This paper is intended to elaborate the anthropocentric paradigm in the study of Islamic law which is done for two reasons. The first is the increasing trend of theocentricism within various puritan communities. This trend rejects the contextualization of Islamic law and has the potential to produce radical movements in the name of religion. The second is that, Islamic law studies is still rarely associated with the issues of legal paradigms, even though they are considered as the foundation in the (...) establishment of Islamic law. Thus, this paper is written as an attempt to make the prophetic social science paradigma an analytical tool for puritans’ Islamic law epistemology. This study reveals that the epistemological demystification is very important for the study of contemporary Islamic law. There are two steps in carrying out epistemological demystification: the first is the transformation of the basic structure of Islamic law. This transformation requires a shifting issue from theocentric to the anthropocentrism. The transformative theoanthropocentric paradigm as the basic legal structure has the capability to contextualize Islamic law which is not only relevant to the Muslim community, but also to the community as a whole. The second is the development of a theoretical framework. Concerning with this, Kuntowijoyo offers analytic-synthetic theories which accommodate a demystified vision as a link to a transformative theological foundation. (shrink)

Recent discussions have fixated on the distinction between perception and cognition. How should recognition be understood in light of this distinction? The relevant sense of recognition involves a sensitivity to particulars from one's past. Recognizing the face of a familiar friend is one instance of this phenomenon, as is recognizing an object or place that one has viewed before. In this article, I argue that recognition is an interface capacity that straddles the border between perception and cognition.

Three recent publications on BEND3 firmly establish its role as a novel sequence‐specific transcription factor that is essential for PRC2 recruitment and maintenance of pluripotency. Here, we briefly review our current understanding of the BEND3‐PRC2 axis in the regulation of pluripotency and also explore the possibility of a similar connection in cancer.

Publication date: 30 August 2017 Source: Author: Ghulam Abid, Tahira Hassan Butt Employees are the building blocks and valuable assets in an organization. Organizational researchers and practitioners have shown a burgeoning attention to satisfy and retain key performer as the cost of leaving a job is very high for the employing organizations. Discovering turnover intention in its formation stages is very crucial, not only to resist its’ piled up effect but also to control the actual turnover in the future. (...) Most of the times, management is not aware of the employee’s quit intention because employees don’t show their intention explicitly until they actually leave the organization. However, majority of the times employees share their feeling with their colleagues or other close work mates. Based on positive relationship at work, we argued that the individuals who work together normally share their feelings with their close colleagues regarding their decision of leaving or staying with the current employer. Therefore, the objective of the current study is to investigate the relationship between turnover intention and expressed turnover intention. Furthermore, we offer a new perspective to data collection from other sources, which will assist us in shortening the questionnaire, also minimizing the common method bias and knowing the quit intention from other source. Finally, theoretical and practical implications along with direction for future studies are also discussed. (shrink)

Suddenly, COVID-19 has changed the world and the way people work. Companies had to accelerate something they knew was imminent in the future, but not immediate and extremely humongous. This situation poses a huge challenge for companies to survive and thrive in this complex business environment and for employees, who must adapt to this new way of working. An effective e-leadership, which promotes companies’ adaptability, is needed. This study investigates the existing knowledge on teleworking and e-leadership; and analyzes the supposed (...) challenges. The literature review shows that companies with effective e-leadership can view teleworking as an opportunity. It is advantageous for not only companies’ productivity but also the environment and people who work remotely. However, a traditional or no leadership can result in some risks. Thriving in remote work environments implies that managers must adjust the companies’ structure, making them less hierarchical, and developing new abilities to establish a strong and trustworthy relationship with their employees to maintain their competitiveness, while retaining a genuine concern for their employees’ well-being. Similarly, successful e-leadership must be able to consolidate and lead effective virtual teams to accomplish organizational goals. This study contributes to the literature and leaders during the pandemic. (shrink)

