The purpose of this research is to identify the extent of the efficiency of the internal control environment in the Palestinian higher educational institutions in Gaza Strip from the perspective of employees in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip, where researchers used in the study five universities. The researchers adopted in their study the descriptive and analytical approach. The research community consists of administrative employees and academic employees with administrative duties. Senior management or the University Council was excluded. The study (...) population compromises of (392) employees. A stratified random sample was chosen and (197) questionnaires were distributed. (160) questionnaires were received back with a return rate of (81.2%).The researchers used a questionnaire to collect that which then was analyzed using (SPSS) to get the results. The research found the following results: the absence of a fundamental difference between the responses of males and females. The lack of significant difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the variable age. The lack of significant difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the variable of years of service. And the existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the university variable. The existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the Qualification variable. The existence of a fundamental difference between the responses of the respondents attributed to the administrative level variable. The research found a group of recommendations including: the need to raise awareness of censorship as the basis for the protection of employees in all administrative levels from making mistake.Updating the systems and instructions of control periodically and parallel with the scientific progress and technology.Benefit from regional and international experiences in the application of internal control standards which commensurate with the administrative system of the institution. (shrink)

The ISA, based on system theory, is the best way to organize knowledge and exchange it. It depends on defining every system through its boundary, main processes within this boundary, and exchange with the environment through this boundary. It relies upon thermodynamics and information theory and is, therefore, applicable to all kinds of systems, which makes it most suitable for cross-disciplinary investigations and innovation. SD is complex and cross-disciplinary by its very nature and, therefore, the ISA is the best way (...) to investigate its different subsystems. Among the most important subsystems of SD are integrated bio-refineries and bio-fuels, both of which are investigated in this article. (shrink)

Abstract - The aim of the study is to identify the degree of administrative transparency in the Palestinian higher educational institutions in the Gaza Strip. In the study, the researchers adopted a descriptive and analytical method. The research population consisted of administrative staff, whether academic or administrative, except for those in senior management or the university council. The study population reached 392 employees. A random sample was selected (197). The number of questionnaires recovered was (160) with a recovery rate of (...) (81.2%). The researchers used a questionnaire for the data collection and were treated using SPSS to obtain the results. The results show that there is no significant difference between male responses and female responses due to gender variable. The results also confirm that there is no significant difference between respondents' responses due to the age variable. The results also showed a significant difference between respondents' responses attributed to the university variable. There is a fundamental difference between respondents' responses attributed to the scientifically qualified variable. The results also confirmed a significant difference between respondents' responses attributed to the management level variable. The results also confirmed a significant difference between respondents' responses due to variable years of service. The research reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is: The necessity of Palestinian universities to adhere to the application of transparency standards in all university activities. The need to benefit from regional and international experience in the application of transparency systems within universities and to examine the possibility of applying these systems in our universities. As well as the need to engage in the program of teaching transparency in universities, as it is confirmed that only five universities participated in this experiment. The importance of raising awareness among the employees of Palestinian universities to clarify the foundations of building transparency and its dimensions to represent the active supporter through workshops and seminars. (shrink)

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a long-term degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that mainly affects the motor system. The symptoms generally come on slowly over time. Early in the disease, the most obvious are shaking, rigidity, slowness of movement, and difficulty with walking. Doctors do not know what causes it and finds difficulty in early diagnosing the presence of Parkinson’s disease. An artificial neural network system with back propagation algorithm is presented in this paper for helping doctors in identifying (...) PD. Previous research with regards to predict the presence of the PD has shown accuracy rates up to 93% [1]; however, accuracy of prediction for small classes is reduced. The proposed design of the neural network system causes a significant increase of robustness. It is also has shown that networks recognition rates reached 100%. (shrink)

The study of politics seems endlessly beset by debates about method. At the core of these debates is a single unifying concern: should political scientists view themselves primarily as scientists, developing ever more sophisticated tools and studying only those phenomena to which such tools may fruitfully be applied? Or should they instead try to illuminate the large, complicated, untidy problems thrown up in the world, even if the chance to offer definitive explanations is low? Is there necessarily a tension between (...) these two endeavours? Are some domains of political inquiry more amenable to the building up of reliable, scientific knowledge than others, and if so, how should we deploy our efforts? In this book, some of the world's most prominent students of politics offer original discussions of these pressing questions, eschewing narrow methodological diatribes to explore what political science is and how political scientists should aspire to do their work. (shrink)

