My first meeting with Kenneth I nada was in 1964, when I passed through Hawai‘i, on my way back from India, at the invitation of Charlie Moore, Editor of Philosophy East and West and Director of that summer’s East-West Philosophers’ Conference. Acting for Moore, who was ill at the time of my arrival, Ken, a member of the UH Philosophy faculty, was kind enough to take me on a tour of the UH-Manoa campus; he did so with considerable good (...) will. I subsequently joined the department in 1967 and appreciated very much having Ken as a colleague. Although he left the University of Hawai‘i after ten years to join the faculty at the State University of New York in Buffalo in 1969, we had subsequent occasion to meet at . (shrink)

Although there is substantial literature examining the flow of foreign investments into various regions of the world, there is still a lack of research about joint ventures and foreign investment activities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). One objective of this paper is to remedy this neglect and extend previous empirical work by focusing on foreign investments in the MENA region. The second objective is to focus on non-traditional determinants that have tended to be overlooked or underestimated in (...) previous research. The increasing globalization has led to a reconfiguration of the ways in which multinationals pursue various types of foreign investments,and changed the motives for and the determinants of FDI. This has prompted some to suggest that non traditional determinants have become more important. In view of that, the paper will focus on factors such as governance, legal environment, and economic freedom and examine their impact on foreign investment activities in the MENA region. (shrink)

The web is being loaded daily with a huge volume of data, mainly unstructured textual data, which increases the need for information extraction and NLP systems significantly. Named-entity recognition task is a key step towards efficiently understanding text data and saving time and effort. Being a widely used language globally, English is taking over most of the research conducted in this field, especially in the biomedical domain. Unlike other languages, Arabic suffers from lack of resources. This work presents a BERT-based (...) model to identify biomedical named entities in the Arabic text data that investigates the effectiveness of pretraining a monolingual BERT model with a small-scale biomedical dataset on enhancing the model understanding of Arabic biomedical text. The model performance was compared with two state-of-the-art models, and it outperformed both models with 85% F1-score. (shrink)

On the fundamentals of Hindu philosophy and doctrines.

There are currently two legally established criteria for death: the irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration and the irreversible cessation of neurologic function. Recently, there have been technological developments that could undermine the irreversibility requirement. In this paper, I focus both on whether death should be identified as an irreversible state and on the proper scope of irreversibility in the biological definition of death. In this paper, I tackle the distinction between the commonsense definition of death and the biological definition (...) of death to show that even the commonsense concept of death is specified by biological facts. Resting on this argument, I argue that any definition of death is a posteriori. Thus, irreversibility is part of any definition of death because the actual phenomenon of death is irreversible. In addition, I show that the proper domain of irreversibility in a definition of death is circumscribed by physical possibilities and that irreversibility in the definition of death refers to current possibilities for the reversal of relevant biological processes. I conclude that, despite recent technological advancements, death is still irreversible. (shrink)

Health care providers are expected both to relieve pain and to provide anticipatory guidance regarding how much a procedure is going to hurt. Fulfilling those expectations is complicated by the cognitive modulation of pain perception. Warning people to expect pain or setting expectations for pain relief not only influences their subjective experience, but it also alters how nociceptive stimuli are processed throughout the sensory and discriminative pathways in the brain. In light of this, I reconsider the characterization of placebo analgesia (...) as pharmacologically inert and the use of it as deceptive. I show that placebo analgesia exploits the same physical mechanisms as proven analgesics and argue that it should be utilized to relieve pain. Additionally, I describe factors to help identify situations in which clinicians have the obligation to disclose the potential for pain coupled with ways of mitigating the risk of high-intensity pain by setting positive expectations. (shrink)

To cause pain, it is not enough to deliver a dose of noxious stimulation. Pain requires the interaction of sensory processing, emotion, and cognition. In this paper, I focus on the role of cognition in the felt intensity of pain. I provide evidence for the cognitive modulation of pain. In particular, I show that attention and expectation can influence the experience of pain intensity. I also consider the mechanisms that underlie the cognitive effects on pain. I show that all the (...) proposed mechanisms of pain modulation affirm the view that cognition impacts the sensory and discriminative aspects of pain. I conclude that pain perception is a cognitively penetrated phenomenon. (shrink)

Recenze seznamuje s knihou Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction, jejímž autorem je Timothy John Bayne. Recenze je zaměřena na obsah jednotlivých kapitol a celkové zhodnocení knihy. Cílem je seznámit čtenáře s klíčovými tématy, jimž se Bayne v knize věnuje, a s jeho argumentací. Klíčová slova: filosofie mysli, Timothy John Bayne, Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction.

