The proposed work describes an approach for the segmentation of abnormal lung CT scans of COVID-19. Lung diseases are the leading killer in both men and women. The pulmonary experts normally make attempts, such as early detection of patients by tomography tests before lung specialists treat patients who are tortured by lung disease. Moreover, lung specialists do their best to detect the presence of lung conditions. X rays or CT scan checks are performed for tomography tests. The finest approach for (...) medical diagnosis and a wide range of uses is computed tomography. This kind of imaging offers elaborate cross-sectional pictures of skinny slices of the organic structure. However, the preprocessing and denoising methods of Lung CT scans may mask some important image features. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework involving an optimization technique algorithm to solve a multilevel thresholding problem based on information theory to segment abnormal lung CT scans. The proposed framework will evaluate a sample of CT scan images taken from a well-known benchmark database. The evaluation results will assess subjectively and objectively to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. (shrink)

Taking an authorial stance is essential in academic writing but remains a challenge for novice researchers, especially EFL/ESL writers. This study explores how authors of English and Arabic research article discussions employ evaluative language resources while commenting on their results. To this end, the study investigated the employment of Engagement resources within Appraisal Theory. The findings exhibited a great divergence between the two language groups as Arabic discussions relied more on Contracting strategies, which indicate the tendency to close down the (...) space for dialogic alternatives, while their English counterparts preferred Expanding resources, which open up the dialogic space for alternative voices. The study, therefore, bears some pedagogical implications for L2 learners. (shrink)

In contrast to the conventional fund management industry with a profit-oriented logic based on risk and return, ethical and faith-based funds should follow the religious principles of their investment-style philosophy. Islamic funds should obey the theological teachings of the primary sources of Islam, the Quran and Sunnah, as stakeholders expect these religious teachings to influence the investment decisions of fund managers. In practice, Islamic fund managers use Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions ’s screening criteria, based on secondary (...) sources of Islam, which allow investments that are only partially halal to be included in their portfolios. This study finds that a more religious logic in screening practices, although impairing diversification, does not necessarily harm performance. Thus, Islamic investment funds, and the wider ethical fund management industry, should, and could, adopt stricter screening criteria that match their investment mandates and bring more ethical business practices to the industry. (shrink)

We present a new viable nonlinear chaotic paradigm. This paradigm has four nonlinear terms. The essential features of the new paradigm have been investigated. Our new system is confirmed to have chaotic behaviors by calculating its Lyapunov exponents. The relations of the system states are displayed by a suggested new signal flow graph. The proposed SFG is discussed via some graph theory tools, and some of its hidden features are calculated. In addition, the system is realized via constructing its electronic (...) circuit which helps in the real applications. Also, a robust controller for the system is designed with the aid of a genetic algorithm. (shrink)

Introduction: Cognitive behavioral therapy for children and adolescents has shown efficacy in treating different psychiatric disorders. It has been added to multiple clinical guidelines as the first-line treatment. However, despite more studies of its efficacy, CBT is underutilized in clinical settings due to a lack of rigorous training programs and qualified CBT therapists. The limited knowledge of parents in this intervention and their negative attitudes toward it have been considered as possible reasons.Methods: This is a cross-sectional survey-based study among 464 (...) Saudi parents living in Riyadh city. We aimed to evaluate the preference, knowledge, and attitudes of Saudi parents toward CBT for their children. We compared the difference in the level of knowledge and attitudes toward CBT in relation to the characteristics of parents. An online questionnaire that included 39 questions was carefully reconstructed from four validated scales, approved by an expert panel, and piloted. Participants were recruited to participate through online social media.Results: Saudi parents had average knowledge about CBT; however, they had positive attitudes toward the therapy itself and its role in treating the behavioral issues of children. Male participants showed better knowledge than female participants. Participants with higher education and those with high income had more favorable attitudes toward CBT than others.Conclusion: The knowledge of parents is considered inadequate and indicated the need for more awareness and perhaps mass education. In contrast, they maintained positive attitudes and were interested in evidence-based treatment, with more preference toward non-psychopharmacological interventions. (shrink)