This article investigates the impacts of proper modeling of the wake effects and wind speed delays, between different wind turbines' rows, on the dynamic performance accuracy of the wind farms models. Three different modeling scenarios were compared to highlight the impacts of wake effects and wind speed time-delay models. In the first scenario, wind wake effect and time delay are ignored. Consequently, all wind turbines are assumed subjected to the same wind speed profile. The second scenario considers the wind wake (...) effect, and it was modeled by reducing the incident wind speed values by 0.5 m/s from one row to the next row facing the wind. The last scenario, the proposed model, used the wind wake effect model developed for wind turbines micrositting applications and considered the effect of the delay time between the wind speed profiles incident on the different wind turbines' rows. (shrink)

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a non-invasive method to identify markers of treatment response in major depressive disorder (MDD). In this review, existing literature was assessed to determine how EEG markers change with different modalities of MDD treatments, and to synthesize the breadth of EEG markers used in conjunction with MDD treatments. PubMed and EMBASE were searched from 2000 to 2021 for studies reporting resting EEG (rEEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation combined with EEG (TMS-EEG) measures in patients undergoing MDD treatments. The search (...) yielded 966 articles, 204 underwent full-text screening, and 51 studies were included for a narrative synthesis of findings along with confidence in the evidence. In rEEG studies, non-linear quantitative algorithms such as theta cordance and theta current density show higher predictive value than traditional linear metrics. Although less abundant, TMS-EEG measures show promise for predictive markers of brain stimulation treatment response. Future focus on TMS-EEG measures may prove fruitful, given its ability to target cortical regions of interest related to MDD. (shrink)

Using fMRI, we investigated how right temporal lobe gliomas affecting the posterior superior temporal sulcus alter neural processing observed during speech perception and production tasks. Behavioural language testing showed that three pre-operative neurosurgical patients with grade 2, grade 3 or grade 4 tumours had the same pattern of mild language impairment in the domains of object naming and written word comprehension. When matching heard words for semantic relatedness (a speech perception task), these patients showed under-activation in the tumour infiltrated right (...) superior temporal lobe compared to 61 neurotypical participants and 16 patients with tumours that preserved the right postero-superior temporal lobe, with enhanced activation within the (tumour-free) contralateral left superior temporal lobe. In contrast, when correctly naming objects (a speech production task), the patients with right postero-superior temporal lobe tumours showed higher activation than both control groups in the same right postero-superior temporal lobe region that was under-activated during auditory semantic matching. The task dependent pattern of under-activation during the auditory speech task and over-activation during object naming was also observed in eight stroke patients with right hemisphere infarcts that affected the right postero-superior temporal lobe compared to eight stroke patients with right hemisphere infarcts that spared it. These task-specific and site-specific cross-pathology effects highlight the importance of the right temporal lobe for language processing and motivate further study of how right temporal lobe tumours affect language performance and neural reorganisation. These findings may have important implications for surgical management of these patients, as knowledge of the regions showing functional reorganisation may help to avoid their inadvertent damage during neurosurgery. (shrink)

SC, CA, QA and QEA denote the class of Pinter’s substitution algebras, Tarski’s cylindric algebras, Halmos’ quasi-polyadic and quasi-polyadic equality algebras, respectively. Let . and . We show that the class of n dimensional neat reducts of algebras in K m is not elementary. This solves a problem in [2]. Also our result generalizes results proved in [1] and [2].

Descartes’s Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science provides a systematic interpretation of Descartes’s method in Rules for the Direction of the Mind and related texts. The book reconstructs Descartes’s method in its entirety and concretely demonstrates both the efficacy of the method in the sciences as well as the unity of the method from Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1620s) to Principles of Philosophy (1644). The principal thesis of the book is that Descartes’s method is a (...) problem-solving cognitive disposition (or habitus) that can be actualized in a variety of well-defined ways, depending always on the nature of problem. The book divides into five parts and eleven chapters. Parts I–II (Chapters 1–4) develop an interpretation of the historical and conceptual foundations of Descartes’s method (its operations and acquisition), while the remainder of the book (Parts III–V, which include Chapters 5–11) demonstrates the fruits of the method in solutions to problems in the sciences (above all, mathematics and optics). (shrink)

