Choice experiment (CE) is a questionnaire based method that the accuracy of research questionnaire determines the validity of the research outcomes. Attribute selection has a prime importance in every CE studies. If respondents do not understand or do not have preference for a certain attribute, the attribute non-attendance problem might happen that biases overall results of the research. Qualitative approaches such as literature review, focus group discussion, and in depth discussion commonly applied in CE researches. However, especially in the developing (...) countries context where ethnical and cultural diversity is a challenge in conducting survey based questionnaires, qualitative methods are not sufficient in selecting attributes. Present study investigates the application of relative importance index (RII) in respondents¡¯ preference for attributes in a modal shift study in Klang Valley, Malaysia. The 5 point Likert scale questions were employed to enhance respondents¡¯ preferences for initial 24 selected attributes. The results of this study showed that from 24 pre-selected attributes, only 18 of them had RII>0.5 and could be included in the final CE design. The results of this study could help researchers to control for unobserved problems in selecting the attributes which could not be discovered through qualitative approaches. -/- . (shrink)

Good agricultural practices certification schemes have been promoted to enhance agricultural sustainability. This study seeks to explain the adoption of GAP certification schemes through an analysis of the role of personal values in guiding such choice. It is a departure from approaches taken in previous studies in the area. Through the laddering interview technique of means-end chain analysis, a hierarchical value map was systematically schematized to illustrate the relationship between adoption of GAP, outcomes, and personal values driving the choice. The (...) personal values identified in this study cluster under the headings of “better life”, “religious responsibility”, “healthy life”, and “responsible farmer”. Amongst these, the main evidence pointed to the desire to have “better life” through the enhanced financial position that is perceived to arise as a consequence of GAP adoption as being of primary importance. These findings suggest that, while profit is not the sole end driver of adoptive behavior, GAP certification schemes have to be seen as lucrative and to enhance the goals of achieving core personal values. Other empirical information in this study also has significant policy implications. It is a key finding of this paper that effective promotions of GAP should be tailored and targeted at specific segments of the farmer population. (shrink)

This paper asks how perception becomes racializing and seeks the means for its critical interruption. My aim is not only to understand the recalcitrant and limitative temporal structure of racializing habits of seeing, but also to uncover the possibilities within perception for a critical awareness and destabilization of this structure. Reading Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Frantz Fanon, Iris Marion Young and race-critical feminism, I locate in hesitation the phenomenological moment where habits of seeing can be internally (...) fractured. Hesitation, I claim, makes visible the exclusionary logic of racializing and objectifying perception, countering its affective closure and opening it to critical transformation. (shrink)

This is the first complete English translation of the Jami al-hikmatayn, written in Persian, the final, and crowning, work of the great poet, philosopher, and Ismaili missionary Nasir-i Khusraw (1004-1077). Twin Wisdoms Reconciled was written at the request of the emir of Badakhshan 'Abu al-Ma'ali 'Ali ibn Asad' who was perplexed by the questions in a long philosophical ode written a century earlier by Abu al-Haytham Jurjani, an obscure Ismaili author. The ode consists of a series of some 90 (...) questions on a wide range of subjects, from logic and metaphysics to medicine, cosmology, and physics, as well as esoteric Ismaili doctrine. Nasir-i Khusraw's text takes the form of a commentary on certain astutely selected lines. Twin Wisdoms Reconciled represents yet another example of the author's lifelong endeavour to transform Persian philosophical prose into a deft and nuanced instrument of expression. The work has not been as extensively studied as Nasir-i Khusraw's other major theological and philosophical treatises, all written in his final exile in Badakhshan, in part perhaps because of its textual difficulties. Twin Wisdoms Reconciled survives in a single manuscript of dubious accuracy in the Aya Sofya collection, Suleymaniyye Library, Istanbul. The present translation is based on the critical edition of the text produced by Henry Corbin and Mohammed Mo'in in 1953, but with frequent reference to the unique original manuscript. Twin Wisdoms Reconciled represents an endeavour to reconcile two apparently opposed forms of knowledge: the knowledge accorded by revelation and exegesis and the knowledge gained by reason. Seeing that "the bazaar of wisdom" stands empty because of the mutual incomprehension of traditional theologians and Aristotelian philosophers, Nasir-i Khusraw stepped boldly forward to reinvigorate that desolate marketplace. His final work, written in 1070, is thus a testimony as well as an exposition of his mature thought. (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)