The increasing global demand for energy necessitates devoted attention to the formulation and exploration of mechanisms of thermal heat exchangers to explore and save heat energy. Thus, innovative thermal transport fluids require to boost thermal conductivity and heat flow features to upsurge convection heat rate, and nanofluids have been effectively employed as standard heat transfer fluids. With such intention, herein, we formulated and developed the constitutive flow laws by utilizing the Rossland diffusion approximation and Stephen’s law along with the MHD (...) effect. The mathematical formulation is based on boundary layer theory pioneered by Prandtl. Governing nonlinear partial differential flow equations are changed to ODEs via the implementation of the similarity variables. A well-known computational algorithm BVPh2 has been utilized for the solution of the nonlinear system of ODEs. The consequence of innumerable physical parameters on flow field, thermal distribution, and solutal field, such as magnetic field, Lewis number, velocity parameter, Prandtl number, drag force, Nusselt number, and Sherwood number, is plotted via graphs. Finally, numerical consequences are compared with the homotopic solution as a limiting case, and an exceptional agreement is found. (shrink)

Clinical responses to dopamine replacement therapy for individuals with Parkinson’s disease are often difficult to predict. We characterized changes in MDS-UPDRS motor factor scores resulting from a short-duration L-Dopa response, and investigated how the inter-subject clinical differences could be predicted from motor cortical magnetoencephalography. MDS-UPDRS motor factor scores and resting-state MEG recordings were collected during SDR from twenty individuals with a PD diagnosis. We used a novel subject-specific strategy based on linear support vector machines to quantify motor cortical oscillatory frequency (...) profiles that best predicted medication state. Motor cortical profiles differed substantially across individuals and showed consistency across multiple data folds. There was a linear relationship between classification accuracy and SDR of lower limb bradykinesia, although this relationship did not persist after multiple comparison correction, suggesting that combinations of spectral power features alone are insufficient to predict clinical state. Factor score analysis of therapeutic response and novel subject-specific machine learning approaches based on subject-specific neuroimaging provide tools to predict outcomes of therapies for PD. (shrink)

Contributing to the efforts to foster business postgraduate students development toward becoming responsible business leaders is the goal of this study by examining the state of responsible management education in business postgraduate programs in Sudan. We examined perceptions and attitudes toward responsible management and its education among postgraduate-level students and constructed a comprehensive framework appropriate for developing responsible management education programs in under-developed countries. This study’s data were gathered via a structured questionnaire answered by 106 postgraduate business students from the (...) largest four Sudanese business schools and facilities. The students were distributed among the management, finance, and marketing fields. The students exhibited affirmative corporate social responsibility perceptions and attitudes with a heightened focus on acting ethically and a diminished focus on financial considerations. A key lesson learned from this study is the need for the continued development of CSR and general ethics across business school curriculums in Sudan. (shrink)

Uma história inicial exemplifica a extensão dos problemas com que doentes e profissionais de saúde se confrontam hoje, nas fases finais de vida. O desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico do último século onginou problemas de índole moral que levaram à criação de um novo corpo teórico que complementa a ética médica, incapaz de, por si só, dar resposta aos problemas da biomedicina actual. No artigo aborda-se esta evolução e tipificam-se os problemas associados com as intervenções médicas em fim de vida. From (...) it's very beginnings till the end of the XIX th century medicine has always been devoted to the care of those in pain and suffering. The growing core of knowledge and it's interpretative theories have evolved, of course, but the moral structure of medical profession has remained almost unchanged until then. The fast growing capacities of the medical applied science and technology in the XXth century implied a new set of moral problems. Among them end of life decisions which became much more than medical problems. We briefly show how these problems changed medical morality and social evaluation of medical actions and how these generated a new theoretical core -the bioethical one. (shrink)

