Drawing on insights from social learning and social cognitive perspectives and research on the multilevel reality of leadership influences, we developed and tested a multilevel model that examines mechanisms and conditions through which ethical leadership deters work unit- and individual-level ostracism. Based on two field studies using multiple measurement points, we found that at the work unit level of analysis, relational climate partially mediates the negative relationship between ethical leadership and work unit-level ostracism whereas state mindfulness partially mediates the cross-level (...) influence of ethical leadership on individual-level ostracism. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that the relationship between ethical leadership and relational climate was stronger when work units had a more mechanistic structure, and not when it had an organic work unit structure. Finally, we found that relational climate not only moderates the relationship between state mindfulness and individual-level ostracism, but also moderates the indirect influence of ethical leadership on individual-level ostracism through state mindfulness such that the indirect effect is stronger when relational climate is high as opposed to low. These findings highlight the individual- and work unit-level conditions and mechanisms through which ethical leadership relates to decreased ostracism at work, and thus extends theory and research on ethical leadership and ostracism. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the approach to punishment the U.S.—in particular, how it is determined what punishments are appropriate for which crimes—not only fails to achieve justice, but also drives much of the dysfunction in the U.S. criminal justice system. We then compare this system of punishment to the approach to trial and punishment used in ancient Athens and explain why this approach to punishment would lead to more trials and more just outcomes. The concern, however, is that using this—or (...) any—approach to punishment that leads to more trials seems as if it might cripple the U.S. justice system. We argue that this concern is unfounded and should not stand in the way of procedures that would likely produce more just results. (shrink)

This paper presents and discusses several methods for reasoning from inconsistent knowledge bases. A so-called argued consequence relation, taking into account the existence of consistent arguments in favour of a conclusion and the absence of consistent arguments in favour of its contrary, is particularly investigated. Flat knowledge bases, i.e., without any priority between their elements, are studied under different inconsistency-tolerant consequence relations, namely the so-called argumentative, free, universal, existential, cardinality-based, and paraconsistent consequence relations. The syntax-sensitivity of these consequence relations is (...) studied. A companion paper is devoted to the case where priorities exist between the pieces of information in the knowledge base. (shrink)

This paper first provides a brief survey of a possibilistic handling of default rules. A set of default rules of the form, "generally, from α deduce β", is viewed as the family of possibility distributions satisfying constraints expressing that the situation where α and β is true has a greater plausibility than the one where α and ⇁β is true. When considering only the subset of linear possibility distributions, the well-known System P of postulates proposed by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor, (...) has been obtained. We also present two rational extensions: one based on the minimum specificity principle and the other is based on the lexicographic ordering. The second part of the paper presents an empirical study of three desirable properties for a consequence relation that capture default reasoning: Rationality, Property Inheritance and Ambiguity Preservation. An experiment is conducted to investigate 13 patterns of inference for the test of these properties. Our experimental apparatus confirms previous results on the relevance of System P, and enforces the psychological relevance of the studied properties. (shrink)

This paper investigates simple syntactic methods for revising prioritized belief bases, that are semantically meaningful in the frameworks of possibility theory and of Spohn''s ordinal conditional functions. Here, revising prioritized belief bases amounts to conditioning a distribution function on interpretations. The input information leading to the revision of a knowledge base can be sure or uncertain. Different types of scales for priorities are allowed: finite vs. infinite, numerical vs. ordinal. Syntactic revision is envisaged here as a process which transforms a (...) prioritized belief bases into a new prioritized belief base, and thus allows a subsequent iteration. (shrink)

. This paper first provides a brief survey of a possibilistic handling of default rules. A set of default rules of the form, “generally, from α deduce β”, is viewed as the family of possibility distributions satisfying constraints expressing that the situation where α and β is true has a greater plausibility than the one where a and - β is true. When considering only the subset of linear possibility distributions, the well-known System P of postulates proposed by Kraus, Lehmann (...) and Magidor, has been obtained. We also present two rational extensions: one based on the minimum specificity principle and the other is based on the lexicographic ordering. The second part of the paper presents an empirical study of three desirable properties for a consequence relation that capture default reasoning: Rationality, Property Inheritance and Ambiguity Preservation. An experiment is conducted to investigate 13 patterns of inference for the test of these properties. Our experimental apparatus confirms previous results on the relevance of System P, and enforces the psychological relevance of the studied properties. (shrink)