Responsible AI (RAI) guidelines aim to ensure that AI systems respect democratic values. While a step in the right direction, they currently fail to impact practice. Our work discusses reasons for this lack of impact and clusters them into five areas: (1) the abstract nature of RAI guidelines, (2) the problem of selecting and reconciling values, (3) the difficulty of operationalising RAI success metrics, (4) the fragmentation of the AI pipeline, and (5) the lack of internal advocacy and accountability. Afterwards, (...) we introduce a number of approaches to RAI from a range of disciplines, exploring their potential as solutions to the identified challenges. We anchor these solutions in practice through concrete examples, bridging the gap between the theoretical considerations of RAI and on-the-ground processes that currently shape how AI systems are built. Our work considers the socio-technical nature of RAI limitations and the resulting necessity of producing socio-technical solutions. (shrink)

This book focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic anthropology into an anthropological problem of cogitation, opening up a fascinating new dialogue between the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and art. Tarek Elhaik embarks on an inquiry composed of a series of cogitations based on fieldwork in an ecology of artistic and scientific practices: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from photographic montages to the videotaping of spirit seances; from artistic interventions in natural history museums to ongoing dialogues between performance (...) artists and marine scientists. The chapters examine the image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of interlocuters including artists Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, Silvia Gruner, Joan Jonas, and Patricia Lagarde. (shrink)

Sources such as diaries, letters and inventories suggest that certain places were preferred for music-making during the seventeenth century: the great chamber for eating and dancing, the chamber and the cabinet for private concerts, and the gallery for great occasions. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the ballroom appears in some beautiful castles and town mansions, equipped with a balcony all around or a small loft to house musicians. During the same period, some people had a cabinet devoted to (...) music. It is only during the second half of the century that we find precise terms such as ‘chamber for music’ at Chenonceau Castle or ‘music room’ as it appears in the well-known Parisian mansion of the duchesse de Guise. This evolution is naturally symptomatic of both the royal examples and the creation of multiple social circles, the so-called ‘salons’. (shrink)

Sumário - Capítulo I. Cultura, realidade, linguagem e lógica; Capítulo II. Premissas epistemológico - jurídicas; Capítulo III. Problemas de teoria geral do direito; Capítulo IV. Sobre a revogação; Capítulo V. Alguns casos concretos de revogação no direito tributário.

This study investigates whether audit partner gender is associated with the extent of auditor disclosure and the communication style regarding risks of material misstatements that are classified as key audit matters. Using a sample of UK firms during the 2013–2017 period, our results suggest that female audit partners are more likely than male audit partners to disclose more KAMs with more details after controlling for both client and audit firm attributes. Furthermore, female audit partners are found to use a less (...) optimistic tone and provide less readable audit reports, compared to their male counterparts, suggesting that behavioural variances between female and male audit partners may have significant implications on their writing style. Therefore, this study offers new insights on the role of audit partner gender in extended audit reporting. Our findings have important implications for audit firms, investors, policymakers and governments in relation to the development, implementation and enforcement of gender diversity. (shrink)

This book presents critical engagements with the work of Hent de Vries, widely regarded as one of the most important living philosophers of religion. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars discuss the role played by religion in philosophy; the emergence and possibilities of the category of religion; and the relation between religion and violence, secularism, and sovereignty. Together, they provide a synoptic view of how de Vries's work has prompted a reconceptualization of how religion should be studied, especially in (...) relation to theology, politics, and new media. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of religious studies, theology, and philosophy. (shrink)

The article examines Rawlss Law of Peoples as an attemptto extend the conception of public justification originallydeveloped in Political Liberalism to the internationaldomain. After briefly sketching the main elements of Rawlssconception of public justification, the article examineshow this is developed in Law of Peoples, pointingout the main differences with the domestic case. The articlethen tries to show that Rawlss justificatory strategy containsa number of inconsistencies which undermine the persuasivenessof the conception of international justice he advocates. Thisin turn can be traced (...) back to the failure fully to addressthe constituency problem facing theories ofpublic justification. (shrink)

