Ibn Taymīyah, Aḥmad ibn ʻAbd al-Ḥalīm, 1263-1328; criticism and interpretation; Islamic philosophy.

Background: Arthritis is very common but is not well understood. Actually, “arthritis” is not a single disease; it is an informal way of referring to joint pain or joint disease. There are more than 100 different types of arthritis and related conditions. People of all ages, sexes and races can and do have arthritis, and it is the leading cause of disability in America. More than 50 million adults and 300,000 children have some type of arthritis. It is most common (...) among women and occurs more frequently as people get older. Common arthritis joint symptoms include swelling, pain, stiffness and decreased range of motion. Symptoms may come and go. They can be mild, moderate or severe. They may stay about the same for years, but may progress or get worse over time. Severe arthritis can result in chronic pain, inability to do daily activities and make it difficult to walk or climb stairs. Arthritis can cause permanent joint changes. These changes may be visible, such as knobby finger joints, but often the damage can only be seen on X-ray. Some types of arthritis also affect the heart, eyes, lungs, kidneys and skin as well as the joints. Objectives: The main goal of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the correct treatment and give the appropriate method of treatment through several tips that concern the disease and how to treat it and we will see it through the application on the expert system. Methods: in this paper the design of the proposed Expert System which was produced to help Orthopedist in diagnosing Arthritis disease through its symptoms such as: pain on pressure in a joint , Inflammation indicated by joint swelling, Stiffness especially in the morning , Loss of flexibility of joint, Limited, joint movement, Deformity of the joints , Weight loss and fatigue , Non-specific fever and Crepitus. The proposed expert system presents an overview about Arthritis disease is given, the cause of diseases is outlined and the treatment of disease whenever possible is given out. SL5 Object Expert System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed Arthritis disease diagnosis expert system was evaluated by Orthopedics students and they were satisfied with its performance. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for Orthopedist, patients with arthritis and newly graduated Orthopedics students. (shrink)

What is difficult to imagine is also surprising to perceive. This indicates that active visual imagery is an integral part of active visual perception. Erroneous mental transformations provide clues to prior assumptions in visual imagery, just as visual illusions provide clues to perceptual assumptions. Visual imagery and perception share generic assumptions about invariants in images of rigid objects.

本书分上下册,主要内容包括格言联壁,交友论,小窗幽记,安得长者言,菜根潭,围炉夜话,六事箴言,居官格言三十三条.

The idea that imperial Confucianism demands the commoners’ absolute political obedience is widespread. Although some scholars have tried to challenge this popular idea, they leave a theory of imperial Confucian political obligation unaddressed. By engaging with political propaganda of the Qing 清 dynasty, specifically The Amplified Instructions of the Sacred Edict, I argue that imperial Confucian political obligation is a theory of paternalistic gratitude. Accordingly, the commoners’ political obligation is conditioned upon the ruler’s parental benevolence, and as a matter of (...) history, this theory guided discursive interaction between the Qing court and the commoners. Indeed, when the empire’s policies made their lives difficult, the commoners tended to appeal to the public transcript of paternalistic gratitude to justify their political disobedience. Both in theory and practice, then, imperial Confucian political obligation is not absolute, but rather a conditional theory of paternalistic gratitude. (shrink)

While researchers have offered remonstration-oriented, reciprocal, voluntary, and gratitude-based accounts of political obligation in classical Confucianism, I argue that these interpretations are either in conflict with the textual evidence or merely scratch the surface of Confucius’ theory of political obligation without fully elaborating its essence. Instead, I demonstrate that the theory of political obligation in Confucianism is a specific argument from paternalistic gratitude in which the people’s political obligation is analogically compared to children’s grateful duty to their parents. Moreover, I (...) use the Confucian theory of paternalistic gratitude to critically examine China’s recent politics of political obligation in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan 四川 earthquake. Although the Confucian-sounding references, such as kindness and the parent-state analogy, figure into the CPC’s Gratitude Education campaign, the Party’s politics of political obligation does not meet the Confucian normative standard. Specifically, in the Confucian theory of paternalistic gratitude, the people will be grateful to a benevolent ruler without this feeling being demanded by the state. However, in the Gratitude Education campaign, the Party self-righteously exacted the earthquake survivors’ gratitude. Local dissidents were subject to the stigmatization of “ungratefulness” and faced political violence as a consequence. The case of the Gratitude Education campaign serves as another example of the CPC’s political use of Confucianism for its non-Confucian goals. (shrink)

Molecular chaperones assist de novo protein folding and facilitate the refolding of stress‐denatured proteins. The molecular chaperone concept was coined nearly 35 years ago, and since then, tremendous strides have been made in understanding how these factors support protein folding. Here, we focus on how various chaperone proteins were first identified to play roles in protein folding. Examples are used to illustrate traditional routes of chaperone discovery and point out their advantages and limitations. Recent advances, including the development of folding (...) biosensors and promising methods for the stabilization of proteins in vivo, provide new routes for chaperone discovery. (shrink)

