This paper aims at helping trainees to overcome the difficulties they face when dealing with Arduino platform by describing the design of a desktop based intelligent tutoring system. The main idea of this system is a systematic introduction into the concept of Arduino platform. The system shows the circuit boards of Arduino that can be purchased at low cost or assembled from freely-available plans; and an open-source development environment and library for writing code to control the board topic (...) of Arduino platform. The system is adaptive with the trainee’s individual progress. The system functions as a special tutor who deals with trainees according to their levels and skills. Evaluation of the system has been applied on professional and unprofessional trainees in this field and the results were good. (shrink)

ASP.net is one of the most widely used languages in web developing of its many advantages, so there are many lessons that explain its basics, so it should be an intelligent tutoring system that offers lessons and exercises for this language.why tutoring system? Simply because it is one-one teacher, adapts with all the individual differences of students, begins gradually with students from easier to harder level, save time for teacher and student, the student is not ashamed to make mistakes, (...) and more. Therefore, in this paper, we describe the design of an Intelligent Tutoring System for teaching ASP.net to help students learn ASP.net easily and smoothly. Tutor provides beginner level in ASP.net. Finally, we evaluated our tutor and the results were excellent by students and teacher. (shrink)

ICT for development projects often focus on integrating social factors in information systems design. A well-designed ICT4D solution must be tailored to the needs of the people who will use them and subsequently, requires an extensive understanding of the context and constraints in people’s lives. With an objective to explore how context-specific issues influence the conveyance of appropriate agricultural information to women, this paper uses PROTIC, a 5-year collaborative project between Monash University and Oxfam, as a case. PROTIC was (...) implemented in three climate vulnerable ecological zones of Bangladesh with an aim to overcome the agricultural information gap for rural women. Based on a study in mixed research method and triangulation, this paper brings evidence on the significance of considering context-specific attributes in designing effective and sustainable information services for marginalized women farmers in developing countries. The paper upfolds some significant recommendations which is expected to contribute to the domain of context-specific information system design in resolving socio-economic problems to pave the way of sustainable development. (shrink)

Purpose Along with the various beneficial uses of artificial intelligence, there are various unsavory concomitants including the inscrutability of AI tools, the fragility of AI models under adversarial settings, the vulnerability of AI models to bias throughout their pipeline, the high planetary cost of running large AI models and the emergence of exploitative surveillance capitalism-based economic logic built on AI technology. This study aims to document these harms of AI technology and study how these technologies and their developers and users (...) can be made more accountable. Design/methodology/approach Due to the nature of the problem, a holistic, multi-pronged approach is required to understand and counter these potential harms. This paper identifies the rationale for urgently focusing on human-centered AI and provide an outlook of promising directions including technical proposals. Findings AI has the potential to benefit the entire society, but there remains an increased risk for vulnerable segments of society. This paper provides a general survey of the various approaches proposed in the literature to make AI technology more accountable. This paper reports that the development of ethical accountable AI design requires the confluence and collaboration of many fields and that lack of diversity is a problem plaguing the state of the art in AI. Originality/value This paper provides a timely synthesis of the various technosocial proposals in the literature spanning technical areas such as interpretable and explainable AI; algorithmic auditability; as well as policy-making challenges and efforts that can operationalize ethical AI and help in making AI accountable. This paper also identifies and shares promising future directions of research. (shrink)

This paper analyses mass media exposure and its effect on family planning in Bangladesh using data from the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 1993s place of residence, education, economic status, geographical region and number of living children appeared to be the most important variable determining mass media exposure to family planning. Multivariate analysis shows that both radio and TV exposure to family planning messages and ownership of a radio and TV have a significant effect on current use of family (...) planning methods. These factors remain significant determinants of contraceptive use, even after controlling socioeconomic and demographic factors. The study reveals that both socioeconomic development policies and family planning programmes with a special emphasis on mass media, especially radio, may have a significant effect on contraceptive use in Bangladesh. The principal policy challenge is to design communications strategies that will reach the less privileged, rural and illiterate people who are by far the majority in Bangladesh. (shrink)

Decision-makers in governments, enterprises, businesses and agencies or individuals, typically, make decisions according to various regulations, guidelines and policies based on existing records stored in various databases, in particular, relational databases. To assist decision-makers, an expert system, encompasses interactive computer-based systems or subsystems to support the decision-making process. Typically, most expert systems are built on top of transaction systems, databases, and data models and restricted in decision-making to the analysis, processing and presenting data and information, and they do not provide (...) support for the normative layer. This paper will provide a solution to one specific problem that arises from this situation, namely the lack of tool/mechanism to demonstrate how an expert system is well-suited for supporting decision-making activities drawn from existing records and relevant legal requirements aligned existing records stored in various databases.We present a Rule-based reporting systems architecture, which is intended to integrate databases, in particular, relational databases, with a logic-based reasoner and rule engine to assist in decision-making or create reports according to legal norms. We argue that the resulting RuleRS provides an efficient and flexible solution to the problem at hand using defeasible inference. To this end, we have also conducted empirical evaluations of RuleRS performance. (shrink)

