This manuscript draws on the moral norms arising from the nuanced accounts of epistemic (in)justice and social identity in relational autonomy to normatively assess and articulate the ethical problems associated with using AI in patient care in light of the Black Box problem. The article also describes how black-boxed AI may be used within the healthcare system. The manuscript highlights what needs to happen to align AI with the moral norms it draws on. Deeper thinking – from other backgrounds other (...) than decolonial scholarship and relational autonomy – about the impact of AI on the human experience needs to be done to appreciate any other barriers that may exist. Future studies can take up this task. (shrink)

Recently a prospective, observational clinical study was carried out in the department of ophthalmology, at a district general hospital. The main purpose of the study was to evaluate the medicolegal and ethical implication of consent and confidentiality in ophthalmic practice, in accordance with the guidelines provided by medical law. One hundred patients, who had been referred by optometrists to ophthalmologists, were included in the study. The general ophthalmic services (GOS) 18 form, a referral form used by optometrists for referring patients (...) to ophthalmologists, which allows optometrists to share a patient's medical information with ophthalmologists, was used as a …. (shrink)

Aesthetics of art and literature; articles.

On Western philosophy from the point of view of Burmese philosophers.

A modern classic of Universal Sufism that explores the mystical dimensions of music-and the musical dimensions of mysticism. Music, according to Sufi teaching, is really a small expression of the overwhelming and perfect harmony of the whole universe-and that is the secret of its amazing power to move us. The Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), the first teacher to bring the Sufi mystical tradition to the West, was an accomplished musician himself. His lucid exposition of music's divine (...) nature has become a modern classic, beloved not only by those interested in Sufism but by musicians of all kinds. This newly reissued edition includes a foreword by Pir Zia Inayat Khan, Hazrat Inayat Khan's grandson and the current leader of the Inayati Order, the widespread Western Sufi organization that Hazrat Inayat Khan founded. (shrink)

Arsalan Khan offers an ethnography of the normative vision that drives Pakistani Muslim men from diverse social and economic backgrounds to participate in a transnational Islamic piety movement: Tablighi Jamaat. Khan examines how Tablighis constitute the domain of religion in ritual and semiotic practice, how they place an ethical commitment to hierarchy at the heart of religion, and how this, in turn, becomes the basis for restructuring domestic and political life.

Within the Ideological Surround Model of the social sciences and religion, so-called “universal” perspectives within the psychology of religion can dialogically clarify and be clarified by the “particular” elements of Muslim commitment. This study developed new scales for operationalizing the experience and behavior of Pakistani Muslims during Ramadan. In a sample of university students, one set of experiential factors apparently facilitated, whereas another interfered with the practices of Ramadan. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Personal Religious Orientations correlated with greater and the Extrinsic (...) Social motivation with lower levels of involvement in Ramadan. Relative to these religious orientation measures, Ramadan experience scales displayed incremental validity by explaining additional variance in Ramadan behavior. Women proved to be more religious than men. At the most general level, these data further supported the dialogic assumptions of the Ideological Surround Model of research in the psychology of religion. (shrink)

This paper examines incorrect use of oral contraceptives (OCs) in rural Bangladesh by using data from an OC compliance survey. Of the 1031 current users of OCs interviewed, about 13% took their pills out of sequence, while 17% left incorrect intervals between pill packs. Forty per cent of the women reported missing one active pill during the 6 months prior to the survey, and 74% of them took correct action with the missed pill. Of the women who missed two active (...) pills (16%), only 9% took correct action. Multivariate analyses revealed that women support helped protect against taking incorrect action with a missed pill. The fieldworker support is essential to improve the pill-taking behaviour of Bangladeshi women. (shrink)

On November 2019, the world commemorated the 30th anniversary of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UNCRC noted that “the press and other media have essential fu...

