We seem to be living through an animist revival.1 The term “new animism” first appeared in 2005, in Graham Harvey’s Animism: Respect for the Living World. Harvey’s work draws heavily on Irving Hall...

Ancient Israel's wisdom literature dealt explicitly with moral education. Applying this literature to modern challenges of business ethics requires reading the texts in the light of existential structures that bond the ancient with the modern world. Such structures could include the temporal categories of present and future along with the challenging angst of managing the future. By providing conflicting positions the ancient wisdom literature provides an attitude of heart for the modern person, especially the modern business person, whose all-absorbing attention (...) to the future may well be based on an underlying existential situation behind much unethical behavior in modern business. (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

Ancient Israel's wisdom literature dealt explicitly with moral education. Applying this literature to modern challenges of business ethics requires reading the texts in the light of existential structures that bond the ancient with the modern world. Such structures could include the temporal categories of present and future along with the challenging angst of managing the future. By providing conflicting positions the ancient wisdom literature provides an attitude of heart for the modern person, especially the modern business person, whose all-absorbing attention (...) to the future may well be based on an underlying existential situation behind much unethical behavior in modern business. (shrink)

Variable responses to transcranial direct current stimulation protocols across individuals are widely reported, but the reasons behind this variation are unclear. This includes tDCS protocols meant to improve attention. Attentional control is impacted by top-down and bottom-up processes, and this relationship is affected by state characteristics such as anxiety. According to Attentional Control Theory, anxiety biases attention towards bottom-up and stimulus-driven processing. The goal of this study was to explore the extent to which differences in state anxiety and related measures (...) affect visual attention and category learning, both with and without the influence of tDCS. Using discovery learning, participants were trained to classify pictures of European streets into two categories while receiving 30 min of 2.0 mA anodal, cathodal, or sham tDCS over the rVLPFC. The pictures were classifiable according to two separate rules, one stimulus and one hypothesis-driven. The Remote Associates Test, Profile of Mood States, and Attention Networks Task were used to understand the effects of individual differences at baseline on subsequent tDCS-mediated learning. Multinomial logistic regression was fit to predict rule learning based on the baseline measures, with subjects classified according to whether they used the stimulus-driven or hypothesis-driven rule to classify the pictures. The overall model showed a classification accuracy of 74.1%. The type of tDCS stimulation applied, attentional orienting score, and self-reported mood were significant predictors of different categories of rule learning. These results indicate that anxiety can influence the quality of subjects’ attention at the onset of the task and that these attentional differences can influence tDCS-mediated category learning during the rapid assessment of visual scenes. These findings have implications for understanding the complex interactions that give rise to the variability in response to tDCS. (shrink)

Computational visual perception, also known as computer vision, is a field of artificial intelligence that enables computers to process digital images and videos in a similar way as biological vision does. It involves methods to be developed to replicate the capabilities of biological vision. The computer vision’s goal is to surpass the capabilities of biological vision in extracting useful information from visual data. The massive data generated today is one of the driving factors for the tremendous growth of computer vision. (...) This survey incorporates an overview of existing applications of deep learning in computational visual perception. The survey explores various deep learning techniques adapted to solve computer vision problems using deep convolutional neural networks and deep generative adversarial networks. The pitfalls of deep learning and their solutions are briefly discussed. The solutions discussed were dropout and augmentation. The results show that there is a significant improvement in the accuracy using dropout and data augmentation. Deep convolutional neural networks’ applications, namely, image classification, localization and detection, document analysis, and speech recognition, are discussed in detail. In-depth analysis of deep generative adversarial network applications, namely, image-to-image translation, image denoising, face aging, and facial attribute editing, is done. The deep generative adversarial network is unsupervised learning, but adding a certain number of labels in practical applications can improve its generating ability. However, it is challenging to acquire many data labels, but a small number of data labels can be acquired. Therefore, combining semisupervised learning and generative adversarial networks is one of the future directions. This article surveys the recent developments in this direction and provides a critical review of the related significant aspects, investigates the current opportunities and future challenges in all the emerging domains, and discusses the current opportunities in many emerging fields such as handwriting recognition, semantic mapping, webcam-based eye trackers, lumen center detection, query-by-string word, intermittently closed and open lakes and lagoons, and landslides. (shrink)

Niche construction is a potentially important concept for the human behavioural sciences but we question how it differs from models of gene-culture coevolution and whether it can be developed in the detailed ways that will be necessary if it is going to make a significant contribution to the human behavioural sciences.