The general mission of feminist philosophy is to correct whatever male biases may exist in the mainstream philosophical traditions. Thus western feminist philosophers investigate and challenge the ways in which western traditions have so long been participating in subordinating women or in rationalizing their subordination. By questioning the gender insensitivity of ethics and philosophy, feminism attempts to reveal various forms of subjugation of women operating through laws, institutions, customs, social theories, and cultural values. Feminism aims at coming up with a (...) better design for society, based on a thorough review and rethinking of gendered positioning of human beings. (shrink)

Over the past several years, the intelligent design/evolutionism debate and a collective national reckoning with Islam as both a religious confession and a political force have both become significant issues in public discourse in the United States. In my paper, I argue that philosophy can begin to determine a connection between extremist, Islamophobic rhetoric and extremist, pro-ID rhetoric. The connection is that both these forms of extreme rhetoric, while they deal with different issues, tend to corrupt reason (...) and show the darker side of human nature – surely if we suppose that the extreme rhetoric expresses falsehoods, and even if we suppose that the extreme rhetoric expresses truth. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 2, Page 389-392, June 2022.

Concerns that cash payments to people who inject drugs (PWID) to reimburse research participation will facilitate illicit drug purchases have led some ethical authorities to mandate department store/supermarket vouchers as research reimbursement. To examine the relative efficacy of the two forms of reimbursement in engaging PWID in research, clients of two public opioid substitution therapy clinics were invited to participate in a 20–30 min, anonymous and confidential interview about alcohol consumption on two separate occasions, 4 months apart. Under the crossover (...) design, at Time 1, clients of Clinic 1 were offered $A20 cash as reimbursement, while clients of Clinic 2 were offered an $A20 voucher; at Time 2, the form of reimbursement was reversed. Using clinic records to determine the denominator (number of clients dosed), we found that compared with clients offered a voucher, a significantly higher proportion of clients who were offered cash participated in the survey (58% (139/241) vs 74% (186/252); χ2=14.27; p=0.0002). At first participation, respondents most commonly reported planning to purchase food/drinks/groceries (68%), cigarettes (21%) and transport/fuel (11%) with their payments, with those reimbursed in cash more likely to report planning to fund transport/fuel (19% vs 1%; p<.01) and less likely to report planning to purchase food/drinks/groceries (62% vs 76%; p=0.02). Just three out of 155 cash participants reported planning to purchase illicit drugs with their payment. Results demonstrate that modest cash payments enhanced recruitment of this group, an important consideration given the challenges of delineating the parameters of a population defined by illegal activity, seemingly without promoting excessive additional drug use. (shrink)

This paper explores artificial intelligence (AI) ethics from an Islamic perspective at a critical time for AI ethical norm-setting. It advocates for a pluralist approach to ethical AI benchmarking. As rapid advancements in AI technologies pose challenges surrounding autonomy, privacy, fairness, and transparency, the prevailing ethical discourse has been predominantly Western or Eurocentric. To address this imbalance, this paper delves into the Islamic ethical traditions to develop a framework that contributes to the global debate on optimal norm setting for designing (...) and using AI technologies.The paper outlines Islamic parameters for ethical values and moral actions in the context of AI's ethical uncertainties. It emphasizes the significance of both textual and non-textual Islamic sources in addressing these uncertainties while placing a strong emphasis on the notion of "good" or "maṣlaḥa" as a normative guide for AI's ethical evaluation. Defining maṣlaḥa as an ethical state of affairs in harmony with divine will, the paper highlights the coexistence of two interpretations of maṣlaḥa: welfarist/utility-based and duty-based. Islamic jurisprudence allows for arguments supporting ethical choices that prioritize building the technical infrastructure for AI to maximize utility. Conversely, it also supports choices that reject consequential utility calculations as the sole measure of value in determining ethical responses to AI advancements. (shrink)

If intelligent design (id) is to compete with evolutionary theory (et), it must meet the modified falsifiability challenge, that is, make some deductive or probabilistic observational assertions. It must also meet the modified translatability challenge, which it fails if et makes all the observational assertions of id, while id does not make all the observational assertions of et. I discuss four prominent but diverse formulations of id and show that each either fails one of the two challenges or (...) is analytically false. (shrink)