The Community of Shared Future for Mankind (CSFM) concept is a comprehensive Chinese proposal for a better future of mankind. In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis of this concept by focusing on its origin, evolution and philosophical foundation. This article deals with the origin and evolution of the CSFM concept. We show that the concept originated during the presidency of Hu Jintao, who initially used it for the domestic affairs of China. However, the usage of the concept was (...) later extended from domestic to international affairs. Though Hu Jintao conceived the CSFM concept, it is president Xi Jinping who became its greatest advocate. We explore the CSFM concept’s development and evolution into one of the most influential, diverse and dominant concepts of international relations under president Xi. Furthermore, the article explores the philosophical foundation of the CSFM concept. We argue that although CSFM concept is seen as a 21st century Chinese idea, the roots of the concept can be traced back to much earlier time in history. The concept is based on three major philosophical thoughts: Marxism, Confucianism and the philosophy of Mencius. We show that the CSFM concept is greatly influenced by Marx’s ideas such as the transformation of the world, the free association of producers, historical materialism and dialectics. We also point to a number of Confucian principles that are adopted by the CSFM concept. The CSFM concept not only adopts Confucian principles but also extends their scope from the individual level to international relations. Similarly, we also highlight that the CSFM concept is influenced by Mencius’ concepts such as universal brotherhood, responsibility towards the betterment of the world, humane governance, free trade, equal sharing of wealth and the conservation of natural resources. (shrink)

The question of the development of aesthetic perception in relation to works of art and phenomena of nature suggests a differentiation between aesthetic education and art education which will be attempted in this study. At the same time the necessary interrelationship between the two will also be analysed.

The web is being loaded daily with a huge volume of data, mainly unstructured textual data, which increases the need for information extraction and NLP systems significantly. Named-entity recognition task is a key step towards efficiently understanding text data and saving time and effort. Being a widely used language globally, English is taking over most of the research conducted in this field, especially in the biomedical domain. Unlike other languages, Arabic suffers from lack of resources. This work presents a BERT-based (...) model to identify biomedical named entities in the Arabic text data that investigates the effectiveness of pretraining a monolingual BERT model with a small-scale biomedical dataset on enhancing the model understanding of Arabic biomedical text. The model performance was compared with two state-of-the-art models, and it outperformed both models with 85% F1-score. (shrink)

The expropriation of marginalized women’s labor is a key issue in business ethics in these times of global outsourcing and informal work arrangements. This has led to a transnational advocacy movement for securing the labor rights of homeworkers, who are poor women working on piece-rate contracts out of their homes. Drawing on materialist feminism, our paper critically explores the homeworker network in Pakistan, that was set up as part of a global push by international institutions and networks to localize the (...) issue across geographies. Our focus is the national women’s NGO that leads advocacy efforts on the issue in the country and its relationship with other actors. Through fieldwork spanning 3 years we find that the network employs a top-down ‘us versus them’ approach in advocacy and mobilization. The race-to-the-bottom between the network’s national and district-level actors for donor funding further undermines prospects for developing indigenous narratives of resistance. The network, while mission bound to enhance the collective agency of its constituency, has depoliticized what should have been a class-based feminist struggle. From a materialist perspective, we conclude that the NGOized network rests upon and feeds off of its constituency, creating an additional layer of primitive accumulation over the workers it represents. (shrink)

The global surge in academic misconduct during the COVID-19 pandemic, exacerbated by remote teaching and online assessment, necessitates a comprehensive understanding of the multidimensional aspects and stakeholders' perspectives associated with this issue. This paper addresses the prevalent use of answer-providing sites and other types of academic misconduct, underscoring the challenge of detecting all or most of the student misconduct. Exploring factors such as faculty inexperience in remote teaching and assessment, the paper advocates for proactive measures to preserve integrity in education. (...) Emphasizing the need for a culture of integrity beyond traditional classrooms, the paper reviews existing models, then details steps to create a framework using the International Labour Organization (ILO)’s TREE training method. It presents the IEPAR framework (Inspiration, Education, Pedagogical considerations, Assessment design, Response and Restorative practice), and assesses its effectiveness. Incorporating faculty feedback, the paper concludes with evidence-based findings, positioning the IEPAR framework as a robust approach for addressing academic misconduct and fostering a culture of academic integrity in higher education through responsible training of all stakeholders. (shrink)

Our objective is to examine the effects of Big Five personality traits on ethical ideologies using a time-lagged design of 406 employees of higher education institutions in Pakistan. Based on low/high idealism versus relativism, we investigate the conceptual linkage between each of the personality traits and moral philosophy. The results illustrate that extraversion and openness to experience believed on subjectivism moral philosophy, agreeableness believed on situationism, and neuroticism believed on absolutism moral philosophies. In addition, contentiousness believed on exceptionism moral philosophy. (...) Furthermore, managerial implications and future research directions are suggested. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Jürgen Habermas’ notion of morality (moral norms) has more in common with Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical life’ as a ‘ sittlich ’ relation – understood as a socially integrative force – rather than Kant’s supreme principle of personal morality. I show that Habermas and Hegel, each in his own way, make a distinction between morality and ethics. However, I make the case that Habermas’ conception of ‘morality’ incorporates aspects of Hegel’s notion of ‘ethical life’, (...) while Habermas’ conception of ‘ethical’ – referring to individual and group conceptions of the good life – is a remedy to the shortcomings in Hegel’s overly unified ethical life. I offer an alternative reading of Habermas’ principle of morality, which I suggest should be read as his attempt to provide a binding process to set up the norms that ought to condition a modern political community understood as a civil association. (shrink)