This study examines the conditions under which apologies help to elicit forgiveness and restore trust following trust violations between leaders and followers. The intentionality and severity of violations are examined in a critical incident study and a laboratory study. The results support a model in which forgiveness mediates the relation of apology quality and trust. More importantly, the moderation–mediation model shows that apology quality influenced forgiveness and subsequent trust following violations that were moderate in severity–intentionality combination. The effect of apologizing (...) affects trust directly without forgiveness when the severity–intentionality combination held minor or extreme intensity. The results suggest a range in which apologies are effective and enrich understanding of the conditions under which trust can be recovered through an apology–forgiveness process in leader–follower relationships. The contribution of the study lies in elucidating that the combination of severity and intentionality of leaders’ trust violations has greater importance than either one separately. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the spillover impact of work-family/family–work conflict and stress on five major industrial sectors, during the first wave of Covid-19. The purpose of this cross-sectional study is twofold; firstly, to test a hypothesized model where work-family/family-work conflicts are related to stress and where stress could exert a mediating role in such relationships. Secondly, we seek to explore the presence of these conflicts and stress in each of the five major industrial sectors and evaluate if there are (...) significant differences between them, identifying the sociodemographic characteristics associated. Two questionnaires were applied to 748 employees from the selected industries. According to our results, stress predicts both types of conflict and also exerts a mediator role. It was primarily found that the five sectors are significantly different regarding the work-family/family-work conflicts and stress. Findings and implications are discussed. (shrink)

Objectives: The present study examined relationships among gaze behaviour and cardiac vagal tone using a novel stress-inducing task.Methods: Participants’ eye movements and heart rate variability were measured during an unsolvable computer-based task randomly presenting feedback of “Right” and “Wrong” answers distinctly onscreen after each trial. Subgroups were created on the basis of more frequent eye movements to the right or wrong areas onscreen.Results: Correct-Attenders maintained HRV from baseline to the stress task. In contrast, Incorrect-Attenders spent significantly more time viewing “Wrong” (...) feedback, exhibited a reduction in HRV during the stress condition, and were more likely to negatively self-evaluate performance.Conclusions: Results demonstrate that pervasive attention to negative feedback elicits perseverative stress and negative self-evaluations among university students. This study highlights the potential for studying attentional biases and emotional distress through combined measures of gaze behaviour and cardiac vagal tone. (shrink)

Numerous studies have examined the manner in which minority groups, including refugees, are depicted in the media discourse of the host countries or the dominant majority groups. The results of such studies indicate that media systematically discriminate these minority groups and deem them as a security, economic and hygiene threat to the majority groups. Through the use of Lakoff and Jonson’s conceptual metaphor theory, this study compares and contrasts the representation of Syrian refugees in the online media discourse of not (...) only host countries but also non-host countries, which, in this study, refers to nations that do not host Syrian refugees. The results show that statistical differences between the metaphors used by host and non-host countries only occur when using the metaphors that describe the entry of refugees and the burden they are inflicting on the host countries. This is clearly indicated by the p-values of the log-likelihood test. (shrink)

Customers are skeptical about shopping online because e-commerce environments are typically considered impersonal. To assure product quality and to enhance customer proclivity in such environments, post-sale services may be considered to alleviate customers’ skepticism. Therefore, this study’s objective is to investigate the role of an online retailer’s post-sale services on customers’ attitudinal and behavioral aspects. Structural equation modeling is applied to data collected through an online survey answered by 409 online customers of jd.com. Research findings show that product return, exchange, (...) and maintenance services are strongly predictive of online customer satisfaction, and satisfaction significantly impacts customer trust. Both customer satisfaction and trust, as indicators of relationship quality, further mediate the links between product return, exchange, and maintenance services and online customer repurchase intention. In addition, differences between male and female customers were found in various aspects of online retailers’ product return, exchange, and maintenance services. This is the first empirical study that not only examines the influence of all three dimensions of online retailers’ post-sale services on customers’ online shopping perceptions and decisions, but also considers differences between male and female customers. Finally, this research provides theoretical and managerial implications based on conceptual and empirical evidence. (shrink)

Artificial Immune Systems (AIS) are intelligent algorithms derived on the principles inspired by human immune system. In this research work, electroencephalography (EEG) signals for four distinct motor movement of human limbs are detected and classified using Negative Selection Classification Algorithm (NSCA). For this study, a widely studied open source EEG signal database (BCI IV - Graz dataset 2a, comprising 9 subjects) has been used. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) are extracted as selected feature from recorded EEG signals. Dimensionality reduction of (...) data is carried out by applying two hidden layered stacked auto-encoder. Genetic Algorithm (GA) optimized detectors (Artificial Lymphocytes) are trained using Negative Selection Algorithm (NSA) for detection and classification of four motor movements. The trained detectors consist of four sets of detectors, each set is trained for detection and classification of one of the four movements from the other three movements. The optimized radius of detector is small enough not to mis-detect the sample. Euclidean distance of each detector with every training dataset sample is taken and compared with optimized radius of detector as a non-self detector. Our proposed approach achieved a mean classification accuracy of 86.39% for limb movements over 9 subjects with a maximum individual subject classification accuracy of 97.5 % for subject number eight. (shrink)

