Sustaining soil fertility is essential to the prosperity of many households in the mid-hills of Nepal, but there are concerns that the breakdown of the traditional linkages between forest, livestock, and cropping systems is adversely affecting fertility. This study used triangulated data from surveys of households, discussion groups, and key informants in 16 wards in eastern and western Nepal to determine the existing practices for soil fertility management, the extent of such practices, and the perception of the direction of changes (...) in soil fertility. The two principal practices for maintaining soil fertility were the application of farmyard manure (FYM) and of chemical fertilizer (mainly urea and diammonium phosphate). Green manuring, in-situ manuring, slicing terrace risers, and burning plant residues are rarely practiced. FYM usage was variable with more generally applied to khet land (average 6053 kg fresh weight manure ha−1) than to bari land (average 4185 kg fresh weight manure ha−1) with manure from goats and poultry preferred above that from cows and buffaloes. Almost all households (98%) apply urea to khet land and 87% to bari land, with 45% applying diammonium phosphate to both types of land. Application rates and timings of applications varied considerably both within and between wards suggesting poor knowledge transfer between the research and farming communities. The benefits of chemical fertilizers in terms of ease of application and transportation in comparison with FYM, were perceived to outweigh the widely reported detrimental hardening of soil associated with their continued usage. Among key informants, FYM applied in conjunction with chemical fertilizer was the most popular amendment, with FYM alone preferred more than chemical fertilizer alone – probably because of the latter’s long-term detrimental effects. Key informant and householder surveys differed in their perception of fertility changes in the last decade probably because of differences in age and site-specific knowledge. All key informants felt that fertility had declined but among households, only about 40% perceived a decline with the remainder about evenly divided between no change and an increase. Householders with small landholdings (< 0.5 ha) were more likely to perceive increasing soil fertility while those with larger landholdings (> 2 ha) were more likely to perceive declining fertility. Perceived changes in soil fertility were not related to food self-sufficiency. The reasons for the slow spread of new technologies within wards and the poor understanding of optimal use of chemical fertilizers in conjunction with improved quality FYM may repay further investigation in terms of sustaining soil fertility in this region. (shrink)

Life and philosophy of Ramchandra Dattatraya Ranade, Indian philosopher.

Tries To Analyse 9 Symbols As Represented In The Art Forms, Religion And Philosophies Of India-These Symbols Are; Rudraksha, Cakra, Prabha-Mandlas, Mudra, Salagrama, Svastika, Sikhara, Circumambulation And Philosopher`S Stone. In Short This Book Tries To Discover India Through Symbols.

A mobile-based messaging app (MMA) was implemented as a teachers’ community of practice in the Indian context through a large-scale educational initiative. The development process adopted a Design-based Research approach to test underlying theories in real-world settings. The researchers theorised the pedagogical affordances of the MMA Telegram using Davis and Chouinard's theoretical framework of affordances, defined as a relational process among users, designers, the environment, and the artefact. This paper discusses the iterative design process in detail. The findings showed that (...) the MMA encourages accessibility and for teachers to showcase their practice in the online community of practice and refuses (does not allow) the development of the online community of practice as an epistemic community. (shrink)

Schools—their curriculum and pedagogy—assume the middle-class child as the norm, effectively rendering other childhoods and life-worlds as being deficient. Shifting away from this assumption, and acknowledging diversity, is usually understood as requiring an ‘attitudinal’ shift on the part of teachers. Teachers are usually held ‘guilty’ of having negative attitudes towards children of the poor. Explanations for the pedagogy generally then refer to these attitudes, and ‘corrective action’ then attends to an attitudinal change. The idea of ‘multiple childhoods’ is gaining influence (...) in the teacher education curricula as providing an alternative normative framework that can enable teachers to work with, and retain, diversity. Some recent research into the manifestation of ‘difference’ in the primary school classroom indicates that differences are experienced by teachers as learning difficulty issues that need a curricular and pedagogic response. The child’s home culture, home support for schooling and home socialization seem to enter into the pedagogy in more ways than can be addressed by changing the ‘teachers’ attitudes’. ‘Educability’ is a central concept for teachers who engage with and try to address the learning requirements of children, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds. Four studies on teachers’ experiences of ‘difference’ are drawn upon to engage with and to evolve an understanding of the specific implications of for pedagogy and educational aims. (shrink)

This study explores the factors associated with neonatal mortality and maternal health care in Nepal. The subjects were 4375 births reported in the 1996 Nepal Family Health Survey. Maternal and child health care was found to have a significant association with neonatal mortality, although preceding birth interval and sex of child had stronger effects. Four aspects of maternal care were found to be highly associated with region, household ownership of assets, mothers education. This indicates that accessibility, affordability and availability of (...) maternal health care are important factors to consider in future research on neonatal mortality. (shrink)

Commentary on Śrībhāṣya, fundamental work of the Viśiṣṭādvaita school in Hindu philosophy by Rāmānuja, 1017-1137.