This paper explores ethical issues raised by whole slide image-based computational pathology. After briefly giving examples drawn from some recent literature of advances in this field, we consider some ethical problems it might be thought to pose. These arise from the tension between artificial intelligence research—with its hunger for more and more data—and the default preference in data ethics and data protection law for the minimisation of personal data collection and processing; the fact that computational pathology lends itself to kinds (...) of data fusion that go against data ethics norms and some norms of biobanking; the fact that AI methods are esoteric and produce results that are sometimes unexplainable and the fact that computational pathology is particularly dependent on scanning technology manufacturers with interests of their own in profit-making from data collection. We shall suggest that most of these issues are resolvable. (shrink)

This inquiry examines the question how the category of ‘religion’ generates a complex form of power oriented to the government of subjects. It does this through a critical reading of the right to freedom of religion, offered from the perspective of governmentality. It is argued that the right to freedom of religion enables the rational goals of government to relate to religiosity in such a manner that those subject to them are made at once freer and more governable ‘in this (...) world’. (shrink)

Despite the ever-changing field of artificial intelligence (AI) and its preponderance of pre-print articles, Cohen offers a timely, nuanced, and self-aware overview of ChatGPT and the world of Larg...

The canonical view of a 3‐domain (3D) tree of life was recently challenged by the discovery of Asgardarchaeota encoding eukaryote signature proteins (ESPs), which were treated as missing links of a 2‐domain (2D) tree. Here we revisit the debate. We discuss methodological limitations of building trees with alignment‐dependent approaches, which often fail to satisfactorily address the problem of ‘‘gaps.’’ In addition, most phylogenies are reconstructed unrooted, neglecting the power of direct rooting methods. Alignment‐free methodologies lift most difficulties but require employing (...) realistic evolutionary models. We argue that the discoveries of Asgards and ESPs, by themselves, do not rule out the 3D tree, which is strongly supported by comparative and evolutionary genomic analyses and vast genomic and biochemical superkingdom distinctions. Given uncertainties of retrodiction and interpretation difficulties, we conclude that the 3D view has not been falsified but instead has been strengthened by genomic analyses. In turn, the objections to the 2D model have not been lifted. The debate remains open. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/-6TBN0bubI8. (shrink)

El artículo aborda el proceso de conceptualización de la rememoración benjaminiana [Eingedenken], entendida por el pensador alemán como ejercicio crítico sobre una idea de historia que, desde Hegel, se asimiló al progreso como principio rector de las sociedades modernas. Partiendo, pues, de unos presupuestos epistemológicos distintos, Walter Benjamin procura en el recuerdo un nuevo tiempo histórico por venir, que se activa dialécticamente desde cierto mesianismo como resto escatológico en el ámbito de una moderna de la secularización.

This chapter argues that Fanon works to interrupt specular and spectacular renderings of suffering and colonial violence. The touch that Fanon advocates is neither optimal grip, violent grasp, nor uniform pressure, nor can it be predicted in advance. His writing touches colonial wounds; by palpating these wounds and dwelling in them, it resuscitates colonial wounds as feelings that are flesh, and does not leave them behind as if their scar tissue was merely a numb object of the past. Fanon seems (...) to reiterate Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological discovery in Ideas II that the hand that touches the surface of a table, as it moves across it, also feels itself touched. Fanon’s aim is not simply to calculate the destructive effects of colonization, against arguments for its partial “civilizing” benefits. (shrink)

This article focuses on the interrelationship of law and life in human rights. It does this in order to theorize the normative status of contemporary biopower. To do this, the case law of Article 2 on the right to life of the European Convention on Human Rights is analysed. It argues that the juridical interpretation and application of the right to life produces a differentiated governmental management of life. It is established that: 1) Article 2 orients governmental techniques to lives (...) in order to ensure that both deprivation and protection of lives is lawful; 2) A proper application of Article 2 grounds itself on a proper discrimination of lives which causes Article 2 to be applied universally but not uniformly to all juridical subjects; 3) The jurisprudence of Article 2 is theoretically appreciable only in a ‘politics of life’. Finally, the article ends with a plea to analyse other fundamental human rights in the context of ‘biopolitical governmentality’. (shrink)

