Professor D. Z. Phillips in ‘Bad Faith and Sartre's Waiter’ assigns to Sartre the view that ‘waiters are necessarily in bad faith’, i.e. the profession of waiting as such is in bad faith. What could this mean in the context of Sartre's philosophy? That waiters as a class seek to flee their freedom by adopting that vocation? It must mean something on those lines since, for Sartre, to engage in bad faith is to deny one's freedom. The question then arises: (...) could Sartre have heldsuch a view ? And, if he could not have, how does Phillips manage tothink he did ? (shrink)

Responding to a major pandemic and planning for allocation of scarce resources under crisis standards of care requires coordination and cooperation across federal, state and local governments in tandem with the larger societal infrastructure. Maryland remains one of the few states with no state-endorsed ASR plan, despite having a plan published in 2017 that was informed by public forums across the state. In this article, we review strengths and weaknesses of Maryland’s response to COVID-19 and the role of the Maryland (...) Healthcare Ethics Committee Network in bridging gaps in the state’s response to prepare health care facilities for potential implementation of ASR plans. Identified “lessons learned” include: Deliberative Democracy Provided a Strong Foundation for Maryland’s ASR Framework; Community Consensus is Informative, Not Normative; Hearing Community Voices Has Inherent Value; Lack of Transparency & Political Leadership Gaps Generate a Fragmented Response; Pandemic Politics Requires Diplomacy & Persistence; Strong Leadership is Needed to Avoid Implementing ASR … And to Plan for ASR; An Effective Pandemic Response Requires Coordination and Information-Sharing Beyond the Acute Care Hospital; and The Ability to Correct Course is Crucial: Reconsidering No-visitor Policies. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 150-152.

Any problem is a problem until a solution is designed and implemented. This paper reports on a workshop that highlights preliminary work done by the working group on Gamification in the scope of European Network for Academic Integrity, which aims to explore the possibility of developing and testing a gamified learning module on academic integrity values. In this paper, the group aims to look at proposing steps we are currently using to develop storyboards of scenarios for the first phase of (...) the project, which were presented at the 6th International Conference Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond 2020 held virtually in Dubai as a workshop. The study also presents updated findings and scenarios drawn from the workshop conducted and audience feedback, in the following sections that pave the way for the future stages of the gamification process. This serves as a guide to academics and researchers in academic integrity who may wish to study gamification and apply it to develop their own modules for their learning modules. (shrink)

Considering the current global trend in the digital economy, Facebook commerce is an indispensable component of today’s digital commerce. The purpose of this research is to test the proposed model to validate current theories that evaluate the relationships between online trust and customer f-commerce usage intentions. It has also been proposed to improve usage intention by integrating the relationship between perceived value and trust in electronic commerce. The data was gathered using a structured questionnaire and analyzed with structural equation modeling. (...) In this study, gender has been discussed as a moderating factor. The findings describe the positive relationships that exist between antecedents of trust and user intentions toward f-commerce. Furthermore, according to the findings of the study, females are more concerned than males about developing their intentions to utilize f-commerce for online shopping. Theoretical and practical implications are also presented in this study. (shrink)

Software defects prediction at the initial period of the software development life cycle remains a critical and important assignment. Defect prediction and correctness leads to the assurance of the quality of software systems and has remained integral to study in the previous years. The quick forecast of imperfect or defective modules in software development can serve the development squad to use the existing assets competently and effectively to provide remarkable software products in a given short timeline. Hitherto, several researchers have (...) industrialized defect prediction models by utilizing statistical and machine learning techniques that are operative and effective approaches to pinpoint the defective modules. Tree family machine learning techniques are well-thought-out to be one of the finest and ordinarily used supervised learning methods. In this study, different tree family machine learning techniques are employed for software defect prediction using ten benchmark datasets. These techniques include Credal Decision Tree, Cost-Sensitive Decision Forest, Decision Stump, Forest by Penalizing Attributes, Hoeffding Tree, Decision Tree, Logistic Model Tree, Random Forest, Random Tree, and REP-Tree. Performance of each technique is evaluated using different measures, i.e., mean absolute error, relative absolute error, root mean squared error, root relative squared error, specificity, precision, recall, F-measure, G-measure, Matthew’s correlation coefficient, and accuracy. The overall outcomes of this paper suggested RF technique by producing best results in terms of reducing error rates as well as increasing accuracy on five datasets, i.e., AR3, PC1, PC2, PC3, and PC4. The average accuracy achieved by RF is 90.2238%. The comprehensive outcomes of this study can be used as a reference point for other researchers. Any assertion concerning the enhancement in prediction through any new model, technique, or framework can be benchmarked and verified. (shrink)