Automatic synonym extraction plays an important role in many natural language processing systems, such as those involving information retrieval and question answering. Recently, research has focused on extracting semantic relations from word embeddings since they capture relatedness and similarity between words. However, using word embeddings alone poses problems for synonym extraction because it cannot determine whether the relation between words is synonymy or some other semantic relation. In this paper, we present a novel solution for this problem by proposing the (...) SynoExtractor pipeline, which can be used to filter similar word embeddings to retain synonyms based on specified linguistic rules. Our experiments were conducted using KSUCCA and Gigaword embeddings and trained with CBOW and SG models. We evaluated automatically extracted synonyms by comparing them with Alma’any Arabic synonym thesauri. We also arranged for a manual evaluation by two Arabic linguists. The results of experiments we conducted show that using the SynoExtractor pipeline enhances the precision of synonym extraction compared to using the cosine similarity measure alone. SynoExtractor obtained a 0.605 mean average precision for the King Saud University Corpus of Classical Arabic with 21% improvement over the baseline and a 0.748 MAP for the Gigaword corpus with 25% improvement. SynoExtractor outperformed the Sketch Engine thesaurus for synonym extraction by 32% in terms of MAP. Our work shows promising results for synonym extraction suggesting that our method can also be used with other languages. (shrink)

Some of the human needs are more important than others in order to be inevitable. One of these needs which cannot be avoided is the need for belonging to any authority. Whatever the name, religion, nation, homeland, flag etc. all these concepts are the reflections of the sense of belonging that comes with human existence. This article will discuss how Kuwaiti novelist Saud Alsanousi reflects the crisis of a child who is born from a secret relationship with a Filipino (...) woman's son who came to Kuwait as a housekeeper in Kuwait. When he returned to Kuwait, where he carried his passport and felt himself unfamiliar in the Philippines because of his physical structure and the Arabs, he was again excluded by his relatives because of his Filipino mother. The novel tries to draw attention to the socio-economic problems of workers coming from South East Asia to the Gulf countries, especially from the character of Jose, who has a nauseous mood due to the uncertainty between Philippine-Kuwait and Christian-Muslim affiliations. The introduction of foreign workers who constitute more than half of the population in the Gulf countries will be reviewed. Afterwards, a short summary of the novel will be given and the main theme of the lack of disability will be analyzed. Summary: In 1973, Syria and Egypt started a air strike against Israel in order to recover their lost territory in the previous wars and their reputation in the international area. Some Western countries -especially the United States- have shown all kinds of military aid to Israel in the face of this attack. Thanks to these aids the Syrian and Egyptian armies have not achieved their intended goals. This attitude of Western countries to Israel has attracted the reaction of other Gulf countries -especially the Saudi administration- which has a large amount of oil reserves. Gulf countries -which have not gotten a strong military option- tried to use the oil in their hands for the first time as a political trump card. These oil-exporting countries have reduced oil production in response. As a result, the economies of Western countries which were industrialized and dependent on oil have been negatively affected by this decision. In contrast, Gulf States have gained a sudden and massive fortune due to oil prices rising three or four times. The Gulf States, which have led this wealth to development in many areas like education, health, urbanism, etc. The need for qualified staff in these fields was supplied by other Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria, and Sudan. However, as the years passed oil prices decreased and so oil revenues decreased. This