Application of technologies has an important role in agricultural development. Identifying and assessing the impacts of agricultural technologies is necessary. This study aimed at assessing the impacts of laser levelling economically, socially, environmentally, and technically in the viewpoint of the agricultural experts and identifying factors determining their perception of the impacts. The study samples (151 experts) were selected using multi-stage random sampling in Fars Province, Iran. The results revealed that experts considered uniform distribution of water, using conservation tillage, facilitating agricultural (...) activities, decreased water consumption and decrease of water wasting as the most important technical impacts of laser levelling technology. The most environmentally important impacts were the decrease of soil erosion and retention of crop residues. Experts stated the most significant social impacts as improvement in villages living conditions and sense of belonging to rural areas. Besides, an increase of income and reduction of inputs costs were among the economic impacts of laser levelling technology. According to the results, attitude towards water and soil resources conservation and environmental beliefs had the highest direct effect on individual perception toward impacts. Practical recommendations have been presented based on the results of the study. (shrink)

Dynamic topological logic is a multi-modal logic that was introduced for reasoning about dynamic topological systems, i.e. structures of the form $\langle{\mathfrak{X}, f}\rangle $, where $\mathfrak{X}$ is a topological space and $f$ is a continuous function on it. The problem of finding a complete and natural axiomatization for this logic in the original tri-modal language has been open for more than one decade. In this paper, we give a natural axiomatization of $\textsf{DTL}$ and prove its strong completeness with respect to (...) the class of all dynamic topological systems. Our proof system is infinitary in the sense that it contains an infinitary derivation rule with countably many premises and one conclusion. It should be remarked that $\textsf{DTL}$ is semantically non-compact, so no finitary proof system for this logic could be strongly complete. Moreover, we provide an infinitary axiomatic system for the logic ${\textsf{DTL}}_{\mathcal{A}}$, i.e. the $\textsf{DTL}$ of Alexandrov spaces, and show that it is strongly complete with respect to the class of all dynamical systems based on Alexandrov spaces. (shrink)

Background: Nurses face challenges regarding professional identify. Being unaware of these challenges and not owning positive professional identify leads to a lack of self-confidence. Thus, nurses face problems in interpersonal communication and lose their attachment to their profession. Few studies have engaged with impediments to forming positive professional identity in relation to intensive care nurses. Objective: The purpose of this study is to investigate the impediments to forming positive professional identity in nurses working in intensive care unit. Research design: In (...) this study, the conventional content analysis method was used in order to obtain the impediments to forming positive professional identities in nurses. Data were collected through 15 semi-structured interviews and 2 focus group interviews from March 2015 to June 2016. Purposive sampling was used and participants were recruited until data saturation was reached; they were then analyzed using the conventional content analysis method. Participants and research context: In total, 24 intensive care unit nurses from one hospital in Northern Iran were selected through purposive sampling. Ethical consideration: This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences. Findings: Four main themes of professional identity challenges were extracted from the analysis of the data: neglect of professional status of nursing; distrust of nursing knowledge; unprofessional performance; and low professional attraction. Discussion and conclusion: Nurses stated that the neglect of the professional status of nursing and distrust of nursing knowledge have always been a hindrance in forming a positive professional identity. They also mentioned that unprofessional performance and low professional attraction are the other influencing factors in this regard. Thus, detecting these factors can guide nurses and their managers towards creating positive professional identity, and as a result, will improve their job satisfaction, professional advancement, and durability. (shrink)

A major focus of attention in psychology has been on the consequences and determinants of well-being. Religiosity and personality have both been shown to predict mental health and well-being, but the two predictors have not often been investigated together. In 4 studies involving 7 surveys in various social and religious contexts, the relations among well-being, religious orientation, and personality factors were studied. Results showed that Extraversion was the single strongest correlate of higher levels of subjective and psychological well-being. Religiosity had (...) null or weak positive relationships with well-being, and managed to explain variance in some aspects of positive functioning beyond personality factors. The null or week relationship of religiosity with well-being beyond personality was consistent across the HEXACO and the Big Five models of personality structure. It has been suggested that religion is relatively more important for eudaimonic than for hedonic way of living. (shrink)

In this paper, the notion of the radical of a filter in BL-algebras is defined and several characterizations of the radical of a filter are given. Also we prove that A/F is an MV-algebra if and only if Ds ⊆ F. After that we define the notion of semi maximal filter in BL-algebras and we state and prove some theorems which determine the relationship between this notion and the other types of filters of a BL-algebra. Moreover, we prove that A/F (...) is a semi simple BL-algebra if and only if F is a semi maximal filter of A. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. (shrink)

Soumises à une politique discriminatoire privilégiant le centre, les minorités ethniques en Iran sont depuis longtemps ciblées par la répression étatique, ce qui provoque des mouvements de rébellion. Le soulèvement de 2019 a révélé une nouvelle facette de la violence de l’État contre les minorités dans des périphéries du pays où le développement économique a été délibérément freiné par le régime. Ces affrontements témoignent d’une crise de citoyenneté dans le pays qui mérite une attention particulière.

