COVID-19 forced lockdown in India, leading to the loss of job, crisis of food, and other financial catastrophes that led to the exodus migration of internal migrant workers, operating in the private sector, back to their homes. Unavailability of transport facilities led to an inflicted need to walk back to homes barefooted without lack of any other crucial resources on the way. The woeful state of internal migrant workers walking back, with all their stuff on their back, holding their children, (...) was trending on social media worldwide. Their problem continued even after reaching home, including misbehavior of villagers, indifferent mannerism of family members toward them, inability to fulfill family responsibility, and financial crisis, which led to stress, fear, and trauma for these internal migrant workers. The present paper aimed to assess the idiosyncratic stressors of internal migrant workers throughout the pandemic era and their responses toward those problems, which helped them cope with it. In-depth semistructured telephonic interviews were conducted with 25 internal migrant workers who were working in different cities in India before lockdown. The analyses revealed that multiple stressors include financial crisis, unavailability of food, inability to continue education, inability to pay house rent, lack of support from neighbors and family, and other psychological stressors that affected them. However, they also tried multiple strategies to deal with the problems, including a cognitive appraisal of the problem and making oneself psychologically competent to deal with the situation. Social support of family and friends played a vital role in enhancing hardiness and increasing the level of happiness at scarce times. At the same time, some of them could not deal with stressors and opted for psychiatric help to manage the physical symptoms of stress. (shrink)

Adoption of technology, a research topic within the Information Systems area, is usually studied at two levels: organizational level and user level. This paper examines the range of methods used for studying technology adoption issues at both these levels. The approaches were selected after conducting a review of 48 articles on technology adoption and usage, published in peer reviewed journals between 1985 and 2003. The journals reviewed include the MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Systems (...) Journal, and other relevant journals in the IS area. The findings suggest that the survey method was used predominantly when investigating the topics of user adoption and the usage of technology. In contrast, the case study method is the most widely used when examining adoption issues at the organizational level. (shrink)

An increasing number of large corporations find themselves caught between two seemingly contradictory goals: satisfying investors’ expectations for progressive earnings’ growth and the stakeholders’ growing demand for ethical conduct. There is an increasing realization across geographies concerning the growing relevance of resolving this issue. The present article is a tool kit for business organizations who want to become ethically fit. The article exhibits the dilemma faced by the corporate world regarding embracing ethics in business. It attempts to establish with the (...) help of some empirical findings that on a broader canvas ethical conduct is contributory towards the bottom line growth. It also suggests that to evaluate the performance of a business the frame of reference has to be changed. Further, it offers tangible suggestions as to what business corporations ought to do in order to get ethically fit. (shrink)

Nowadays, the whole world is facing a pandemic situation in the form of coronavirus diseases. In connection with the spread of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths, various researchers have analysed the impact of temperature and humidity on the spread of coronavirus. In this paper, a deep transfer learning-based exhaustive analysis is performed by evaluating the influence of different weather factors, including temperature, sunlight hours, and humidity. To perform all the experiments, two data sets are used: one is taken from Kaggle (...) consists of official COVID-19 case reports and another data set is related to weather. Moreover, COVID-19 data are also tested and validated using deep transfer learning models. From the experimental results, it is shown that the temperature, the wind speed, and the sunlight hours make a significant impact on COVID-19 cases and deaths. However, it is shown that the humidity does not affect coronavirus cases significantly. It is concluded that the convolutional neural network performs better than the competitive model. (shrink)

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic was soon declared a global health threat and had significant economic and health implications. Unprecedented government measures brought massive shifts in teaching-learning pedagogy in nursing to curb the infection. The study was conducted to explore the predictors of pandemic fatigue among nursing undergraduates and mediating role of individual resilience and coping styles during the third wave in India.MethodsThis online survey included 256 undergraduate nursing students studying at Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital in North India. Lockdown/Pandemic Fatigue Questionnaire, Brief (...) Resilience Scale, and Coping Behavior Questionnaire were used to collect the information. Appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to compute the results.ResultsNursing undergraduates reported a moderate level of fatigue during the restrictions imposed at the time of the third wave. Students’ year of study, tested positive during pandemic, and post-COVID-19 hospitalization were found associated with higher fatigue status. Advanced age and higher personal resilience status were associated with lower fatigue levels. Resilience status and second year of study were reported as independent predictors of pandemic fatigue in students.ConclusionFindings suggest that lockdown-related fatigue was common in nursing undergraduates. Considering negative consequences on mental health, routine psychosocial screening of the nursing students should be conducted. Recommending stress-relieving measures should be enforced to help nursing undergraduates to combat lockdown-induced exhaustion. (shrink)