reduction led the Gulf States -which have only oil-based economies- to look for cheaper labor. While the foreign employment provided from the Arab countries previously later this need has begun to supply from far East Asian countries which are economically very weak. Vast number of employees emigrated to the Gulf countries to work in the labor service sector with very low wages especially from the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. This segment -which has employed with very low wages- has been subjected to injustice and discrimination. The injustices faced by the Far East Asian foreign labor force deprived of social rights have been the subject of many painful stories over time. The modern novel -which aims to reflect the life and the human being with all its details- has reflected the stories of the victims of that employers. Saq al-Bamboo (Bamboo Bar) is one of these novels which has published by Kuwaiti writer Saud Alsanousi in 2012. Within a short time after the publication of the work the novel was interested in the Arab world and in 2013 he was awarded the International Arabic Novelist Prize. The novel is consisting of five chapters and each chapter is divided into three sections 1,2,3... The author conveys the crisis of unetnicity from Jose’s chracter who was born from a Filipino mother and a Kuwaiti father. A translator named Ibrahim Selâm -which is a translation of the souvenirs and diaries belonging to Jose from the Philippine language to Arabic is intended to increase the realism of the work. Josephine -who came to Kuwait to work from the Philippines- was settled in 1985 in one of the country's most reputable families. The old woman who owns the house has a son named Rasheed. Rasheed was interested in Josephine who worked as a servant in their house and he married her with a secret marriage. Because the marriage of a Kuwaiti man and a foreign woman who was working as a housekeeper in Kuwait is accepted as a great shame that will cast a shadow on the dignity and honor of the family the marriage which was concealed by the couple inside and outside of the house, which could only come together with privacy has appeared after months. Rasheed -who was expelled from the house with Josephine- has temporarily found another house. Rasheed and his wife, who thought that his mother's attitude would change as their children were born have disappointed. Rasheed after realizing that his mother would never be satisfied, finally lost his ability to resist this crisis and sent his wife back to. With this development the problem of-identity crisis of Jose’s chracter is dealt with in a multi-faceted way. Jose, who left his age with his mother from Kuwait, had suffered from familial negativities that had passed through Kuwait years later in his twenties, and “familial negativities through his return to Kuwait and depressions caused by the sense of belonging. In an interesting coincidence when he met Gassân, one of the closest friends of Jose’s father in the Philippines, he returned to his dream Paradise ’Kuwait”. The journey from Jesus who has known as “Arabo to “Jesus” started with great hope because he was born from a Kuwaiti father in his own near the Philippines and likened to Arabs alike. But perhaps more of the crisis in the Philippines is waiting for him in Kuwait. Because his father was killed during the years when the Iraqi army occupied Kuwait. Although his father's mother welcomed Jose at first, exclusionary attitude towards foreigners in Kuwait caused her to take a negative attitude towards here grandson. The work is a continuation of the tradition of novels of criticism of the Arab society that has been going on for almost a century. The fact that novel was able to make deep psychological analyzes with his comprehensible language and simple style without being ambiguous and to keep the tension alive by leaving the problems at the end of the episodes and thus to provide immersion in this way reinforced the fictional soundness of the work. The novel also presents fictional material within the Arab society for the researchers in the field of religion psychology and sociology of religion, in order to show how a non-Muslim feels amoung the Muslim society. (shrink)