In philosophy and political theory, the term paradox is often used synonymously with antinomy, contradiction and aporia. This article clarifies the meaning of these terms through tracing their respective etymology. We see that antinomy denotes a deep-seated conceptual opposition, whereas contradiction and aporia represent alternative responses to antinomy. The former presents the antinomy as potentially resolvable at some future time, and the latter sees the antinomy instead as a constitutive impasse. By way of contrast, para doxa originally referred to a (...) statement that is ‘contrary to received opinion’, but this idea has generally been subsumed – both in philosophy and more common place understandings – under the notion of aporia. This conceptual recovery enables a better understanding of key traditions in social and political theory, notably post-structuralism and Habermasian critical theory, which can be demarcated through their respective responses to the emergence of ‘paradoxes’. However, the article also demonstrates the material significance of these philosophical categories through their application to contemporary democratic politics. I analyse the constitutive tension between liberalism and democracy as well as the emergence of populism and show how these conceptual tools provide new insights for understanding these most pressing political developments of our time. (shrink)

Classical commentary, with a supercommentary, on Jaimini's Mīmāṃsāsūtra, presenting the tradition of Bhāṭṭa school; includes Mīmāṃsāśāstrasāraḥ, by N.S. Anantakrishna Sastri.

Mostly consists of works composed in Tibetan, with translations into Mongolian, on the Soyombo script.

In this paper, we utilized triangular conorms. The essence of using S-norm is that the similarity order does not change using different norms. In fact, we are investigating for a new conception for calculating the similarity of two Fermatean fuzzy sets. For this purpose, utilizing an S-norm, we first present a formula for calculating the similarity of two Fermatean fuzzy values, so that they are truthful in similarity properties. Following that, we generalize a formula for calculating the similarity of the (...) two Fermatean fuzzy sets which prove truthful in similarity conditions. Finally, various numerical examples have been presented to elaborate this method. (shrink)

Keyword extraction refers to the process of selecting most significant, relevant, and descriptive terms as keywords, which are present inside a single document. Keyword extraction has major applications in the information retrieval domain, such as analysis, summarization, indexing, and search, of documents. In this paper, we present a novel supervised technique for extraction of keywords from medium-sized documents, namely Corpus-based Contextual Semantic Smoothing. CCSS extends the concept of Contextual Semantic Smoothing, which considers term usage patterns in similar texts to improve (...) term relevance information. We introduce four more features beyond CSS as our novel contributions in this work. We systematically compare the performance of CCSS with other techniques, when implemented over INSPEC dataset, where CCSS outperforms all state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction techniques presented in the literature. (shrink)

The Ahmadiyya Muslim community represents the followers of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a charismatic leader whose claims of spiritual authority brought him into conflict with most other Muslim leaders of the time. The controversial movement originated in rural India in the latter part of the 19th century and is best known for challenging current conceptions of Islamic orthodoxy. Despite missionary success and expansion throughout the world, particularly in Western Europe, North America, and parts of Africa, Ahmadis have effectively been banned from (...) Pakistan. Adil Hussain Khan traces the origins of Ahmadi Islam from a small Sufi-style brotherhood to a major transnational organization, which many Muslims believe to be beyond the pale of Islam. (shrink)

Non-naturalist realists are committed to the belief, famously voiced by Parfit, that if there are no non-natural facts then nothing matters. But it is morally objectionable to conditionalise all our moral commitments on the question of whether there are non-natural facts. Non-natural facts are causally inefficacious, and so make no difference to the world of our experience. And to be a realist about such facts is to hold that they are mind-independent. It is compatible with our experiences that there are (...) no non-natural facts, or that they are very different from what we think. As Nagel says, realism makes scepticism intelligible. So the non-naturalist must hold that you might be wrong that your partner matters, even if you are correct about every natural, causal fact about your history and relationship. But to hold that conditional attitude to your partner would be a moral betrayal. So believing non-naturalist realism involves doing something immoral. (shrink)