Recent studies from Western countries indicate significant levels of questionable research practices, but similar data from low and middle-income countries are limited. Our aims were to assess the prevalence of and attitudes regarding research misconduct among researchers in several universities in the Middle East and to identify factors that might account for our findings. We distributed an anonymous questionnaire to a convenience sample of investigators at several universities in Egypt, Lebanon, and Bahrain. Participants were asked to a) self-report their extent (...) of research misconducts, as well as their knowledge of colleagues engaging in similar research misconducts and b) provide their extent of agreement with certain attitudes about research misconduct. We used descriptive, bivariate, and multivariate logistic regression statistics to analyze the data. Data from 278 participants showed a high prevalence of misconduct, as 59.4% of our respondents self-reported to committing at least one misbehaviors and 74.5% reported having knowledge of any misbehaviors among any of their colleagues. The most common type of self-report misconduct was “circumventing research ethics regulations” followed by “fabrication and falsification”. A significant predictor of misconduct included a lack of “prior ethics training”. Scientific misconduct represents a significant issue in several universities in the Middle East. The demonstration that a lack of “prior ethics training” was a significant predictor of misconduct should lead to educational initiatives in research integrity. Further studies are needed to confirm whether our results can be generalized to other universities in the Middle East. (shrink)

This paper investigates the idea of reasoning, in a local (or contextual) way, under prioritized and possibly inconsistent knowledge bases. Priorities are not supposed to be given globally between all the beliefs in the knowledge base, but locally inside sets of pieces of information responsible for inconsistencies. This local stratification offers more flexibility for representing priorities between beliefs. Given this local ordering, we discuss five basic definitions of influence relations between conflicts. These elementary notions of influence between two conflicts A (...) and B exhaustively explore the situations where solving A leads to solve B. Then we propose natural approaches to restore the coherence of a knowledge base on the basis of influence relations between locally-stratified conflicts. (shrink)

Assisted suicide, many argue, honors self‐determination in returning control of their dying to patients themselves. But physician assistance and measures proposed to safeguard patients from coercion in fact return ultimate authority over this “private and deeply personal” decision to medicine and society.

One of the major problems of intrusion detection concerns the large amount of alerts that intrusion detection systems (IDS) produce. Security operator who analyzes alerts and takes decisions, is often submerged by the high number of alerts to analyze. In this paper, we present a new alert correlation approach based on knowledge and preferences of security operators. This approach, which is complementary to existing ones, allows to rank-order produced alerts on the basis of a security operator knowledge about the system, (...) used IDS and his preferences about alerts that he wants to analyze or to ignore. Our approach is based on the development of a new non-classical logic for representing preferences, called FO-MQCL (First Order - Minimal Qualitative Choice Logic). Our logic extends a fragment of the first order logic by adding a new logical connective. The general idea is to present only alerts that fully fit security operator's preferences and knowledge. And if needed, less preferred alerts can also be presented. (shrink)

One of the major problems of intrusion detection concerns the large amount of alerts that intrusion detection systems (IDS) produce. Security operator who analyzes alerts and takes decisions, is often submerged by the high number of alerts to analyze. In this paper, we present a new alert correlation approach based on knowledge and preferences of security operators. This approach, which is complementary to existing ones, allows to rank-order produced alerts on the basis of a security operator knowledge about the system, (...) used IDS and his preferences about alerts that he wants to analyze or to ignore. Our approach is based on the development of a new non-classical logic for representing preferences, called FO-MQCL (First Order - Minimal Qualitative Choice Logic). Our logic extends a fragment of the first order logic by adding a new logical connective. The general idea is to present only alerts that fully fit security operator's preferences and knowledge. And if needed, less preferred alerts can also be presented. (shrink)

The two-volume set LNCS 10350 and 10351 constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Industrial, Engineering and Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems, IEA/AIE 2017, held in Arras, France, in June 2017. The 70 revised full papers presented together with 45 short papers and 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 180 submissions. They are organized in topical sections: constraints, planning, and optimization; data mining and machine learning; sensors, signal processing, and data fusion; recommender (...) systems; decision support systems; knowledge representation and reasoning; navigation, control, and autonome agents; sentiment analysis and social media; games, computer vision; and animation; uncertainty management; graphical models: from theory to applications; anomaly detection; agronomy and artificial intelligence; applications of argumentation; intelligent systems in healthcare and mhealth for health outcomes; and innovative applications of textual analysis based on AI. (shrink)