Neuroethics is an emerging interdisciplinary field with unsettled boundaries. Many of the ethical issues within the purview of neuroethics could be described as resulting from the clash between the scientific perspective on concepts such as free will, personal identity, consciousness, etc., and the putatively commonsense conceptions of those terms. The assumption that undergirds the framing of the conflict between these two approaches is that advances in neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology can be used to explain phenomena covered by commonsense concepts and (...) in some cases undermine them entirely. This book is focused on the examination of the particular relationship between developments in neuroscience and commonsense moral concepts. Common sense, I argue, has been misinterpreted as a static, either foundational or degenerative, basis of our morality, when it is an ever shifting repository of theories from many domains. Within this discussion, I focus on the application of neuroscience to human beings, i.e., the ethics of neuroscience. But I also cover issues within the purview of the neuroscience of ethics, and attempt to address the infiltration of neuroscientific knowledge into everyday parlance and the impact of that on our commonsense morality and psychology. (shrink)

Pogost motiv v rimski paliati so medgeneracijski konflikti. Medtem ko očetje največkrat poudarjajo konvencionalno moralo in kažejo varčnost, že kar skoporitost, se sinovi v njihovi odsotnosti radi predajajo razvratu: zapravljajo denar, popivajo in se spuščajo v razmerja s heterami, ponavadi ob pomoči kakega nabritega domačega sužnja. Ker vlada v komediji saturnalijski narobe svet, na koncu »zmagajo« sinovi in sužnji, ki so tudi glavni junaki teh komedij. Tu in tam pa Plavt sinovom položi na jezik besede, ki odstopajo od njihovega siceršnjega (...) ravnanja in jih prikažejo v odgovornejši luči. Njegova najrazvpitejša »moralistična« komedija je Trinovčevo (Trinummus), vendar zasledimo moralno navdahnjene vložke in značajske lastnosti tudi v drugi komediji s podobnim izhodiščem, ki deluje veliko bolj razposajeno: v Hišnem strahu (Mostellaria). Ob primerjavi mladih protagonistov v Plavtovih komedijah Hišni strah in Trinovčevo ugotovimo, da je komedija Trinovčevo občutno bolj moralistična od Hišnega strahu, vendar po drugi strani tudi v slednjem ni mogoče videti gole burke kot, denimo, v Oslih (Asinaria) istega avtorja. Če si v Oslih oba protagonista, oče in sin, ki se pehata za isto meretrix, pravzaprav zaslužita zgolj posmeh občinstva, imajo glavni junak Hišnega strahu, njegov prijatelj in ljubica več značajskih lastnosti, ki so jih morale prikupiti tudi kritikom Katonovega kova. (shrink)

Education (good teachers and good schools) is crucial for the successful integration of vulnerable groups in the society. Multicultural diversity presents an opportunity to make schools more inclusive, creative and open-minded. Although there are different projects and activities for Roma inclusion in schools, the number of Roma children attending formal education is still very low. Without having attended formal education, the chances for social exclusion are high and minimal for leading a self-defined life. To increase the rate of school registration (...) and the rate for completion, long-term policy interventions and financial support from international donations are needed. This paper aims to analyze the general situation of Roma children and youth the age of pre-school education, primary and secondary education, as well as the engagement of youth in volunteering activities as a significant role in the inclusion of Roma children in schools. Engagement in volunteering activities can help young people to be more integrated into society, as through volunteering they gain valuable experiences, new skills, and competencies that can improve their employability possibilities and enhance their attitudes towards citizenship. (shrink)

This study treats firm productivity as an accumulation of productive intangibles and posits that stakeholder engagement associated with better corporate social performance helps develop such intangibles. We hypothesize that because shareholders factor improved productive efficiency into stock price, productivity mediates the relationship between corporate social and financial performance. Furthermore, we argue that key stakeholders’ social considerations are more valuable for firms with higher levels of discretionary cash and income stream uncertainty. Therefore, we hypothesize that those two contingencies moderate the mediated (...) process of corporate social performance with financial performance. Our analysis, based on a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of the U.S. manufacturing firms from 1992 to 2009, lends strong support for these hypotheses. In short, this paper uncovers a productivity-based, context-dependent mechanism underlying the relationship between corporate social performance and financial performance. (shrink)

Oriental thought requires the introduction of a novel metaphysical concept of nonbeing, along with being, to exhibit the dynamics of becoming. The initial contact of being and nonbeing is the basis of aesthetic nature and the fountainhead of Oriental aesthetics.

