Abstract: Background: In spite of the fact that computers continue to improve in speed and functions operation, they remain complex to use. Problems frequently happen, and it is hard to resolve or find solutions for them. This paper outlines the significance and feasibility of building a desktop PC problems diagnosis system. The system gathers problem symptoms from users’ desktops, rather than the user describes his/her problems to primary search engines. It automatically searches global databases of problem symptoms and solutions, and (...) also allows ordinary users to contribute exact problem reports in a structured manner. Objectives: The main goal of this Knowledge Based System is to get the suitable problem desktop PC symptoms and the correct way to solve the errors. Methods: In this paper the design of the proposed Knowledge Based System which was produced to help users of desktop PC in knowing many of the problems and error such as : Power supply problems, CPU errors, RAM dumping error, hard disk errors and bad sectors and suddenly restarting PC. The proposed Knowledge Based System presents an overview about desktop PC hardware errors are given, the cause of fault are outlined and the solution to the problems whenever possible is given out. CLIPS Knowledge Based System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed PC desktop troubleshooting Knowledge Based System was evaluated by IT students and they were satisfied with its performance. (shrink)

While empirical studies of research ethics and integrity are increasingly common, few have aimed at national scope, and even fewer at current results from Central and Eastern Europe. This article introduces the results of the first national research integrity survey in Estonia, which included all research-performing organisations in Estonia, was inclusive of all disciplines and all levels of experience. A web-based survey was developed and carried out in Estonia with a call sent to all accredited Estonian research institutions. The results (...) indicate that the vast majority (89%) of respondents consider research ethics and integrity issues important and view falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism (FFPs) as the most severe forms of misconduct. Self-reporting of FFPs is generally comparable to levels published in other studies (6.2%). Gift authorship (41%) and hampering the work of a colleague (32%) were problematic practices most noticed among colleagues. At the same time, two of the noticed questionable research practices (QRPs) – salami-slicing and misuse of research funding – were seen as less severe, hinting at the existence of counter-norms that career advancement rules and structural factors like funding policies may encourage. The availability of research ethics and integrity guidelines was considered good. Ethical aspects of studying potentially stigmatising data in a very small research community are discussed in the article and results are analysed through counter-norms and normative dissonance frames. (shrink)

In Causes, Laws, and Free Will, Kadri Vihvelin argues that we can have free will even if everything we do is predictable given the laws of nature and the past. The belief that determinism robs us of free will springs from mistaken beliefs about the metaphysics of causation, the nature of laws, and the logic of counterfactuals.

Deductive inference seems to reveal semantic connections between their premise(s) and conclusion that were there all along. This looks inconsistent with Wittgenstein's later views on meaning. The paper argues that W's treatment of aspects suggests a Wittgensteinian treatment of deduction that accommodates the troublesome phenomenon without conceding its force.

Great critical theorists from Marx and Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer not only came from the margins but also stayed faithful to the plight of the marginalized. They refused to compromise about the struggle for equality and tried to universalize its emancipatory essence. From Marx to Benjamin, critical philosophers who showed fidelity to the cause were denied a career in European universities and made impoverished, stateless, and homeless. Marginalization and critical theory are inseparable; yet, today, Marxism is institutionalized, and the (...) Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is gentrified. Critical Theory from the Margins, however, revives the Critical Theory that endorses criticism, aiming to negate dominant regimes of truth. It is unapologetic in its fidelity to the universalist struggles of the minoritized. In that spirit, Saladdin Ahmed shows that capitalism imposes a totalitarian social mode of existence and neoliberalism perpetuates fascism as a class of ideology across nationalist and religious movements. This book, then, is both a theorization and an argument in favor of the application of the episteme of the silenced as the essence of the critical education necessary for achieving universal emancipation. (shrink)

Published in 1953, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations had a deeply unsettling effect upon our most basic philosophical ideas concerning thought, sensation, and language. Its claim that philosophical questions of meaning necessitate a close analysis of the way we use language continues to influence Anglo-American philosophy today. However, its compressed and dialogic prose is not always easy to follow. This collection of essays deepens but also challenges our understanding of the work's major themes, such as the connection between meaning and use, the (...) nature of concepts, thought and intentionality, and language games. Bringing together leading philosophers and Wittgenstein scholars, it offers a genuinely critical approach, developing new perspectives and demonstrating Wittgenstein's relevance for contemporary philosophy. This volume will appeal to readers interested in the later Wittgenstein, in addition to those interested in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. (shrink)

The paper offers a model of Kant's claim that unity of consciousness entails objectivity of experience. This claim has nothing especially to do with thought, language or the categories but is a general truth about arbitrary signaling systems of the sort modeled in the paper. In conclusion I draw some consequences for various forms of idealism.