Key Words creation science, evolution education s Abstract Creationism, the rejection of evolution in favor of supernatural design, comes in many varieties besides the common young-earth Genesis version. Creationist attacks on science education have been evolving in the last few years through the alliance of different varieties. Instead of calls to teach “creation science,” one now finds lobbying for “intelligent design” (ID). Guided by the Discovery Institute’s “Wedge strategy,” the ID movement aims to overturn evolution and what (...) it sees as a pernicious materialist worldview and to renew a theistic foundation to Western culture, in which human beings are recognized as being created in the image of God. Common ID arguments involving scientific naturalism, “irreducible complexity,” “complex specified information,” and “icons of evolution,” have been thoroughly examined and refuted. Nevertheless, from Kansas to Ohio to the U.S. Congress, ID continues lobbying to teach the controversy, and scientists need to be ready to defend good evolution education. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Intelligent Design Darwin's Scientific Revolution Natural Selection Chance and Necessity: Mutation and Natural Selection “Only a Theory” Evolution Is a Fact Irreducibly Complex? The Disguised Friend References and Recommended Readings.

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battlegrounds over them. I begin by examining whether creationism and intelligent design are controversial issues, drawing on Robert Dearden’s epistemic criterion of the controversial and more recent responses to and defences (...) of this. I then examine whether the notion of ‘worldviews’ in the context of creationism is a useful one by considering the film March of the Penguins. I conclude that the ‘worldviews’ perspective on creationism is useful for two reasons: first, it indicates the difficulty of using the criterion of reason to decide whether an issue is controversial or not; secondly, it suggests that standard ways of addressing the diversity of student views in a science classroom may be inadequate. I close by examining the implications of this view for teaching in science lessons and elsewhere, for example in religious education lessons and at primary level where subject divisions cannot be made in so clear-cut a manner. (shrink)

i The 2005 decision by Judge John E. Jones in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was celebrated by all red-blooded American liberals as a victory over the forces of darkness. The result was probably inevitable, in view of the reckless expression by some members of the Dover School Board of their desire to put religion into the classroom, and the clumsiness of their prescribed statement in trying to dissimulate that aim.1 But the conflicts aired in this trial—over the status (...) of evolutionary theory, the arguments for intelligent design, and the nature of science—reveal an intellectually unhealthy situation. The political urge to defend science education against the threats of religious orthodoxy, understandable though it is, has resulted in a counterorthodoxy, supported by bad arguments, and a tendency to overstate the legitimate scientific claims of evolutionary theory. Skeptics about the theory are seen as so dangerous, and so disreputably motivated, that they must be denied any shred of.. (shrink)

Due to the logical relations between theism and intelligent design (id), there are two challenges to theism that also apply to id. In the falsifiability challenge, it is charged that theism is compatible with every observation statement and thus asserts nothing. I argue that the contentious assumptions of this challenge can be avoided without loss of precision by charging theism (and thus id) directly with the lack of observational assertions. In the translatability challenge, it is charged that theism (...) can be translated into a (non-theistic) set of observation statements without loss of cognitive content. I argue that the contentious assumptions of this challenge are avoided by the related charge that the (non-theistic) evolutionary theory makes all the observational assertions of id, while the converse does not hold. Elliott Sober has argued that id meets the falsifiability challenge, but, since it makes almost no observational assertions, is not testable. I point out two problems with Sober’s argument and show that id is both deductively and probabilistically testable. Sober’s argument, I suggest, inconsistently combines the modified falsifiability challenge with the modified translatability challenge. If his claims about id’s observational assertions are true, however, id succumbs to the modified translatability challenge. (shrink)

Nowadays, mobile telephony interruptions in our daily life activities are common because of the inappropriate ringing notifications of incoming phone calls in different contexts. Such interruptions may impact on the work attention not only for the mobile phone owners, but also for the surrounding people. Decision tree is the most popular machine-learning classification technique that is used in existing context-aware mobile intelligent interruption management model to overcome such issues. However, a single-decision tree-based context-aware model may cause over-fitting problem and (...) thus decrease the prediction accuracy of the inferred model. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an ensemble machine-learning-based context-aware mobile telephony model for the purpose of intelligent interruption management by taking into account multi-dimensional contexts and name it “E-MIIM”. The experimental results on individuals’ real-life mobile telephony data sets show that our E-MIIM model is more effective and outperforms existing MIIM model for predicting and managing individual’s mobile telephony interruptions based on their relevant contextual information. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel has recently discussed whether intelligent design theory is scientific and should be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution . Nagel writes: I do not regard divine intervention as a possibility, even though I have no other candidates. Yet I recognize that this is because of an aspect of my overall worldview that does not rest on empirical grounds or any other kind of rational grounds…. [S]omeone who can offer serious scientific reasons to doubt (...) the adequacy of [ET], and who believes in God, in the same immediate way that I believe there is no god, can quite reasonably conclude that the hypothesis of design should be taken seriously. , pp. 187–205, p. 192.). (shrink)