Caste is a multidimensional reality in history and society, and it has manifested itself through varieties of structures of domination which are simultaneously cultural, economic, political and ideological as caste has also been related in complex ways with structures of class and gender domination. These structures of domination have led to the annihilation of self and society. This led Ambedkar to challenge us for annihilating caste. For Ambedkar, annihilation of caste calls for the realization of each person as an individual (...) and not just a caste person. It also calls for the destruction of caste privileges, discrimination and their scriptural legitimation. However, this call for annihilation mainly has been a structural project without enough attention to the project of transformation of consciousness—self and social. There is a hint of this in Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste when he urges us to realize each one of us as unique individuals beyond the holes of caste which is further deepened in his Buddha and His Dhamma. Transformation of consciousness is also suggested in Adi Shankara’s treatise on self, Atmastakam. The essay engages itself with Ambedkar, Shankara, Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo, among others, as they help us in the transformation of caste domination and present a new hermeneutics of self-realization and social liberation. It deals with the simultaneous challenges of structural transformation of caste as well as consciousness of caste at the levels of both self and society which can draw on multiple sources of critique, creativity and transformations in India and the world. Brahminism is the poison which has spoiled Hinduism. You will succeed in saving Hinduism if you will kill Brahminism. There should be no opposition to this reform from any quarter. It should be welcomed even by the Arya Samajists, because this is merely an application of their own doctrine of guna-karma. Whether you do that or you do not, you must give a new doctrinal basis to your religion—a basis that will be in consonance with liberty, equality and fraternity; in short, with democracy. I am no authority on the subject. But I am told that for such religious principles as will be in consonance with liberty, equality and fraternity, it may not be necessary for you to borrow from foreign sources, and that you could draw for such principles in the Upanishads. Whether you could do so without a complete remoulding, a considerable scraping and chipping off from the ore they contain, is more than I can say. (Ambedkar, 2002[1936], p. 303). (shrink)