The article investigates the issue and the mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship in Soviet philosophy. The major forms of censorship are described and analyzed together with their epistemological implications and the peculiar policy of truth. The philosophical problem of defining and describing “facts” and ideological judgments during the “double” technique of reading and re-reading was exposed in the articles of V.F. Asmus and V.V. Bibikhin, thinkers, who experienced the self-censorship and reflected upon this in their texts. Analyzing the complex relation (...) between the “dogmatic” or “critical” foreword and the original word is important, as is reconstructing and deconstructing the way we can reread the ideologically biased foreword, which might be a certain reliquary or protective camouflage, acting as, potentially, either a deactivator or an inhibitor of the reader’s own interpreting efforts. The given case of an attentive reading of V. Asmus’ foreword to the Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus can itself become an interesting philosophical language game. Interpretation of the foreword may reveal a hidden sense and references and encourage reflection based on the “common sense” assessments and perception of text. These hermeneutical exercises on reading forewords may paradoxically provoke starting the dialogue with the alternative foreword by B. Russell and the text of L. Wittgenstein himself, on one hand, and Marxism-Leninism and its variations in the form of historical materialism and Soviet dialectical materialism, on another. The situation of attentive reading with “a throat, strangled by ideology” is opposed to the power of imaginative “broadening of vocal ranges of the Others” thinking, whereas an inattentive reading of the text leaves a complete disability to object, or reply, to the censorship. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Jürgen Habermas’ notion of morality (moral norms) has more in common with Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical life’ as a ‘ sittlich ’ relation – understood as a socially integrative force – rather than Kant’s supreme principle of personal morality. I show that Habermas and Hegel, each in his own way, make a distinction between morality and ethics. However, I make the case that Habermas’ conception of ‘morality’ incorporates aspects of Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical life’, (...) while Habermas’ conception of ‘ethical’ – referring to individual and group conceptions of the good life – is a remedy to the shortcomings in Hegel’s overly unified ethical life. I offer an alternative reading of Habermas’ principle of morality, which I suggest should be read as his attempt to provide a binding process to set up the norms that ought to condition a modern political community understood as a civil association. (shrink)

Pervasive usage and the development of social media networks have provided the platform for the fake news to spread fast among people. Fake news often misleads people and creates wrong society perceptions. The spread of low-quality news in social media has negatively affected individuals and society. In this study, we proposed an ensemble-based deep learning model to classify news as fake or real using LIAR dataset. Due to the nature of the dataset attributes, two deep learning models were used. For (...) the textual attribute “statement,” Bi-LSTM-GRU-dense deep learning model was used, while for the remaining attributes, dense deep learning model was used. Experimental results showed that the proposed study achieved an accuracy of 0.898, recall of 0.916, precision of 0.913, and F-score of 0.914, respectively, using only statement attribute. Moreover, the outcome of the proposed models is remarkable when compared with that of the previous studies for fake news detection using LIAR dataset. (shrink)