In late 2019, an infectious disease with a high rate of human-to-human transmission was identified in Wuhan, China, which was called Covid-19. In a short time, this disease affected several regions of the world and became a pandemic, with huge impacts on people's lives and the environment. This article aims to investigate the existing relationships between health and the environment, at the moment of confronting Covid-19 in Brazil, focusing on the socioenvironmental issues of sanitation and agglomeration and its consequences/limits for (...) prevention/care in Public Health. For the development of the research, a systematic review was carried out between May and June 2020. The article brings aspects about the industrial revolution and its relationship with life forms; the issue of sanitation, agglomeration as a reflection of geographical inequalities and their impact on combating Covid-19. Thus, there is an urgent need to understand the various health measures that dialogue with environmental, social and political actions that need to be built, in the various dimensions, in order to fight socio-environmental inequalities. (shrink)

BackgroundFear of failure is described as a “dispositional tendency to avoid failure in achievement settings.” It may potentially and adversely affect students’ ability to perform well in their educational activities.ObjectivesTo measure FoF among medical students at King Saud University, FoF between men and women, academic levels, grade point average, and other factors among medical students were compared.MethodA cross-sectional observational study was carried out using a stratified random sampling method. A total of 455 medical students completed “the Performance Failure Appraisal (...) Inventory” during the academic year 2019–2020 at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.ResultsThe results showed that the mean of FoF was −0.3117. Moreover, higher levels of fear of devaluing one’s self-estimate were seen in women, and higher levels of fear of important others losing interest were seen in men. A significant relation was seen between different academic levels and fear of shame and embarrassment, fear of upsetting important others, as well as FoF. Higher levels of FoF were seen in those who had a GPA below 3.5 and a GPA greater than 4.9. Also, it was high in students who were not interested in studying medicine. The Cronbach’s α value of 0.93 of all items indicates good internal consistency, and the factor analysis confirms five items of an instrument.ConclusionThe overall level of FoF was low among medical students at King Saud University. However, the domains and levels of FoF differed significantly according to gender, academic level, GPA, and interest in studying medicine. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo propõe pensar sobre as vicissitudes do cuidado na rede pública de atenção psicossocial e sobre a fundamentação de uma perspectiva ético-dialógica de trabalho a partir de contribuições bakhtinianas. A reflexão se entretece na análise de impasses e possibilidades para a práxis em um Centro de Atenção Psicossocial da Região Metropolitana I do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. O estudo é resultado da pesquisa de mestrado vinculada ao Programa de Pós-graduação em Saúde Pública da Escola Nacional de Saúde (...) Pública Sergio Arouca da Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas com os profissionais e observação participante no cotidiano da instituição. A partir das análises realizadas sob o prisma do Construcionismo Social e do recurso de análise de práticas discursivas e produção de sentidos, verificamos a presença de posicionamentos contraditórios expressos em percepções que se mostraram ao mesmo tempo consonantes e conflitantes com pressupostos ético-dialógicos. ABSTRACT This paper proposes to think about the vicissitudes of care in the public psychosocial care network and about the fundamentals of an ethical-dialogical perspective of work with grounds in the Bakhtinian contributions. The reflection is interwoven in the analysis of the impasses and possibilities for the praxis in one Centro de Atenção Psicossocial - [Psychosocial Care Center - PCC] in the metropolitan area of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The study is the result of a Master’s Degree research, linked to the Public Health Postgraduate Program of the Sergio Arouca National Public Health School of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. Semi-structured interviews and participant observation were carried out with professionals during the institutional routine. From the analyses performed under the perspective of Social Constructionism and using the resource of analysis of discursive practices and meaning production, we verified the presence of contradicting positions expressed in perceptions that are both aligned and conflicting with dialogical ethics assumptions. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyze the concept of desire in the ethical project of Spinoza. On the first part, the pathway to the concept of desire is recovered, leading to the preposition nine of the third part of Ethics, in which the concept of desire is defined as the essence of human being. On the second part, taking into consideration the partial results of a research developed in the field of mental health that aims to understand the motives of internment (...) of children and adolescents in a psychiatric institution with the characteristics of an asylum, it will be developed an analysis of two distinct dimensions of this study considering the concepts of Spinoza’s Ethic. (shrink)

The main objective of this work is to understand the daily practices of user management in post-reformist devices in the Brazilian mental health field. Through Foucault's genealogical work on government practices, understood as forms of conducting the behavior of others, it is possible to open a possible field for the study of the practices of psi knowledge, considering them as forms of management that act by through the free and natural acts of individuals. More specifically, our goal is to examine (...) day-to-day practices on some reformist devices such as CAPS through user files. Basically, two driving models have been found in the new devices: 1) Cases with frank intervention of production of commitments and agreements with users, seeking the entry of this to varied activities and political leadership ; 2) Cases with little response from the user, in which the forms of conduction are implemented by policies of inclusion of family members and close reference characters in the management of the patient's life. (shrink)