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)

Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. It takes up the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, as a case study and engages its legacy in three ways. In addition to presenting the first full translation and extended commentary in English, Asad Q. Ahmed offers detailed assessments of the technical contributions of the work, explores the social and institutional settings of (...) the vast commentarial response it elicited, and develops a theory of the philosophical commentary that is internal to the tradition. The technical, social, and theoretical approaches to the commentarial text complicate presuppositions upon which questions of Islam's intellectual decline are erected. As such, Ahmed offers a unique and powerful opportunity to understand the transmission of knowledge across the Islamic world. (shrink)

This book develops critical feminist animal and multispecies studies focusing on food and eating. It seeks to contest the exploitation of nonhuman animals while promoting intersectionally sensitive scholarship.

The Human Genome Project and the related research and development activities have raised heated discussions around some very basic ethical and social issues. A much debated concern is that of justice in human genetic research and in possible applications, especially pertaining to questions of just benefit-sharing - who and based on what sort of argumentation has the right to require benefits arising from research and discoveries, and what can even be considered as benefits? In what follows I will be examining (...) and clarifying the notion of benefit-sharing by focusing on its justifications. I will argue for certain qualifications and limitations in using this concept in specific and universal contexts. (shrink)

The expression “common good” usually conjures up benevolent associations: it is something to be desired, a worthy goal, and it would be a brave person who declared he or she was against the common good. Yet modern times have taught us to be critical and even suspicious of such grand rhetoric, leading us to query what lies behind this ambitious notion, who formulates what it stands for, and how such formulations have been reached.

Digital technology has revolutionized connectivity, but it has also overcome spatial obstacles that used to shield people from subjugating gazes and unlimited exercise of power. The home as an auratic space is dead, and this alienation has hindered our democratic capacities and created complex crises. The Death of Home aims to intellectually engage readers via enhancing spatial literacy to critically confront today’s crises.

The Consequence argument is an argument from plausible premises–our lack of causal power over the laws and past–to an implausible conclusion: that if determinism is true, we are equally powerless with respect to the future. What the compatibilist needs is a theory of counterfactuals that preserves the links between counterfactuals, causation, and the natural laws in a way that supports our commonsense belief that we have the power to make a causal difference to the future but no such power with (...) respect to the past. Lewis’s critique of the Consequence argument was based on his theory of counterfactuals and his analysis of causation as a counterfactual relation between particular events. He argued that, at a world that is deterministic in the way that ours might be, counterfactuals are temporally asymmetric in a way that matches the contingent temporal asymmetry of cauation. So it is not surprising, but only to be expected, that the past is causally closed while the future is causally open. If this worked, it would be just what the compatibilist needs. But it doesn’t work. There is an argument, due to Tooley and recently endorsed by Wasserman, that a fundamental feature of Lewis’s theory of counterfactuals is inconsistent with the metaphysical possibility of time travel and backwards causation. If this is right, then Lewis’s response to the Consequence argument fails. I endorse this conclusion, but argue that there is a better theory of counterfactuals–a theory that leaves open the metaphysical possibility of time travel to the past and backwards causation. (shrink)