Information is considered to be the major part of an organization. With the enhancement of technology, the knowledge level is increasing with the passage of time. This increase of information is in volume, velocity, and variety. Extracting meaningful insights is the dire need of an individual from such information and knowledge. Visualization is a key tool and has become one of the most significant platforms for interpreting, extracting, and communicating information. The current study is an endeavour toward data modelling and (...) user knowledge by using a rough set approach for extracting meaningful insights. The technique has used different rough set algorithms such as K-nearest neighbours, decision rules, decomposition tree, and local transfer function classifier for an experimental setup. The approach has found its accuracy for the optimal use of data modelling and user knowledge. The experimental setup of the proposed method is validated by using the dataset available in the UCI web repository. Results of the proposed study show that the model is effective and efficient with an accuracy of 96% for KNN, 87% for decision rules, 91% for decision trees, 85.04% for cross validation architecture, and 94.3% for local transfer function classifier. The validity of the proposed classification algorithms is tested using different performance metrics such as F-score, precision, accuracy, recall, specificity, and misclassification rates. For all these performance metrics, the KNN classifier outperformed, and this high performance shows the applicability of the KNN classifier in the proposed problem. (shrink)

In the area of machine learning, different techniques are used to train machines and perform different tasks like computer vision, data analysis, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Computer vision is one of the main branches where machine learning and deep learning techniques are being applied. Optical character recognition is the ability of a machine to recognize the character of a language. Pashto is one of the most ancient and historical languages of the world, spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. OCR (...) application has been developed for various cursive languages like Urdu, Chinese, and Japanese, but very little work is done for the recognition of the Pashto language. When it comes to handwritten character recognition, it becomes more difficult for OCR to recognize the characters as every handwritten character’s shape is influenced by the writer’s hand motion dynamics. The reason for the lack of research in Pashto handwritten character data as compared to other languages is because there is no benchmark dataset available for experimental purposes. This study focuses on the creation of such a dataset, and then for the evaluation purpose, a machine is trained to correctly recognize unseen Pashto handwritten characters. To achieve this objective, a dataset of 43000 images was created. Three Feed Forward Neural Network models with backpropagation algorithm using different Rectified Linear Unit layer configurations were trained and tested with this dataset. The simulation shows that Model 1 achieved accuracy up to 87.6% on unseen data while Model 2 achieved an accuracy of 81.60% and 3% accuracy, respectively. Similarly, loss was the lowest for Model 1 with 0.15 and 3.17 for training and testing, followed by Model 2 with 0.7 and 4.2 for training and testing, while Model 3 was the last with loss values of 6.4 and 3.69. The precision, recall, and f-measure values of Model 1 were better than those of both Model 2 and Model 3. Based on results, Model 1 is found to be the most efficient as compared to the other two models in terms of accuracy to recognize Pashto handwritten characters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rushdie’s Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses As Rushdie’s Love Letter to IslamFeroza Jussawalla (bio)Meheruban likhoon ya dilruba likhoon hyran hoon ke apke khat me kya likhoonYe mera prempatr padh kar ke tum naraz na hona ke tum meri zindagi ho ke tum meri bandagi ho[Should I address you as respected one Should I address you as beloved one I am so distraught about how I should address youWhen you read (...) my love letter You should not be disappointed Because you are my life and you are my “life’s work”]—Popular Hindi film song from Raj Kapoor’s Sangam (1964) [my translation]Salman Rushdie has been classified as a postcolonial 1 writer whose fiction depicts the hybrid nature of postcolonials in their migrations and movements, their merging and mixing. Rushdie has variously been called a “Third World Cosmopolitan” [Brennan, Salman Rushdie viii], a “metropolitan intellectual,” and “a hybrid” but most often a [End Page 50] “postcolonial,” because of his “birth” as a “Midnight’s child”—a child born as India was gaining independence at midnight on 14 August 1947 2 —his subsequent education in England, and the making of his home in metropolitan London. Such a perspective is eurocentric and does not provide complete answers to Rushdie’s complex works or the complicated response to his work. For the very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a “post-British” colonial but also a “post-Mughal” colonial.The British were not the only colonizers of India. In fact, Indian historians have traditionally identified several waves of colonization. Journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre best summarize the two major waves of colonization as follows:Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the North to wrest the subcontinent from its ancient Dravidian inhabitants.... The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus’ hold on the great Gangetic Plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful.[Freedom at Midnight 36]While the British were actually occupying India, post-Mughal colonialism in the form of Persian poetry, literature, and the general “sumptuousness” of its art and architecture held sway. The Persian language begot Urdu, often described by linguists as a “camp language” of the Muslim invaders of the Subcontinent. However, Persian, Arabic, and Hindi had come together to create a new language for the poetry, literature, arts, and in general the “high culture” of today’s Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his definitive history of India entitled Discovery of India, wrote,The Mughals were outsiders and strangers to India and yet they fitted into Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period.... Their dynasties became completely Indianized with their roots in India, looking upon India as their homeland, and the rest of the world as foreign.[236]A synthesis worked itself out: new styles of architecture arose; food and clothing changed; and life was affected and varied in many other ways.... The Persian language became the official court language and many Persian words crept into popular use.[237]Persian was the lingua franca of the incoming Muslims from AD 1193 onward, and Persian literature became the favored literature of India for approximately five centuries [Ali 3–4].It is in this tradition of post-Mughal Urdu high culture that Rushdie grew up. In a 1983 interview with Michael Kaufman, Rushdie said,My grandfather, my father’s father, was a good Urdu poet. My father is not a writer but he’s a very literary and literate man, a student of both Arabic and Persian Literature and of Western Literature. At Cambridge he was quite scholarly. So I grew up in an atmosphere of books. And both my parents, in their different ways, were very gifted storytellers. [End Page 51]My mother, in common with most Eastern women and perhaps even women of the West, was the... (shrink)

