Closed Loop medical devices such as Closed Loop Deep Brain Stimulation and Brain Computer Interface are some of the emerging neurotechnologies. New generations of implantable brain–computer interfaces have recently gained success in human clinical trials. These implants detect specific neuronal patterns and provide the subject with information to respond to these patterns. Further, Closed Loop brain devices give control to the subject so that he can respond and decide on a therapeutic goal. Although the implants have improved subjects’ quality of (...) life, their use has raised varied ethical concerns. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of the ethical implications specific to the therapeutic goals of closed loop brain implants. The authors analyze the related work qualitatively and quantitatively so as to help readers in understanding the various ethical implications of closed loop brain implants. (shrink)

Meaning and Purpose of Life are perhaps the most thought about, if not talked about, issues on the planet since human beings have walked on earth. This book is another attempt to understand the Meaning and Purpose of Life using ideas of Vedanta in Indian philosophy, and of mainstream economics. Starting from first principles, Dr Agarwal explores the core concept of Brahman in Vedanta, and builds an axiomatic foundation for understanding the meaning and purpose of life using the fundamental (...) ideas of the Prasthana Traya, and in particular of The Bhagavad Gita and The Principal Upanishads. Dr Agarwal adheres to the philosophy of Karma Yoga as his chosen area of interest for the exploration of meaning and purpose, which allows him to seek linkages between the concepts of social welfare in Vedanta and economics. Ideas of lokasamgraha in Indian Philosophy and of externalities in economics provide a clear common ground between the two apparently disparate disciplines. Throughout the book, he emphasizes simple practical approaches for making life more meaningful and happier, while relying fundamentally on the basic ideas of Vedanta. (shrink)

With an increasing number of individuals living with chronic illness and pain, integrative approaches offering self-management support are needed. This book proposes a multi-layered framework integrating the body/self/environment that cultivates wholeness as an authentic embodied presence in alignment with a reflexive self.

Insulin is stored within the pancreas in an inactive Zn2+‐bound hexameric form prior to release. Similarly, clinical insulins contain Zn2+ and form multimeric complexes. Upon release from the pancreas or upon injection, insulin only becomes active once Zn2+ disengages from the complex. In plasma and other extracellular fluids, the majority of Zn2+ is bound to human serum albumin (HSA), which plays a vital role in controlling insulin pharmacodynamics by enabling removal of Zn2+. The Zn2+‐binding properties of HSA are attenuated by (...) non‐esterified fatty acids (NEFAs) also transported by HSA. Elevated NEFA concentrations are associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes. Here we present the hypothesis that higher NEFA levels in obese and/or diabetic individuals may contribute to insulin resistance and affect therapeutic insulin dose‐response profiles, through modulation of HSA/Zn2+ dynamics. We envisage this novel concept to have important implications for personalized treatments and management of diabetes‐related conditions in the future. (shrink)

In this article, I seek to consider this practice of “communitarian” reading—reading aloud, reading together—as a defining aspect of the cultures of reading among Bengali women in the nineteenth century. I wish to contest the privileging of “silent” reading as a “modern” mode of reading and the subsequent celebration of the protean incorporeality of the “silent” reader, in the works of prominent scholars of readership, arguing that the privileging of “silent” reading as the predominant “modern” mode of reading does not (...) offer a sufficient framework for the study of reading practices of the “historical” “woman reader” in the age of colonial “modernity” in a terrain such as that of Bengal. The article thus engages with alternate frameworks of considering the practice of reading aloud, drawing upon diverse feminist scholarship on practices of reading to argue in favor of considering the practice of “communitarian” reading as a form of female sociality for Bengali women in the nineteenth century, at a time when public spaces remained largely inaccessible to women. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of the study is to probe millennials on their perceptions towards consumer ethics and to generate new insights in the realm of consumer behaviour. Millennials constitute a big fraction of the total consumer base with immense buying power. Therefore, the exploration of the ethical perspective of millennials is of vital importance for organizations. Design/methodology/approach The study applies a grounded theory approach to explore the subjective experiences of consumers and draws insights from the data following an interpretivist epistemology. (...) Findings The findings revealed five prominent themes that throw light on the consumer’s ethical orientations. The findings extend Hunt Vettel’s theoretical framework and ethical relativism. Research limitations/implications This research is limited by the small sample of millennials studied. Practical implications The paper advances the Hunt Vittel theoretical framework of ethics and provides insights into the deontological and teleological evaluations of millennials while making ethical decisions. The study adds to the existing research on millennials materialism and ethical orientation. The organizations get an insight into the ethical perceptions of millennials. The findings reinforce the consumer’s perceived importance of adoption of green practices by the organizations. The organization’s investment in green practices precipitate a favourable image of the organization among the millennials. Originality/value Literature in ethics is replete with studies adopting positivist methodologies. This paper is unique as it shuns the methodological bias and adopts a grounded theory approach to study new age digitally savvy millennial consumers. (shrink)

