Seasonal outbreaks have several different periods that occur primarily during winter in temperate regions, while influenza may occur throughout the year in tropical regions, triggering outbreaks more irregularly. Similarly, dengue occurs in the star of the rainy season in early May and reaches its peak in late June. Dengue and flu brought an impact on various countries in the years 2017–2019 and streaming Twitter data reveals the status of dengue and flu outbreaks in the most affected regions. This research work (...) presents that Social Media Analysis can be used as a detector of the epidemic outbreak and to understand the sentiment of social media users regarding various diseases. Providing awareness about seasonal outbreaks through SMA is an effective approach for researchers and healthcare responders to detect the early outbreaks. The proposed model aims to find the sentiment about the disease in tweets, and the seasonal outbreaks-related tweets are classified into two classes as disease positive and disease negative. This work proposes a machine-learning-based approach to detect dengue and flu outbreaks in social media platform Twitter, using four machine learning algorithms: Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, and Decision Tree, with the help of Term Frequency and Inverse Document Frequency. For experimental analysis, two datasets are analyzed individually. The experimental results show that the RF classifier has outperformed the comparison models in terms of improved accuracy, precision, recall, F1-measure, and Receiver Operating Characteristic curve. The proposed work offers favorable performance with total precision, accuracy, recall, and F1-measure ranging from 84% to 88% for conventional machine learning techniques. (shrink)

Fake news detection involves predicting the likelihood that a particular news article is intentionally deceptive. Arabic FND started to receive more attention in the last decade, and many detection approaches demonstrated some ability to detect fake news on multiple datasets. However, most existing approaches do not consider recent advances in natural language processing, i.e., the use of neural networks and transformers. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative study of neural network and transformer-based language models used for Arabic FND. We examine (...) the use of neural networks and transformer-based language models for Arabic FND and show their performance compared to each other. We also conduct an extensive analysis of the possible reasons for the difference in performance results obtained by different approaches. The results demonstrate that transformer-based models outperform the neural network-based solutions, which led to an increase in the F1 score from 0.83 to 0.95, and it boosted the accuracy by 16% compared to the best in neural network-based solutions. Finally, we highlight the main gaps in Arabic FND research and suggest future research directions. (shrink)

This article aims to read feminist new materialisms (Barad), together with ‘postulated’ linguistic or cultural primacy of Queer Theory (Butler), to show how both are engaged in similar critical-ethical endeavours. The central argument is that the criticism of Barad and new materialisms misses Butler’s materialistic insights due to a narrow interpretation of Butler's alleged social-constructivist position. There is, therefore, a specific focus on where they both make similar ethical appeals. Moreover, the article relies on Adorno's negative dialectic to highlight an (...) interpretation of Barad and Butler as being part of the same dialectical movement, in which materialism and idealism fluctuate in their mutual criticisms, thus continuing the procession towards 'new knowledge' and emancipation, or freedom, through their motions back and forth. (shrink)

Terence Irwin's edition of the Nicomachean Ethics offers more aids to the reader than are found in any modern English translation. It includes an Introduction, headings to help the reader follow the argument, explanatory notes on difficult or important passages, and a full glossary explaining Aristotle's technical terms. The Third Edition offers additional revisions of the translation as well as revised and expanded versions of the notes, glossary, and Introduction. Also new is an appendix featuring translated selections from related texts (...) of Aristotle. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

The development of transplantation technology increasingly places before society a multitude of diverse, complex ethical and legal problems. The subject is the more complex because of the various divergent interests involved. There are the interests of the donor of organs, who has a right to protection of his legal position, and those of the patient in need of an often lifesaving organ. There are also the interests of the donor’s relatives, after his death, and those of the transplantation surgeons. The (...) international dimension of transplantation technology makes the picture even more complicated. Though this article is devoted to the European situation, the problems are similar all over the world. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s intuitions.

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

Examining the quality perceptions of consumers has often been recommended as an international research paradigm. This study is grounded in the Pakistani consumer market to evaluate the impact of food packaging cues on perceived product quality. The moderating effect of consumer knowledge was also taken into consideration in the study. A signaling theory was used in the study for its established predictive power in consumer behavior, marketing, and various fields of research. Based on the essence of the signaling theory, this (...) study hypothesized that food packaging cues cast a positive impact on perceived product quality and consumer knowledge moderates these relationships. By using the sample of 504 consumers, data were gathered using the mall intercept method following a multi-stage sampling technique. The responses were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social sciences and Smart Partial Least Square. The findings of this study unveil that the extrinsic cues' brand name, price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels were positively and significantly related to the perceived product quality. However, the country of origin cast no impact on the perceived product quality. Consumer knowledge reflected a moderation effect on the relationships between brand name and country of origin with the perceived product quality whereas it exerted no moderation impact on the relationships of price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels with the perceived product quality. As the results exhibit that Pakistani consumers rely on food packaging cues for perceiving a product, hence it is recommended that marketers and policymakers develop appropriate marketing strategies focused on the significance of food packaging cues. (shrink)