The problem of merging multiple sources information is central in many information processing areas such as databases integrating problems, multiple criteria decision making, expert opinion pooling, etc. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to merge classical propositional bases, or sets of (non-prioritized) goals. These approaches are in general semantically defined. Like in belief revision, they use priorities, generally based on Dalal's distance, for merging the classical bases and return a new classical base as a result. An immediate consequence of the (...) generation of a classical base is the impossibility of iterating the fusion process in a coherent way w.r.t. priorities since the underlying ordering is lost. This paper presents a general approach for fusing prioritized bases, both semantically and syntactically, when priorities are represented in the possibilistic logic framework. Different classes of merging operators are considered including conjunctive, disjunctive, reinforcement and adaptive operators. We show that the approaches which have been recently proposed for merging classical propositional bases can be embedded in this setting. The result is then a prioritized base, and hence the process can be coherently iterated. Moreover, we also provide a syntactic counterpart for the fusion of classical bases. (shrink)

In a digital communication environment, information security is mandatory. Three essential parameters used in the design process of a steganography algorithm are Payload, security, and fidelity. However, several methods are implemented in information hiding, such as Least Significant Bit (LBS), Discrete Wavelet Transform, Masking, and Discrete Cosine Transform. The paper aims to investigate novel steganography techniques based on agent technology. It proposes a Framework of Steganography based on agent for secret communication using LSB. The most common image steganography databases are (...) explored for training and testing. The methodology in this work is based on the statistical properties of the developed agent software using Matlab. The experiment design is based on six statistical feature measures, including Histogram, Mean, Standard deviation, Entropy, Variance and Energy. For steganography, an Ensemble classifier is used to test two scenarios: embedding a single language message and inserting bilingual messages. ROC Curve represents the evaluation metrics. The result shows that the designed agent-based system with 50% training/testing sample set and 0.2 Payload can pick out the best cover image for the provided hidden message size to avoid visual artifact. (shrink)

‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as feminists to pause and reflect on the trajectory the concept has taken and on (...) the ways in which it has traveled through time and space. Conceptualizing intersectionality as a traveling theory allows for these multiple critiques to be contextualized and addressed. It is argued that the context of the neoliberal academy plays a major role in the ways in which intersectionality has lost much of its critical potential in some of its usages today. It is further suggested that Marxist feminism offers an important means of grounding intersectionality critically and expanding intersectionality’s ability to engage with feminism transnationally. (shrink)

Biases towards negative information, as well as away from positive information, are associated with psychopathology. Examining biases in multiple processes has been theorised to be more predictive than examining bias in any process alone. Anhedonia is a core symptom of psychopathology and predictive of future psychopathological symptoms. Finding that combined biases are associated with anhedonia would advance knowledge of the nature of emotional processing biases and the value of objective performance-based measures for identifying early risk markers. Participants completed tasks that (...) assess latency bias and biased recognition of emotional information, as well as an anhedonia measure. An index was computed for each task’s performance reflecting biased processing of positive and negative words. Only combined biases on both tasks were associated with anhedonia. Attentional bias was positively associated with anhedonia, but only when recognition bias for emotional words was high. Thus, assessing biases in multiple domains increased sensitivity to uncover relationships between emotional processing biases and anhedonic symptoms. (shrink)

The precise and proper territorial boundaries of skepticism, relativism, and pluralism have been perennial topics of debate in philosophy. Very few philosophers endorse these positions in an unqual...

