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I present a "moral argument" for the non-existence of God. Theism, I argue, can't accommodate an ordinary and fundamental moral obligation acknowledged by many people, including many theists. My argument turns on a principle that a number of philosophers already accept as a constraint on God's treatment of human beings. I defend the principle against objections from those inclined to reject it.

Over the last few years, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy has rapidly developed into an important and extremely useful method of analysis. In fact, for certain research areas and applications, ranging from material science via chemistry to life sciences, it has become an indispensable tool because this fast and cost-effective type of spectroscopy provides qualitative and quantitative information not available from any other technique. This book offers a balanced overview of the fundamental theory and instrumentation of NIR spectroscopy, introducing the material in a readily comprehensible mann.

This article shows that for a single-vote electoral system for a representative body to treat all voters and all parties equally, it must produce results essentially identical to list proportional representation (PR). Democratic theory has often been agnostic concerning representative institutions. Different institutions have been compared in terms of behavioral outcomes rather than axiomatic properties. Building on van der Hout (Annual meeting of the Public Choice Society, San Diego, 2002) result, we show that for an electoral system to completely respect the principle of liberal political equality and popular sovereignty, its results must be equivalent to those of list PR.

Near miss research shifts the conceptual focus away from the negative outcome of events to the study of everyday close calls and represents an alternative pathway into knowledge production. The discipline of sociology is well suited for the study of near misses given its focus on social context, social meanings, and analyzing social interactions and patterns of group behaviour. This article discusses the challenges that researchers will face when conducting near miss research as well as different near miss data collection strategies. A comparison of two unique near miss data sets, on the same population, is also provided in order to illustrate that different methodologies capture different types of near miss information. Near misses represent an untapped area of research not yet fully explored by sociologists and social scientists.

Abstract. The present study proposes an alternative method to construct an index of globalization which is based on the principle of almost equi-marginal contributions (AEMC) or Shapley values of the constituent variables to the overall index rather than the correlation coefficients among the constituent variables and the overall index (the KOF index based on the principal component scores). This has been done by minimization of the Euclidean norm of the Shapley values of the constituent variables. As an exercise, secondary time series data (1970-2013) on the measures of globalization in three different dimensions (economic, social and political) of three economies (China, India and Pakistan) have been used. A comparison of the AEMC index with the KOF index reveals that while the former is more inclusive, the latter is more elitist in matters of inclusion of the weakly correlated constituent variables in the overall (composite) index. As a consequence, the AEMC index is more sensitive than the KOF index of globalization. Both indices capture the trends in globalization in the countries under study and are highly correlated between themselves. Thus, AEMC is an alternative or perhaps a better method to construct composite indices. Keywords. Globalization, KOF index, Equi-marginal, Shapley value, Global optimization, China, India, Pakistan.JEL. C43, C61, C71, F60, P52.