Thomas Nagel has recently discussed whether intelligent design theory is scientific and should be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution. Nagel writes: I do not regard divine intervention as a possibility, even though I have no other candidates. Yet I recognize that this is because of an aspect of my overall worldview that does not rest on empirical grounds or any other kind of rational grounds…. [S]omeone who can offer serious scientific reasons to doubt the (...) adequacy of [ET], and who believes in God, in the same immediate way that I believe there is no god, can quite reasonably conclude that the hypothesis of design should be taken seriously., pp. 187–205, p. 192.). (shrink)

Neuromarketing relies on Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology to gain insight into how customers react to marketing stimuli. Marketers spend about$750 billion annually on traditional marketing camping. They use traditional marketing research procedures such as Personal Depth Interviews, Surveys, Focused Group Discussions, and so on, which are frequently criticized for failing to extract true consumer preferences. On the other hand, Neuromarketing promises to overcome such constraints. This work proposes a machine learning framework for predicting consumers' purchase intention (PI) and affective (...) attitude (AA) from analyzing EEG signals. In this work, EEG signals are collected from 20 healthy participants while administering three advertising stimuli settings: product, endorsement, and promotion. After preprocessing, features are extracted in three domains (time, frequency, and time-frequency). Then, after selecting features using wrapper-based methods Recursive Feature Elimination, Support Vector Machine is used for categorizing positive and negative (AA and PI). The experimental results show that proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 84 and 87.00% for PI and AA ensuring the simulation of real-life results. In addition, AA and PI signals show N200 and N400 components when people tend to take decision after visualizing static advertisement. Moreover, negative AA signals shows more dispersion than positive AA signals. Furthermore, this work paves the way for implementing such a neuromarketing framework using consumer-grade EEG devices in a real-life setting. Therefore, it is evident that BCI-based neuromarketing technology can help brands and businesses effectively predict future consumer preferences. Hence, EEG-based neuromarketing technologies can assist brands and enterprizes in accurately forecasting future consumer preferences. (shrink)

Background: Post-mortem needle biopsies have been used in resource-poor settings to determine cause of death and there is interest in using them in Bangladesh. However, we did not know how families and communities would perceive this procedure or how they would decide whether or not to consent to a post-mortem needle biopsy. The goal of this study was to better understand family and community concerns and decision-making about post-mortem needle biopsies in this low-income, predominantly Muslim country in order to (...) class='Hi'>design an informed consent process. Methods: We conducted 16 group discussions with family members of persons who died during an outbreak of Nipah virus illness during 2004-2008 and 11 key informant interviews with their community and religious leaders. Qualitative researchers first described the post-mortem needle biopsy procedure and asked participants whether they would have agreed to this procedure during the outbreak. Researchers probed participants about the circumstances under which the procedure would be acceptable, if any, their concerns about the procedure, and how they would decide whether or not to consent to the procedure. Results: Overall, most participants agreed that post-mortem needle biopsies would be acceptable in some situations, particularly if they benefitted society. This procedure was deemed more acceptable than full autopsy because it would not require major delays in burial or remove organs, and did not require cutting or stitching of the body. It could be performed before the ritual bathing of the body in either the community or hospital setting. However, before consent would be granted for such a procedure, the research team must gain the trust of the family and community which could be difficult. Although consent may only be provided by the guardians of the body, decisions about consent for the procedure would involve extended family and community and religious leaders. Conclusions: The possible acceptability of this procedure during outbreaks represents an important opportunity to better characterize cause of death in Bangladesh which could lead to improved public health interventions to prevent these deaths. Obstacles for research teams will include engaging all major stakeholders in decision-making and quickly building a trusting relationship with the family and community, which will be difficult given the short window of time prior to the ritual bathing of the body. (shrink)

Review of Ahmed Malik, S. (2021). Islam and Evolution: Al-Ghazālī and the Modern Evolutionary Paradigm. London: Routledge.

Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of ISKCON, had a complex relationship with science and modernity, and many of his followers have consequently allied themselves with various kinds of critiques of the modern project. A favourite enemy has been Darwin’s theory of evolution. This article undertakes a close reading of the book Rethinking Darwinism, written by a Danish member of the society, Leif A. Jensen, and published by the movement’s official publishing house, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust in 2010. Contextualising the book within the (...) history of ISKCON’s relationship with science, the article asks what the motivations for challenging Darwin here are, how it is done, and what the consequences of it are for a movement often taken to be a fundamentalist one. (shrink)

Until recently, little attention has been paid in the school classroom to creationism and almost none to intelligent design. However, creationism and possibly intelligent design appear to be on the increase and there are indications that there are more countries in which schools are becoming battle-grounds over them. I begin by examining whether creationism and intelligent design are controversial issues, drawing on Robert Dearden's epistemic criterion of the controversial and more recent responses to and (...) defences of this. I then examine whether the notion of ‘worldviews’ in the context of creationism is a useful one by considering the film March of the Penguins. I conclude that the ‘worldviews’ perspective on creationism is useful for two reasons: first it indicates the difficulty of using the criterion of reason to decide whether an issue is controversial or not; secondly, it suggests that standard ways of addressing the diversity of student views in a science classroom may be inadequate. I close by examining the implications of this view for teaching in science lessons and elsewhere, for example in religious education lessons and citizenship lessons and at primary level where subject divisions cannot be made in so clear-cut a manner. (shrink)

In a recent article, Thomas Nagel argues against the court’s decision to strike down the Dover school district’s requirement that biology teachers in Dover public schools inform their students about Intelligent Design. Nagel contends that this ruling relies on questionable demarcation between science and nonscience and consequently misapplies the Establishment Clause of the constitution. Instead, he argues in favor of making room for an open discussion of these issues rather than an outright prohibition against Intelligent Design. (...) We contend that Nagel’s arguments do not succeed. First, we argue that Nagel’s case trades on an ambiguity regarding the content of non-theological views and fails to engage adequately some of the problems of ID. Then we raise concerns about Nagel’s conclusion; specifically, we will point to three incongruities between Nagel’s argument and his conclusion, and then we will raise a more general worry about the likely impact of Nagel’s view. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the human upper limb rehabilitation scheme that utilizes the concept ofteleoperation. Teleoperation can help the therapist demonstrate different rehab exercises to a different group of people at the same time remotely. Different groups of people from a different place connected to the same network can get therapy from the same therapist at the same time using the telerehabilitation scheme. Here, we presented a humanoid robot NAO that can be operated remotely by a therapist to (...) demonstrate the exercise to a patient. To mimic the movement demonstrated by the therapist, Kinect V2 sensor which is a markerless vision-based motion-tracking device, was used. Modified Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) convention was used for the kinematic modeling of the human upper arm. From the Kinect data, a geometric solution was developed to find a unique inverse kinematic solution of human upper-extremity. Experimental results revealed that NAO could be teleoperated successfully to instruct and demonstrate patients to perform different arm movement exercises in real-time. (shrink)

In a recent article, Thomas Nagel argues against the court’s decision to strike down the Dover school district’s requirement that biology teachers in Dover public schools inform their students about Intelligent Design. Nagel contends that this ruling relies on questionable demarcation between science and nonscience and consequently misapplies the Establishment Clause of the constitution. Instead, he argues in favor of making room for an open discussion of these issues rather than an outright prohibition against Intelligent Design. (...) We contend that Nagel’s arguments do not succeed. First, we argue that Nagel’s case trades on an ambiguity regarding the content of non-theological views and fails to engage adequately some of the problems of ID. Then we raise concerns about Nagel’s conclusion; specifically, we will point to three incongruities between Nagel’s argument and his conclusion, and then we will raise a more general worry about the likely impact of Nagel’s view. (shrink)

A persuasive argument that theism is a Humean “natural belief” relies on the assertion that belief in intelligent design is caused by “Cleanthes’s propensity,” introduced in Hume’s Dialogues—a universal propensity to believe in a designer triggered by the observation of apparent telos in nature. But Hume neverclaims in his own voice that religious belief is founded on anything like Cleanthes’s propensity. Instead, in the Natural History, he argues that the belief in invisible intelligent power is caused by (...) the psychological propensity to anthropomorphize triggered by the observation of disorder. I argue that religious belief is among theHumean natural beliefs only if this propensity is relevantly similar to the propensity responsible for inductive beliefs—the paradigmatic case of natural belief. Evidence from the Natural History and Treatise confirm that this is not the case. I conclude that belief in intelligent design is not, for Hume, a natural belief. (shrink)