Promoting innovative work behaviour and employee wellbeing has become essential as it endows companies with competitive advantages to thrive in today's complex business environment. This study investigates the role of workplace spirituality in inducing innovative work behaviour and employee wellbeing based on the social exchange theory and the spillover theory. It also looks at the previously unexplored mediating function of employee engagement in the relationship between workplace spirituality and the outcomes above. Additionally, it examines the interactive effect of workplace spirituality (...) and individual spirituality on employee engagement. Two waves of survey data were collected from 538 employees and their managers working in the IT sector in Pakistan. This study contributes to the expanding corpus of research on workplace spirituality, confirming that the latter positively influence innovative work behaviour and employee wellbeing. The mediating effect of employee engagement on the relationship between workplace spirituality and innovative work behaviour and employee wellbeing is also significant. Further, the results confirm that the influence of workplace spirituality on employee engagement is contingent on the degree of individual spirituality. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The manufacturing industry faces a trend in which employees’ work processes are being redesigned into simple, repetitive tasks that maximize performance and efficiency. This neo-Tayloristic business model reduces social interactions and stifles relationship building, leading to disgruntled employees and raising questions about leaders’ moral obligation as to the mechanisms they use to enhance employees’ performance at work. As an alternative to redesigning work processes, we contend that servant leaders can enhance employees’ overall performance by cultivating positive interpersonal dynamics at work (...) where social connectedness flourishes. Integrating insights from self-determination theory with servant leadership’s moral foundations, we investigate the degree to which servant leadership fosters two elements of a relationally supportive social context, interactional justice climate and coworker support, that facilitate its influence on followers’ intrinsic motivation and, subsequently, their voice and in-role performance. Temporally-separated data collected from a sample of 296 employees and their supervisors situated in 44 teams yielded results that support our hypotheses. Results underscore the importance of servant leadership cultivating a positive relational context to increase employees’ intrinsic motivation and improve their behaviors at work. (shrink)

This study examined the relationship between urban culture and street vending. Prior research on this topic is limited and inconclusive. Therefore, we have proposed an integrated model to test the positive effect of urban culture on street vending using multiple mediations of consumption patterns, resistance, and microfinance. We tested a sample of 425 responses that reflect the public opinion in Baghdad, Iraq. These responses were collected between September and November 2018. A partial least squares–based structural equation modeling is employed to (...) test the validity of measurement models and the significance of the entire structural model, predictive power, and mediation analysis. We found that resistance mediates the effect of urban culture on street vending; low-income consumption and resistance sequentially mediate the effect of urban culture on street vending, while resistance mediates the effect of a lack of microfinance on street vending. The direct impact of culture on street vending is not significant, and a lack of microfinance positively influences the pervasiveness of trading on streets. This study contributes to the extant literature as it proposed and tested a novel and comprehensive model to analyze the relationship between urban culture and street vending, simultaneously examining the effects of culture, consumption, resistance, and microfinance on street vending. (shrink)

The present study is a differential study that describes the nature of the relationship between cooperation and altruistic behavior in a sample of gifted adolescents in three universities in Egypt and Kuwait University. It also identified the differences between males/females, and senior students/junior students in both cooperation and altruism. A total of 237 gifted adolescents—with average age 21.3 ± SD 2.6 years—from three Egyptian universities: Alexandria University, Sadat Academy for Management Sciences, and Suez University, and Kuwait University, were involved in (...) this study. Measures used in the study include the Scales for Rating the Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students, Generative Altruism Scale, and The Cooperative/Competitive Strategy Scale. Results revealed that there is a significant positive relationship between altruism and cooperation among gifted adolescents. Also, findings show that there are statistically significant differences between males and females in both altruism and cooperation. In addition, there are differences statistically significant between senior students and junior students in both altruism and cooperation in favor of senior students. It is recommended that altruism and cooperation intervention-based programs should be designed to increase the adaptive behaviors of adolescents. (shrink)

