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Friday, April 24, 2009

Few ways to improvise Google Page Rank & Alexa Rank

I convince that every bloggers want to improve their blogs page rank. This are steps you can do:
  • Usage of Keywords – Effective Google Searches can be referred to know more about the working of keyword phrases. It is better to have a keyword phrase for your site as it has to be the most used and most relevant parameter to shoot your ranking.
  • Density of the Keyword – The required density of the keyword should be between 3 % - 5 % ideally. The number of times the keyword is repeated which is relevant to the context in a blog contributes to the rank.
  • Linking of the Site – The hyperlinking of one’s site by others is ‘the’ most important measure by which the rankings are calculated. The links should be in between the posts or the article to add more value to the hyperlinking than just hyperlinking for the sake of it.
  • Well designed page – Another significant influencer to the shooting of the ranking is the design content and properly organized pages. As goes the famous quote, good design is popular design.
  • Proper Site Submission – The open directory project is widely regarded by Google as the most essential link in the calculation of its rankings. The best possible submission sites to be added to are dedicated directories and organizations.
Alexa ranking can be improved by adhering to the mentioned implementations:
  1. Firstly, install the Alexa toolbar and display the widget.
  2. Some article can be written about Alexa itself, just to get the required number of links.
  3. Enriching content writing and promotions on social networking sites and webmaster forums also helps the cause.
  4. Get the linking of your articles done to stumbleupon.com, digg.com and del.icio.us.
  5. Site optimization using the keyword phrases strategy.
  6. An unethical practice is enabling running of many scripts which in turn uses numerous multiple proxy servers to create a jump in the visitor list.
Source

Monday, April 20, 2009

Is Obama a Good leader?

When President Obama was elected he seemed like a different kind of leader.

Not just the first black man in the White House but a new sort of American president: thoughtful, reflective and determined to represent all of his country.

Now, a year away from the next presidential election many people question what sort of leader he has turned out to be.

One unkind critic said that he seemed like a 50-year-old man who has just got his first proper job, that he has had no experience of running any organisation and it shows in his management of the White House.

Republicans are of course the harshest critics. Ed Rogers, a veteran of the George H W Bush and Reagan White House, told me: "I think Obama is not a very effective leader.

"I think he is a thinker and a ditherer to a fault. I think his leadership style does not lend itself to crisp decision making.

"I get the impression he anguishes before a decision, and even worse for a president, he anguishes after a decision. So, his team never has certainty.

"They never know if the other side is back in appealing to the president, they never know if they have gotten clear, certain decisions.

"And at the end of the day being president is about making decisions and sticking with them."

Of course in part Mr Obama's initial appeal was that he did consider the facts, carefully and dispassionately.

Dithering
He was seen as the diametric opposite of his predecessor, President George W Bush, in the popular imagination a cowboy president who shot from the hip, trusting his first gut instinct.

Mr Obama, on the other hand, likes to get down with the details.

When he was economic advisor to the vice-president, Jared Bernstein attended daily economic briefings with Mr Obama throughout the worst of the economic crisis. He still marvels at just how wonky the president can be.

"I remember one day Paul Volker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve [of New York], and we were showing the president data on differences in interest rates between credit instruments at a level of minutiae and I remember Volker coming out of the meeting saying, 'wow I can't believe the president was interested in that'."

But Mr Bernstein says that in the middle of a crisis - when the tiny daily changes in the markets could make a critical difference - that was no bad thing.


Start Quote

I think that if you ask people who love and support Obama what are his three or five priorities they couldn't tell you”

Ed Rogers
Chairman, BGR Group
He makes the point that Mr Obama was faced with an immense challenge and says he stopped the economy going off the edge of a cliff.

However, he accepts there is a perception of dithering:

"The guy has an amazing capacity to assimilate a lot of information. He really likes to solve a problem pragmatically - but from a perspective of being as well informed as he can be.

"He certainly doesn't reach snap decisions. He is a pretty deliberative guy, but you put the facts in front of him he will reach a conclusion pretty quickly.

"I think what looks like excessive deliberation has more to do with the politics. The president might come to a decision on economic policy pretty quickly, but then you've got to navigate this Congress and that is a fairly tough equation, getting through all those road blocks."

Sausage factory
But the president has to be a navigator, or at least know people who are.

Mr Obama does not seem to have a strategy for dealing with the sausage factory that is Congress. It has perhaps been his worst failure.