Tumors, abscesses, cysts, scars, fractures are familiar types of what we shall call pathological continuant entities. The instances of such types exist always in or on anatomical structures, which thereby become transformed into pathological anatomical structures of corresponding types: a fractured tibia, a blistered thumb, a carcinomatous colon. In previous work on biomedical ontologies we showed how the provision of formal definitions for relations such as is_a, part_of and transformation_of can facilitate the integration of such ontologies in ways which have (...) the potential to support new kinds of automated reasoning. We here extend this approach to the treatment of pathologies, focusing especially on those pathological continuant entities which arise when organs become affected by carcinomas. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pains And Gains Of Rural Health Practice:Lessons Books Never TaughtSridevi Seetharam, Bindu Balasubramaniam, G. S. Kumar, and M. R. SeetharamHow The Journey BeganIn the early 1980s, as fresh graduates from Mysore Medical College in southern India, we were brimming with a zeal to "cure the sick" and "change the world." We had an ideal of evidence-based, rational, ethical and equitable health care and set out to serve rural (...) and under-served communities which included displaced forest-based tribes. In the initial years, with the naivety of the inexperienced, we believed that by correcting the dehydration of the doe-eyed six-year-old Mare and giving her a free course of antibiotics, we had made health care accessible to her. Much to our dismay, within a month, Mare was back in the outpatient clinic, with diarrhea all over again and looking thinner than ever. We realized that it was a losing battle to keep her healthy as long as she continued to drink water from the same contaminated stream, live in unhygienic surroundings, and eat only the paltry meals that her family could barely afford. We gradually began to connect these living examples to what our preventive medicine text books had stressed all along—there are many social determinants of health which, if left unaddressed, do not permit realization of the vision of health for all.Such instances continually pulled us out of the hospital building and into the villages and tribal hamlets. We discovered that our textbook of Preventive and Social Medicine (Park, 1986) (P&SM as we used to call it), was our most valuable possession. [End Page 106] We devoured the descriptions of national health programs, sanitation procedures, water treatment protocols, and maintenance of cold chain for vaccines with a completely new perspective. We discovered the Manual of Basic Techniques for a Health Laboratory, (World Health Organization, 1980) detailing how to set up a laboratory with low cost, reliable and simple methods. We learned to drive a jeep to haul supplies and patients. To step up the level of clinical care, some of us pursued post-graduate programs and equipped ourselves to provide more specialized care too. It has been over two decades since we embarked on this journey. We have encountered a variety of perplexing dilemmas with no clear solutions. We have sometimes been compelled to adopt health practices that were not really evidence-based, seemingly irrational, inequitable and even downright unethical. This narration describes only a few of our thousands of cases, and hopefully conveys our periods of self-doubt, despair and hope, as well as, the challenges we face to reconcile with the difficult choices we are forced to make every day.Unforeseen Challenges in Saving Mothers and ChildrenHigh maternal and child mortality rates have been one of the most disturbing aspects of the health care scenario in rural India. To ensure immunization of all children, health workers with vaccine carriers go from village to village and hamlet to hamlet to reach those infants that would have missed visits to the immunization clinics. Our grass-root workers facilitate these visits by identifying households with such children. Occasionally, they encounter families who spirit away the infant into the adjoining woods as soon as the health worker is seen approaching, and blandly proclaim that the child is not at home. Despite reassurance and counseling about the safety and necessity of the vaccine, their apprehensions and misconceptions are insurmountable. What is the extent of the responsibility of the health worker? Is it ethical to hunt down the child and force the administration of the vaccine in view of the public health gains, besides the child's welfare?A few months ago, a pre-term neonate was admitted to our hospital, but worsened and needed referral to a higher centre in the city. The family refused to go despite repeated persuasion and detailed explanation about the technical limitations of care at our centre. From the family's perspective, the variety of social, cultural, and monetary challenges they would face in the city were themselves limitations for care. We were compelled to retain the baby and continue giving the best care we could.Two... (shrink)

Description: Knowledge, Truth and Realism is a collection of essays written by Pranab Kumar Sen over a period of ten years (from 1989 to 1998). The essays deal mainly with issues in Philosophy of Language and Theory of Knowledge from the standpoint of analytical philosophy. They bring forth Sen's realist philosophical position and his attempt to weave together specific questions concerning meaning, reference, truth, knowledge and objectivity in this realistic framework. By responding to and by making use of the (...) ideas of Philosophers like, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.V. Quine, Donald Davidson, Peter Strawson, H.P. Grice, Michael Dummett, John McDowell, Sen develops his distinctive theory of meaning and understanding along with his theory of knowledge/knowing. In doing so he also addresses the larger issue regarding the nature of philosophical analysis. The essays are a testimony to the painstaking and lifelong engagement of the Philosopher with some of the central and contemporary debates in analytical philosophy. (shrink)

Corporate governance has come to be recognised as a cornerstone of economic reforms seeking to promote stability and growth in developing countries. The Asian crisis of the 1997 was viewed as having roots in poor governance and hence national governments as well as international organisations have sought to promote a strengthening of governance mechanisms. This article investigates governance reforms in India over the last decade. The paper reviews changes in Indian governance codes that indicate a preference of adoption of Anglo-American (...) governance models. A survey of ownership structures of Indian listed companies reveals a mixture of governance mechanisms and a persistence of the "business house model" of governance. The paper concludes that despite external pressures towards an "Anglo-Americanisation" of governance practice, the outcomes thus far reveal the emergence of a diversity of governance mechanisms arising in a path-dependent fashion. (shrink)