This 1984 book describes the development of thought, both of Keynes and others, culminating in the publication in 1936 of Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. As one of Keynes' close collaborators - from December 1929, when the writing of the Treatise was nearing its completion - Richard Khan provides a uniquely insightful analysis of these events. The author starts with a brief survey of the contributions influential in forming Keynes' early ideas, and moves on to explore (...) the significance of the Quantity Theory of Money, and traces the development of Keynes' attitude towards the theory through his published books. Subsequent lectures are devoted to Keynes' Treatise on Money, and to his more popular writings as an economic adviser which marked the transition from the thinking in the Treatise to that in the General Theory which the author critically examines. The final lecture records the author's memory of his personal relationship with Keynes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis (...) appeals to the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

This paper starts with one of Chalmers’ basic points: first-hand experience is an irreducible field of phenomena. I claim there is no ‘theoretical fix’ or ‘extra ingredient’ in nature that can possibly bridge this gap. Instead, the field of conscious phenomena requires a rigorous method and an explicit pragmatics for its exploration and analysis. My proposed approach, inspired by the style of inquiry of phenomenology, I have called neurophenomenology. It seeks articulations by mutual constraints between phenomena present in experience and (...) the correlative field of phenomena established by the cognitive sciences. It needs to expand into a widening research community in which the method is cultivated further. (shrink)

On November 2019, the world commemorated the 30th anniversary of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UNCRC noted that “the press and other media have essential fu...

Mostly consists of works composed in Tibetan, with translations into Mongolian, on the Soyombo script.

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is the most likely site where egocentric spatial relationships are represented in the brain. PPC cells receive visual, auditory, somaesthetic, and vestibular sensory inputs; oculomotor, head, limb, and body motor signals; and strong motivational projections from the limbic system. Their discharge increases not only when an animal moves towards a sensory target, but also when it directs its attention to it. PPC lesions have the opposite effect: sensory inattention and neglect. The PPC does not seem (...) to contain a “map” of the location of objects in space but a distributed neural network for transforming one set of sensory vectors into other sensory reference frames or into various motor coordinate systems. Which set of transformation rules is used probably depends on attention, which selectively enhances the synapses needed for making a particular sensory comparison or aiming a particular movement. (shrink)