Global challenges such as climate change, food security, or public health have become dominant concerns in research and innovation policy. This article examines how responses to these challenges are addressed by governance actors. We argue that appeals to global challenges can give rise to a ‘solution strategy' that presents responses of dominant actors as solutions and a ‘negotiation strategy' that highlights the availability of heterogeneous and often conflicting responses. On the basis of interviews and document analyses, the study identifies both (...) strategies across local, national, and European levels. While our results demonstrate the co-existence of both strategies, we find that global challenges are most commonly highlighted together with the solutions offered by dominant actors. Global challenges are ‘wicked problems' that often become misframed as ‘tame problems’ in governance practice and thereby legitimise dominant responses. (shrink)

Background: Dementia care at home often involves decisions in which the caregiver must weigh safety concerns with respect for autonomy. These dilemmas can lead to situations where caregivers provide care against the will of persons living with dementia, referred to as involuntary treatment. To prevent this, insight is needed into how family caregivers of persons living with dementia deal with care situations that can lead to involuntary treatment. Objective: To identify and describe family caregivers’ experiences regarding care decisions for situations (...) that can lead to involuntary treatment use in persons living with dementia at home. Research design: A qualitative descriptive interview design. Data were analysed using the Qualitative Analysis Guide of Leuven. Participants and research context: A total of 10 family caregivers providing care for 13 persons living with dementia participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews. Participants were recruited by registered nurses via purposive sampling. Ethical consideration: The study protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University Hospitals Leuven and the Medical Ethical Test Committee Zuyderland. Findings: Family caregivers experience the decision-making process concerning care dilemmas that can lead to involuntary treatment as complicated, stressful and exhausting. Although they consider safety and autonomy as important values, they struggle with finding the right balance between them. Due to the progressive and unpredictable nature of dementia, they are constantly seeking solutions while they adapt to new situations. Family caregivers feel responsible and experience social pressure for the safety of persons living with dementia. They may be blamed if something adverse happens to the persons living with dementia, which increases an already stressful situation. Their experience is influenced by characteristics of the care triad such as practical and emotional support, knowledge, and previous experiences. Discussion and conclusion: To prevent involuntary treatment, professionals need to proactively inform family caregivers, and they need to support each other in dealing with complex care situations. (shrink)

Little is known about distance processing in patients with posterior brain damage. Although many investigators have claimed that distance estimates are normal or abnormal in some of these patients, many of these observations were made informally and the examiners often asked for relative, and not absolute, distance estimates. The present investigation served two purposes. First, we wanted to contrast the use of distance information in peripersonal space for perceptual report as opposed to visuomotor control in our visual form agnosic patient, (...) DF. Second, we wanted to see to what extent her abilities to process distance cues were dependent on binocular vision, in light of Milner et al.'s (1991) observations of preserved stereopsis in DF, and Dijkerman et al.'s (1996) and Marotta et al.'s (1997) observations that her visual guidance of grasping may be particularly dependent on binocular vision of the target. We hypothesized that DF's visuomotor responses would show normal sensitivity to target distance, while her perceptual estimates would not. In the first experiment, we required DF and two age- and sex-matched control subjects to reach out and grasp black cubes placed at varying distances, or to estimate the distance of the cubes from the hand starting position without making a reaching movement. In the second experiment, we required DF and two age-matched control subjects to point as rapidly and accurately as possible to small LED targets which differed in spatial location, under binocular and monocular conditions. The results showed that, relative to the control subjects, DF's grasping movements produced normal peak velocity-distance scaling-when she reached for blocks which varied in depth or pointed to LED targets which were presented at different distances in depth. In contrast, in the cube experiment, her verbal estimates of object distance were poorly scaled, although they improved slightly under the binocular conditions. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of processing streams in extrastriate visual cortex and the distinction between categorical and coordinate spatial processing. (shrink)

Many studies have argued for distinct but complementary contributions from each hemisphere in the control of movements to visual targets. Investigators have attempted to extend observations from patients with unilateral left- and right-hemisphere damage, to those using neurologically-intact participants, by assuming that each hand has privileged access to the contralateral hemisphere. Previous attempts to illustrate right hemispheric contributions to the control of aiming have focussed on increasing the spatial demands of an aiming task, to attenuate the typical right hand advantages, (...) to try to enhance a left hand reaction time advantage in right-handed participants. These early attempts have not been successful. The present study circumnavigates some of the theoretical and methodological difficulties of some of the earlier experiments, by using three different tasks linked directly to specialized functions of the right hemisphere: bisecting, the gap effect, and visuospatial localization. None of these tasks were effective in reducing the magnitude of left hand reaction time advantages in right handers. Results are discussed in terms of alternatives to right hemispheric functional explanations of the effect, the one-dimensional nature of our target arrays, power and precision given the size of the left hand RT effect, and the utility of examining the proportions of participants who show these effects, rather than exclusive reliance on measures of central tendency and their associated null hypothesis significance tests. (shrink)