Hello readers! Hope everyone is fine especially in this season where we often are prone to attacks of cold or flu. The holiday season is at our threshold, and we wish everyone to be in the best of health and happiness.This issue of the BJB is very interesting with topics stretching from Non Communicable Diseases to the ethical issues related to the habitation of the planet Mars, and proves how forward looking are our readers and authors.Mohammad Rashedul Islam et al (...) discuss the application of the SARA method in a district in Bangladesh. The method is based on the principle of Service Availability and Readiness Assessment of WHO. The study in a district in Bangladesh found that about 62% of all the facilities were ready to provide general services like basic amenities with basic equipment, standard precautions for infection prevention, diagnostic capacity and essential medicines. However in case of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCD), only 40% of the health facilities had chronic respiratory disease and cardiovascular diseases diagnosis/management and only 32% had availability of diabetes diagnosis/management. Therefore, service availability and readiness of the health facilities to provide NCD related health services were not satisfactory. The authors emphasize that SARA which is a tool to monitor facilities to be ready for provision of services including NCD, should be used by all clinic managers.The very scientific and forward looking article titled “SCNT Method and the Application for Patent Eligibility on Cloned Animals” by Norman K. Swazo reviews US federal court decisions regarding applications for patent in the case of live-born animal clones. A decision issued from the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit established an earlier decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that live-born animals cloned by the somatic cell nuclear transfer method (SCNT) like cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats are not patentable, so a scientist using the method is not eligible for a patent claim on the animals. The author feels that this decision has ethical implications related to the moral status of cloned animals. The author argues whether the end product of a SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer) application is same as an invention or only a revelation of nature at the cellular level. The author quotes Article 11 of Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights UNDHGR “Practices which are contrary to human dignity, such as reproductive cloning of human beings, shall not be permitted.” He concludes that the judicial assessments in the USA deciding on the question of patenting of animal clones provide important barriers to human reproductive cloning research, safeguarding moral and legal commitment to human dignity. The article on Ethics in Public Health Research and Clinical Research by Muhammad Waseem Khanet al discusses on the need to continue to focus on ethical values in conducting any research. Tha authors stress the importance, either in public health research or clinical research, of the need to recognize an ethical standard that respects individual’s autonomy and community’s wellbeing. This can be achieved through collective collaboration for the protection of individual’s autonomy, dignity and wellbeing. Research ethics is a fundamental criterion to be complied with throughout a research study. The very interesting article on Planetary Protection for Mars: Time for Reconsideration by Svetoslav Alexandrov looks into the ethical questions beyond mother earth but which could be affected by people from our planet. In this manuscript the author discusses the ethics of the protection of hypothetical organisms on Mars in terms of planned manned space missions and subsequent colonization. The author discusses the possible problems related to a process called terraformation where the planet is converted to make it suitable for Earth life. He argues that terraformation will change the whole condition of the planet. The author quotes Carl Sagan, of The Planetary Society: “If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life. Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes”. I think we all agree with this brilliant recommendation.The article ‘We Still Need to Improve Our Research Writing Ethics’ by Sheikh Arslan Sehgal looks into the value of maintaining professional integrity of research work. Particularly with issues like plagiarism, ethics, authorship and data fabrication. He argues that the scientific community must obey the scientific ethical norms and rules. He feels that ethical problems must be resolved for the advancement of research in countries including Pakistan. The author recommends teaching students the international, institutional and professional standards regarding research and authorship issue. Thus from the beginning researchers will know the key components of ethics in conducting research and the end product will be research work of quality and acceptability.Dear Readers, we look forward to your articles, commentaries, observations on different issues which touch our lives and will help in broadening our knowledge and understanding of Bioethics. (shrink)

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book examines the current state of elective placements of medical undergraduate students in developing countries and their impact on health care education at home. Drawing from a recent case study of volunteer deployment in Uganda, the authors provide an in-depth evaluation of the impacts on the students themselves and the learning outcomes associated with placements in low resource settings, as well as the impacts that these forms of student (...) mobility have on the host settings. In addition to reviewing the existing literature on elective placements, the authors outline a potential model for the future development of ethical elective placements. As the book concurs with an increasing international demand for elective placements, it will be of immediate interest to universities, intermediary organizations, students as consumers, and hosting organisations in low-resource settings. (shrink)

Dresser le portrait de l'homme, selon une lecture platonico-platonicienne, est la fin de ce livre.

