Software piracy is a damaging and important moral issue, which is widely believed to be unchecked in particular areas of the globe. This cross-cultural study examines differences in morality and behavior toward software piracy in Singapore versus the United States, and reviews the cultural histories of Asia versus the United States to explore why these differences occur. The paper is based upon pilot data collected in the U.S. and Singapore, using a tradeoff analysis methodology and analysis. The data reveal some (...) fascinating interactions between the level of ethical transgression and the rewards or consequences which they produce. (shrink)

Views of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, 1877-1938 on education.

This article reports on the development and teaching of compulsory courses on ethics and engineering at Delft University of Technology (DUT). Attention is paid to the teaching goals, the educational setup and methods, the contents of the courses, involvement of staff from engineering schools, experiences to date, and challenges for the future. The choices made with respect to the development and teaching of the courses are placed within the European and Dutch context and are compared and contrasted with the American (...) situation and experiences. (shrink)

According to the World Health Organisation, three to five million individuals are infected by influenza, and around 250,000 to 500,000 people die of this infectious disease worldwide. Influenza epidemics pose a serious public health threat. Moreover, graver dangers are encountered with influenza subtypes against which there is little or no preexisting human immunity. Such subtypes of influenza have the potential to cause devastating epidemics. Thus, enhancing surveillance systems for the purpose of detecting influenza epidemics in an early stage can quicken (...) response times and save millions of lives. This paper presents three adapting intelligence models: support vector machine regression, artificial neural network using particle swarm optimisation, and our intelligent time series to predict influenza epidemics. The novelty of the current study is that it proposes a new intelligent model to predict influenza outbreaks. The INTS model combines clustering with a time series model to enhance the prediction of influenza outbreaks. The innovation of our proposed model integrates the results obtained from the existing weighted exponential smoothing model with centroids obtained from clustering. We developed a surveillance system for influenza epidemics using Google search queries. The current research is based on a weighted version of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention influenza-like illness activity level obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention data, as well as query data obtained from the Goggle search engine in the USA. The influenza-like illness data was collected from January 4, 2009, to December 27, 2015, stretching across a total time span of 312 weeks. Google Correlate was used to select search queries related to influenza epidemics. In total, 100 search queries were obtained from Google Correlate, 10 of which were better and more relevant search queries selected in this study. The model was evaluated using online Google search queries collected from Google Correlate. Standard measure performance MSE, RMSE, and MAE were employed to estimate the results of the proposed model. The empirical results of the INTS model showed MSE = 0.003, RMSE = 0.036, and MAE = 0.0185, indicating that the errors of the proposed model are very limited. A comparative model of predicting results between the INTS model, alternative Google Flu Trend, and autoregression with Google search data is also presented. The proposed model outperformed the existing models. (shrink)

This article analyzes the contribution Christian ethics might be able to make to the ethical debate on policy and caregiving in health and social care in the United Kingdom. The article deals particularly with the concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity which are essential in Christian social ethics and health care ethics, and which may be relevant for the ethical debate on health and social caregiving in the United Kingdom. An important argument in the article is that utilitarian and market-driven policies (...) in the National Health Service (NHS) and the social care system have marginalized the position of the elderly and have seriously impoverished the quality of care for the elderly. The neglect of the elderly and other vulnerable groups is also the result of widespread consumerist attitudes among patients and of libertarian models of noninterference which are affirmed by a public ethos of self-sufficiency and counter-dependency. Those who need care dare not make their need known to others and ask for help, while simultaneously those who could help are so intimidated by the public affirmation of privacy and negative rights that they do not dare to offer help except if this is explicitly demanded. This distant and standoffish attitude is in an important way responsible for the fact that the voice of those in need is altogether lost to the public forum. Christian ethics puts much emphasis on responsibility and solidarity with the needy other but is not able to have much impact on the delivery of care in a secularized society and health care system like the NHS. Nonetheless, Christianity still has a powerful and respected voice, by speaking up for those who cannot speak for themselves, such as the elderly and the handicapped. Christians can find allies in the ethics of care and other relational approaches in health care ethics in order to combat libertarianism, consumerism, and utilitarianism. (shrink)

There has been a lot of interest in generalizing orthodox quantum mechanics to include POV measures as observables, namely as unsharp obserrables. Such POV measures are related to symmetric operators. We have argued recently that only maximal symmetric operators should describe observables.1 This generalization to maximal symmetric operators has many physical applications. One application is in the area of quantization. We shall discuss a scheme, to he called quantization by parts,which can systematically deal with what may be called quantum circuits. (...) As a specific application we shall present a novel derivation of the famous Josephson equation for the supercurrent through a Josephson junction in a superconducting circuit. An interesting effect emerges from our quantization scheme when applied to a superconducting Y-shape circuit configuration. We also propose an experimental test for this effect which is expected to shed light on some conceptual problems on the quantum nature of the condensate. (shrink)

Originally published in 1937 as part of the 'Yesterday and Today in Germany' series for Cambridge Contact Readers, this German text describes a fantasy tour around Germany taken by David Hanes, the fictional English schoolchild from the first instalment, now an Oxford undergraduate. David now corresponds with a number of German friends during his trip, and learns more about German traditions and ways of life. The text is illustrated with valuable photographs of inter-war German life, as well as maps, charts (...) and sheet music. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Germany and the history of German teaching in Britain. (shrink)

John Lavery's The First Wounded, London Hospital, August 1914 records a memorable event in the First World War. This painting and the archives of the Royal London Hospital provide a fascinating insight into the nursing and medical care of these early war casualties.

Each Girard quantale (i.e., commutative quantale with a selected dualizing element) provides a support for a semantics for linear propositional formulas (but not for linear derivations). Several constructions of Girard quantales are known. We give two more constructions, one using an arbitrary partially ordered monoid and one using a partially ordered group (both commutative). In both cases the semantics can be controlled be a relation between pairs of elements of the support and formulas. This gives us a neat way of (...) handling duality. (shrink)

Recent interest by scholars in the ocean and its complex geographies has not been directed much towards the everyday life of those on board fishing vessels and how they sense the nature around them. A large trawler for oceanic fishing is a highly efficient industrial production machine, carrying an array of equipment that mediates the connection between crew and nature. This article presents results from an experimental research project, where one of the authors joined a fishing trip on an Icelandic (...) factory trawler. The resulting rich set of ethnographic material reveals much about the particularities of being at sea. It is argued that the ship can be understood as a series of distinct taskscapes, each of which affords certain relations between human and non-human nature. (shrink)