In today’s competitive world, the pressures of work have been escalating and there is a growing feeling among employees that the demands of work begin to dominate life and a sense of work life imbalance is felt. Thus, finding a balance between work and life in today’s swift world presents a major challenge to both the employer and employee. This article seeks to explore the variation among men and women academicians with regards to overall job satisfaction, job stressors and work (...) family conflict that influence overall balance among the academicians. Data were collected via questionnaire. T-test and Analysis of Variance were used to find out the important component to persist balance. The result indicates that women faculty members as compared to the male faculty members exhibit a high degree of dissatisfaction with regards to career, family responsibilities and work life integration issues while balancing the work life domain. (shrink)

An important factor that leads governments to engage in public service contracts with nonprofit organizations is the belief that they share similar ethical and value orientations that will allow governments to reduce monitoring costs. However the notion of the existence of similarities in ethical climate has not been systematically examined. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical climate in government and nonprofit sectors and to determine the extent to which similarities (and differences) exist in ethical climate dimensions. (...) Using survey data and structural equation modeling technique, the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of the ethical climate in the two sectors are tested. Results indicate that while there is a significant overlap in shared perception of ethical climate dimensions, there are also key differences between the two sectors. The outcome of this research provides important preliminary insights for public policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using the nonprofit sector for service delivery. (shrink)

Comatose survivors of cardiac arrest may die following withdrawal of life-sustaining therapy (WLST) due to poor neurologic prognosis. Family members, acting as surrogate decision makers, are frequently asked to decide whether the patient should continue to receive ongoing life-sustaining therapy such as mechanical ventilation in this context of risk of death following removal. Sometimes, physicians and family members disagree about what is in the patient's best interest, and this conflict causes distress for both families and medical personnel. This article examines (...) themes recorded in the medical records of 24 cardiac arrest patients at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) whose families chose to pursue continued life support despite physician recommendations for withdrawal. In documented conversations between patients' families and their providers, the most prominent themes included faith in miracles, the inappropriateness of "playing God," the value of more time with the patient, and differences in how providers and family members perceived the patient's status. (shrink)

In multiple robot systems, the problem of allocation of complex tasks to heterogeneous teams of robots, also known as the multiple robot coalition formation problem, has begun to receive considerable attention. Efforts to address the problem range from heuristics based approaches that search the subspaces of the coalition structure to evolutionary learning approaches. Conventional approaches typically strive to optimize a single objective function such as the number of tasks executed or the time required to execute all tasks, or a weighted (...) function of such objectives. In real world applications, objectives such as minimizing distance traveled and maximizing the number of tasks completed are often conflicting in nature. The coalition formation problem thus naturally lends itself to a multi-objective optimization approach based on evolutionary learning. In this paper, we formulate the problem of mapping coalitions of robots to a set of tasks as a multi-objective optimization problem and propose a variant of non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm to arrive at trade-off solutions. Additionally, we extend the solution to domains where robot resources are non-additive. Simulations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in generating the set of Pareto-optimal solutions. (shrink)

On 24th March 2020, the first nationwide complete lockdown was announced by the Prime Minister of India for 21 days which was later extended to 31st May 2020. Consequently, thousands of migrant workers placed in big cities had no other option but to go back to their native villages. Their journeys back to villages- thousands of kilometres on bicycles or foot due to the non-availability of public transport amidst the travel ban- were driven by the compulsions of food and shelter. (...) In one of many heart-wrenching incidents, sixteen laborers were run over by a freight train while they were resting on the railway tracks. The images of the Roti on the railway track strewn across were beamed on the national news channels, as a telling commentary of the unimaginable hardships of these workers. Ironically, in the eyes of law, they were trespassers under the Indian Railways Act, 1989. The Indian Railway did not pay any compensation to the victims. Their act also violated the Indian Disaster Management Act, 2005 and Indian Penal Code, 1860- the law for the breach of lockdown guidelines and the law for disobedience of order by public servants respectively- for having decided to travel amidst a travel ban. The semiotics of law-making acts ‘criminal’ bereft of ‘moral culpability’ are seldom questioned on their supposed amoral foundations. Pandemic exhibited that social fissures not only condition the individual or community actions but also the actions of the State. Minorities especially Muslims were at the receiving end of State’s selective enforcement of lockdown laws in India. The various instances in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic expose the hollow claims of equality before the law and the equal protection of laws as a constitutional promise to every citizen. This article aims to unravel the ostensible and the actual moral exhibition of such Indian laws through the lens of several incidents during the nationwide lockdown in India. This paper would argue that this constructed positivist amorality needs to be deconstructed to unearth the power imbalance that it seeks to hide. (shrink)