I suggest that virtue ethics can learn from Foucault’s critical observations on biopolitics and governmentality, which identify how a good cannot be disassociated from power and freedom. I chart a way through which virtue ethics internalizes this critical point. I argue that this helps address concerns that both virtue ethics and the critical scholarship inspired by Foucault otherwise ignore. I apply virtue ethics to the contexts of refugee arrival, asylum procedure, and immigrant integration in Western Europe; I then see how (...) Foucault’s critical thought provides a counterpoint to virtue ethics; I finally analyze how incorporating that critique allows virtue ethics to make sense of both the context and the stakes involved. (shrink)

Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror explores the cases for war put forward by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. It systematically lays out how violence has been justified on both 'sides', and how these justifications have been criticised within the West and the Muslim world.

This essay focuses on the interrelationship of regulation and private life in human rights. It argues three main points. Article 8 connects the question of protection of private lives and privacies with the question of their management. Thus, Article 8 orients regulatory practices to private lives and privacies. Article 8’s holders are autonomous to the extent that laws respect their private lives and privacies. They are not autonomous in a ‘pre-political’ sense, where we might expect legal rules to protect an (...) already autonomous private life or privacy. Article 8 does not simply prohibit or permit acts. In certain cases, it also ‘enables’ acts. Then, this essay introduces the idea of oikopolitics. This idea allows us to capture these three points in a useful manner. By this idea, this essay means the context where the interpretation of privacy reaches out to broader social practices and norms and where the status of rights-holders living their private lives makes them objects of attention. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to offer a reparative framework for current feminist approaches, most of which seek to inhabit rather than assimilate previous forms of inclusivity or intersectionality, by vindicating the pioneering role of past feminisms. For this purpose, I will stick to a double-edged methodological tool that has been an object of dispute in feminist and literary studies for the last decades, namely, critique and postcritique, two concepts that could be said to bear witness to old (...) and new ways of doing feminism. My aim is not to dismiss recent feminist work but to render visible forgotten critiques that have been an essential heritage of feminism. To acknowledge such debts is part of the reparative reading I present here, for I hold that the desire for deep knowledge is accretive and demands a closer and more respectful attention to past practices and theoretical positions. (shrink)

This project investigates the ethical frameworks in place for Pakistani television news journalists reporting cases of domestic violence. It also examines the provision and structure of training for Pakistani media professionals to support accurate and balanced reporting of such violence. The research comprised in-depth semi-structured interviews with a small group of television journalists. The findings reveal that there was no formalized code of ethics guiding how journalists represent incidents of this crime, its victims, or perpetrators. Moreover, it was revealed that (...) due to a paucity of formal professional development opportunities, journalists negotiate the challenges of reporting domestic violence on-the-job, resulting in instances of irresponsible reporting practices. (shrink)

Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logics are used to model events with imprecise, incomplete, and uncertain information. Researchers have developed numerous methods and techniques to cope with fuzziness or uncertainty. This research intends to introduce the novel concepts of complex neutrosophic relations and its types based on the idea of complex neutrosophic sets. In addition, these concepts are supported by suitable examples. A CNR discusses the quality of a relationship using the degree of membership, the degree of abstinence, and the degree (...) of nonmembership. Each of these degrees is a complex number from the unit circle in a complex plane. The real part of complex-valued degrees represents the amplitude term, while the imaginary part represents the phase term. This property empowers CNRs to model multidimensional variables. Moreover, some interesting properties and useful results have also been proved. Furthermore, the practicality of the proposed concepts is verified by an application, which discusses the use of the proposed concepts in statistical decision-making. Additionally, a comparative analysis between the novel concepts of CNRs and the existing methods is carried out. (shrink)

Today the issue of ethics and most importantly moral values are being seen as merely based upon opinions and emotions. This has led towards a relativisation of moral values and thus towards the erosion of values amongst societies. This paper would analyze and suggest ways of preserving values for the structuring of developmental ideas for thinkers in developing countries. Coming from an Islamic standpoint the ideas of virtues have to be rooted within the transcendent or the Absolute. Such defense of (...) virtues are definitely beyond the grasp of usual western philosophy as the philosophy that is propagated by Islam is not a mere intellectual exercise but a transformative exercise which connects the profane to the sacred, the outer to the inner and the physical world to the spiritual world. The loci or the focus point is the human being thus developing the idea of being human via the inculcation of and preservation of virtues is of utmost importance. The virtues most important in Islam such as justice, moderation or temperance have been discussed by various muslim philosophers. These virtues are rooted in the Absolute and through His presence in the various levels of existences are they known. For Using ideas from malay cosmology and soteriology based upon the writings of Malay scholars, this paper would highlight ways to preserve and ensure Malay society does not fall under the threat of relativism of moral values. (shrink)