As the world keeps advancing, the need for automated interconnected devices has started to gain significance; to cater to the condition, a new concept Internet of Things has been introduced that revolves around smart devicesʼ conception. These smart devices using IoT can communicate with each other through a network to attain particular objectives, i.e., automation and intelligent decision making. IoT has enabled the users to divide their household burden with machines as these complex machines look after the environment variables (...) and control their behavior accordingly. As evident, these machines use sensors to collect vital information, which is then the complexity analyzed at a computational node that then smartly controls these devicesʼ operational behaviors. Deep learning-based guessing attack protection algorithms have been enhancing IoT security; however, it still has a critical challenge for the complex industries’ IoT networks. One of the crucial aspects of such systems is the need to have a significant training time for processing a large dataset from the networkʼs previous flow of data. Traditional deep learning approaches include decision trees, logistic regression, and support vector machines. However, it is essential to note that this convenience comes with a price that involves security vulnerabilities as IoT networks are prone to be interfered with by hackers who can access the sensor/communication data and later utilize it for malicious purposes. This paper presents the experimental study of cryptographic algorithms to classify the types of encryption algorithms into the asymmetric and asymmetric encryption algorithm. It presents a deep analysis of AES, DES, 3DES, RSA, and Blowfish based on timing complexity, size, encryption, and decryption performances. It has been assessed in terms of the guessing attack in real-time deep learning complex IoT applications. The assessment has been done using the simulation approach and it has been tested the speed of encryption and decryption of the selected encryption algorithms. For each encryption and decryption, the tests executed the same encryption using the same plaintext for five separate times, and the average time is compared. The key size used for each encryption algorithm is the maximum bytes the cipher can allow. To the comparison, the average time required to compute the algorithm by the three devices is used. For the experimental test, a set of plaintexts is used in the simulation—password-sized text and paragraph-sized text—that achieves target fair results compared to the existing algorithms in real-time deep learning networks for IoT applications. (shrink)

Background: There is evidence that household point-of-use water treatment products can reduce the enormous burden of water-borne illness. Nevertheless, adoption among the global poor is very low, and little evidence exists on why. Methods: We gave 600 households in poor communities in Dhaka, Bangladesh randomly-ordered two-month free trials of four water treatment products: dilute liquid chlorine, sodium dichloroisocyanurate tablets, a combined flocculant-disinfectant powdered mixture, and a silver-coated ceramic siphon filter. Consumers also received education on the dangers of untreated drinking water. (...) We measured which products consumers used with self-reports, observation, and chlorine tests. We also measured drinking water's contamination with E. coli. Findings: Households reported highest usage of the filter, although no product had even 30% usage. E. coli concentrations in stored drinking water were generally lowest when households had Water Guard. Households that self-reported product usage had large reductions in E. coli concentrations with any product as compared to controls. Conclusion: Traditional arguments for the low adoption of POU products focus on affordability, consumers' lack of information about germs and the dangers of unsafe water, and specific products not meshing with a household's preferences. In this study we provided free trials, repeated informational messages explaining the dangers of untreated water, and a variety of product designs. The low usage of all products despite such efforts makes clear that important barriers exist beyond cost, information, and variation among these four product designs. Without a better understanding of the choices and aspirations of the target end-users, household-based water treatment is unlikely to reduce morbidity and mortality substantially in urban Bangladesh and similar populations. © 2011 Luoto et al. (shrink)

Abstract Jeffrey Koperski claims in Zygon (2008) that critics of Intelligent Design engage in fallacious ad hominem attacks on ID proponents and that this is a “bad way” to engage them. I show that Koperski has made several errors in his evaluation of the ID critics. He does not distinguish legitimate, relevant ad hominem arguments from fallacious ad hominem attacks. He conflates (or equates) the logical use of valid with the colloquial use of valid. Moreover, Koperski doesn't take (...) seriously the legitimate concerns of the ID critics, and in doing so, commits the straw man fallacy. In the end, I show that no one disagrees with the criticism of improper use of fallacies as methods of evaluation. But what constitutes proper, relevant evaluation of the ID theorists and their motivation is a matter of dispute. And sometimes attacking a person as a method of evaluation is justified, and thus is not fallacious. The definition of ad hominem arguments as either a “good way” or a “bad way” rests on justification, which I argue ID opponents have. The basis for these good objections relies on the motivation many Christians have to share their faith with non-Christians, which they call the “great commission.”. (shrink)

Contemporary Thomists, by and large, have been very critical of the intelligent design movement. Their criticism raises two important issues; the first being whether such criticism is well-founded, the second being whether it is consistent with the views of St. Thomas, from whom they claim to take their direction. I shall argue that their criticism typically misses the mark and that they are mistaken in their representation of Thomas’s views as regards intelligent design.