Management scholars have paid close attention to the construct of organizational or corporate reputation, particularly in the applied business ethics and corporate social responsibility fields. Extant research demonstrates that CR is one of the key mediators between CSR and important organizational outcomes, which ultimately improve organizational performance. Yet, hitherto the research focused on CR construct has been plagued by multiple definitions, conflicting conceptualizations, and unclear operationalizations. The purpose of this article is to provide theoretical ground for positioning of CR as (...) an assessment construct that is modeled as a second-order factor affecting individual first-order dimensions, and to provide methodological and empirical support toward such conceptualization. We assert that intangible, socially complex, and causally ambiguous CR can be accurately estimated through its individual measurable dimensions. Using survey data from Peru, we empirically test the hypothesized second-order reflective model within a hierarchy of nested and non-nested models, and compare its model fit and predictive power with alternative conceptualizations. Modeling CR as a second-order reflective construct relies on a set of theoretical propositions and yields several methodological advantages, including strong conceptual interpretability and parsimony when tested within a nomological context. We explicitly demonstrate positive organizational outcomes of CR: customer trust, corporate identification, in-role behavior, and extra-role behavior. Then, we demonstrate that the shorter scales of CR can be used as a good proxy for the full construct measure. The paper concludes by highlighting theoretical insights, and methodological and managerial implications of the findings. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated model of ethical decision‐making in business that incorporates teleological, deontological and existential theory. Existentialism has been curiously overlooked by many scholars in the field despite the fact that it is so fundamentally a theory of choice. We argue that it is possible to seek good organisational ends (teleology), through the use of right means (deontology), and enable the decision‐maker to do so authentically (existentialism). More specifically, we provide a framework that will enable the decision‐maker to (...) integrate the various ethical schools of thought available to them and to apply this framework in the ethical decision‐making process. The model presented makes explicit the existential position of choice and takes into account other contextual moderating factors. Negative Option Marketing is used as a running application to illustrate the role of existentialism in the decision‐making process. (shrink)

This paper presents an integrated model of ethical decision‐making in business that incorporates teleological, deontological and existential theory. Existentialism has been curiously overlooked by many scholars in the field despite the fact that it is so fundamentally a theory of choice. We argue that it is possible to seek good organisational ends (teleology), through the use of right means (deontology), and enable the decision‐maker to do so authentically (existentialism). More specifically, we provide a framework that will enable the decision‐maker to (...) integrate the various ethical schools of thought available to them and to apply this framework in the ethical decision‐making process. The model presented makes explicit the existential position of choice and takes into account other contextual moderating factors. Negative Option Marketing is used as a running application to illustrate the role of existentialism in the decision‐making process. (shrink)

Plant‐specific NAC transcription factors (TFs) evolve during the transition from aquatic to terrestrial plant life and are amplified to become one of the biggest TF families. This is because they regulate genes involved in water conductance and cell support. They also control flower and fruit formation. The review presented here focuses on various properties, regulatory intricacies, and developmental roles of NAC family members. Processes controlled by NACs depend majorly on their transcriptional properties. NACs can function as both activators and/or repressors. (...) Additionally, their homo/hetero dimerization abilities can also affect DNA binding and activation properties. The active protein levels are dependent on the regulatory cascades. Because NACs regulate both development and stress responses in plants, in‐depth knowledge about them has the potential to help guide future crop improvement studies. (shrink)

The current study has mapped the impact of changes in different climatic parameters on the productivity of major crops cultivated in India like cereal, pulses, and oilseed crops. The vulnerability of crops to different climatic conditions like exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive indicators along with its different components and agribusiness has been studied. The study uses data collected over the past six decades from 1960 to 2020. Analytical tools such as the Tobit regression model and Principal Component Analysis were used for (...) the investigation which has shown that among climatic parameters, an increase in temperature along with huge variations in rainfall and consistent increase in CO2 emissions have had a negative impact by reducing crop productivity, particularly cereals and oilseed. Among various factors, adaptive factors such as cropping intensity, agricultural machinery, and livestock density in combination with sensitivity factors such as average operational land holding size and productivity of cereals, and exposure indicators like Kharif temperature, heavy rainfall, and rate of change in maximum and minimum Rabi temperature have contributed significantly in increasing crop vulnerability. The agribusiness model needs to be more inclusive. It should pay attention to small and remote farmers, and provide them with inclusive finance that can facilitate the adoption of climate-smart financial innovations, serve the underserved segments, and help them reach the target of a sustainable and inclusive agribusiness model. Though the social, technological, and economic initiatives can enhance the adaptive capacity of farmers, political measures still have a major role to play in providing a healthy climate for agriculture in India through tailored adaptive approaches like the adoption of craft climate adaptation program, dilating the irrigation coverage and location-centric management options. Hence, multidisciplinary and holistic approaches are worth emphasizing for evaluating the future impacts of change in climate on Indian agriculture. (shrink)