This article examines ḥikma as it was practiced by Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, or Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1640), in explaining the connection between the divine names and the attributes of God. This is done via a translation of the fourth part of his al-Maẓāhir al-ilāhiyya fī asrār al-ʿulūm al-kamāliyya [The loci of divine manifestations in the secrets of the knowledge of perfection]. Ḥikma, philosophy, as it is defined here, is the combination of rational demonstrations and spiritual unveiling. Shīrāzī’s philosophy is a (...) synthesis of Ibn ʿArabī’s school of metaphysical unveiling, the Ishrāqī school led by Suhrawardī, and the rational school of the Peripatetics. The text is translated here for the first time, and includes annotations. (shrink)

This article examines ḥikma as it was practiced by Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī, or Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1640), in explaining the connection between the divine names and the attributes of God. This is done via a translation of the fourth part of his al-Maẓāhir al-ilāhiyya fī asrār al-ʿulūm al-kamāliyya [The loci of divine manifestations in the secrets of the knowledge of perfection]. Ḥikma, philosophy, as it is defined here, is the combination of rational demonstrations and spiritual unveiling. Shīrāzī’s philosophy is a (...) synthesis of Ibn ʿArabī’s school of metaphysical unveiling, the Ishrāqī school led by Suhrawardī, and the rational school of the Peripatetics. The text is translated here for the first time, and includes annotations. (shrink)

Purpose of the StudyThe significance of creativity and performance in the workplace has been illustrated on various occasions. This study aims to find out if there is a link between transformative leadership, organizational innovation, psychological issues such as hindrance and challenge stressors, and employee creativity and employee performance. There is still a lack of awareness of the factors that influence employee performance in small and medium businesses in Pakistan. Pakistan’s SMEs have struggled to survive in their early years, with an (...) initial failure rate of 90 percent to 95 percent.MethodologyThe relationship between hindrance and challenge stressors, organizational innovation, transformational leadership, employee creativity, and their effect on overall employee performance is established through employing Structural Equation Modeling. In this study, constructs were developed from existing theories, hypotheses were generated, data were collected from 424 SME employees, and SEM analysis was conducted to prove the suggested hypothesis. The employees of SMEs are the research study’s unit of analysis.FindingsThe findings of this study demonstrated that challenge stressors, transformational leadership, and employee creativity all had positive and significant effects on employee performance.Originality/ValueThis is one of the first studies to study and extends existing understanding of psychological research in this manner and following correlations in a developing country, Pakistan: the links between transformational leadership and employees’ perception of creativity and performance along with organizational innovation and work stressors. Based on theoretical considerations, a model is proposed, and hypotheses are established and explored. The findings of this study can help businesses increase employee performance by informing employee performance improvement methods. Business executives might learn more about how to engage and motivate employees to improve their performance. (shrink)

Eyewitnesses are often susceptible to recollection failures and memory distortions. These failures and distortions are influenced by several factors. The present review will discuss two such important factors, attention failures and stress. We argue that acute stress, often experienced by eyewitnesses and victims of crimes, directly influences attentional processes, which likely has downstream consequences for memory. Attentional failures may result in individuals missing something unusual or important in a complex visual field. Amongst eyewitnesses, this can lead to individuals missing details, (...) even unusual or important central details, regarding the crime. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated attentional failures in eyewitness scenarios, and none have investigated the relationship between stress, attention, and witness memory. This review will discuss the impact of attentional failures, mainly those resulting from inattentional blindness, in applied contexts in order to bridge to eyewitness scenarios. In addition, we will integrate the applied literature on attentional failures with literature that examines the influences of arousal and stress on attention. We will conclude by presenting how future research may tease apart the independent contributions of arousal and stress on attentional failures and successes and how this research may inform understanding of eyewitness reliability. (shrink)