Within the Ideological Surround Model of the social sciences and religion, so-called “universal” perspectives within the psychology of religion can dialogically clarify and be clarified by the “particular” elements of Muslim commitment. This study developed new scales for operationalizing the experience and behavior of Pakistani Muslims during Ramadan. In a sample of university students, one set of experiential factors apparently facilitated, whereas another interfered with the practices of Ramadan. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Personal Religious Orientations correlated with greater and the Extrinsic (...) Social motivation with lower levels of involvement in Ramadan. Relative to these religious orientation measures, Ramadan experience scales displayed incremental validity by explaining additional variance in Ramadan behavior. Women proved to be more religious than men. At the most general level, these data further supported the dialogic assumptions of the Ideological Surround Model of research in the psychology of religion. (shrink)

_A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist the humanitarian work of nurses, doctors, and other health care providers in the fight against COVID-19 and beyond._ _Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics_ is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with (...) reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation, as well as ethical issues relating to COVID-19. (shrink)

The New Towns Movement began in England and later spread world-wide in response to the increasing concern felt at the deterioration of the quality of life in the large cities under the impact of industrialization. The New Towns, it was felt, would combine the advantages of life in the country with that of life in the city. They would be small communities of between 30.000 and 60.000 inhabitants. Their principal characteristics were to be a balanced economy and a well-defined pattern (...) of industrial, commercial and residential zones. (shrink)

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Based on the Lotka–Volterra system, a pest-natural enemy model with nonlinear feedback control as well as nonlinear action threshold is introduced. The model characterizes the implementation of comprehensive prevention and control measures when the pest density reaches the nonlinear action threshold level depending on the pest density and its change rate. The mortality rate of the pest is a saturation function that strictly depends on their density while the release of natural enemies is also a nonlinear pulse term depending on (...) the density of real-time natural enemies. The exact impulsive and phase sets are given. The definition and properties of the Poincaré map corresponding to the pulse points on the phase set are provided. We investigate the existence and stability of boundary and interior order-1 periodic solution. The theoretical analysis developed in the present paper combined with nonlinear controlling measures as well as nonlinear action threshold methods and techniques laid the foundation for the establishment and analysis of other state-dependent feedback control models. (shrink)

On Western philosophy from the point of view of Burmese philosophers.

All developed human beings possess a practical mastery of a vast range of concepts, including such basic structural notions as those of identity, truth, existence, material objects, mental states, space, and time; but a practical mastery does not entail theoretical understanding. It is that understanding which philosophy seeks to achieve. In this book, one of the most distinguished of living philosophers, assuming no previous knowledge of the subject on the part of the reader, sets out to explain and illustrate a (...) certain conception of the nature of analytical philosophy. Strawson draws on his many years of teaching at Oxford University, during which he refined and developed what he regards as the most productive route to understanding the fundamental structure of human thinking. Among the distinctive features of his exposition are the displacement of an older, reductive conception of philosophical method in favor of elucidating the interconnections between the complex but irreducible notions which form the basic structure of our thinking; and the demonstration that the three traditionally distinguished departments of metaphysics, epistemology, and logic are but three aspects of one unified enquiry. Strawson has produced an elegant work that will be invaluable to students and stimulating for professional philosophers and general readers alike. (shrink)

Experiences like pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenal character: they feel pleasant or unpleasant. Imperativism proposes to explain affective phenomenal character by appeal to imperative content, a kind of intentional content that directs rather than describes. We argue that imperativism is on the right track, but has been developed in the wrong way. There are two varieties of imperativism on the market: first-order and higher-order. We show that neither is successful, and offer in their place a new theory: reflexive (...) imperativism. Our proposal is that an experience P feels pleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content, while an experience U feels unpleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content : More of P!Less of U! If you need a slogan: experiences have affective phenomenal character in virtue of commanding us Get more of me! Get less of me! (shrink)