True, he not only got through economic packages which admirers would say saved the country, he also in the end got a healthcare package that has long been a dream of Democrats.

But it was so diminished that it offended his own side while enraging the right and helping the Tea Party to get off the ground.

The trail of sometimes grubby compromises that led to a deal made him look part of a Washington he said he had come to fix.

Perhaps even more importantly it led to an unclear proposal that left many Americans confused and worried that it would leave them worse off.

Mr Obama seems to lack the sort of special political skills you need to make sausages (Bismarck said you don't want to know how sausages or laws are made).

Bridge builder
He's obviously not a thug nor, more oddly, a charmer.

Undoubtedly he has buckets of charisma. It is just that he doesn't spend any time tipping it all over senators and representatives. Powerful men and women can be surprisingly easy to persuade if even more powerful people bathe them in love.

Strangely, Rahm Emanuel, a charming bully if there ever was one, doesn't seem to have done the trick when he was chief of staff.

Of course, since the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives in last year's elections things have become even more difficult.

Critics on the left like Jesse Jackson don't want a bridge-builder-in-chief.

"I think sometimes he wants to heal the wound by taking the glass out," he says. "He wants to avoid the confrontation.

"Former President Lyndon Johnson knew that you had to defeat southern institutional racism and gender bias - and you had to defeat them politically and then reconcile.

"Barack Obama wants to reconcile without engaging in the battles."

But this is essential to the president's image. He portrayed himself not just as a bridge builder, but the bridge. (It is also the title of the most serious study of him to date).

'Disconnect problem'
What made Mr Obama a unique political phenomenon was that he, quite literally, wrote his own story.

When most politicians pop up in the public eye national journalists often rely on early profiles in local newspapers and of course their own investigations to paint a picture of the new kid on the block.

Mr Obama wrote his own story in Dreams From My Father before he was even on the public stage.

Yet this master storyteller appears to have lost control of the narrative in office.

Some may think this is post-modern claptrap or simply a silly way to look at politics.

But part of being a leader, and especially an American president, is telling people in very clear terms what is going on, why it's going on and what should happen next.

Mr Obama himself has said the best solutions to the economic crisis may not be the best story.

The plot twists of real life get in the way of a simple tale. The president - and just about everyone else - thought the economy would be showing stronger signs of recovery by now.

But the author of a critical book about the president's handing of the economic crisis, Ron Suskind, says the disconnect is the problem.

"Even if the words of a leader are not along the lines of what people want if they match his deeds people say 'Well, I may not agree with him, he's a straight shooter' and that gets you confidence points.

"Mr Obama has had trouble because of his brilliance at soaring rhetoric - inspirational rhetoric.

"And often the caution that has abided his deeds, a kind of split-the-middle-let's-find-some-middle-ground, even if there is not much coherence to it, a half of this and a little of that, often does not make sound, dramatic policy."

Republican strategist Ed Rogers says Mr Obama has lost something that set him apart: his clarity.

"I think that if you ask people who love and support Obama what are his three or five priorities they couldn't tell you. That means his message has lost its way.

"When you are president, people always need to know what you would do if you were a dictator. What you would do. Not what's possible or the realities of Congress or the limits on your authority.

"What would you do if you were dictator? People don't know that about Obama. And that's a problem. A weakness. And stylistically it is going to be hard for him to get that back."

Best on offer?
But Ron Suskind points out the story is not yet over.

"I think he is a leader with extraordinary capacities. He is brilliant. The question that emerges is, 'is his brilliance the kind that makes for great presidents?' The kind that creates a distillate of decisiveness?

"That remains to be seen. He only has a few months to do something dramatic in terms of words and deed before he slips into the swirl of an election. This is his moment."

Second-term presidents, freed to a certain extent from the cruder political considerations about their own future, can surprise.

We may see that happen. But we may not. Mr Obama first has to convince people that he is a leader, even if one with faults.