This paper employs institutional theory as a theoretical lens and examines the role of status and peer influence on diversity following a change in European labour law in 1995. This change in European labour law, well-known as the Bosman ruling, significantly increased labour mobility in European soccer. The ruling lifted restrictions on the number of foreign players that soccer teams could recruit and eliminated compulsory transfer fees for players whose contracts had ended. We demonstrate that the Bosman ruling, while increasing (...) the number of foreign players on a team, did not uniformly affect all teams. Our investigation indicates that the increase in racio-ethnic diversity in teams depended on the status of teams and on peer influence (the behaviour of similar teams). This setting, though specific to European labour law in the context of soccer, allows an examination of the complex interplay between racio-ethnic diversity, status, and peer influence in a period of institutional change. (shrink)

This baseline study was conducted to find out the knowledge, attitudes and practices of medical ethics among the undergraduate medical interns who did not have structured ethics curriculum in their course. A descriptive, cross-sectional study was carried out using a self-administered structured questionnaire among the medical undergraduate interns of Maharajgunj Medical Campus, the pioneer medical college of Nepal which enrols 60 students in a year. A total of 46 interns participated in the study. The most common source of knowledge on (...) ethics was lectures/seminars (35.7%) followed by experience at work (24.5%), training (21.4%) and own reading (17.3%). The main contents of Hippocratic Oath were known to 98.8% while 60.9% knew the main contents of Nepal Medical Council (NMC) code of ethics. Great majority (91.3%) regard ethics as very important in medical profession. “Doctors know the best irrespective of patients’ opinion” was disagreed by only 39.1% indicating the paternalistic attitude. However, 78.3% were in favour of adhering to the patient’s wish. None of the participant agreed to abandon confidentiality. Only about one-fourth (26.1%) claim to encounter ethical dilemma every day while the highest number (43.5%) had once in a month. To deal with the situation of ethical dilemma, majority approached to immediate supervisor followed by head of the department and colleagues. Eighty-seven percent of participating interns were involved in research activities involving human subjects. Only one of the participants had encountered the ethical issue on end-of-life and it was do-not-resuscitate consent in a terminally ill patient. On implementation of the curriculum on medical ethics focus should be - principles of biomedical ethics, sensitive ethical dilemmas like end-of-life care and practical experiences with participation in deliberations of the ethics committee. (shrink)

As the Rig Vedas and Buddhist sutras foretell, as well as the Hopi and Mayan calendars, we are in the midst of complete transformation-ecologically, economically, politically, culturally. This graceful introduction offers creative safe passage through the sometimes overwhelming transition, drawing on ancient and contemporary spiritual practices particularly useful for these times. The endings we experience are always the beginning of something else. Hence author Ji Hyang Padma organizes teachings around the four seasons. In living connected to natural rhythms-the stillness (...) of winter, the renewal of spring, the ripening of summer, the harvest of autumn-we touch a wholeness that is the source of healing and happiness. Practical exercises at the end of each chapter promote this state of being and bring the mind home to its innate clarity. Ideally suited to anyone experiencing personal change-through career, relationships, or world events-the book provides a way into Zen for beginners as well as a refresher for the more advanced. (shrink)

Study of Cārvāka, an exponent of the materialistic school in Indian philosophy.

Critical analysis of Pramana (Buddhist logic) subject.

On the fundamentals of Buddhist doctrines; including explation of the karmic law of cause and effect with stories.

With reference to significance of number nine in the musical compositions of Carnatic music of India; a study.

With reference to significance of number nine in the musical compositions of Carnatic music of India; a study.