Using a time-lagged design, we tested the main effects of Islamic Work Ethic (IWE) and perceived organizational justice on turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and job involvement. We also investigated the moderating influence of IWE in justice–outcomes relationship. Analyses using data collected from 182 employees revealed that IWE was positively related to satisfaction and involvement and negatively related to turnover intentions. Distributive fairness was negatively related to turnover intentions, whereas procedural justice was positively related to satisfaction. In addition, procedural justice was (...) positively related to involvement and satisfaction for individuals high on IWE however it was negatively related to both outcomes for individuals low on IWE. For low IWE, procedural justice was positively related to turnover intentions, however it was negatively related to turnover intentions for high IWE. In contrast, distributive justice was negatively related to turnover intentions for low IWE and it was positively related to turnover intentions for high IWE. (shrink)

Experiences like pains, pleasures, and emotions have affective phenomenal character: they feel pleasant or unpleasant. Imperativism proposes to explain affective phenomenal character by appeal to imperative content, a kind of intentional content that directs rather than describes. We argue that imperativism is on the right track, but has been developed in the wrong way. There are two varieties of imperativism on the market: first-order and higher-order. We show that neither is successful, and offer in their place a new theory: reflexive (...) imperativism. Our proposal is that an experience P feels pleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content, while an experience U feels unpleasant in virtue of being constituted by a Command with reflexive imperative content : More of P!Less of U! If you need a slogan: experiences have affective phenomenal character in virtue of commanding us Get more of me! Get less of me! (shrink)

This article focuses on the perception of the importance of business ethics among Czech and Slovak entrepreneurs (this includes business owners and managers) within the SME sector. The comparison is based on an analysis of the approach to business ethics according to a set of parameters, namely company size, years in business, and the gender and education of the entrepreneurs. Empirical research was conducted in 2020 on a sample set consisting of 454 respondents in the Czech Republic and 368 respondents (...) in Slovakia. The most important outcome of the research was the finding that business ethics is considered extremely important in both countries. The research results not only revealed that just over 90% of Czech entrepreneurs and 88% of Slovak entrepreneurs within the SME sector agreed that they should take into account the moral and ethical consequences of their decisions, but that the structure of their answers was very similar. Also, of interest were the findings that women were more aware of business ethics than their male counterparts, as were those entrepreneurs who possessed a higher education over those with a secondary education. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue 2, Page 437-460, Summer 2022.

Contract cheating is a growing menace that most academic institutions are grappling with globally. With governments now taking steps to help combat the industry and ban such services, it is also important to encourage students to stay away from such services through proactive strategies to raise awareness so that students stop using such services. This paper uses a case study approach to capture a time-series data from three years of a university campus’s efforts to raise awareness by celebrating the International (...) Centre for Academic Integrity ‘s International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating. This is in order to explore if such campaigns can be used as tools to increase student understanding of contract cheating as an academic misconduct issue and what roles students can play in raising awareness among other students on contract cheating. Proposing to look at contract cheating as a social issue, the paper positions the misconduct as such and explores how awareness campaigns can help address contract cheating. Over the three years, results show steep increase in awareness of contract cheating, a type of academic misconduct, and that students themselves have a positive influence on other students when raising awareness. An interesting finding of the study is that graduated students have had an impact by showing responsibility to younger students and by actively denouncing contract cheating companies and their approaches on social media; thus providing solid evidence that awareness campaigns can help increase awareness which is the first step towards building a culture of integrity in any campus. (shrink)

Contract cheating is a growing menace that most academic institutions are grappling with globally. With governments now taking steps to help combat the industry and ban such services, it is also important to encourage students to stay away from such services through proactive strategies to raise awareness so that students stop using such services. This paper uses a case study approach to capture a time-series data from three years of a university campus’s efforts to raise awareness by celebrating the International (...) Centre for Academic Integrity ‘s International Day of Action Against Contract Cheating. This is in order to explore if such campaigns can be used as tools to increase student understanding of contract cheating as an academic misconduct issue and what roles students can play in raising awareness among other students on contract cheating. Proposing to look at contract cheating as a social issue, the paper positions the misconduct as such and explores how awareness campaigns can help address contract cheating. Over the three years, results show steep increase in awareness of contract cheating, a type of academic misconduct, and that students themselves have a positive influence on other students when raising awareness. An interesting finding of the study is that graduated students have had an impact by showing responsibility to younger students and by actively denouncing contract cheating companies and their approaches on social media; thus providing solid evidence that awareness campaigns can help increase awareness which is the first step towards building a culture of integrity in any campus. (shrink)

This article focuses on how an often-overlooked portion of PPACA, “Community Transformation Grants,” might close the evidence gap in the relationship between obesity and the built environment and provide a pathway to effectively address this medically and economically costly epidemic.

