Using a sample of 15,174 firms from 24 countries included in the 2009 World Bank Enterprise Survey, we investigate the impact of disclosure standards and auditing infrastructure on the bribery of public officials to secure government contracts. We find that firms are less likely to grant gift to secure a government contract in countries having more extensive financial reporting requirements and countries where audit firms face a higher litigation and sanction risk. Findings also show that firms are less likely to (...) bribe bureaucrats in case financial statements are reviewed by an external audit firm. Our results are economically significant and are robust to several sensitivity analyses. These findings support certain policies that are currently being implemented or discussed to mitigate bribery within the public sector across the globe. (shrink)

Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness is a widely used framework for studying the evolution of social behavior, but controversy surrounds its status. Hamilton originally derived his famous rb > c rule for the spread of a social gene by assuming additivity of costs and benefits. However, it has recently been argued that the additivity assumption can be dispensed with, so long as the −c and b terms are suitably defined, as partial regression coefficients. I argue that this way of generalizing (...) Hamilton’s rule to the nonadditive case, while formally correct, faces conceptual problems. (shrink)

Buildings energy consumption is growing gradually and put away around 40% of total energy use. Predicting heating and cooling loads of a building in the initial phase of the design to find out optimal solutions amongst different designs is very important, as ell as in the operating phase after the building has been finished for efficient energy. In this study, an artificial neural network model was designed and developed for predicting heating and cooling loads of a building based on a (...) dataset for building energy performance. The main factors for input variables are: relative compactness, roof area, overall height, surface area, glazing are a, wall area, glazing area distribution of a building, orientation, and the output variables: heating and cooling loads of the building. The dataset used for training are the data published in the literature for various 768 residential buildings. The model was trained and validated, most important factors affecting heating load and cooling load are identified, and the accuracy for the validation was 99.60%. (shrink)

Resilience may be referred to as the capacity for positive adaptation and to quickly recover from difficulties and significant adversity. After examining operational definitions of related concepts, the article discusses resilience building exercises for functional fitness at the individual soldier level, to include among others, self-monitoring, self-evaluation, self-reinforcement, emotional regulation exercises, mindfulness training, relaxation and grounding exercises and importance of maintaining discipline and routine in the military. Using an acronym CARRIES, the article examines efforts to enhance resilience building through empirically (...) validated cognitive, behavioural and intrapersonal skills originating from best practices learned in the military. (shrink)

BackgroundEthical care provided by nurses to earthquake victims is one of the main subjects in nursing profession.ObjectivesGiven the information gap in this field, the present study is an attempt to explore the nurses’ experience of ethical care provided to victims of an earthquake.Research design and methodA hermeneutic phenomenological study was performed. The participants were 16 nurses involved in providing care to the injured in Kermanshah earthquake, Iran. They were selected using purposeful sampling, and in-depth and semi-structured interviews were carried out. (...) The transcribed interviews were analyzed based on the hermeneutic approach using the analysis method proposed by Diekelmann et al.Ethical considerationsThe study was approved by the Research Council and Ethics Committee of Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Iran.FindingsData analyses revealed four themes and 10 sub-themes that illustrated nurses’ experience of ethical care during earthquake. The themes were (1) Respecting humanistic values (sacrifice, stepping beyond task description, and voluntary work), (2) Commitment to ethics (honesty, confidentiality, and trustworthiness), (3) Respecting dignity of victims (respecting cultural values, maintaining privacy, having humanistic perspective, and effective communication), and (4) Spiritual support (helping patients to do religious rituals Psychological support).ConclusionThe results showed the nurses’ experience with providing care to earthquake victims. The findings underlined ethics and ethical values in providing nursing care during disasters. It is suggested that special courses on the importance of nursing ethics in critical situations be incorporated into nursing curriculums and in-service educations. (shrink)

Following a long-term international collaboration between leaders in cosmology and the philosophy of science, this volume addresses foundational questions at the limit of science across these disciplines, questions raised by observational and theoretical progress in modern cosmology. Space missions have mapped the Universe up to its early instants, opening up questions on what came before the Big Bang, the nature of space and time, and the quantum origin of the Universe. As the foundational volume of an emerging academic discipline, experts (...) from relevant fields lay out the fundamental problems of contemporary cosmology and explore the routes toward finding possible solutions. Written for graduates and researchers in physics and philosophy, particular efforts are made to inform academics from other fields, as well as the educated public, who wish to understand our modern vision of the Universe, related philosophical questions, and the significant impacts on scientific methodology. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