RESUMO Em “Ecce Homo”, Nietzsche apresenta-se ao mesmo tempo como terapeuta e enfermo. Se nos seus escritos ele concebe o filósofo como médico da cultura, nesse livro é também como paciente que comparece. Compreender as razões que o levaram a proceder dessa maneira em “Ecce Homo”, é o problema que presidirá este trabalho. Tomando como ponto de partida a análise dos primeiros capítulos do livro, contamos de início esclarecer a dupla condição de seu autor: a de terapeuta e enfermo, explorando (...) em particular sua ideia de se tomar em mãos. Examinando o último capítulo à luz dessas análises, estaremos então em condições de nos perguntar sobre o que permite a Nietzsche passar da condição de médico de si mesmo à de médico da cultura. Esperamos elucidar desse modo a relação intrínseca que ele afirma existir entre suas concepções de filosofia e vida. ABSTRACT In “Ecce Homo”, Nietzsche presents himself, at the same time, both as a doctor and a sufferer. If in his writings he conceives the philosopher as the physician of the culture, in this book he also appears as a patient. The present paper aims at questioning about the reasons which led Nietzsche to adopt this way of doing in “Ecce Homo”. Taking the analysis of the first chapters of this book as a start point, we intend to clarify, first of all, its authors’ dual condition as both a doctor and a sufferer, particularly exploring his idea of taking himself in hand. Then examining the last chapter of the book in the light of these analyses, we attempt to find out what allows Nietzsche to make the transition from his condition of being his own doctor to the condition of physician of the culture. Thereby, we aim at elucidating the fundamental relationship between Nietzsche’s conceptions of philosophy and of life. (shrink)

A new continuous version of the inverse flexible Weibull model is proposed and studied. Some of its properties such as quantile function, moments and generating functions, incomplete moments, mean deviation, Lorenz and Bonferroni curves, the mean residual life function, the mean inactivity time, and the strong mean inactivity time are derived. The failure rate of the new model can be “increasing-constant,” “bathtub-constant,” “bathtub,” “constant,” “J-HRF,” “upside down bathtub,” “increasing,” “upside down-increasing-constant,” and “upside down.” Different copulas are used for deriving many (...) bivariate and multivariate type extensions. Different non-Bayesian well-known estimation methods under uncensored scheme are considered and discussed such as the maximum likelihood estimation, Anderson Darling estimation, ordinary least square estimation, Cramér-von-Mises estimation, weighted least square estimation, and right tail Anderson Darling estimation methods. Simulation studies are performed for comparing these estimation methods. Finally, two real datasets are analyzed to illustrate the importance of the new model. (shrink)

Impaired neurodevelopmental outcome, in particular cognitive impairment, after neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy is a major concern for parents, clinicians, and society. This study aims to investigate the potential benefits of using advanced quantitative electroencephalography analysis for early prediction of cognitive outcomes, assessed here at 2 years of age. EEG data were recorded within the first week after birth from a cohort of twenty infants with neonatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. A proposed regression framework was based on two different sets of features, namely graph-theoretical (...) features derived from the weighted phase-lag index and entropies metrics represented by sample entropy, permutation entropy, and spectral entropy. Both sets of features were calculated within the noise-assisted multivariate empirical mode decomposition domain. Correlation analysis showed a significant association in the delta band between the proposed features, graph attributes and entropy features from the neonatal EEG data and the cognitive development at age two years. These features were used to train and test the tree ensemble regression models. The highest prediction performance was reached to 14.27 root mean square error, 12.07 mean absolute error, and 0.45 R-squared using the entropy features with a boosted tree regression model. Thus, the results demonstrate that the proposed qEEG features show the state of brain function at an early stage; hence, they could serve as predictive biomarkers of later cognitive impairment, which could facilitate identifying those who might benefit from early targeted intervention. (shrink)

