J. S. Russell has argued that it is morally permissible for children to participate in dangerous sports and that much of value can be gained from such participation. He attempts to justify children’s participation in dangerous sport with two arguments, which he calls the common sense view and the uncommon sense view, and I apply the basic reasons given in these general arguments to the specific case of justifying children’s participation in mixed martial arts (MMA). To safeguard against wanton and (...) gratuitous risk of great harm, Russell also includes some basic limitations for children’s participation in dangerous sports, and I use these limitations as a general framework for providing a number of additional constraints to render children’s MMA morally permissible. (shrink)

Many video games require complex, rapid sequences of skilled bodily movements in order to complete game-world tasks. It is not unreasonable to think that this might interfere with our ability to aesthetically appreciate such video games. I present two versions of this argument from extreme difficulty: a strong version and a weak version. While extant treatments of the aesthetics of video games can be used to rebut the strong version, the weak version remains recalcitrant. I develop a reply to the (...) weak version, use it to clarify key features of reasons used by video-game critics to argue in favor of their critical judgments, and to illuminate the development of video games over time. (shrink)

Francis Offor’s claim that terrorism is a product of globalization, a process described as an unjust imposition of “Western” values, such as industrialization and literacy, on other cultural values is rejected by this paper as mistaken, too simplistic, and begging the question. These “Western” values are more correctly described as secondary human values that could universally facilitate the attainment of primary human values, such as peace and social justice, if properly applied in society. An adequate understanding of terrorism, a complex (...) phenomenon, requires a consideration of mutually reinforcing political, economic, cultural, and religious factors that underpin it. (shrink)

This study investigated assessment of e-learning resources utilization by students of tertiary institutions in Katsina State. The descriptive survey design was adopted for this study. Three hundred and eighty-one students of tertiary institutions in Katsina State were randomly selected for the study. A researchers’ designed questionnaire titled “Utilization of E-learning Resources Questionnaire” with a Cronbach’s Alpha reliability coefficient of 0.85 was used to collect data. frequency, percentage, mean, t-test and ANOVA statistics were used to analyse the data collected. Findings revealed (...) that there is no significant difference in the e-learning utilization by students of tertiary institutions in Katsina State based on gender and agebut there is significant difference based on class levels and institutions. It was recommended that Nigerian tertiary institutions general studies curriculum should be re-designed to include e-learning utilization training to help the students understand how they can utilize e-learning resources. (shrink)

This paper proposes a Multi-Agent based Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) Framework for the Traveling salesman problem (MAPSOFT). The framework is a deployment of the recently proposed intelligent multi-agent based PSO model by the authors. MAPSOFT is made up of groups of agents that interact with one another in a coordinated search effort within their environment and the solution space. A discrete version of the original multi-agent model is presented and applied to the Travelling Salesman Problem. Based on the simulation results (...) obtained, it was observed that agents retrospectively decide on their next moves based on consistent better fitness values obtained from present and prospective neighborhoods, and by reflecting back to previous behaviors and sticking to historically better results. These overall attributes help enhance the conventional PSO by providing more intelligence and autonomy within the swarm and thus contributed to the emergence of good results for the studied problem. (shrink)