The article starts with stating the fact that today there is an increasing recognition of difficulties with Darwinism accompanied by vigorous responses on the part of Darwin’s defenders; among the instances of challenge to the dominant theory, one can find a book of Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, and those behind the Intelligent Design movement. Inrelating the book of Gilson to the ID proponents, the author concludes that, while in some ways they are on the (...) same side in opposing the anti-creation thrust of Darwinism, Gilson is neutral on the validity or truth of Darwin’s biological hypothesis. Gilson, however, whose book preceded the ID movement by some twenty years, seeks to analyze Darwinism from the perspective of the classical philosophy of nature. He well understands that, according to modern scientific method, final causes are excluded from consideration, but he calls for a biophilosophy which will be open to the reality of human experience as Aristotle was and recognize that teleology is present in nature. According to him, even if teleology seems to be a contestable explanation, chance as understood by Darwinists is the pure absence of explanation. (shrink)

This article shows how Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of science can bring resolution to a recent controversy: the controversy that arises from Intelligent Design theorists' and proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution. Intelligent Design theories argue that the complex structures of living organisms cannot be adequately explained by neo-Darwinian theories, especially by its postulate of random variations. Hence, an "intelligent designer" must be postulated in order to fill out scientific explanations. This article finds fault with the Intelligent (...) Design arguments, but proposes a different form of design argument–one that accepts neo-Darwinian evolution (or something very much like it). It shows how Lonergan's analysis of scientific methods grounds his account of evolution, and how much this can overcome the most basic Intelligent Design objections. It then shows how Lonergan's philosophy of God also can offer a design argument based, not in the complexity of this or that organism, but in the "design" of evolution itself. /// O presente artigo mostra até que ponto a filosofia da ciência de Bernard Lonergan pode trazer resolução à recente controvérsia suscitada pelos defensores da Teoria do Desígnio Inteligente, teoria essa fortemente atacada pelos defensores neo-darwinistas da teoria da evolução. As teorias do Desígnio Inteligente defendem que as estruturas complexas dos organismos vivos não podem ser adequadamente explicadas pelas teorias neo-darwinistas, especialmente pelo seu postulado relativo às variações de acaso. Nesse sentido, um agente Inteligente teria de ser postulado em ordem a prover as necessárias explicações científicas. O autor do presente artigo, porém, considera que a argumentação dos defensores do Desígnio Inteligente é defeituosa, pelo queavança um novo argumento de desígnio, um efectivamente que aceita a teoria da evolução neo-darwiniana (ou algo muito semelhante a ela). Em suma, o artigo mostra até que ponto a análise lonerganiana dos métodos científicos subjaz à sua própria teoria da evolução, mostrando-se assim também de que forma esta doutrina ultrapassa as objecções mais elementares dos defensores da Teoria do Desígnio Inteligente. Por fim, mostra-se ainda de que modo a filosofia de Lonergan sobre Deus pode oferecer um argumento de desígnio baseado, não na complexidade deste ou daquele organismo, mas no "desígnio" da evolução em si mesma. (shrink)

This essay offers a critical introduction to the intellectual issues involved in the Kitzmiller case relating to intelligent design, and to Steve Fuller’s involvement in it. It offers a brief appraisal of the intelligent design movement stemming from the work of Phillip E. Johnson, and of Steve Fuller’s case for intelligent design in a rather different sense.

Online social networks are highly dynamic and sparse. One of the main problems in analyzing these networks is the problem of predicting the existence of links between users on these networks: the link prediction problem. Many studies have been conducted to predict links using a variety of techniques like the decision tree and the logistic regression approaches. In this work, we will illustrate the use of the rough set theory in predicting links over the Facebook social network based on homophilic (...) features. Other supervised learning algorithms are also employed in our experiments and compared with the rough set classifier, such as naive Bayes, J48 decision tree, support vector machine, logistic regression, and multilayer perceptron neural network. Moreover, we studied the influence of the “common groups” and “common page likes” homophilic features on predicting friendship between users of Facebook, and also studied the effect of using the Jaccard coefficient in measuring the similarity between users’ homophilic attributes compared with using the overlap coefficient. We conducted our experiments on two different datasets obtained from the Facebook online social network, where users in each dataset live within the same geographical region. The results showed that the rough set classifier significantly outperformed the other classifiers in all experiments. The results also demonstrated that the common groups and the common page likes features have a significant influence on predicting the friendship between users of Facebook. Finally, the results revealed that using the overlap coefficient homophilic features provided better results than that of the Jaccard coefficient features. (shrink)

It is often assumed that there is a hard line between theistic evolution (TE) and intelligent design (ID). Many theistic evolutionists subscribe to the idea that God only acts through natural processes, as opposed to the ID assertion that God, at certain points in natural history, has acted in a direct manner; directly causing particular features of the world. In this article, I argue that theistic evolutionists subscribe to what might be called Natural Divine Causation (NDC). NDC does (...) not merely provide a nonsupernaturalist and noninterventionist model of divine action, it provides a line of demarcation between TE and ID. I make the critique that NDC is philosophically untenable and argue, consequently, that the line between TE and ID is blurred. (shrink)