Internationalization of higher education is a concept that is currently making its way to every corner of the globe. An Introduction to the Internationalization of Higher Education aims to provide the reader with an introduction to this subject and explore three of its most fundamental aspects; namely, internationalization at home, internationalization abroad, and internationalization of curriculum. This publication delves into the underlying rationale for internationalization of higher education and discusses the opportunities and challenges brought about by this concept. Current practices (...) regarding the internationalization of higher education are discussed, and the requirements for the realization of these activities are laid out. This book can act as a basis for future research endeavors as it clearly and comprehensively introduces the internationalization of higher education and answers various questions about this topic. (shrink)

Two types of logical consequence are compared: one, with respect to matrix and designated elements and the other with respect to ordering in a suitable algebraic structure. Particular emphasis is laid on algebraic structures in which there is no top-element relative to the ordering. The significance of this special condition is discussed. Sequent calculi for a number of such structures are developed. As a consequence it is re-established that the notion of truth as such, not to speak of tautologies, is (...) inessential in order to define validity of an argument. (shrink)

In one of his earliest dialogues, the Soliloquia, Augustine identifies the liberal arts (disciplinae) with truth (veritas), and employs this somewhat puzzling identification as a premise in his infamous proof of the immortality of the soul (Sol. 2.24). In this paper, I examine Augustine’s argument for this peculiar identification. Augustine maintains both (1) that the constituent propositions of the liberal arts are true, and (2) that the liberal art of dialectic (disciplina disputandi) is the “truth through which all disciplines are (...) true” (Sol. 2.21). I argue that Augustine identifies the liberal arts with truth because (1) the constituent propositions of the liberal arts are learned, and (2) dialectic’s structure is essential to the liberal arts. I further suggest that the subject matter of each liberal art reflects a distinct segment of intelligible reality, that is, the realm of the intelligible Forms. (shrink)

The reluctant revolutionary -- The patent slave -- The golden Dane -- The quantum atom -- When Einstein met Bohr -- The prince of duality -- Spin doctors -- The quantum magician -- A late erotic outburst -- Uncertainty in Copenhagen -- Solvay 1927 -- Einstein forgets relativity -- Quantum reality -- For whom Bell's theorem tolls -- The quantum demon.

The paper aims to reflect upon the significance of interrelationship of ethics and business in multinational corporate world. The issue of focus is: Which is appropriate course for pursuing business without ethics or business with ethics? To arrive at a just resolve, the paper attempts to see the pros and cons of introducing ethics into business. The pivotal problem seems to lie with regard to the concept of 'profit making' in business. Business corporates are apprehensive of not being able to (...) earn 'maximum'-profit if business activity is pursued with moral considerations. On the other hand, those who argue for ethics in business emphasize that ethical values are prior to 'maximization' of profit making. On their view, the point of emphasis is that it is after-all human beings for which business activity is carried out. As such, business (must) is to 'serve' them rather than make them 'suffer'. By the term 'human beings', we mean here the concept of 'society' and not 'individual'-in-isolation from other individuals. Nevertheless, to mean this, it is not to deny the fact that individual is a species of society. Also, it is defensively argued that the apprehension that ethical behaviour negatively affects profit making in business is not true on the ground that contrarily in fact ethical attitude is really consistent with rather than obstructive to business pursuit for a healthy society and abhyudaya (i.e., for rise and prosperity for all). Hence the case for ethics in business. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe role that principles of global health ethics play in the formulation of global and national level policies remains poorly understood. In this article we examine the status and trajectory of India, as a prototype low-middle income country that is on track to meet some important health targets set by the Sustainable Development Goals, with a view to assessing how relevant the global goals are to achieving equitable health care and health outcomes in India. We define the principles of global (...) health ethics relevant to our discussion and then examine some critical aspects of Indian healthcare policy through this lens. We demonstrate various areas where principles of global health ethics have been overlooked in planning and resulted in serious flaws in the healthcare system. It is our position that explicit attention should be given to the principles of global health ethics while framing policy at the national as well as the global level to ensure just health care outcomes in the future. (shrink)

The authors study the impact of institutional corporate social responsibility —defined as CSR targeted at a borrowing firm’s secondary stakeholders—on bank loans. Findings suggest that higher levels of institutional CSR are associated with lower levels of interest rates and loan spreads. In addition, institutional CSR also tempers the positive impact of loan maturity and firm leverage on interest rates and loan spread. These effects were strongest among firms that demonstrated sustained performance, rather than among firms that showed mixed performance in (...) terms of their secondary stakeholder-related activities. This study indicates institutional CSR is valued by stakeholders for its risk mitigating and transaction cost reducing effects independent of technical CSR, defined as CSR targeted at primary stakeholders. (shrink)

Reasons and Recognition brings together fourteen new papers on an array of topics from the many areas to which Scanlon has made path-breaking contributions, ...