In the conditions in which dominant global powers is still trying to expand their cultural hegemony, neo-colonialism, over the countries which are trying to hold their independence, through the creation of native intellectuals who are mentally Gharbzadeh, Westoxificated. This study finds it crucial to take the issue a step further ahead to discuss how the ideas of Ale-e Ahamad’s famous theory of Gharbzadegi is still applicable in our time and reveals its representations in Said’s well-known concept of Orientalism. These imperial (...) powers through the controlling of the world’s educational system and thoughts and ultimately the mindsets of the native intellectuals of the downtrodden countries would have produced Intellectuals who are mentally filled with Westernized knowledge. These people who are mostly kind, good in nature, and placid seem to be dominated by a sense of instrumental rationality which makes them obediently adaptable to the dominant power. These people have narrated our history so far and we have had enough. (shrink)

Architectural theory arises from building, when the mind considers its symbolic relations to its own constructions. The intent of this essay is to discuss the intellectual causes that precede building and precede theory. It considers certain fundamental dualities in our thinking about architecture—such as image and word; type and model; imitation and invention—and the role they play in its making, its perfection as an art, and the eventual elaboration of its tenets into a theory. At a time when theories of (...) architecture proliferate as expressions of ‘personal philosophies,’ a careful and incisive philosophical approach to if, how, and when does theory become formative of building, may ensure that architecture remain faithful to its intrinsic purposes. (shrink)

Hox proteins are part of the conserved superfamily of homeodomain‐containing transcription factors and play fundamental roles in shaping animal body plans in development and evolution. However, molecular mechanisms underlying their diverse and specific biological functions remain largely enigmatic. Here, we have analyzed Hox sequences from the main evolutionary branches of the Bilateria group. We have found that four classes of Hox protein signatures exist, which together provide sufficient support to explain how different Hox proteins differ in their control and function. (...) The homeodomain and its surrounding sequences accumulate nearly all signatures, constituting an extended module where most of the information distinguishing Hox proteins is concentrated. Only a small fraction of these signatures has been investigated at the functional level, but these show that approaches relying on Hox protein alterations still have a large potential for deciphering molecular mechanisms of Hox differential control. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, development studies encounters the set of ideas popularly known as 'Chaos Theory'. Samir Rihani applies to the processes of economic development, ideas from complex adaptive systems like uncertainty, complexity, and unpredictability. Rihani examines various aspects of the development process - including the World Bank, debt, and the struggle against poverty - and demonstrates the limitations of fundamentally linear thinking in an essentially non-linear world.

Such obvious truth must be made even more obvious, and this is exactly what Samir Selmanovic is doing for all of us and for the future of humanity.

Contrairement à l’ironie polémique et insidieuse des Sophistes, celle de Socrate est plutôt interrogeante, désirante et ex-centrique, toujours en quête de connaissance vraie. Le fameux «je sais que je ne sais rien» devient chez lui un outil de défigement de la pensée prisonnière des «systèmes compacts», mais, aussi le meilleur remède contre les pseudo-vérités religieuses et idéologiques.

Contrary to the general belief that modernist art and architecture reflect the technological society, Jacques Ellul maintains in his L’empire du non-sens that they are justifications for the integration of humankind into what he called the technicist complex. Modernism in art and architecture meant that every product must be qualified by a technological character. This unassailable belief exerted some far-reaching influences on symbolic thought, on artistic expression, on architectural character. If imitation and invention were the two inseparable concepts through which (...) art and architecture were produced and symbolized, it is because they operate on a certain transparency between an exemplar and a work of art. By contrast, in the mentality of technique, artistic production operates based on a certain opacity to meanings outside of itself. Imitation and invention were separated. Thus, one of the principal beliefs in modernism, that art and architecture symbolize the technological society is actually one of its weakest. In considering technology as both the symbol and the product, the artistic idea and its representation collapsed into each other. (shrink)

This essay assesses the opposition of pluralism and monism with respect to politics and architecture, developing the argument within three general areas: the spurious association between political intentions and architectural character, the distinctions and commonalties between political freedom and artistic freedom, and the adverse effect of inappropriate associations between political content and artistic form in general and, in particular, the perceptual impairment of the processes by which buildings come to be endowed with their suitable character.