Human adults possess the extraordinary ability to produce mental imagery about a wide variety of non-occurrent events. We can, for example, simulate the perception of different places, different times, different possibilities, or others’ perspectives. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience suggest that all of these capacities rely on the same neuro-cognitive mechanism: episodic simulation. This ability produces mental imagery by constructively recombining elements of past experiences to simulate event representations. However, if episodic simulation indeed produces mental imagery, it (...) remains unclear how the non-imagistic aspects of its outputs become cognitively determined. In this article, I argue that there are (at least) four such non-imagistic ‘dimensions’ of episodic simulation: specificity, temporal orientation, subjectivity, and factuality. Further, I propose an account of the mechanisms which might be responsible for determining where a given output of episodic simulation falls within this dimensional space. According to this view, episodic simulation relies on propositional ‘scope-operators’ either deployed as inputs to the simulation process itself or produced by post-hoc monitoring processes operating over its outputs. This view has consequences for how we should view the operation, development, and evolution of episodic simulation. (shrink)

In this book, Yaqub describes a simple conception of truth and shows that it yields a semantical theory that accommodates the whole range of our seemingly conflicting intuitions about truth. This conception takes the Tarskian biconditionals as correctly and completely defining the notion of truth. The semantical theory, which is called the revision theory, that emerges from this conception paints a metaphysical picture of truth as a property whose applicability is given by a revision process rather than by a fixed (...) extension. The main advantage of this revision process is its ability to explain why truth seems in many cases almost redundant, in others substantial, and yet in others paradoxical. Yaub offers a comprehensive defense of the revision theory of truth by developing consistent and adequate formal semantics for languages in which all sorts of problematic sentences can be constructed. Yaqub concludes by introducing a logic of truth that further demonstrates the adequacy of the revision theory. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a new analysis of knowledge: knowledge, I claim, is normal belief. I begin with what I take to be the conceptual truth that knowledge is epistemically justified, or permissible, belief. I then argue that this in turn is simply doxastically normal belief, first clarifying what is meant by this claim, and then providing reasons to think that normal belief, so understood, must be true and safe from error, making it a good candidate for knowledge.

Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the (...) United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century. (shrink)

This paper traces the background to R. A. Fisher's multi-factorial theory of inheritance. It is argued that the traditional account is incomplete, and that Karl Pearson's well-known pre-Fisherian objections to the theory were in fact overcome by Pearson himself. It is further argued that Pearson's stated reasons for not accepting his own achievement has to be seen as a rationalization, standing in for deeper-seated metaphysical objections to the Mendelian paradigm of a type not readily discussed in a formal scientific paper. (...) The apparent, post-Fisherian, continued acceptance of Pearson's objections is presented as an interesting problem for the historian and sociologist. (shrink)

Anthony Everett has argued that fictional realism entails that some fictional characters are indeterminately identical. Benjamin Schnieder and Tatjana von Solodkoff deny that fictional realism has that entailment. But, we argue in this paper, their view is arbitrary, since there is no reason to prefer their principles to alternative ones. We don’t take this to show that fictional realism should be rejected. But we do take this to show that fictional realists who deny that some fictional characters are indeterminately identical (...) need another response to Everett’s argument. (shrink)

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child risks harm to adolescents insofar as it encourages not only poor decision making by adolescents but also parenting styles that will have an adverse impact on the development of mature decision-making capacities in them. The empirical psychological and neurophysiological data weigh against augmenting and expression of the rights of children. Indeed, the data suggest grounds for expanding parental authority, not limiting its scope. At the very least, any adequate appreciation of (...) the moral claims regarding the authority of parents with respect to the decision-making capacity of adolescents needs to be set within an understanding of the psychological and neurophysiological facts regarding the development of adolescent decision-making capacity. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida agree that translation is a tensive activity oscillating between the possible and the impossible with reference to the transposition of meaning among diverse systems of discourse. Both acknowledge that risk, alterity, and plurality accompany every attempt at paraphrasing language “in other words.” Consequently, their positions adhere to the traditional adage that “the translator is a traitor,” precisely because something is always lost in the semantic transfer. Yet, Derrida notes an important disagreement between their respective approaches (...) to translation and accuses Ricoeur of harboring a nostalgia for unitive meaning and of promoting the possibility of a transcendental signified that could produce a “pure” translation. In this essay, I critique Derrida’s interpretation of Ricoeur specifically by examining their individual interpretations of the Tower of Babel myth. I argue that Ricoeur’s theory of Babel as a non-punitive celebration of diversity and the open play of meaning “out-deconstructs” Derrida’s own notion of dissemination. (shrink)