The formalist linguists are of the opinion that the literary language is formed by polishing and foregrounding the practiced slang. Many of this literary tricks used in foregrounding are categorized; but there exist some literary tricks that have not been dealt with and are not named or addressed in the available categories. The attempt is made in this study to find an answer to the questions that why has Mandanipour in his masterpiece, “Shargh-e Banafshe” achieved a superior language that is (...) outstanding among his colleagues of the same era and has become a model in advanced language for the writers to come based on adopting defamiliarization theory in the Leech foregrounding format? Assessing the language of this unique work indicates that in addition to introducing an innovation in the usual styles in contemporary writing and the themes he has allowed assimilation and metaphor and other obsolete styles in his language; and yet has used special literary tricks that have never been tried or tested before. This approach has pat language in story writing to a high position. (shrink)

This article investigates conceptual metaphors for Covid-19 in two languages, American English and Persian, using two approaches, namely Lakoff & Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory and Kövecses’s...

We define the set of double complemented elements in BL-algebras and state and prove some theorems which determines properties of these sets. We introduce the notion of an almost top element and study the properties of these elements.

As studies continue to accumulate on leader humility, it has become clear that humility in a leader is largely beneficial to his or her followers. While the majority of the empirical research on this topic has demonstrated the positive effects of leader humility, this study challenges that consensus by arguing that a leader’s humble behavior can have contradictory outcomes in followers’ voice behavior. Drawing on attachment theory, we develop a model which takes into account the ways in which leader humility (...) influences the seemingly contradictory voice behavior of followers, i.e., inducing challenging voice, and defensive voice depending on the followers’ sense of security as reflected by feeling trusted and self-efficacy for voice. The results of this empirical study confirm that leader humility influences followers’ voice in a contradictory way through their sense of security. (shrink)

Background: Euthanasia is a controversial issue in many countries. However, there is little evidence about attitudes of nurses and nursing students toward euthanasia. Research aims: The present study aimed to compare nurses and nursing students' attitudes toward euthanasia. Research design: This is a descriptive cross-sectional study. Participants and research context: Using census sampling, 390 nurses and 125 nursing students were enrolled in this study. Methods: Data were collected using a socio-demographic questionnaire and Euthanasia Attitude Scale that included 20 items that (...) sought to record participants’ level of agreement with euthanasia based on a Likert-type scale. Ethical considerations: Objectives of the study were stated for all samples, and emphasized the confidentiality of their specifics and responses, and informed written consent was obtained from all participants. Findings: The mean score of nurses and nursing students’ attitudes about euthanasia was 3.14 ± 0.26 and 3.22 ± 0.24 out of 5, respectively. The majority of nurses and nursing students had a positive attitude toward euthanasia. There was a significant statistical difference between the attitudes of nurses and nursing students to euthanasia. Discussion: The results indicated that the majority of students and nurses had a positive attitude regarding euthanasia. Conclusion: It was recommended to conduct more studies on euthanasia in Iran. (shrink)

Abstract:Nicolette Bragg asks Grant Farred about the legacy of his text Martin Heidegger Saved My Life and what it means to think.

BackgroundCognitive impairments are prevalent in patients with unipolar and bipolar depressive disorder. Considering the fact assessing cognitive functions is increasingly feasible for clinicians and researchers, targeting these problems in treatment and using them at baseline as predictors of response to treatment can be very informative.MethodIn a naturalistic, retrospective study, data from 120 patients with UDD and BDD were analyzed. Patients received 20 sessions of bilateral rTMS and were assessed regarding their depressive symptoms, sustained attention, working memory, and executive functions, using (...) the Beck Depression Inventory and Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery Cambridge, at baseline and after the end of rTMS treatment course. Generalized estimating equations and logistic regression were used as the main statistical methods to test the hypotheses.ResultsFifty-three percentage of all patients responded to treatment. In particular, 53.1% of UDD patients and 46.9% of BDD patients responded to treatment. Bilateral rTMS improved all cognitive functions except for visual memory and resulted in more modulations in the working memory of UDD compared to BDD patients. More improvements in working memory were observed in responded patients and visual memory, age, and sex were determined as treatment response predictors. Working memory, visual memory, and age were identified as treatment response predictors in BDD and UDD patients, respectively.ConclusionBilateral rTMS improved cold cognition and depressive symptoms in UDD and BDD patients, possibly by altering cognitive control mechanisms, and processing negative emotional bias. (shrink)

