Purpose. Aging is intricate process of self-transformation in view of involution of body, loss of sexual attractiveness, but at the same time, old age is a time for reconsideration of self-existence in time and in the world within coherence of life sense targets and their realization. Unique individual experience of growing old implemented in Ukrainian literature can complete the data received by gerontology. Moreover gender approach in literary gerontology highlights masculine / feminine phenotypical features of internal reverberating of aging. Theoretical (...) basis. To inquire into existential and psychological problems of aging exemplified in the twentieth-century Ukrainian Lyrics it is seems to be the most effective to employ philosophical and psychological approaches in gerontology, as well as feministic studies on elder female body discrimination, in particular in literature. Originality. This research paves the way to the development of gender and literary dimensions in Ukrainian gerontology and anthropology in general. Some of the existential and psychological problems of aging are revealed on the material of 20th-century Ukrainian poetry. The individual lyric experience of aging in different gender moods is anchored mostly in psychic, mental, sense-life strategies. Conclusions. Among the feminine strategies of aging self-reception there are observation of own elder body with anxiety and fear, its "invisibility", deepened feelings of loneliness, self-estrangement, but also finding the sense of life and soul harmony in own family, offspring. Masculine self-reception of aging deals with ideal spiritual model of Wise old man – more abstract than personal; masculine anxiety is caused by physical bodily declining, not attractiveness, but strength and power loosing. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: (...) in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges. (shrink)

As a preliminary step to beginning to assess the usefulness of clinical vignettes to measure ethical sensitivity in undergraduate medical students, five clinical vignettes with seven to nine ethical issues each were created. The ethical issues in the vignettes were discussed and outlined by an expert panel. One randomly selected vignette was presented to first, second and third year students at the University of Toronto as part of another examination. The students were asked to list the issues presented by the (...) patient problem. Responses from 281 students were obtained. These students identified an average of 2.72 ethical issues per vignette. Each response was classified under the domains of autonomy, beneficence and justice. Comparisons were made between classes and between vignettes. There was considerable variation between classes and the responses to different vignettes seem to indicate that different vignettes measure the various domains in different ways. It does appear that the use of vignettes is one way to measure aspects of ethical sensitivity in medical students but more study is required to clarify exactly what is being measured. (shrink)

Today, ethics has become an important dimension for businesses. Broadly, there are two lines of thought on this issue. The first one suggests that ethical issues have to be resolved through development of appropriate ethical standards at personal or organizational level. The second one emphasizes the process of developing ethical standards rather than the standards themselves. This paper argues that the latter line of thought, when taken forward, implies that ethical dimension is essentially challenging businesses to transform themselves and their (...) people at a very fundamental level in order to evolve continuously to higher levels of perfection. The deeper significance is that in future, businesses will play a dominant role in bringing forth the human spirit, an aspect that is hitherto perceived to be in the purview of other human activity systems like the Church or family. This restructuring at the societal level is probably the most fundamental message of this age of growing interdependence. (shrink)

Nikolai Alekseevich Umov , a professor at Moscow and New Russian universities, Russia's first theoretical physicist and a mathematical philosopher, according to N. E. Zhukovskii's definition, developed a genuinely ecological philosophy, which is usually included in the philosophy of Russian cosmism. He made the first global forecast1 that took into account the finiteness of resources on earth, population growth, and food reserves.

The need for new models of social development capable of increasing the resilience of society and of counteracting the destructive processes that ruined a once-powerful state edifice has led to an interest in Eurasianism-a philosophical-historical, culturological, and intellectual-political movement that arose in Russian émigré circles in the early 1920s. Eurasianism made itself known by the publication in 1921 in Sofia of a collection with the symbolic title Exodus to the East [Iskhod k Vostoku]. The initiators of this work were the (...) economist and geographer P.N. Savitskii, the linguist N.S. Trubetskoi, the theologian and philosopher G.V. Florovskii, and the art critic P.P. Suvchinskii. The legal scholar N.N. Alekseev, the historian and philosopher L.P. Karsavin, the historian G.V. Vernadskii, and other eminent Russian émigré scholarly and cultural figures also took part in the movement. (shrink)

The book deals with the notion of Downward Causation from a wide array of perspectives, including physics, biology, psychology, social science, communication studies, text theory, and philosophy. The book includes proponents as well as opponents discussing the validity of the notion.

We present a modernized proof, with a modification by M.A. Shtan’ko, of the Markov theorem on the unsolvability of the homeomorphy problem for manifolds. We then discuss a proof of the S.P. Novikov theorem on the unrecognizability of spheres for n≥5, from which we obtain a corollary about unrecognizability of all manifolds of dimension at least five. An analogous argument then proves the unrecognizability of stabilizations of all four-dimensional manifolds. We also give a brief overview of known results concerning algorithmic (...) recognizability of three-dimensional manifolds. (shrink)

Defect detection is a major concern in quality control of various products in industries. This paper presents two different machine-vision based methods for detecting defects on periodically patterned textures. In the first method, input defective image is split into several blocks of size same as the size of the periodic unit of the image and chi-square histogram distances of each periodic block with respect to itself and all other periodic blocks are calculated to get a dissimilarity matrix. This dissimilarity matrix (...) is subjected to Ward's hierarchical clustering to automatically identify defective and defect-free blocks. The second method of defect detection is based on Universal Quality Index which is a measure of loss of correlation, luminance distortion and contrast distortion between any two signals. Quality indices of a periodic block with respect to itself and all other periodic blocks are calculated to get a similarity matrix containing quality indices. Specific variances of the periodic blocks are derived from the quality index matrix through orthogonal factor model based on eigen decomposition. These variances are subjected to Ward's hierarchical clustering to automatically identify defective and defect-free blocks. Results of experiments on real fabric images with defects show that the defect detection methods based on chi-square histogram distance and universal quality index yield a success rate of 98.6% and 97.8% respectively. (shrink)