In 1959 two French neurologists, Pierre Mollaret and Maurice Goullon, coined the term coma dépassé to designate a state beyond coma. In this state, patients are not only permanently unconscious; they lack the endogenous drive to breathe, as well as brainstem reflexes, indicating that most of their brain has ceased to function. Although legally recognized in many countries as a criterion for death, brain death has not been universally accepted by bioethicists, by the medical community, or by the public. I (...) this paper, I defend brain death as a biological concept. I challenge two assumptions in the brain death literature that have shaped the debate and have stood in the way of an argument for brain death as biological. First, I challenge the dualism established in the debate between the body and the brain. Second, I contest the emphasis on consciousness, which prevents the inclusion of psychological phenomena into a biological criterion of death. I propose that the term organism should apply both to the functioning of the body and the brain. I argue that the cessation of the organism as a whole should take into account three elements of integrated function. Those three elements are: 1) the loss of integrated bodily function; 2) the loss of psychophysical integration required for processing of external stimuli and those required for behavior; and, 3) the loss of integrated psychological function, such as memory, learning, attention, and so forth. The loss of those three elements of integrated function is death. (shrink)

The Myners Review of the pension fund industry has started a debate on pension fund governance and the fund industry itself. This paper provides a review of pension fund trusteeship in the UK, its role, operating models and impact. It argues that deficiencies in the systems uncovered by the Myners Review stem from a tension between conflicting philosophies - that of trusteeship built on stakeholder principles but operating in shareholder markets.

Neoliberal restructuring and the feminization of export-led industries are often associated with the disempowerment of women in the workplace. Surprisingly, this disempowerment was not the case with a public textile company in Mahalla, an industrial city north of Cairo. Between 2006 and 2008, workers organized wildcat strikes involving around 24,000 workers. In contrast to the strike waves of the 1980s, women were integral to organizing the strikes and assumed leadership roles in them. This article argues that even as Egypt adopted (...) structural adjustments in the 1990s that led to the decline of the historically leading sectors of textiles and yarn, exports of clothing increased. By the 2000s, the clothing sector was completely feminized and women in Mahalla were positioned in the most productive departments. This change empowered women by elevating their role and induced skeptical male colleagues to support women’s activism in the company and to build cross-gender solidarity. (shrink)

The buddhist approach to the concepts of time and temporality is necessarily based on the correct understanding of the ordinary but dynamically oriented experiential process. in such a process, the concept of time takes on conventional, arbitrary and abstract natures, and subsequently gives way to the concept of temporality which is part and parcel of the experiential process and directly opens up other buddhist doctrines such as relational origination and voidness of being. temporality is non-conventional 'lived time'.

An illustrated study of the early twentieth-century transformation from Expressionism to Constructivism and beyond in the Central European arts. Central European Avant-Gardes presents the first interpretive overview of the complex webs of interaction among the artists and intellectuals of early twentieth-century Central Europe. The key stylistic transformation of the period was from Expressionism to Constructivism, as artists and writers, against a volatile background of war and revolution, saw the opportunity literally to construct a new world through their work. The borders (...) between the visual arts, photography, film, architecture, poetry, and typography were obliterated, as artists sought to transcend the forces of traditionalism to forge an elemental visual language that would overcome national and linguistic boundaries. Yet at the same time that these artists advocated pluralism and unity, their work engaged issues such as nationalism and tradition that still resonate in artistic circles today. The book, which accompanies a major exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and curated by Timothy Benson, assisted by Monika Krol, is arranged around events and situations rather than by linear, art historical categories. It features hundreds of color plates and reproductions of documents; discussions of movements from Artificialism to Zenitism; essays on figures, publications, and exhibitions; and shorter "city views" of Belgrade, Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest, Cracow, Dessau, Ljubljana, £ódz, Poznañ, Prague, Vienna, Warsaw, Weimar, and Zagreb. (shrink)