We propose a new relevance sensitive model for representing and revising belief structures, which relies on a notion of partial language splitting and tolerates some amount of inconsistency while retaining classical logic. The model preserves an agent's ability to answer queries in a coherent way using Belnap's four-valued logic. Axioms analogous to the AGM axioms hold for this new model. The distinction between implicit and explicit beliefs is represented and psychologically plausible, computationally tractable procedures for query answering and belief..

Several authors have recently suggested that classic psychedelics might be safe and effective agents of moral enhancement. This raises the question: can we learn anything interesting about the nature of moral experience from a close examination of transformative psychedelic experiences? The interdisciplinary enterprise of philosophical psychopathology attempts to learn about the structure and function of the “ordinary” mind by studying the radically altered mind. By analogy, in this chapter we argue that we can gain knowledge about the everyday moral life (...) by studying extraordinary experiences of altered moral cognition and experience. We focus on a specific class of cases: experiences of forgiveness induced by psychedelics. We argue that close attention to such experiences reveals the importance of thought/emotion coherence and dissonance in the moral life and vindicates some heterodox ideas about moral phenomenology and psychology. (shrink)

Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida’s thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida’s well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply (...) political writings. (shrink)

Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays ftz Evolution: Findings, hypotheses and speculations (response to DOI 10.1002/bies.201100019) AbstractOn the border of the homeotic function: Re‐evaluating the controversial role of cofactor‐recruiting motifs AbstractControl of DNA replication: A new facet of Hox proteins? AbstractClassification of sequence signatures: a guide to Hox protein function Abstract.

A number of recent philosophers, including Michael Williams, Barry Stroud and Donald Davidson, have argued that scepticism about the external world stems from the founda‐tionalist assumption that sensory experience supplies the data for our beliefs about the world. In order to assess this thesis, I offer a brief characterisation of the logical form of sceptical arguments. I suggest that sceptical arguments rely on the idea that many of our beliefs about the world are‘underdetermined’by the evidence on which they are based. (...) Drawing on this characterisation of scepticism, I argue that Williams, Stroud and Davidson are right to see the foundationalist assumption as essential to the sceptic's argument, but wrong to think that scepticism is inevitable once that assumption is in place. By pursuing an analogy with some recent debates in the philosophy of science, I try to locate the additional assumptions which the sceptic must make, in order to derive her conclusion. (shrink)

This paper addresses the impact of the unethical business conduct of a few individuals that shook the financial market in 1986. Specifically, in the study undertaken for this paper, the wealth status of the shareholders of securities firms was examined in relation to the public disclosure of the insider-trading scandals involving Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky, and their confederates. It was hypothesized that the expected market-adjusted stock returns for the securities firms would be negative as a result of the scandals. The (...) findings of the study supported the hypothesis. (shrink)

During the past three decades, two terms, “postmodernism” and “globalization” have entered not only academic discourse, but everyday discussions outside the groves of academia. This book contains essays assembled with a conviction that both postmodernism and globalization have the potential to be valuable tools for social analysts, this despite the uncertainties and ambiguities that persist. The editors and the contributors make no claim to have found a solution that would overcome the uncertainties and ambiguities. Rather, it is assumed that at (...) some level both the concepts will remain contested. All the essays are expressions of efforts to employ one or both of the concepts in terms of empirically grounded topics. They also add further precision or clarity to the concepts themselves in order to enhance their utility in making sense of the dynamics of social change. (shrink)

section 1. Reason, language, and the self -- section 2. Law, emergency, and exception -- section 3. Terrorism as a paradigm of (in)security -- section 4. Terrorism and the crisis of the political.

Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.

En el presente artículo se pretende comprender el horizonte en el que la sociedad contemporánea construye su sentido de la cotidianidad, a partir de la positividad y negatividad del aburrimiento. El método empleado será la propuesta interpretativa de Heidegger, orientado por el concepto de cotidianidad en dialogo con Han, en lo referente a la manifestación del aburrimiento en la vida cotidiana de los sujetos. En una primera instancia se abordan las determinaciones de la racionalidad instrumental y el neoliberalismo en la (...) construcción de sentido en la de la sociedad contemporánea. Posteriormente, en un segundo lugar, se comprende la imposibilidad dialéctica de la positividad del aburrimiento, para luego entender cómo la negatividad del aburrimiento posibilita desde la dialéctica una negación del discurso neoliberal. Esta comprensión resulta relevante al momento de plantear la negatividad del aburrimiento como una posibilidad de mundo. Se concluye, que el aburrimiento es una apertura a los modos en los que la sociedad contemporánea construye su cotidianidad. (shrink)