Are there any cultural universals left? Does multiculturalism inevitably involve a slide into moral relativism? This timely and insightful book examines questions of politics and identity in the age of multicultures. It draws together the contribution of outstanding contributors such as Fraser, Honneth, O'Neill, Bauman, Lister, Gilroy and De Swann to explore how difference and multiculturalism take on the arguments of universalist humanism. The approach taken derives from the traditions of cultural sociology and cultural studies rather than political science and philosophy. The book takes seriously the argument that the social bond and recognition are in danger through globalization and deterritorialization. It is a major contribution to the emerging debate on the form of post-national forms of civil society.

Human rights and their principles of interpretation are the leading legal paradigms of our time. Freedom of religion occupies a pivotal position in rights discourses, and the principles supporting its interpretation receive increasing attention from courts and legislative bodies. This book critically evaluates religious pluralism as an emerging legal principle arising from attempts to define the boundaries of freedom of religion. It examines religious pluralism as an underlying aspect of different human rights regimes and constitutional traditions. It is, however, the static and liberal shape religious pluralism has assumed that is taken up critically here. In order to address how difference is vulnerable to elimination, rather than recognition, the book takes up a contemporary ethics of alterity. More generally, and through its reconstruction of a more difference-friendly vision of religious pluralism, it tackles the problem of the role of rights in the era of diverse narratives of emancipation.

The book offers a comprehensive survey of soft-computing models for optical character recognition systems. The various techniques, including fuzzy and rough sets, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, are tested using real texts written in different languages, such as English, French, German, Latin, Hindi and Gujrati, which have been extracted by publicly available datasets. The simulation studies, which are reported in details here, show that soft-computing based modeling of OCR systems performs consistently better than traditional models. Mainly intended as state-of-the-art survey for postgraduates and researchers in pattern recognition, optical character recognition and soft computing, this book will be useful for professionals in computer vision and image processing alike, dealing with different issues related to optical character recognition.

The past two decades have seen an outpouring of work in legal theory that is self-consciously critical of aspects of American law and the institutions of the liberal state. In this lively volume, eminent scholars in philosophy, law, and political science respond to this recent scholarship by exploring what constitutes a "radical" critique of the law, examining such theories as critical legal studies, feminist theory and theories of "difference," and critical race theory. The authors consider whether the critiques advanced in recent legal theory can truly be called radical and what form a radical critique of American law should take. Writing at the cutting edge of the critique of critical legal theory, they offer insights first on critical legal scholarship, then on feminist political and legal theory. A third group of contributions questions the radicalness of these approaches in light of their failure to challenge fundamental aspects of liberalism, while a final section focuses on current issues of legal reform through critical views on criminal punishment, including observations on rape and hate speech. Each major essay describes the underlying principles in the development of a radical legal theory and addresses unresolved questions relating to it, while accompanying commentaries present conflicting views. The resulting dialogue explores wide-ranging issues like equity, value relativism, adversarial and empathic legal advocacy, communitarianism and the social contract, impartiality and contingency, "natural" law, and corrective justice. A common thread for many of the articles is a focus on the social dimension of society and law, which finds the individualism of prevailing liberal theories too limiting. Radical Critiques of the Law is particularly unique in presenting critical and feminist approaches in one volume-along with skeptical commentary about just how radical some critiques really are. Proposing alternative critiques that embody considerably greater promise of being truly radical, it offers provocative reading for both philosophers and legal scholars by showing that many claims to radicalism are highly problematic at best.

Globalisation has caused an increase in the amount of cultural mingling. For some people diversity is seen as richness but for others there have been problems of identity and hence conflict. This world survey looks at the current debates, cultural policies, national identity and methods of measuring culture. It is backed up by statistical tables and cultural indicators and includes a CD-ROM of cultural resources on the Web.