Firms and industries increasingly subscribe to voluntary codes of conduct. These self-regulatory governance systems can be effective in establishing a more sustainable and inclusive global economy. However, these codes can also be largely symbolic, reactive measures to quell public criticism. Cross-sector alliances (between for-profit and nonprofit actors) present a learning platform for infusing participants with greater incentives to be socially responsible. They can provide multinationals new capabilities that allow them to more closely ally social responsibility with economic performance. This paper (...) examines learning facilitators in cross-sector alliances that enrich corporate understanding of stakeholder concerns. It suggests that these organizational learning experiments can translate into globally responsible practices and processes that improve the content and effectiveness of voluntary corporate codes. (shrink)

Those considering careers in medicine and other health and humanitarian disciplines as well as those concerned about the growing presence of militarized ...

Recent scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Global Crossing have put the ethical spotlight on corporate malfeasance as never before. However, these are the situations in which management knew that they made the wrong choice. As professor Joseph Badaracco of Harvard Business School points out, the real ethical dilemmas arise when people must choose between right and right — where both choices can be justified, yet one must be chosen over the other. Whether or not to reprice stock options represents one (...) such ethical dilemma. Repricing can help exodus of talented employees and motivate them to improve firm performance. However, it alienates shareholders and other workers of the company who are left unprotected from the adverse economic consequences of a stock price decline.In this paper we examine the ethics and the economics of stock option repricing. We find that repricing runs counter to two key tenets of business ethics — distributive justice and ordinary decency. To examine the economics of repricing, we draw upon agency theory to identify situations where repricing has the potential to benefit shareholders. However, a survey of empirical research reveals that these benefits do not translate into reality. Repricing does not improve employee retention or firm performance. In addition, managers benefit by opportunistically timing the repricing. Due to weaknesses in corporate governance such as lack of independence and conflicts of interest, the current repricing practice seems to be at odds with the objective of shareholder wealth maximization, and at a more fundamental level, a violation of board's fiduciary duty to shareholders. We offer suggestions that mitigate the ethically undesirable effects of repricing in the wider context of prevailing corporate governance and regulatory environment. We believe that these suggestions, if properly implemented, can transform repricing from a greed-inspired evil to a valuable compensation tool to retain employees, boost their morale, and enhance stockholder wealth. (shrink)

Using speech act theory from the Philosophy of Language, this paper attempts to develop an ethical framework for the phenomenon of speech processing. We use the concepts of the illocutionary force and the illocutionary content of a speech act to explain the ethics of speech processing. By emphasizing the different stages involved in speech processing, we explore the distinct ethical issues that arise in relation to each stage. Input, processing, and output are the different ethically relevant stages under which a (...) spoken item or a speech navigates within the range of speech-processing modules. Employing the illocutionary force-content distinction, we specify and characterize the input-related ethical issues, the output-related ethical issues, and the processing-related ethical issues involved in speech processing. Together with illocutionary force-content distinction, we employ the data-information distinction to characterize the stage-wise ethical issues in the phenomenon of speech processing as the ethics of collecting (speech) data, the ethics of contextualizing (speech) data/information, and the ethics of releasing the con-textualized information (processed speech). Immediate ethical issues that arise from the range of speech processing modules are distinguished from distant ethical issues. We also indicate the nature of ethical issues that arise from Speaker Independent speech technologies. (shrink)

Comparative study of Nyaya and Vaiśeshika systems of Hindu philosophy.

Study on the fundamentals of Vaiśeṣika philosophy as discussed in Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya of Haribhadrasūri, 700-770.

Study on creation in R̥gveda and Vedic literature and philosophy.