The current study investigates whether tournament incentives motivate chief executive officer to be socially responsible. Furthermore, it explores the role of sub-national institutional contingencies [i.e., state-owned enterprises vs. non-SOEs, foreign-owned entities vs. non-FOEs, cross-listed vs. non-cross-listed, developed region] in CEO tournament incentives and the corporate social responsibility performance relationship. Data were collected from all A-shared companies listed in the stock exchanges of China from 2014 to 2019. The study uses the baseline methodology of ordinary least squares and cluster OLS regression. (...) Moreover, firm-fixed effects regression, two-stage least squares regression, and propensity score matching deal with the endogeneity problem and check the robustness of the results. The results provide reliable evidence that tournament incentives motivate CEOs to be more socially responsible. On the other hand, sub-national institutional contingencies positively affect the association between CEO tournament incentives and CSRP. The findings have important implications for companies and regulators who wish to enhance CSP by providing incentives to top managers. (shrink)

The Belt and Road initiative was announced in 2013 under the administration of China’s President, Xi Jinping. It was designed to fulfill the aim of interconnecting Asia, Europe, and Africa through reliable connectivity networks. In reaction to it, the 47th summit of G7 in June 2021 has given a response to this Chinese Initiative with the idea of Build Back Better World. G7 tried to show that the world can have an alternative to BRI. The main objective of the study (...) is to compare the feasibility of these two massive infrastructural projects. It is a qualitative document analysis of the previously published material on the related theme, that highlighted a competition of economic supremacy between the US and China. The research finds that BRI is gaining enough popularity as compared to B3W in the eyes of the world specifically in connecting different regions. (shrink)

Agitation is one of the most common behavioural and psychological symptoms in people living with dementia. This behaviour can cause tremendous stress and anxiety on family caregivers and healthcare providers. Direct observation of PLwD is the traditional way to measure episodes of agitation. However, this method is subjective, bias-prone and timeconsuming. Importantly, it does not predict the onset of the agitation. Therefore, there is a need to develop a continuous monitoring system that can detect and/or predict the onset of agitation. (...) In this study, a multi-modal sensor platform with video cameras, motion and door sensors, wristbands and pressure mats were set up in a hospital-based dementia behavioural care unit to develop a predictive system to identify the onset of agitation. The research team faced several barriers in the development and initiation of the study, namely addressing concerns about the study ethics, logistics and costs of study activities, device design for PLwD and limitations of its use in the hospital. In this paper, the strategies and methodologies that were implemented to address these challenges are discussed for consideration by future researchers who will conduct similar studies in a hospital setting. (shrink)

Jensen’s inequality is one of the fundamental inequalities which has several applications in almost every field of science. In 2003, Mercer gave a variant of Jensen’s inequality which is known as Jensen–Mercer’s inequality. The purpose of this article is to propose new bounds for Csiszár and related divergences by means of Jensen–Mercer’s inequality. Also, we investigate several new bounds for Zipf–Mandelbrot entropy. The idea of this article may further stimulate research on information theory with the help of Jensen–Mercer’s inequality.

If one thing that the failed coup by a small but some of the top hierarchy of Turkish armed forces on that fateful July 15, 2016 day made clear, it was: the ordinary civilians, unarmed as they were poured into the streets to defend the government whatever way they can. This massive public sympathy and support for Turkish resident Erdogan and his government would be hard, if not impossible to understand, without knowing the historical intellectual, academic, and moral combat between (...) the modernists and Islamist groups working within the country. Mustafa Kamal had turned Turkey, mostly by force, from Ottoman Empire into the secular mode using military power. Various Islamic revolutionary outfits struggled for the revival of Ottoman Empire. Among them Bedi-uz-Zaman Said Nursi managed to cast a strong influence. A little slow but steadfast effort influenced by Nursi movement. Islam-shy Western powers managed alternate power structure against sitting President Tayyep Erdogan. They, however, failed due to result oriented social work delivered by his regime as Mayor and Prime Minister. It is a lesson for other revolutionaries and Governments especially for Islamic revolutionaries that if politicians deliver no power can oust them like a bee from butter. (shrink)