This response to Bruce Janz’s African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition (2023) uses the work of Martin Heidegger and Stanley Cavell to understand the relationship among philosophy, thinking, and place and, most crucially, Africa as a place from which philosophy might be thought, that is, might be proposed as native to philosophy. Invoking the late Heidegger, for whom thinking presents itself as the question, and Cavell’s use of Ralph Waldo Emerson as a thinker native to America, the difficulty is raised as (...) to how these relations manifest themselves in Janz’s Enactivist Cognition. (shrink)

The article investigates the significance of syntax in the multilingual EU law. It attempts to respond to the question whether syntax is apt to contribute to the uniformity of that law and how, with regard to this function, it relates to the (widely disputed yet uncontested) semantic and pragmatic methods of achieving such a uniformity. In order to respond to this question, the article firstly, recalls fundamental concepts which would help conceptualize the endeavour and, secondly, presents examples of analysis of (...) syntax arrangements which can be deemed representative for the study of the said problem of contribution. The study finds that EU law (expressed in 24 official languages which have equal authentic status) relies on diversified syntax of its respective constitutive languages. Syntax structures used in respective language versions of EU law represent narrower, law-specific, form of syntax structures available in these languages. Its specificity is determined mostly by legislative traditions of respective EU member states. Syntactic structures of EU law produced in different official languages do not represent a single pattern because of diversified mode of producing illocutionary value of provisions in which strongly idiomatic modal verbs (modal operators) and even special modal structures (not necessarily containing modal verbs) are used to express legal norms. They also differ when it comes to their law-specific compositionality, i.e. flexibility of different syntax structure to produce the same meaning and, in the same time, to preserve their genre/register informational value. Notwithstanding, these structures have well pronounced and system-significant common features within respective Germanic, Romanic, and Slavic families of languages in which EU law is mostly reproduced. The sentence structure and the relevant register of EU law provisions are the same for respective versions of EU texts of law expressed in the languages belonging to the respective three language families which were examined for the sake of this study. These common features are re-enforced by the synoptic mode of producing EU law which imposes formal resemblance of provisions reproduced in respective EU official languages to each other. The multilingual EU legislator also uses patterns which grant legal text the relevant register, yet its specific EU character ultimately transpires through semantic aspects of EU texts rather than their mere syntax. The unity of the system is achieved most strongly through the EU specific interpretation, where the teleological methods (which can be conceived as a language means to achieve EU law goals and objectives at the pragmatic level) are of utmost importance. Thus, there is no EU-specific syntax which would, as such, contribute to unity of EU law. Instead, unity is achieved in the area of semantics and pragmatics. The well exposed anaphoric character of EU law (as any other type of law) may contribute to narrowing down possibility for differentiation of respective language versions of EU law. (shrink)

In _Entre Nous_ Grant Farred examines the careers of international football stars Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez, along with his own experience playing for an amateur township team in apartheid South Africa, to theorize the relationship between sports and the intertwined experiences of relation, separation, and belonging. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's concept of relation and Heideggerian ontology, Farred outlines how various relationships—the significantly different relationships Messi has with his club team FC Barcelona and the Argentine national team; Farred's shifting modes (...) of relation as he moved between his South African team and his Princeton graduate student team; and Suarez's deep bond with Uruguay's national team coach Oscar Tabarez—demonstrate the ways the politics of relation both exist within and transcend sports. Farred demonstrates that approaching sports philosophically offers particularly insightful means of understanding the nature of being in the world, thereby opening new paths for exploring how the self is constituted in its relation to the other. (shrink)

This collection of essays marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Frantz Fanon’s classic study of anticolonial struggle, _The Wretched of the Earth_. Scholars explore the relevance of Fanon’s work for current modes of psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, and political thought. One contributor reposes a classic question of postcolonial scholarship: what does it mean for a colonial Caribbean man to practice a Continental intellectual tradition? Others identify Fanon’s experiences working at a mental institution in colonial French Algeria as a powerful (...) influence on his psychoanalytic perspective. This issue revitalizes Fanon’s canonical status as Third World theorist by asserting that the main imperatives of Fanon’s work remain as urgent as ever: combating the psychic and physical violence of colonialism, achieving real forms of liberation for colonized peoples, and ending the degradation of people of color. Contributors: Matthew Abraham, Gerard Aching, John E. Drabinski, Grant Farred, Nigel C. Gibson, Priyamvada Gopal, Joy James, Ranjana Khanna, Alfred J. López, Miguel Mellino, Simon Morgan Wortham, Richard Pithouse Grant Farred is Professor of Africana Studies and English at Cornell University. He is the former editor of the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ and the author, most recently, of_ Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football_. (shrink)