In step with rapid advancements in computer vision, vehicle classification demonstrates a considerable potential to reshape intelligent transportation systems. In the last couple of decades, image processing and pattern recognition-based vehicle classification systems have been used to improve the effectiveness of automated highway toll collection and traffic monitoring systems. However, these methods are trained on limited handcrafted features extracted from small datasets, which do not cater the real-time road traffic conditions. Deep learning-based classification systems have been proposed to incorporate the (...) above-mentioned issues in traditional methods. However, convolutional neural networks require piles of data including noise, weather, and illumination factors to ensure robustness in real-time applications. Moreover, there is no generalized dataset available to validate the efficacy of vehicle classification systems. To overcome these issues, we propose a convolutional neural network-based vehicle classification system to improve robustness of vehicle classification in real-time applications. We present a vehicle dataset comprising of 10,000 images categorized into six-common vehicle classes considering adverse illuminous conditions to achieve robustness in real-time vehicle classification systems. Initially, pretrained AlexNet, GoogleNet, Inception-v3, VGG, and ResNet are fine-tuned on self-constructed vehicle dataset to evaluate their performance in terms of accuracy and convergence. Based on better performance, ResNet architecture is further improved by adding a new classification block in the network. To ensure generalization, we fine-tuned the network on the public VeRi dataset containing 50,000 images, which have been categorized into six vehicle classes. Finally, a comparison study has been carried out between the proposed and existing vehicle classification methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed vehicle classification system. Consequently, our proposed system achieved 99.68%, 99.65%, and 99.56% accuracy, precision, and F1-score on our self-constructed dataset. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

Law abidance is very important for effective leaders. Without law abidance, abuse of power and corruption would easily happen, which would eventually erode organizational health. To promote law abidance leadership in university students in Hong Kong, we developed a law abidance leadership program with 3 h of face-to-face lecture and 7 h of self-study of materials disturbed to students. To understand students’ perception of the 3-h lecture, we conducted a post-lecture evaluation study using a 26-item measure. Results showed that the (...) scale possessed good reliability and validity. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the assessment tool has three internally consistent and factorial invariant dimensions: program attributes, appreciation of law abidance, and teacher attributes. Regarding students’ perception of the program, students were generally satisfied with the lecture attributes, including design, content, lecture atmosphere, teaching quality, and benefits to students. In particular, students agreed that the lecture helped them understand the importance and value of law abidance and national security; over 95% of the students indicated that they would try their best to serve as law-abiding citizens and socially responsible leaders. Multiple regression analyses showed that program attributes, appreciation of law abidance, and teacher attributes predicted overall satisfaction with the lecture. Qualitative comments of the student echoed the quantitative findings, with most of the comments being positive in nature. The present study replicated the findings reported previously. Local and international contextual factors relevant to the interpretations of the findings are highlighted. (shrink)

In his paper, “Higher‐order truths about chmess,” Daniel Dennett argues that “[m]any projects in contemporary philosophy are artifactual puzzles of no abiding significance.” In other words, much contemporary academic philosophy is a waste of time. In this chapter, we use mathematics, models, and metaphysics, to expand and clarify Dennett's chmess analogy. We further the argument that some contemporary academic philosophy loses its way and chases chmess‐like endeavors – arguing that philosophy is bloated by extraneous, esoteric, and bizarre philosophical projects that (...) aren't detached from reality but only related to it tangentially. Chmess‐like games, like some contemporary academic philosophy, nick reality and then shoot off on their own trajectory, often down intellectual rabbit holes. (shrink)

Illusory Abiding: The Cultural Construction of the Chan Monk Zhongfeng Mingben. By Natasha Heller. Harvard East Asian Monographs, vol. 368. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, Harvard Univ. Press, 2014. Pp. xiv + 471. $49.95.