There are various non-contrastive questions that one can ask about a single hypothesis H and a body of evidence E: What is the probability of H, given E [Pr(H | E)]? What is the likelihood of H on E [Pr(E | H)]? Does E support/counter-support H? Should we accept/reject H in light of E? There are also contrastive questions concerning pairs of alternative hypotheses H1 vs H2 and a body of evidence E: Is H1 more probable than H2, given E? (...) Is the likelihood of H1 greater than that of H2 on E? Does E favor H1 over H2 (or vice versa)? (shrink)

Why do design arguments—particularly those emphasizing machine metaphors such as “Organisms and/or their parts are machines”—continue to be so convincing to so many people after they have been repeatedly refuted? In this essay I review various interpretations and refutations of design arguments and make a distinction between rationally refuting such arguments (RefutingR) and rendering them psychologically unconvincing (RefutingP). Expanding on this distinction, I provide support from recent work on the cognitive power of metaphors and developmental psychological work indicating (...) a basic human propensity toward attributing agency to natural events, to show that design arguments “make sense”unless one is cued to look more closely. As with visual illusions, such as the Müller-Lyer arrow illusion, there is nothing wrong with a believer's cognitive apparatus any more than with their visual apparatus when they judge the lines in the illusion to be of unequal length. It takes training or a dissonance between design beliefs and other beliefs or experiences to play the role that a ruler does in the visual case. Unless people are cued to “look again” at what initially makes perfect sense, they are not inclined to apply more sophisticated evaluative procedures. (shrink)

Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? To see what’s at stake, consider Mount Rushmore. The evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design is direct—eyewitnesses saw the sculptor Gutzon Borglum spend the better part of his life designing and building this structure. But what if there were no direct evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design? What (...) if humans went extinct and aliens, visiting the earth, discovered Mount Rushmore in substantially the same condition as it is now? (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga argues by counterexample that no naturalistic account of functions is possible--God is then the only source for natural functions. This paper replies to Plantinga's examples and arguments. Plantinga misunderstands naturalistic accounts. Plantinga's mistakes flow from his assimilation of functional notions in general to functions from intentional design in particular.

An anthology of writings by proponents and critics of intelligent design creationism.

This paper defends two theses about probabilistic reasoning. First, although modus ponens has a probabilistic analog, modus tollens does not – the fact that a hypothesis says that an observation is very improbable does not entail that the hypothesis is improbable. Second, the evidence relation is essentially comparative; with respect to hypotheses that confer probabilities on observation statements but do not entail them, an observation O may favor one hypothesis H1 over another hypothesis H2 , but O cannot be said (...) to confirm or disconfirm H1 without such relativization. These points have serious consequences for the Intelligent Design movement. Even if evolutionary theory entailed that various complex adaptations are very improbable, that would neither disconfirm the theory nor support the hypothesis of intelligent design. For either of these conclusions to follow, an additional question must be answered: With respect to the adaptive features that evolutionary theory allegedly says are very improbable, what is their probability of arising if they were produced by intelligent design? This crucial question has not been addressed by the ID movement. (shrink)

Is theistic evolution (TE) a philosophically tenable position? Leidenhag argues in his article “The Blurred Line between Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design” that it is not, since it, Leidenhag claims, espouses a view of divine action that he labels “natural divine causation” (NDC), which makes God explanatory redundant. That is, in so far as TE does not invoke God as an additional cause alongside natural causes, it is untenable. Theistic evolutionists should therefore “reject NDC and affirm a more (...) robust notion of divine agency.” However, this will, Leidenhag claims, have the effect that theistic evolutionists “will move their position significantly closer to Intelligent Design,” and so the line between TE and intelligent design is (or ought to be?) blurred. If successful, the criticism by Leidenhag would be bad news for theists who want to take science seriously and good news for those scientistic atheists according to whom there simply is no scientifically respectable way of combining theism and modern natural science in an overarching worldview. So, is TE stuck between a rock (of redundancy) and a hard place (of pseudo‐science)? No, at least not due to the criticism offered by Leidenhag—but maybe religious naturalism is? (shrink)

Social epistemology is the normative theory of socioepistemic practices. Teaching is a socioepistemic practice, so educational practices belong on the agenda of social epistemology. A current question is whether intelligent design should be taught in biology classes. This paper focuses on the argument from “fairness” or “equal time.” The principal aim of education is knowledge transmission, but evidence renders it doubtful that giving intelligent design equal time would promote knowledge transmission. In making curricular decisions, boards of (...) education should consult the experts. Are novices capable of identifying genuine experts? This social epistemological question is answered affirmatively. (shrink)