In the recently discovered Cambridge manuscript, widely regarded as an early draft ofRules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes does not describe the mind as a ‘purely spiritual’ force ‘distinct from the whole body’. This has led some readers to speculate that Descartes did not embrace mind-body dualism in the Cambridge manuscript. In this article, I offer a detailed interpretation of Descartes's mind-body dualism in the established Charles Adam and Paul Tannery edition ofRules, and argue that, while differences between (...) the Cambridge manuscript and the established version ofRulesare significant, the relevant passages in the Cambridge manuscript preclude interpretation along both materialist and hylomorphic lines. I then offer an account of the development of Descartes's mind-body dualism between the Cambridge manuscript and the established version ofRules. What the Cambridge manuscript reveals is not Descartes before dualism, but rather Cartesian dualism in its barest form. (shrink)

Descartes’s most extensive discussion of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens is contained in Rule 8 of "Rules for the Direction of the Mind". Few reconstructions of Descartes’s discovery of the law of refraction take Rule 8 as their basis. In Rule 8, Descartes denies that the law of refraction can be discovered by purely mathematical means, and he requires that the law of refraction be deduced from physical principles about natural power or force, the (...) nature of the action of light, and the behavior of light rays in a variety of transparent media. For over a century, however, there has been broad agreement that Descartes discovered the law of refraction by purely mathematical means, and that he only later provided the relevant physical rationale (via comparisons or analogies) in Dioptrics II. I execute each step in Descartes’s proposed deduction of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens in Rule 8 and concretely show how Descartes could have discovered the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic by its means. Rule 8, I argue, reflects Descartes’s actual path to the discovery of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens. (shrink)

This paper posits that differences in corporate governance structure partly result from differences in institutional arrangements linked to business systems. We developed a new international triad of business systems: the Anglo-American, the Communitarian and the Emerging system, building on the frameworks of Choi et al. (British Academy of Management (Kynoch Birmingham) 1996, Management International Review 39, 257–279, 1999). A common factor determining the success of a corporate governance structure is the extent to which it is transparent to market forces. Such (...) transparency is more than pure financial transparency; as it can also be based on factors such as governmental, banking and other types of institutional transparency mechanism. There may also be a choice for firms to adopt voluntary corporate disclosure in situations where mandatory disclosure is not established. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1999 and the more recent corporate governance scandals such as Enron, Andersen and Worldcom in the United States and Ahold and Parmalat in Europe show that corporate governance and business ethics issues exist throughout the world. As an illustration we focus on Asia’s emerging1 markets, as, both in view of the pressure of globalization and taking into account the institutional arrangements peculiar to the emerging business system, these issues are important there. Particularly for those who have to find an accommodation between the corporate governance structures and disclosure standards of the Emerging system and those of the Anglo-American and Communitarian systems. (shrink)

This article aims to achieve two goals: to show that probability is not the only way of dealing with uncertainty ; and to provide evidence that logic-based methods can well support reasoning with uncertainty. For the latter claim, two paradigmatic examples are presented: logic programming with Kleene semantics for modelling reasoning from information in a discourse, to an interpretation of the state of affairs of the intended model, and a neural-symbolic implementation of input/output logic for dealing with uncertainty in dynamic (...) normative contexts. (shrink)

We give a new characterization of the class of completely representable cylindric algebras of dimension 2 #lt; n w via special neat embeddings. We prove an independence result connecting cylindric algebra to Martin''s axiom. Finally we apply our results to finite-variable first order logic showing that Henkin and Orey''s omitting types theorem fails for L n, the first order logic restricted to the first n variables when 2 #lt; n#lt;w. L n has been recently (and quite extensively) studied as a (...) many-dimensional modal logic. (shrink)

For most commentators, the universality of Descartes’s method goes hand in hand with the uniformity with which it must be applied to any problem in any science. I will henceforth refer to this as the Uniformity Thesis. Finding themselves unable to identify such a uniformly applied method in any of Descartes’s extant treatises, many readers of Descartes have been led to conclude that Descartes’s method played little or no role in Cartesian science. My principle argument will be that Descartes did (...) not, in fact, accept the Uniformity Thesis, and that the relevant textual evidence strongly suggests that he denied it. For Descartes, the method is universal, and can be employed to discover scientia, not because it can or ought to be uniformly applied to any problem in any science, but rather because practice in the method habituates the human ingenium to be sensitive to diff erent kinds of problem, such that the procedure for constructing and resolving a problem can, within definable limits, vary from application to application. (shrink)