Within the corporate social responsibility research field, the construct of organizational reputation has been extensively scrutinized as a crucial mediator between the firm CSR engagement and valuable organizational outcomes. Yet, the existing literature on organizational reputation suffers from substantive divergence between the studies in terms of defining the construct’s domain, dimensional structure, and the methodological operationalization. The current study aims to refine the organizational reputation construct by reconciling varying theoretical perspectives within the construct’s definitional landscape, suggesting a holistic but parsimonious (...) triadic view on the organizational reputation construct for customer stakeholders. Based on commonly used extant organizational reputation measures, we theoretically and empirically develop the customer-based triadic organizational reputation scale and position it as a superordinate multidimensional construct influencing three distinct first-order dimensions: product and service efficacy, societal ethicality, and market prominence. Results show that the proposed triadic conceptualization of organizational reputation is theoretically defensible, and the resulting scale is cross-culturally generalizable and performs well compared with existing, longer measures of organizational reputation. Together, the organizational reputation model developed here suggests that, for cognitive economy and functional efficiency, customers will access a second-order reflective model of organizational reputation as the default implicit attitude, which in turn will activate reflections of the implicit attitude in the form of first-order dimensions. (shrink)

A theory is presented to explain how accurate, single-joint movements are controlled. The theory applies to movements across different distances, with different inertial loads, toward targets of different widths over a wide range of experimentally manipulated velocities. The theory is based on three propositions. (1) Movements are planned according to “strategies” of which there are at least two: a speed-insensitive (SI) and a speed-sensitive (SS) one. (2) These strategies can be equated with sets of rules for performing diverse movement tasks. (...) The choice between SI and SS depends on whether movement speed and/or movement time (and hence appropriate muscle forces) must be constrained to meet task requirements. (3) The electromyogram can be interpreted as a low-pass filtered version of the controlling signal to the motoneuron pools. This controlling signal can be modelled as a rectangular excitation pulse in which modulation occurs in either pulse amplitude or pulse width. Movements to different distances and with loads are controlled by the SI strategy, which modulates pulse width. Movements in which speed must be explicitly regulated are controlled by the SS strategy, which modulates pulse amplitude. The distinction between the two movement strategies reconciles many apparent conflicts in the motor control literature. (shrink)

Recent advances in genomic and imaging techniques have revealed the complex manner of organizing billions of base pairs of DNA necessary for maintaining their functionality and ensuring the proper expression of genetic information. The SMC proteins and cohesin complex primarily contribute to forming higher‐order chromatin structures, such as chromosomal territories, compartments, topologically associating domains (TADs) and chromatin loops anchored by CCCTC‐binding factor (CTCF) protein or other genome organizers. Cohesin plays a fundamental role in chromatin organization, gene expression and regulation. This (...) review aims to describe the current understanding of the dynamic nature of the cohesin‐DNA complex and its dependence on cohesin for genome maintenance. We discuss the current 3C technique and numerous bioinformatics pipelines used to comprehend structural genomics and epigenetics focusing on the analysis of Cohesin‐centred interactions. We also incorporate our present comprehension of Loop Extrusion (LE) and insights from stochastic modelling. (shrink)

Research indicates that religious values and ethical behavior are closely associated, yet, at a firm level, the processes by which this association occurs are poorly understood. Family firms are known to exhibit values-based behavior, which in turn can lead to specific firm-level outcomes. It is also known that one’s family is an important incubator, enabler, and perpetuator of religious values across successive generations. Our study examines the experiences of a single, multigenerational business family that successfully enacted their religious values in (...) their business. Drawing upon intergenerational solidarity and values-based leadership theory, and by way of an interpretive, qualitative analysis, we find that the family’s religious values enhanced their cohesion and were manifested in their leadership style, which, in turn, led to outcomes for the business. Our findings highlight the processes that underlie the relationship between religious values and organizational outcomes in family firms and offer insights into the role of solidarity in values-based leadership. (shrink)