A personalized recommender system is broadly accepted as a helpful tool to handle the information overload issue while recommending a related piece of information. This work proposes a hybrid personalized recommender system based on affinity propagation, namely, APHPRS. Affinity propagation is a semisupervised machine learning algorithm used to cluster items based on similarities among them. In our approach, we first calculate the cluster quality and density and then combine their outputs to generate a new ranking score among clusters for the (...) personalized recommendation. In the first phase, user preferences are collected and normalized as items rating matrix. This generated matrix is then clustered offline using affinity propagation and kept in a database for future recommendations. In the second phase, online recommendations are generated by applying the offline model. Negative Euclidian similarity and the quality of clusters are used together to select the best clusters for recommendations. The proposed APHPRS system alleviates problems such as sparsity and cold-start problems. The use of affinity propagation and the hybrid recommendation technique used in the proposed approach helps in improving results against sparsity. Experiments reveal that the proposed APHPRS performs better than most of the existing recommender systems. (shrink)

Data mining’s primary clustering method has several uses, including gene analysis. A set of unlabeled data is divided into clusters using data features in a clustering study, which is an unsupervised learning problem. Data in a cluster are more comparable to one another than to those in other groups. However, the number of clusters has a direct impact on how well the K-means algorithm performs. In order to find the best solutions for these real-world optimization issues, it is necessary to (...) use techniques that properly explore the search spaces. In this research, an enhancement of K-means clustering is proposed by applying an equilibrium optimization approach. The suggested approach adjusts the number of clusters while simultaneously choosing the best attributes to find the optimal answer. The findings establish the usefulness of the suggested method in comparison to existing algorithms in terms of intra-cluster distances and Rand index based on five datasets. Through the results shown and a comparison of the proposed method with the rest of the traditional methods, it was found that the proposal is better in terms of the internal dimension of the elements within the same cluster, as well as the Rand index. In conclusion, the suggested technique can be successfully employed for data clustering and can offer significant support. (shrink)

本书共分九章,内容包括:儒家概说、儒家追求的理想境界、内与外的和谐统一、家庭的和谐、人与人的和谐、人与社会的和谐等。.

This article shows how Arab students at an Arab college in Israel, majoring in teaching of mathematics, English, and science, rely on metaphor as an important rhetorical tool for the advancement of their ideological positions and for criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, which discriminates against and disenfranchises Arab Israelis. The underlying hypothesis of the article is that the way Arab students in Israel use metaphor in their writing has unique rhetorical aspects that help to sharpen their message (...) in pursuit of the broader goal of emphasizing Arab Israelis’ suffering and changing for the better the Israeli government’s discriminatory patterns of action against them. (shrink)

In the Indian context; contributed articles.

Recent studies have found abnormal levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in a variety of central nervous system diseases. This suggests that BDNF may be involved in the pathogenesis of these diseases. Moreover, regulating BDNF signaling may represent a potential treatment for such diseases. With reference to recent research papers in related fields, this article reviews the production and regulation of BDNF in CNS and the role of BDNF signaling disorders in these diseases. A brief introduction of the clinical application status (...) of BDNF is also provided. (shrink)

Fan Zhen’s 范縝 Shenmielun 神滅論 is a famous Chinese treatise discussing the body-soul problem. This discussion had been advocated by Huan Tan 桓譚 and Wang Chong 王充. However, their views did not receive positive attention: at the beginning of the Eastern Han dynasty, their intellectual weight was far from significant enough to spur the court’s interest in the topic. During the time of Fan Zhen, Emperor Wu of Liang, a keen protector of the thought of dharma, raised the question of (...) the soul and the body to a political level, making it the focus of academic debate. The aim of this article is to give a comprehensive account on the development of the idea of the nonidentity and inseparability of the body and the soul as promulgated by Fan Zhen and his predecessors from the perspective of the history of ideas. (shrink)

Background: Depression (major depressive disorder) is a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act. Fortunately, it is also treatable. Depression causes feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in activities once enjoyed. It can lead to a variety of emotional and physical problems and can decrease a person’s ability to function at work and at home. Depression affects an estimated one in 15 adults (6.7%) in any given (...) year. And one in six people (16.6%) will experience depression at some time in their life. Depression can strike at any time, but on average, first appears during the late teens to mid-20s. Women are more likely than men to experience depression. Some studies show that one-third of women will experience a major depressive episode in their lifetime. Objectives: The main goal of this expert system is to get the appropriate diagnosis of disease and the correct treatment and give the appropriate method of treatment through several tips that concern the disease and how to treat it and we will see it through the application on the expert system. Methods: in this paper the design of the proposed Expert System which was produced to help Psychologist in diagnosing depression disease through its symptoms such as: a loss of energy, a change in appetite, sleeping more or less, anxiety, reduced concentration, indecisiveness, restlessness, feelings of worthlessness, guilt or hopelessness and thoughts of self-harm or suicide. The proposed expert system presents an overview about depression disease is given, the cause of diseases is outlined and the treatment of disease whenever possible is given out. SL5 Object Expert System language was used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The proposed depression disease diagnosis expert system was evaluated by psychologist students and they were satisfied with its performance. Conclusions: The Proposed expert system is very useful for psychologist, patients with depression and newly graduated psychologist. (shrink)