This article presents an approach to how to make reasonable social choices when independent criteria (e.g., prioritarianism, religious freedom) fail to fully determine what to do. The article outlines different explanations of why independent criteria sometimes fail to fully determine what to do and illustrates how they can still be used to eliminate ineligible alternatives, but it is argued that the independent criteria cannot ground a reasonable social choice in these situations. To complement independent criteria when they fail to fully (...) determine what to do, it is suggested that society must engage in public deliberation by way of generating new reasons that can determine how to rank the alternatives. It is suggested that the approach to social choice presented here reveals a way of accepting the relevance of independent criteria for social choice without letting go of the idea that the attitudes of affected parties matter. (shrink)

The global corporate scandals such as Enron, Worldcom and Global Crossing have raised fundamental issues of business ethics as well as economic, social and anthropological questions concerning the nature of business competition and global capitalism. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to introduce the concept of "welfare exchange" to the existing notions of economic, social and anthropological notions of business and exchange in markets and society in the 21st century. Global competition and business success in the 21st century continue (...) to raise the nature of economic value and the interaction among diverse actors in international markets, institutions and society. We believe that the nature of such exchange between consumers and organizations, which can also be termed social marketing, need to increasingly take into account a welfare and ethical component. In this paper, we introduce our concept of welfare exchange to emphasize the importance of such welfare and ethical issues in the global business environment of the 21st century. (shrink)

An assessment of Descartes’s relation to his Aristotelian contemporaries in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii—and more specifically his relation to the theory of scientific habitus—has never been undertaken and is long overdue. Despite broad scholarly consensus that Descartes rejected the scholastic theory of scientific habitus in the Regulae, I will show that, in fact, he redefines a centuries-old scholastic debate about the unity of science, and that he does so by employing, not rejecting, the concept of scientific habitus. For Descartes, (...) the sciences are collectively one in virtue of a habitus which inclines the intellect to regard all things, not as they are in reality, but rather as they are relative to the intellect alone. Descartes establishes the unity of science via what Suárez refers to as “extrinsic denomination” in Disputationes metaphysicae 44.11.64. This creates a serious problem. As he no doubt knew and as Suárez would have rightly pointed out, the extrinsic denominations that Descartes employs in the Regulae have no ontological basis in the things denominated. Descartes’s method creates, arguably for the first time, a chasm between how things can be known by the intellect and how they are in reality—i.e., between “epistemology” and “ontology”—that motivates him to pursue metaphysics after the Regulae. (shrink)

Computational Creativity, Concept Invention, and General Intelligence in their own right all are flourishing research disciplines producing surprising and captivating results that continuously influence and change our view on where the limits of intelligent machines lie, each day pushing the boundaries a bit further. By 2014, all three fields also have left their marks on everyday life – machine-composed music has been performed in concert halls, automated theorem provers are accepted tools in enterprises’ R&D departments, and cognitive architectures are being (...) integrated in pilot assistance systems for next generation airplanes. Still, although the corresponding aims and goals are clearly similar (as are the common methods and approaches), the developments in each of these areas have happened mostly individually within the respective community and without closer relationships to the goings-on in the other two disciplines. In order to overcome this gap and to provide a common platform for interaction and exchange between the different directions, the International Workshops on “Computational Creativity, Concept Invention, and General Intelligence” (C3GI) have been started. At ECAI-2012 and IJCAI-2013, the first and second edition of C3GI each gathered researchers from all three fields, presenting recent developments and results from their research and in dialogue and joint debates bridging the disciplinary boundaries. The chapters contained in this book are based on expanded versions of accepted contributions to the workshops and additional selected contributions by renowned researchers in the relevant fields. Individually, they give an account of the state-of-the-art in their respective area, discussing both, theoretical approaches as well as implemented systems. When taken together and looked at from an integrative perspective, the book in its totality offers a starting point for a (re)integration of Computational Creativity, Concept Invention, and General Intelligence, making visible common lines of work and theoretical underpinnings, and pointing at chances and opportunities arising from the interplay of the three fields. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 124-126, March 2022.

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

Let 1 n. We show that the class NrnCAβ of n-dimensional neat reducts of β-dimensional cylindric algebras is not closed under forming elementary subalgebras. This solves a long-standing open problem of Tarski and his co-authors Andréka, Henkin, Monk and Németi. The proof uses genuine model-theoretic arguments.