An election is a choice, not the final judgment of history. He has to persuade people not that he is the best leader ever but the best on offer.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Islamic Education in China

Islamic Education is the religious education of Chinese Muslims. Its main contents include religious belief, value out1ook, ethics and moral principles, and Islamic culture and knowledge. Education is an important way to raise Muslims’ concepts and personalities to a higher level. According to the historical records, a special form of education originated in the middle of the 16th century. Over a long period of development, there appeared two forms of teaching: one form is called Mosque Education, initiated by the pioneer Mr.Hu Dengzhou(1522-1579);the other fom1is called Islamic School Education, which appeared in modem times. The former has a long history, and is a kind of specific religious education, which is taught by imams in mosques-By this means, Islamic knowledge is spread and religious personnel are trained. In order to improve their living standards and the fine traditions of Islam, the pioneer Chinese Muslims always put study and education in the first position. They used the Arabic, Persian and Chinese languages to teach, translate and expound the Islamic scriptures. By doing so, they created the conditions for Islam and Islamic culture to spread in China. Where there is a Muslim community, there is a mosque, so it is very convenient for a Muslim to get Mosque Education. Chinese Mosque Education is the result of Islamic culture adapting to the Chinese traditional cultural environment, and the combination of the traditional education in Arabic countries of the Middle Ages and old-style Chinese private school education. This teaching system suits Chinese social conditions and the Chinese Muslim situation in China. In addition, Mosque Education is open to all Muslim students. A Mosque provides free accommodation and tuition for any student who comes to study. Imams also teach for free-Islamic schools set up in Mosques are the best choice for Chinese Muslims.

Chinese Mosque Education is Islamic education with Chinese characteristics. From the Ming Dynasty to the present, Mosque Education has produced several educational sects and teaching styles. In the early period, there was the Shanxi Sect, which was represented by Feng Yangwu and Zhang Shao Shan, which focussed on "Ilm al-kalam"and "Ilm al-Trafsir". There was the Shandong Sect, which was represented by Chang Zhimei, Li Yanling and She Qiling, focussing on the 13 scriptures in Arabic and Persian, and on the study of Suffism. There was theYunan Sect, which reformed mosque education and taught the scriptures in both Arabic and Chinese. There was the Hezhou Sect, which originated in Linxia Hezhou in the Northwest of China, and which concentrated on teaching "kitab Mishkat al-Masabih"and "Ihya ulum al-Masabih". Religious education in the Xhujiang area is in the form of small and scattered old-style private schools. Every big mosque in Xinjiang has an independent Madrassa (Islamic School), at which the teaching mode, contents and management pattern have the characteristics of central Asian Muslim education. Chinese Mosque Education has been constantly improving. When this education mode was first established, there were not enough scripture books, and few students. So at the beginning, Imams taught students in their own homes. Later, the mosque became the teaching place. In modern Chinese Islamic history, Mosque Education has made great1mprovemenu. It has a fixed teaching place, as the classroom is in the mosque. Usually, the north and south teaching halls in the mosque are specially used for teaching. Teaching both Islamic and ordinary culture, and a step-by-step teaching pattern were the new contents added to the old-style Mosque Education in the past two or three hundred years. Mosque Education is divided into two sections: One is the primary school section, in which Muslim children get basic Islamic education. Imams teach children Arabic so that they can read the Qu'ran in Arabic pronunciation. The students in the primary school section also get Tauhid education, recite selected readings from the Qu'ran, read popular religious books and learn various salat (prayers) in a period of 3-4 years; the other section is the Islamic University section, also taught by imams. The students receive systematic religious education and Islamic ethical education. They study for 6-7 years. The courses are of two kinds-basic courses and professional courses. The basic courses are Arabic, Persian, rhetoric and logic; the professional courses include "Ilm a1-Tafsir", Hadith, "Ilm al-kalam", Shariah and Suffi philosophy. There are 13 kinds of textbooks. After Enisi1ing all these courses, the students graduate with the approval of the imams who taught them. The graduate students go to mosques in various places to be imams, by invitation. There is another form of Islamic education in China, called School Education, which emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by the new cultural concepts springing from the May 4th Movement of 1919, some Muslim intellectuals and social activists tried to find a way by which cultural education could promote the development of the nation. To establish a system of modem Islamic education, they set up Islamic schools successively in Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan, Jinan, Yunnan Ningxia and other places in China. Of these schools, the Beiping Dacheng Normal School, Shanghai Islamic Normal School, Sichuan Wanxian Islamic Normal School and Ningxia Wuhong Chinese and Arabic Normal School made great contributions by fostering qualified personnel who not only possessed scientific and Islamic knowledge, but were proficient in Arabic. What was more important was that these educators with modem concepts also sent Chinese Muslim students abroad from the 1930s. This pioneering work added new contents to modern Chinese Islamic education. The overseas students played important ro1es in the fields of Islamic education and academic research after they came back to the motherland.