Previous research has explored how emotional valence affected face-context associative memory, while little is known about how arousing stimuli that share the same valence but differ in emotionality are bound together and retained in memory. In this study, we manipulated the emotional similarity between the target face and the face associated with the context emotion, and examined the effect of emotional similarity of negative emotion on face-context associative memory. Our results showed that the greater the emotional similarity between the faces, (...) the better the face memory and face-context associative memory were. These findings suggest that the processing of facial expression and its associated context may benefit from taking into account the emotional similarity between the faces. (shrink)

The effect of emotion on memory often leads to the trade-off: enhanced memory for emotional items comes at the cost of memory for background information. Although this effect is usually attributed...

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers may be the most popular children's program since the inception of television. While the program is a commercial success, it also generates much controversy. For example, with an average of 211 acts of violence per hour, is Power Rangers too violent for children to watch? The show's U.S. producers rebut by claiming that Power Rangers is perhaps the most multicultural children's program available in the United States and should be encouraged. How is this so-called multiculturalism (...) presented to millions of children across America 6 days a week? Can such expression be so valuable that it outweighs the controversy surrounding the program? Through textual analysis this paper concludes that the multiculturalism in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers is, at most, a mirage. The ethical implications of such mirage multicultualism are examined. (shrink)

This study aims to explore if local responsiveness pressure and subsidiary resources influence green management adoption of overseas subsidiaries, and to investigate the relationships between the level of green management adoption and performance. The 101 effective samples were collected from 583 Taiwanese firms, which are listed in the top 1000 manufactory firms and have invested in China. Though structural equation model analysis' empirical results indicate that local responsiveness pressure and subsidiary resources both have positive effects on the level of green (...) management adoption of the subsidiary. This study also suggests that the level of green management adoption is positively related to the subsidiary's performance. (shrink)

There is a considerable scholarly discussion regarding how Islamic values influence CSR, but prior studies remain fragmented and scattered across several fields. This paper, therefore, aims to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the impacts of Islamic values on CSR by conducting a systematic literature review of 84 relevant publications from 1995 through 2020. The results of a thematic analysis show that there are four underlying themes to consider when explaining the influence of Islamic values on CSR: (1) Islamic narratives (...) promoting CSR, (2) Islam-based CSR, (3) Islamic financial institutions as enablers of CSR, and (4) stakeholders’ perspectives on how Islamic values influence CSR. This study contributes to the CSR literature by providing a systematic understanding of how Islamic values influence CSR and by identifying current challenges and promising directions for future exploration along this line of inquiry. (shrink)

My response to Stephen C. Angle focuses on his question: “Can the People (_min_ 民) ever grow up?” I conclude that the people-centered approach developed in “What Did the Emperor Ever Say?” (Lee 2020 ) does not rule out the idea of commoners becoming politically mature. With its focus on textual evidence specifically addressing the commoners and with its attentiveness to their political agency in historical China, the approach has the potential to help scholars find room for a more progressive (...) theory in the Confucian tradition. In response to Manyul I m, I clarify the meaning of paternalistic gratitude, specifying it as a reciprocal obligation toward the nontransactional benevolence received from the emperor. I then critically examine Im’s nonreciprocal theory of existential obligation. I argue that the existential obligation, as defined by Im, presents no check on an abusive relationship and therefore cannot withstand the test of textual evidence. Upon reflection, I conclude that the theory of paternalistic gratitude remains a plausible understanding of Confucian political obligation. For one, it accurately reflects the Confucian reciprocal idea that the commoners’ political obligation is conditional upon the ruler’s noncontractual benevolence. For another, it contains the feature of endurance which, as Im reminds us, is an essence in the parent-child relation and its political application. (shrink)

Literature on ethical behavior has paid little attention to the mechanism between macro-environmental variables and environmental performance. This study aims at constructing a model to examine the relationships which link cultural values, population growth, economic development, and environmental performance by incorporating the mediating role of education. The multiple linear regression model was employed to test the hypotheses on a 3-year-pooled sample of 51 countries. Empirical results conclude that national culture, economic development, and population growth would significantly influence environmental performance directly. (...) In addition, through the mediating effect of education, population growth and national culture would significantly affect environmental performance indirectly. These findings provide theoretical and managerial implications for constructing the mechanism of cultural values and ethical behavior in general and environmental management in particular. (shrink)