The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve presents a road map for an evolutionary psychology of the twenty-first century. It brings together theory from biology and cognitive science to show how the brain can be composed of specialized adaptations, and yet also an organ of plasticity. Although mental adaptations have typically been seen as monolithic, hard-wired components frozen in the evolutionary past, The Shape of Thought presents a new view of mental adaptations as diverse and variable, with distinct functions (...) and evolutionary histories that shape how they develop, what information they use, and what they do with that information. The book describes how advances in evolutionary developmental biology can be applied to the brain by focusing on the design of the developmental systems that build it. Crucially, developmental systems can be plastic, designed by the process of natural selection to build adaptive phenotypes using the rich information available in our social and physical environments. This approach bridges the long-standing divide between "nativist" approaches to development, based on innateness, and "empiricist" approaches, based on learning. It shows how a view of humans as a flexible, culturally-dependent species is compatible with a complexly specialized brain, and how the nature of our flexibility can be better understood by confronting the evolved design of the organ on which that flexibility depends. (shrink)

We report on the first stage of a project on the representations of gender in the coverage of the Arab Spring by Western media. We focus on designing comparable corpora to examine Arab women’s depiction in English and German news during the uprisings. The English corpus is composed of reports published by _The Guardian and The New York Times_. The German corpus consists of articles collected from _Der Spiegel, Die Welt_, _Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,_ and _Süddeutsche Zeitung_. The datasets (...) were processed through Sketch Engine to identify the terms collocating with _women_ in the English corpus and _Frau_ in the German one. Then, the themes reflected by these expressions in the two corpora were compared. The results show that both news media feature two types of topical frames linked to Arab women; one is associated with the uprisings while the other is related to their recurrent stereotypes in Western news discourse. Yet, there are discrepancies between their focus on related issues to each type. Other differences between the two sets of news outlets include intensity of reporting on Arab women and stressing their nationalities. These findings suggest that although Arab women’s negative stereotypes continued to feature in western news discourse during the Arab Spring, new positive images emerged and contributed to changing their depictions in global media. (shrink)

This paper offers a unified explanation for the procreation asymmetry and the non-identity thesis – two of the most intractable puzzles in population ethics. According to the procreation asymmetry, there are moral reasons not to create lives that are not worth living but no moral reasons to create lives that are worth living. I explain the procreation asymmetry by arguing that there are moral reasons to prevent the bad, but no moral reasons to promote the good. Various explanations for the (...) procreation asymmetry have failed to explain the non-identity thesis: if one could create a person with a good life or a different person with a better life, one has a moral reason to create the better life. I argue that reflections on the misfortune of unfulfilled potential allow us to circumvent the non-identity problem. (shrink)

I argue, first, that the deprived individuals whose predicaments Nussbaum cites as examples of "adaptive preference" do not in fact prefer the conditions of their lives to what we should regard as more desirable alternatives, indeed that we believe they are badly off precisely because they are not living the lives they would prefer to live if they had other options and were aware of them. Secondly, I argue that even where individuals in deprived circumstances acquire tastes for conditions that (...) we regard as bad, they are typically better off having their acquired preferences satisfied. If they are badly off it is because they cannot get what we and they, would regard as more desirable alternatives. Preference utilitarianism explains why individuals in such circumstances are badly off whether they have adapted to their deprived circumstances or not. Even if they prefer the conditions of their lives to all other available alternatives, most would prefer alternatives that are not available to them which would, on the preferentist account, make them better off. And that, on the preferentist account, is the basis for a radical critique of unjust institutions that limit people's options and prevent them from getting what they want. (shrink)

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Currently, there is widespread skepticism that higher cognitive processes, given their apparent flexibility and globality, could be carried out by specialized computational devices, or modules. This skepticism is largely due to Fodor's influential definition of modularity. From the rather flexible catalogue of possible modular features that Fodor originally proposed has emerged a widely held notion of modules as rigid, informationally encapsulated devices that accept highly local inputs and whose operations are insensitive to context. It is a mistake, however, to equate (...) such features with computational devices in general and therefore to assume, as Fodor does, that higher cognitive processes must be non‐computational. Of the many possible non‐Fodorean architectures, one is explored here that offers possible solutions to computational problems faced by conventional modular systems: an ‘enzymatic’ architecture. Enzymes are computational devices that use lock‐and‐key template matching to identify relevant information (substrates), which is then operated upon and returned to a common pool for possible processing by other devices. Highly specialized enzymes can operate together in a common pool of information that is not pre‐sorted by information type. Moreover, enzymes can use molecular ‘tags’ to regulate the operations of other devices and to change how particular substrates are construed and operated upon, allowing for highly interactive, context‐specific processing. This model shows how specialized, modular processing can occur in an open system, and suggests that skepticism about modularity may largely be due to failure to consider alternatives to the standard model. (shrink)