ArgumentBy the mid-eighteenth century, governors of the major European states promoted the study of nature as part of natural-resource based schemes for improvement and economic self-sufficiency. Procuring beneficial knowledge about nature, however, required observers, collectors, and compilers who could produce usable and useful descriptions of nature. The ways governments promoted scientific explorations varied according to the form of government, the makeup of the civil society, the state's economic ideologies and practices, and the geographical situation. This article argues that the roots (...) of a major natural history initiative in Denmark-Norway were firmly planted in the state-church organization. Through the clergymen and their activities, a bishop, supported by the government in Copenhagen, could gather an impressive collection of natural objects, receive observations and descriptions of natural phenomena, and produce natural historical publications that described for the first time many of the species of the north. Devout naturalists were a common species in the eighteenth century, when clergymen and missionaries involved themselves in the investigation of nature in Europe and far beyond. The specific interest here is in how natural history was supported and enforced as part of clerical practice, how specimen exchange was grafted on to pre-existing institutions of gift exchange, and how this influenced the character of the knowledge produced. (shrink)

This paper rereads David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion as dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connect Dialogues and the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation of Dialogues part (...) 12 as political drama. Finally, I develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime. (shrink)

I evaluate Kusch's arguments that everyday and scientific psychological beliefs are made true by the institutional facts about the people to whom they are applied. I conclude that institutional facts are among the truth-makers of such beliefs, and that this is a very significant point to have made, but that they are unlikely to be the sole such truth-makers.

This paper rereads David Hume'sDialogues Concerning Natural Religionas dramatising a distinctive, naturalistic account of toleration. I have two purposes in mind: first, to complete and ground Hume's fragmentary explicit discussion of toleration; second, to unearth a potentially attractive alternative to more recent, Rawlsian approaches to toleration. To make my case, I connectDialoguesand the problem of toleration to the wider themes of naturalism, scepticism and their relation in Hume's thought, before developing a new interpretation ofDialoguespart 12 as political drama. Finally, I (...) develop the Humean theory of toleration I have discovered by comparison between Rawls's and Hume's strategies for justification of a tolerant political regime. (shrink)

The last half-century has seen a steady loss of confidence in the defensibility of a duty to obey the law — even a qualified, pro tanto duty to obey the laws of a just or nearly just state. Over roughly the same period, there has been increasing interest in virtue ethics as an alternative to the dominant consequentialist and deontological approaches to normative ethics. Curiously, these two tendencies have so far only just barely linked up. Although there has been discussion (...) of the question whether patriotism should be considered a virtue, and abstract discussion about the virtuous person’s relation to authority and justice in general, there has been little virtue-oriented discussion having specific reference to the kinds of difficulties that have motivated the ascendant skepticism about political obligation. This silence has persisted despite repeated calls for renewed work on “virtue politics”. This article proposes and defends a preliminary account of law-abidance (as contrasted to obedience) as a virtue. It argues that a virtue-theoretic account of our relation to the law offers advantages that are not contingent upon the independence or priority of the virtues with respect to consequentialist and deontological components of a complete moral theory. Chief among these advantages is the promise of an alternative to the deadlocked positions taken by apologists for the duty to obey the law and their philosophical-anarchist critics — positions which have tacitly been assumed to exhaust the viable possibilities. (shrink)

other distinct subjects is famously difficult (see James 1890: 1.160-161; Goff 2006) but I cannot avoid the difficulty in the way Coleman can (2006:48—50), ...

In his later depiction of an ideal city, the Laws, Plato does not move from rule by experts to the rule of law, as often claimed, since law is also basic to the Republic. Rather, he now sees educated law-abidance as part of civic virtue: the laws are to be obeyed strictly, but also to be understood so that they are obeyed in the right spirit. Plato introduces original means to encourage this, and is led to make some moves in (...) the direction of what will later be developed by the Stoics as natural law. (shrink)

In the professions of today are ethical concerns of no overwhelming importance? Are these concerns less important in certain professions rather than others? Do some practitioners carry a blase attitude regarding ethics within their profession?This study, sometimes asking life-blood, career-jeopardizing questions is less interested in electronic data results and more interested in actual respondent replies on dissent and competence.

