on 10-May-2017 (Wed)

De- spite the fame gained by naq¯a - id . poetry in the Umayyad era, many as- pects of it are still ambiguous. Unfortunately, many of the scholars who have dealt with such aspects have arrived at their conclusions through a rapid treatment of only some of the accounts mentioned in various classical works. A considerable number of these studies neglect other accounts that seem to reveal important data concerning many aspects of the naq¯a - id . poetry. In addition, in most cases they refrain from an- alyzing complete poems in order to support or disprove the conclusions they had extracted from the accounts. Such a method of analyzing and discussing the material at hand is insufficient. It is imperative to pe- ruse all the available accounts and to make a profound analysis of each one, since each account may shed new light on the naq¯a - id . poetry and the naq¯a - id . contests. In addition to the accounts, analyses of the po- ems themselves are very important, since they examine the reliability and credibility of the prose accounts.

This article will deal with the synchronic history and methods of composition, presentation and transmission of naqaid poetry according to Abu Ubayda’s book Kitab al-naqaid: Naqaid Jarır wa-l-Farazdaq. Despite the fame gained by naqaid poetry in the Umayyad era, many aspects of it are still ambiguous. Unfortunately, many of the scholars who have dealt with such aspects have arrived at their conclusions through a rapid treatment of only some of the accounts mentioned in various classical works. A considerable number of these studies neglect other accounts that seem to reveal important data concerning many aspects of the naqaid poetry. In addition, in most cases they refrain from analyzing complete poems in order to support or disprove the conclusions they had extracted from the accounts. Such a method of analyzing and discussing the material at hand is insufficient. It is imperative to peruse all the available accounts and to make a profound analysis of each one, since each account may shed new light on the naqaid poetry and the naqaid contests. In addition to the accounts, analyses of the poems themselves are very important, since they examine the reliability and credibility of the prose accounts.

The present paper discusses aspects of the naq¯a - id . poetry in its age of floresence and in its period of eclipse.

Since their water had run out, al-Farazdaq drinks al- , Anbar¯ı’s urine and finds it as tasty and delicious as honey [NJF 33:47–57]. Some classical scholars mention this story, except for the urine drinking, and tend to believe that it really took place. 2

There is a clear indication that the number of verses in this poem was expanded in a certain period and presented in al-Mirbad.

Many poets used to visit the market place, with each poet having a circle (h . alaqa) in which he recited his poetry while surrounded by his audience. A certain account in Kit¯ab al-agh¯an¯ı shows that each h . alaqa had places where the audience used to sit. 4 Two or more poets sometimes had one common circle.

Formally, this can be cast as a combinatorial domain where the set of binary issues is X ={X 1 ,...,X p }, with D i ={0 i , 1 i } for each i. These binary issues correspond to a set of items C ={c 1 ,...,c p }, where X i = 1 i (resp. 0 i ) means that item c i is (resp. is not) in the selection S. Because of the focus on the selection of a subset of items, we change the notational convention by denoting an alternative x ∈ A = {0 1 , 1 1 }×...×{0 p , 1 p } as a subset of issues S composed of items c i s with X i = 1 i . Thus, alternatives are elements of 2 C .

As argued by Betzler et al. (2013), finding a committee of representatives should satisfy two criteria: representativity (the composition of the committee should globally reflect the will of the voters), and accountability (each voter should be represented by a

given member of the committee).

In consensus recommendations, the rationale for the last step is that each user will benefit from the best option according to her own preferences (Lu and Boutilier, 2011a); in this case, the “representative” of a voter is her most preferred item in S. 6,7 The latter interpretation leads to an obvious choice for defining representative items for voters: if the set of items S is chosen, then the representative item of voter i is c ∈ S if c i c for all c ∈ C \{c}. Alternatively, we say that each agent is represented by an item in S. In committee elections, this principle is the basis of the Chamberlin and Courant multiwinner election scheme (discussed later)

preferences are assumed to be separable; reformulated in terms of preference extensions, each input defines a score over single candidates, and the total score of a candidate is the sum of the scores it gets from the voters.

Scholars have conventionally interpreted the Iwan Kisra Ode as an anti-imperial ode critical of the Abbasids in a time of decline evinced by the murder of the Caliph al-Mutawakkil and the emerging power of the Turkic guards at Samarra. This arti- cle re-examines al-Buhturi's own motives to demonstrate that an anti-imperial ode would be anathema to his interests and posits an alternative interpretation. The analysis is based on extensive Abbasid lore and a close reading of the ode. It sug- gests that the ode had the effect of redeeming the Abbasids in order to avoid civil strife in a time of dange

Because the set of feasible subsets is generally exponentially large, finding the opti- mal subset is highly nontrivial. Brams and Potthoff (1998) were the first to discuss the computation of the Chamberlin-Courant and the Monroe voting schemes, showing that the optimal committee can be determined using integer programming. This provides a method that works in practice when the number of voters and items are small, but may not scale up well. They formulate an improved integer program for settings where the number of agents is large, but this modified integer program is still too large to be solved when the number of items is large

it is an open issue whether for all k there exists a profile for which the smallest Condorcet winning set has size k

On Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump dismissed James Comey from his position as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Officially, Comey was fired for mishandlingformer presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's alleged misuse of private email servers, but Senate Democrats and the ACLU have raised concerns over whether the real reason may have been that Comey was leading the investigation into the Trump campaign's alleged ties to Russia and possible tampering with the election that placed Trump in high office.