En dépit des réformes dites libérales des années 1860, l'Empire russe resta tout au long du XIX e siècle un empire dont le souverain s'intitulait officiellement : « Tsar et Autocrate de toutes les Russies ». L'autocratie différait fortement de la monarchie française d'Ancien Régime, qu'embarrassaient et que contenaient mille traditions et reliques du passé : droit coutumier et droit romain, vieilles lois de sources diverses toujours en vigueur, privilèges, prérogatives, immunités, franchises, exceptions et exemptions, Église indépendante, etc. Dans le (...) système russe du « césaropapisme », l'empereur faisait également office de souverain pontife de la religion orthodoxe : il en était le « défenseur et gardien ». - En 1881, le tsar Alexandre II fut tué dans un attentat, alors que l'octroi d'une Constitution semblait imrm'nent. Son règne avait été marqué par une série de réformes, dont la plus célèbre (1861) est celle qui avait émancipé les paysans serfs. Constantin Pétrovitch Pobedonostsev (1827-1907), célèbre juriste et homme d'État russe, qui avait été le précepteur des fils d'Alexandre II, va alors devenir le principal représentant d'une politique de contre-réformes, d'une politique refusant que soit faite la moindre concession aux idées libérales. Nommé par Alexandre III procureur du Saint-Synode, il exercera une influence prépondérante en Russie pendant la première partie du règne de ce tsar (c'està-dire de 1881 à 1887). Certains de ses écrits, pamphlets ou manifestes ont été réunis dans un Recueil de Moscou, paru en 1896. Nous y verrons Pobedonostsev dénoncer une à une toutes les institutions qui pourraient, si jamais elles étaient importées d'Occident, limiter les prérogatives du tsar autocrate : séparation de l'Église et de l'État ; suffrage universel et discours sur la prétendue souveraineté du peuple ; instruction gratuite et obligatoire, impliquant une limitation du travail des enfants ; liberté de la presse et invocation constante de l' « opinion publique » ; institution (à l'anglaise) de jurys populaires dans les tribunaux. - Mais nous aurons la surprise de trouver également, dans ce même Recueil de Moscou, un catalogue très raisonné des principales « pathologies » qui, selon Pobedonostsev, accompagnent nécessairement un régime de démocratie représentative : corruption des représentants ; combinaisons et tractations incessantes entre les partis ; indifférentisme massif et hypertrophie du moi personnel chez les électeurs ; omniprésence d'une presse dépourvue de tout mandat électif et parlant cependant au nom du public ; etc. Un tel catalogue constitue à n'en pas douter ce que l'œuvre de Pobedonostsev, ce réactionnaire « sur toute la ligne », contient de moins inactuel. (shrink)

While the migration of the Muslim in the U.S. dates back to the late 1800s and they have been active members of society for decades, the presence of Muslims in the U.S. has recently come under focus and discussion. The U.S. is a nation that has historically struggled with treating all its citizens equally and has been in the frontlines of eliminating these inequalities. As a result of 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., there has been a systematic and troubling (...) trend of violations of citizenship rights of American Muslims in general. This paper examines these violations before and after 9/11 from a historical perspective. For this purpose, Chicago, as the home of one of the largest Muslim communities in the country, is used to document and conduct this analysis. The paper also discusses the implications of these issues in terms of citizenship, race, and ethnicity. (shrink)

We show in this paper how three continental philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida respectively) respond negatively to the analytic correspondence theory of truth using different notions developed by them (i.e. the notion of Intentionality by Husserl, the notion of Dasein by Heidegger, and the notion of Trace by Derrida). We show that despite the fact that the three philosophers are united against the analytic correspondence theory of truth, there are still deep differences between them which stem from the different tools (...) they use to articulate the concept of truth. Also, we argue that Husserlian truth has an advantageous position over the other concepts of truth presented. (shrink)

Grains de poussiere dans un rayon de soleil... poesie du discontinu que la lumiere de l'entendement met a jour, verite du mobile et du minuscule: l'atomisme de Democrite porte, assurement, a rever. A l'aide des nombreux temoignages et fragments reunis par Diels et Luria, J. Salem a souhaite retrouver l'unite d'inspiration qui dut presider a cette oeuvre encyclopedique. Il est tout a fait possible de distinguer l'immense silhouette de Democrite dans maints textes de l'Antiquite: aussi est-il fort tentant de (...) reconstituer le systeme de pensee de celui que Seneque a tenu pour le plus subtil de tous les Anciens. (shrink)

Although Heidegger's philosophical complicity with National Socialism has been the focus of virtually all discussions of his politics, little to no attention has been placed on how the conception of human existence developed in Being and Time might shed light on debates about the self between contemporary liberals and communitarians. By situating Heidegger's early work within these ongoing debates, the author will show how his descriptions of Dasein—especially the descriptions of the relationship between Dasein and its community—are actually more consistent (...) with liberal views of the self than with communitarian interpretations. Heidegger helps to clarify how a thickly constituted, social self may nevertheless stand back from its community in ways that communitarians are hard pressed to explain. In the final section, the author will comment on the compatibility of Heidegger's conception of Dasein with liberalism as a political philosophy, focusing in particular on Heidegger's conception of Mitsein or being-with. (shrink)

In the past decade, the use of the Chapter XI has soared to the detriment of many creditors, workers, and consumers. A good number of cases were not based on imminent insolvency, but on firms attempts to avoid litigation claims against them, to terminate labor or other contractual obligations, or to gain new financing.These filings for Chapter XI highlight the use of bank-ruptcy as a strategic option used by management in running a viable organization. This usage is even advised by (...) some academics and management consultants. (shrink)