In 2017, the blockade of Qatar Gulf states caused a plethora of effects on the country. This paper sought to examine the resulting threat effects of this blockade in terms of lowered self-esteem and well-being, and the potential buffering effects of an overarching identity. Using self-report questionnaire data from Qatari secondary school students, multiple moderated mediation models investigated the predictive effects of youngsters’ perceived threat, via self-esteem, on their well-being, and the mitigating roles herein of, respectively, national, Gulf region, and (...) Arab identity. Perceived threat was indeed related to lower well-being via lower self-esteem, and this relationship was equally strong for those low and high in social identity. In terms of the three facets of identity, the overarching Gulf identity seems the most predictive, and it even buffers the negative relationship between threat and reduced self-esteem. (shrink)

Is there a pro tanto moral reason to create a life merely because it would be good for the person living it? Proponents of the procreation asymmetry claim there is not. Defending this controversial no reason claim, some have suggested that it is well in line with other phenomena in the moral realm: there is no reason to give a promise merely because one would keep it, and there is no reason to procreate merely to increase the extent of justice (...) in the world. Allegedly, some analogs extend so far as to support a unified theory of the no reason claim and the nonidentity thesis, that is, the view that of two persons leading lives of positive wellbeing, there is a reason to create the person with higher wellbeing. I dismantle the proposed analogs and show that they fail to meet various desiderata. Moreover, I refute Johann Frick's argument that the no reason claim follows from the assumption that reasons of beneficence are reasons to act for the sake of people. By criticizing attractive defenses for the no reason claim, I weaken its plausibility. (shrink)

We applaud the spirit of MacNeilage's attempts to better explain the evolution and cortical control of speech by drawing on the vast literature in nonhuman primate neurobiology. However, he oversimplifies motor cortical fields and their known individual functions to such an extent that he undermines the value of his effort. In particular, MacNeilage has lumped together the functional characteristics across multiple mesial and lateral motor cortex fields, inadvertantly creating two hypothetical centers that simply may not exist.

Amyloid beta precursor protein (APP) and prion protein (PrP) are cell membrane elements implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. Both proteins undergo endoproteolysis. Evidence is adduced from the literature hinting that the process in the two proteins could be related, their functions may overlap and their distributions coincide. It is proposed that PrP catalyses its own cleavage, the C-terminal fragment functions as an α secretase and the N-terminal segment chaperones the active site; the α secretase releases anticoagulant and neurotrophic ectodomains from APP. (...) The proposals explain some features of spongiform encephalopathies. BioEssays 23:456–462, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Der private, sehr gefahrdete Bucherbestand Friedrich Nietzsches gilt als ein besonders interessantes Beispiel einer Schriftstellerbibliothek des 19. Jahrhunderts.

Maintenance and promotion of patient dignity is an ethical responsibility of healthcare workers. The aim of this study was to investigate patient dignity and related factors in patients with heart failure. In this qualitative study, 22 patients with heart failure were chosen by purposive sampling and semi-structured interviews were conducted until data saturation. Factors related to patient dignity were divided into two main categories: patient/care index and resources. Intrapersonal features (inherent characteristics and individual beliefs) and interpersonal interactions (communication, respect, enough (...) information, privacy, and authority) were classified as components of the patient/care index category. Human resources (management and staff) and environmental resources (facilities and physical space) were classified as components of the resources category. The results will increase healthcare staff's understanding of patient dignity and its related factors, and provide information regarding the development of systems and processes that support patients in ways that are consistent with these values. (shrink)

Presence as ordinarily understood requires spatio-temporal proximity. If however Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is understood in this way it would take a miracle to secure multiple location and an additional miracle to cover it up so that the presence of Christ where the Eucharist was celebrated made no empirical difference. And, while multiple location is logically possible, such metaphysical miracles—miracles of distinction without difference, which have no empirical import—are problematic. I propose an account of Eucharist according to which Christ (...) is indeed really and objectively present in the religiously required sense, without benefit of metaphysical miracles. According to the proposed account, which draws upon Searle’s discussion of “social ontology” in The Construction of Social Reality and The Making of the Social World, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is an institutional fact. I argue that such an account satisfies the requirements for a real presence doctrine. (shrink)

This unique volume will appeal to those interested in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence as well as students of Castaneda and Latin American philosophy.

It is widely held that intuitive dualism—an implicit default mode of thought that takes minds to be separable from bodies and capable of independent existence—is a human universal. Among the findings taken to support universal intuitive dualism is a pattern of evidence in which “psychological” traits (knowledge, desires) are judged more likely to continue after death than bodily or “biological” traits (perceptual, physiological, and bodily states). Here, we present cross-cultural evidence from six study populations, including non-Western societies with diverse belief (...) systems, that shows that while this pattern exists, the overall pattern of responses nonetheless does not support intuitive dualism in afterlife beliefs. Most responses of most participants across all cultures tested were not dualist. While our sample is in no way intended to capture the full range of human societies and afterlife beliefs, it captures a far broader range of cultures than in any prior study, and thus puts the case for afterlife beliefs as evidence for universal intuitive dualism to a strong test. Based on these findings, we suggest that while dualist thinking is a possible mode of thought enabled by evolved human psychology, such thinking does not constitute a default mode of thought. Rather, our data support what we will call intuitive materialism—the view that the underlying intuitive systems for reasoning about minds and death produce as a default judgment that mental states cease to exist with bodily death. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 48 Heft: 1 Seiten: V-VIII.