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the impact of perceived service quality on tourist satisfaction and behavioral intentions and explore the potential mediating role of tourist satisfaction in the relationship between service quality and behavioral intentions in the yoga tourism context during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, this is to examine to what extent yoga tourist satisfaction directly affects their behavioral intentions.Design/methodology/approachBased on a review of literature, the study proposes a conceptual model to test four hypothesized relationships among the constructs of perceived (...) service quality, tourist satisfaction, and behavioral intentions. Data was collected by using a self-administrated questionnaire that was developed and directed to a convenience sample of yoga tourists. Structural equation modeling was employed to determine the relationship between study constructs.FindingsThe results of SEM illustrated that all the hypothesized relationships are supported. The findings confirm that yoga tourists’ behavioral intentions are significantly affected directly and indirectly by perceived service quality. Additionally, tourist satisfaction significantly partially mediates the relationship between PSQ and tourists’ behavioral intentions.Research limitationsThe subject of this study was yoga tourists staying in yoga retreats/studios in Egyptian destinations. Future research... (shrink)

We revisit the flight-to-quality and flight-from-quality occurrences vis-à-vis the stock-bond nexus across differing investment time scales in the COVID-19 era, using a novel technique hinged on a denoised frequency-domain transfer entropy. Our findings divulge that flights, both FTQ and FFQ, could be attained during stress periods. Generally, in the intermediate term of the COVID-19 pandemic, both Islamic and conventional bonds could act as safe havens, diversifiers, and hedges for international equities, and the same could be observed for international equities. We (...) reiterate empirically that flights may improve the financial system’s stability and robustness by allowing diversity to be effective when it is most required. The findings have financial and portfolio implications for investors considering how to deploy their investments in the COVID-19 era. Our findings may impact policymakers’ responses to changes in various asset classes, allowing them to better monitor financial markets and adjust macroeconomic policies. (shrink)

Determinism is a claim about the laws of nature: very roughly, it is the claim that everything that happens is determined by antecedent conditions together with the natural laws. Incompatibilism is a philosophical thesis about the relevance of determinism to free will: that the truth of determinism rules out the existence of free will. The incompatibilist believes that if determinism turned out to be true, it would also be true that we don't have, and have never had, free will. The (...) compatibilist denies that determinism has the consequences the incompatibilist thinks it has. According to the compatibilist, the truth of determinism does not preclude the existence of free will. (Even if we learned tomorrow that determinism is true, it might still be true that we have free will.) The philosophical problem of free will and determinism is the problem of understanding, how, if at all, the truth of determinism might be compatible with the truth of our belief that we have free will. That is, it's the problem of deciding who is right: the compatibilist or the incompatibilist. (shrink)

The traditional debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists was based on the assumption that if determinism deprives us of free will and moral responsibility, it does so by making it true that we can never do other than what we actually do. All parties to the debate took for granted the truth of a claim now widely known as "the principle of alternate possibilities": someone is morally responsible only if he could have done otherwise. In a famous paper, Harry Frankfurt argued (...) that the principle of alternate possibilities is false. I argue that Frankfurt's argument rests on a modal fallacy. (shrink)

This study presents an Islamic conception of sovereignty from mainstream Sunni theology by closely examining Ghiyāth al-umam fī iltyāth aẓ-ẓulam, the major political work of Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwayn...

The object of study in the present article is birds, more precisely the sounds of birds as they are represented in Estonian nature writing. The evolutionary and structural parallels of bird song with human language are reviewed. Human interpretation of bird sounds raises the question, whether it is possible to transmit or “translate” signals between the Umwelts of different species. The intentions of the sender of the signal may remain unknown, but the signification process within human Umwelt can still be (...) traced and analysed. By approaching the excerpts of nature writing using semiotic methodology, I attempt to demonstrate how bird sounds can function as different types of signs, as outlined by Thomas A. Sebeok. It is argued that the zoosemiotic treatment of nature writing opens up a number of interesting perspectives that would otherwise remain beyond the scope of traditional literary analysis. (shrink)

