public sector universities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa i.e. The University of Agriculture, University of Peshawar and Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Women University Peshawar. Simple random method was applied to pick the samples from the study area whereas chi-square statistics was applied to get the major findings. Results reveal a contradictory type of situation as on the one hand, religion particularly the rituals were strictly followed during marriage but on the other hand, the mate selection rights of women were ignored mainly. This is practiced despite of the fact that Islam has given right/liberty in mate selection to both men and women.  Female respondents attributed it to lack of Islamic knowledge on part of family members or they do it to get more say and power through following common values and culture. Religious leaders do not lay much stress on the rights given by Islam to females in mate selection in their religious sermons. The issue according to respondents was not discussed either. Females on their part, though found interested in mates from their own sect or religious groups preferred liberal males over conservative ones because believing them to be stern and inflexible. The study recommends that an awareness campaign through mass media which may include religious leaders, civil society and political parties needs to be launched in order to raise awareness among both the educated and uneducated females along with their parents regarding mate selection, the nature and impact of religious misinterpretations, and current wave of western values, materialistic outlook and idealism that affects the selected females perception about mate selection.

Use of Approximate Symmetry Methods to Define Energy of Gravitational Waves

In this thesis approximate Lie symmetry methods for differential equations are used to investigate the problem of energy in general relativity and in particular in gravitational waves. For this purpose second-order approximate symmetries of the system of geodesic equations for the Reissner-Nordström (RN) spacetime are studied. It is shown that in the second-order approximation, energy must be rescaled for the RN spacetime. Then the approximate symmetries of a Lagrangian for the geodesic equations in the Kerr spacetime are investigated. Taking the Minkowski spacetime as the exact case, it is shown that the symmetry algebra of the Lagrangian is 17 dimensional. This algebra is related to the 15 dimensional algebra of conformal isometries of the Minkowski spacetime. First introducing spin angular momentum per unit mass as a small parameter first-order approximate symmetries of the Kerr spacetime as a first perturbation of the Schwarzschild spacetime are considered. We then investigate the second-order approximate symmetries of the Kerr spacetime as a second perturbation of the Minkowski spacetime. Next, second-order approximate symmetries of the system of geodesic equations for the charged-Kerr spacetime are investigated. A rescaling of the arc length parameter for consistency of the trivial second-order approximate symmetries of the geodesic equations indicates that the energy in the charged-Kerr spacetime has to be rescaled. Since gravitational wave spacetimes are time-varying vacuum solutions of Einstein''s field equations, there is no unambiguous means to define their energy content. Here a definition, using slightly broken Noether symmetries is proposed. A problem is noted with the use of the proposal for plane-fronted gravitational waves. To attain a better understanding of the implications of this proposal we also use an artificially constructed time-varying non-vacuum plane symmetric metric and evaluate its Weyl and stress-energy tensors so as to obtain the gravitational and matter components separately and compare them with the energy content obtained by our proposal. The procedure is also used for cylindrical gravitational wave solutions. The usefulness of the definition is demonstrated by the fact that it leads to a result on whether gravitational waves suffer self-damping.