Risk management is a well-known method to face technological challenges through a win–win combination of protective and proactive approaches, fostering the collaboration of operators, researchers, regulators, and industries for the exploitation of new markets. In the field of autonomous and unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, a considerable amount of work has been devoted to risk analysis, the generation of ground risk maps, and ground risk assessment by estimating the fatality rate. The paper aims to expand this approach with a tool (...) for managing data protection risks raised by drones through the design of flight maps. The tool should allow UAS operators choosing the best air corridor for their drones based on the so-called privacy by design principle pursuant to Article 25 of the EU data protection regulation, the GDPR. Among the manifold applications of this approach, the design of fly zones for drones can be tailored for public authorities in the phase of authorization of new operations, much as for national Data Protection authorities that have to control the lawfulness of personal data processing by UAS operations. The overall aim is to present the first win–win approach to data protection issues, aerospace engineering challenges, and risk management methods for the threats posed by this technology. (shrink)

Risk management is a well-known method to face technological challenges through a win–win combination of protective and proactive approaches, fostering the collaboration of operators, researchers, regulators, and industries for the exploitation of new markets. In the field of autonomous and unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, a considerable amount of work has been devoted to risk analysis, the generation of ground risk maps, and ground risk assessment by estimating the fatality rate. The paper aims to expand this approach with a tool (...) for managing data protection risks raised by drones through the design of flight maps. The tool should allow UAS operators choosing the best air corridor for their drones based on the so-called privacy by design principle pursuant to Article 25 of the EU data protection regulation, the GDPR. Among the manifold applications of this approach, the design of fly zones for drones can be tailored for public authorities in the phase of authorization of new operations, much as for national Data Protection authorities that have to control the lawfulness of personal data processing by UAS operations. The overall aim is to present the first win–win approach to data protection issues, aerospace engineering challenges, and risk management methods for the threats posed by this technology. (shrink)

Risk management is a well-known method to face technological challenges through a win–win combination of protective and proactive approaches, fostering the collaboration of operators, researchers, regulators, and industries for the exploitation of new markets. In the field of autonomous and unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, a considerable amount of work has been devoted to risk analysis, the generation of ground risk maps, and ground risk assessment by estimating the fatality rate. The paper aims to expand this approach with a tool (...) for managing data protection risks raised by drones through the design of flight maps. The tool should allow UAS operators choosing the best air corridor for their drones based on the so-called privacy by design principle pursuant to Article 25 of the EU data protection regulation, the GDPR. Among the manifold applications of this approach, the design of fly zones for drones can be tailored for public authorities in the phase of authorization of new operations, much as for national Data Protection authorities that have to control the lawfulness of personal data processing by UAS operations. The overall aim is to present the first win–win approach to data protection issues, aerospace engineering challenges, and risk management methods for the threats posed by this technology. (shrink)

An approach to the semantics of fiction that uses the tools of truth relativism provides an alternative to Meinongian and pretence-based approaches. The approach is consistent with the deep motivations of John Wood's Truth in Fiction.

Since Blood Simple, the first film they wrote and directed together, the Coen Brothers have been working their way up in the film world and, in spite of their outside-the-mainstream taste for the noir and the surreal, have earned a number of prestigious prizes. After Fargo, one of their most critically acclaimed films, expectations were high, and when the Brothers released their next bizarre venture, most critics rushed to measure it against Fargo’s success. Consequently, The Big Lebowski, the Coens’ 1998 (...) neo-noir detective comedy, was considered an incoherent, “unsatisfactory” medley of genres and styles and a box office bomb, and nothing hinted that this unorthodox story of mistaken identity, featuring a pot-smoking, unemployed character named the Dude as its “hee-ro,” would gain a following. Yet, since its 1998 DVD release, The Big Lebowski has been hailed as the first cult film of the Internet, continuously inspiring versatile cultural phenomena as nonconformist in their nature as the movie itself. This essay examines particular factors which initially might have been responsible for alienating the audience only to help The BigLebowski become a peculiar cultural event in later years. It looks at TheBig Lebowski’s characters, the historical time and place of the film’s action as well as at various external historical events, phenomena, places and people such as, for example, the Port Huron Statement, the Reagan-Bush era, Los Angeles and its immigration issues, racial minorities, civil rights activists, the Western genre and, last but not least, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Reflecting the film’s oddities, this bag of cultural idiosyncrasies appears to provide some plausible explanations for The Big Lebowski’s unexpected, against-all-odds rise from the marginal position of a critical and commercial failure to the status of a cult classic and cultural landmark. (shrink)