The object of study in the present article is birds, more precisely the sounds of birds as they are represented in Estonian nature writing. The evolutionary and structural parallels of bird song with human language are reviewed. Human interpretation of bird sounds raises the question, whether it is possible to transmit or “translate” signals between the Umwelts of different species. The intentions of the sender of the signal may remain unknown, but the signification process within human Umwelt can still be (...) traced and analysed. By approaching the excerpts of nature writing using semiotic methodology, I attempt to demonstrate how bird sounds can function as different types of signs, as outlined by Thomas A. Sebeok. It is argued that the zoosemiotic treatment of nature writing opens up a number of interesting perspectives that would otherwise remain beyond the scope of traditional literary analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in the organisation of bodies and spaces before we ask the question of the limits of ‘hate crime’ as a legal category. Rather than assuming hate is a psychological disposition - that it comes from within a psyche and then moves out to others - the paper suggests that hate works to align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Such alignments (...) are unstable precisely given the fact that hate does not reside in a subject, object or body; the instability of hate is what makes it so powerful in generating the effects that it does. Furthermore, although hate does not reside positively in a subject, body or sign, this does not mean that hate does have effects that are structural and mediated. This paper shows that hate becomes attached or ‘stuck’ to particular bodies, often through violence, force and harm. The paper dramatizes its arguments by a reflection on racism as hate crime, looking at the circulation of figures of hate in discourses of nationhood, from both extreme right wing and mainstream political parties. It also considers the part of what hate is doing can precisely be understood in terms of the affect it has on the bodies of those designated as the hated, an affective life that is crucial to the injustice of hate crime. (shrink)

I have argued that even if time travel is metaphysically possible, there are some things a time traveler would not be able to do. I reply here to critics who have argued that my account entails fatalism about the past or entails that the time traveler is unfree or that she is bound by “strange shackles.” My argument does not entail any sort of fatalism. The time traveler is able to do many of the things that everyone else can do (...) and is as free as any non-time-traveler. The time traveler is constrained only as we all are by the laws of nature. My argument shows only how strangely those constraints must operate if those laws permit time travel. (shrink)

The market relationships are being contested. This can be seen in the increasing number of alternative social experiments in the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ which propose to think out the present market relationships in a different way, in particular in establishing exchange value and in facilitating access to trade. These practical alternatives are supported by trends in academic circles that over the past three decades have opposed neoliberal capitalism and individualism in today's commercialised society. Calling for greater solidarity and social (...) justice in economic relationships, in particular, partisans of social and solidarity economics, identifying with these trends, demand new forms of exchange. The objective of this article is to re-examine these demands. What exactly do the SSE mean by ‘solidarity’ and ‘solidarity-based economy'? We would like to trace the contours of this theoretical and political project and to assess the practicability of the proposed alternative to neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

The study aimed at measuring the dominant pattern of leadership and its relation to the performance of the administrative staff in the Palestinian universities. The study community consists of all the administrative staff from Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University, and through the census of the study society it was found to consist of (655) administrative staff. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, the researchers used the method of random sample in the study, and the study was (...) conducted on a sample of (221) administrative staff of the surveyed universities and the response rate was (82.35%). The study found that there is a high degree of satisfaction with the Dominant Pattern of Leadership in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip from the point of view of the administrative staff, which reached (71.67%). There is a high level of performance from the point of view of administrative staff, with a percentage of (82.53%). There is a direct correlation between the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff, the absence of differences between the sample according to the gender variable in their perception of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the age variable. There are differences of statistical significance according to the variable of scientific qualification in the Dominant Pattern of Leadership, while there were no differences in performance, the differences in the dominant pattern of leadership according to the scientific qualification were in favor of those who obtained the diploma degree compared to other practical qualifications, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the variable years of service, the absence of differences in the perception of employees of the dominant pattern of leadership and the functional Performance of Administrative Staff depending on the variable level of career (Director, Head of Department, and Administrative Officer). There were differences in the perception of workers to the dominant pattern of leadership depending on the variable of the workplace, where there were differences in favor of workers in deanships and colleges compared with the workers in the technical departments. While there were no differences in job performance according to the workplace variable, the existence of differences in the perception of workers to the dominant pattern of leadership depending on the university in which they work in favor of the Islamic University and the absence of differences in performance between the Islamic University and Al-Azhar University. The study reached a number of recommendations, the most important of which is that the interest of the managements of the Palestinian universities in improving the dominant pattern of leadership, to give universities the opportunity to participate in decision-making, the continued administration of universities interest and continuous improvement of the performance of its employees, enhance the periodic evaluation of job performance and to inform employees and express their opinion, solving workers' problems and giving them the opportunity to contribute to solving their own problems, the use of the staff rotation method periodically and strengthening the democratic the dominant pattern of leadership and empowering university staff. -/- . (shrink)

Ahmed uncovers new historiographical perspectives by critically examining the work of prominent intellectuals, such as Muhammad Abduh, Qasim Amin and Abdul A'la Maududi.