The 3D Prandtl fluid flow through a bidirectional extending surface is analytically investigated. Cattaneo–Christov fluid model is employed to govern the heat and mass flux during fluid motion. The Prandtl fluid motion is mathematically modeled using the law of conservations of mass, momentum, and energy. The set of coupled nonlinear PDEs is converted to ODEs by employing appropriate similarity relations. The system of coupled ODEs is analytically solved using the well-established mathematical technique of HAM. The impacts of various physical parameters (...) over the fluid state variables are investigated by displaying their corresponding plots. The augmenting Prandtl parameter enhances the fluid velocity and reduces the temperature and concentration of the fluid. The momentum boundary layer boosts while the thermal boundary layer mitigates with the rising elastic parameter strength. Furthermore, the enhancing thermal relaxation parameter ) reduces the temperature distribution, whereas the augmenting concentration parameter drops the strength of the concentration profile. The increasing Prandtl parameter declines the fluid temperature while the augmenting Schmidt number drops the fluid concentration. The comparison of the HAM technique with the numerical solution shows an excellent agreement and hence ascertains the accuracy of the applied analytical technique. This work finds applications in numerous fields involving the flow of non-Newtonian fluids. (shrink)

Due to the advance computer technology, the use of probability distributions has been raised up to solve the real life problems. These applications are found in reliability engineering, computer sciences, economics, psychology, survival analysis, and some others. This study offers a new probability model called Marshall–Olkin Extended Gumbel Type-II which can model various shapes of the failure rate function. The proposed distribution is capable to model increasing, decreasing, reverse J-shaped, and upside down bathtub shapes of the failure rate function. Various (...) statistical properties of the proposed distribution are derived such as alternate expressions for the density and distribution function, special cases of MOEGT-II distribution, quantile function, Lorenz curve, and Bonferroni curve. Estimation of the unknown parameters is carried out by the method of maximum likelihood. A simulation study is conducted using three different iterative methods with different samples of sizes n. The usefulness and potentiality of the MOEGT-II distribution have been shown using three real life data sets. The MOEGT-II distribution has been demonstrated as better fit than Exponentiated Gumbel Type-II, Marshall–Olkin Gumbel Type-II, Gumbel Type-II, Marshall–Olkin–Frechet, Frechet, Burr III, Log Logistic, Beta Inverse Weibull, and Kumaraswamy Inverse Weibull distributions. (shrink)

The question that this paper tries to answer is Q: “Can good academic bioethics be done without commitment to moral theory?” It is argued that the answer to Q is an unequivocal “Yes” for most of what we could call “critical bioethics,” that is, the kind of bioethics work that primarily criticizes positions or arguments already in the literature or put forward by policymakers. The answer is also “Yes” for much of empirical bioethics. The second part of the paper then (...) provides an analysis of Q in relation to “constructive bioethics,” that is, bioethics work aimed at providing an argument for a particular position. In this part, it is argued that a number of the approaches or methods used that initially look like they involve no commitment to moral theory, nevertheless, involve such a commitment. This is shown to be the case for reflective equilibrium, mid-level theory, the use of theory fragments, and argument by analogy. (shrink)

In this book, S. A. Lloyd offers a radically new interpretation of Hobbes's laws of nature, revealing them to be not egoistic precepts of personal prudence but rather moral instructions for obtaining the common good.

The status quo: dogmatism, the biopsychosocial model, and alternatives -- What there is: of mind and brain -- How we know: understanding the mind -- What is scientific method? -- Reading Karl Jaspers's General Psychopathology -- What is scientific method in psychiatry? -- Darwin's dangerous method: the essentialist fallacy -- What we value: the ethics of psychiatry -- Desire and self: Hellenistic and Islamic approaches -- On the nature of mental illness: disease or myth? -- Order out of chaos: from (...) insanity to DSM-III to a pluralistic nosology -- A theory of DSM-IV: ideal types -- Dimensions versus categories -- The perils of belief: psychosis -- The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune: depression -- Life's rollercoaster: mania -- Being self-aware: insight -- Calvinism or hedonism? -- Truth and statistics: problems of empirical psychiatry -- A climate of opinion: what remains of psychoanalysis -- Being there: existential psychotherapy -- Beyond eclecticism: teaching psychotherapy in the twenty-first century -- Bridging the biology/psychology dichotomy: the hopes of integrationism -- Why it is hard to be pluralist. (shrink)

Study of Hans-Georg Gadamer's and Julius Stenzel's interpretations of Plato.