This essay uses Derrida's concept of autoimmunity to critique Homeland, a television show that deals with an American prisoner of war who has been ‘turned’ into an operative for an al Queda-like movement. Autoimmunity is critical to thinking the ways in which the existence of a turned POW within the state, who belongs visibly to the state, presents a particularly heteronomic challenge to how the distinction between Self and Other operates. This Self who has taken up the cause of the (...) Other presents, this essay argues, an infinitely greater threat to the state precisely because it cannot be identified as Other, precisely because bears no ostensible traces of the Other. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology is a tradition that is as old as philosophy itself, so much so that it might be said to be indistinguishable from philosophy itself. Philosophical anthropology, extending as it does from Socrates to Sartre, best describes the work of V.Y. Mudimbe. Anthropology, broadly conceived as the science that studies human origins, the material and cultural development of humanity, is always Mudimbe’s first line of philosophical inquiry. It is certainly Mudimbe’s interest in anthropology that allows him to conduct his (...) investigations into Africa, its modes of thinking, and colonialism and its continuing effects on the continent. Writing on the latter issue in The Invention of Africa, Mudimbe, with his customary deftness of mind, argues that colonialism and its aftermath cannot by itself account for the continent’s extant condition: “The colonizing structure, even in its most extreme manifestations... might not be the only explanation for Africa’s present-day marginality. Perhaps this marginality could, more essentially, be understood from the perspective of wider hypotheses about the classification of beings and societies.” [ Making sense of Africa, in Mudimbe’s terms, must begin with a hypothesization that explicates how “beings and societies” come to be classified, the anthropological undertaking par excellence, which also requires a study of the forces that construct, implement and maintain these classifications. (shrink)

Rational decision making depends on what one believes, what one desires, and what one knows. In conventional decision models, beliefs are represented by probabilities and desires are represented by utilities. Software agents are knowledgeable entities capable of managing their own set of beliefs and desires, and they can decide upon the next operation to execute autonomously. They are also interactive entities capable of filtering communications and managing dialogues. Knowledgeability includes representing knowledge about the external world, reasoning with it, and sharing (...) it. Interactions include negotiations to perform tasks in cooperative, coordinative, and competitive ways. In this paper we focus on decision-making mechanisms for agent-based systems on the basis of agent interaction. We identify possible interaction scenarios and define mechanisms for decision making in uncertain environments. It is believed that software agents will become the underlying technology that offers the capability of distribution of competence, control, and information for the next generation of ubiquitous, distributed, and heterogeneous information systems. (shrink)

Rational decision making depends on what one believes, what one desires, and what one knows. In conventional decision models, beliefs are represented by probabilities and desires are represented by utilities. Software agents are knowledgeable entities capable of managing their own set of beliefs and desires, and they can decide upon the next operation to execute autonomously. They are also interactive entities capable of filtering communications and managing dialogues. Knowledgeability includes representing knowledge about the external world, reasoning with it, and sharing (...) it. Interactions include negotiations to perform tasks in cooperative, coordinative, and competitive ways. In this paper we focus on decision-making mechanisms for agent-based systems on the basis of agent interaction. We identify possible interaction scenarios and define mechanisms for decision making in uncertain environments. It is believed that software agents will become the underlying technology that offers the capability of distribution of competence, control, and information for the next generation of ubiquitous, distributed, and heterogeneous information systems. (shrink)

Taking up Jacques Derrida as a figure of thought in relation to Africa, this edited collection poses the questions: What is Derrida to Africa? And, its corollary, what is Africa to Derrida?

Introduction: sport and the event -- Ron Artest: the black body at rest (Alain Badiou) -- Eric Cantona: the body in motion (Gilles Deleuze) -- Zinedine Zidane: coup de boule (Jacques Derrida) -- Epilogue: being, event, and the philosophy of sport.

Each of the essays collected here presents one or more flashpoints or crises in a history of 20 th - and 21 st -century dwelling.

It is dwelling that allows mortals to initiate themselves in time and space. As such, dwelling constitutes the event of being. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger stipulates that dwelling can only be achieved through harmonious relations among the constituents, earth, sky, mortals and gods, of the “fourfold.” Heidegger writes, “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals – this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling.” (...) Initiating themselves in time and space is the great difficulty that the residents of Ilmorog, the remote village in postcolonial Kenya in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Petals of Blood is set, experience; in Petals of Blood, dwelling is what defines mortals’ being. (shrink)

This essay considers James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time as a philosophical contemplation on love. Drawing on sources such as the Bible, Jacques Derrida, and a host of Baldwin critics, this essay understands the Christian love of The Fire Next Time as asymmetrical. The asymmetry of love derives from its understanding of love as the responsibility to Self and Other that demands no reciprocation. Asymmetrical love makes itself vulnerable before the Other and, most importantly, it is a love that risks (...) itself absolutely by offering love to those who will do violence to the subject who gives love. (shrink)