In the recruitment process, manually selecting suitable candidates from curriculum vitae (CVs) for a job description (JD) is both time-consuming and expensive. Traditional keyword-based methods struggle to capture skill semantics, prompting the development of more advanced JD-CV matching systems. This paper aims to investigate and construct an ontology-based skills recommendation system, with objectives including creating a skills ontology and developing skills matching methods for JD-CV pairs. The objective of our approach is to enhance the accuracy and contextual relevance of recommendations (...) by utilizing the proposed score. The proposed skills ontology and skills matching strategies are applied to a real dataset in Vietnam. The results of our study can automatically recommend a list of CVs for a given JD. Furthermore, the findings indicate that our proposed model surpasses comparative approaches by a margin of at least 1% to 5%. Overall, the study demonstrates the potential of utilizing ontology-based approaches to offer a practical solution for enhancing hiring practices. (shrink)

Objectives: The official implementation of clinical pharmacy in Vietnam has arrived relatively late, resulting in various stressors. This study aims to evaluate job stress level and suggest viable solutions.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on clinical pharmacists in 128 hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City. Job stress questions were derived from the Healthcare Profession Stress Inventory.Results: A total of 197 CPs participated, giving a response rate of 82.4%. Participants were found to have moderate job stress with an overall mean stress (...) score of 1.5 and stress rate of 52.8%. The sample size was statistically adequate and the HPSI was valid and reliable. Patient care responsibility was the main stressor, especially in public hospitals, followed by job conflicts. Lack of experience, low income, and inability to participate in clinical ward rounds caused significant stress to CPs regarding job recognition and job uncertainty. More practice-oriented training programs in bachelor curricula and clinical practice should be applied to help CPs gain more experience, self-confidence, and diminish job stress.Conclusion: CPs in HCMC have moderate stress. More practice-oriented training programs should be prioritized to lessen stress for CPs. (shrink)

Cách mạng 4.0 đã và đang mang đến sự thay đổi lớn trong đời sống của người dân Việt Nam. Sự tiện dụng của Grab, khả năng cập nhật 24/24 của Facebook, hay sự đa dạng về nội dung của YouTube thúc đẩy xã hội tiến tới thời đại mới của khởi nghiệp điện toán (Vuong, 2019). Ở đó, mỗi cá nhân đều có cơ hội để khởi nghiệp thông qua sự kết nối đến khắp mọi nơi trên thế (...) giới của Internet và sức mạnh tính toán nằm gọn trong long bàn tay. Hiện nay, sản xuất video trên YouTube, cho thuê nhà qua AirBnb, hay chạy xe cho Grab tạo ra công việc có khả năng tạo lợi nhuận cho người tham gia thị trường, dù là người lao động, hay tổ chức cung ứng dịch vụ. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom suggests that aesthetic experiences - those moments when the senses come to life - are important only after more basic needs have been met. In this inspiring wealth of provocative ideas, Yi-Fu Tuan demonstrates that feeling and beauty are essential parts of life and society. The aesthetic is shown to be not merely one aspect of culture but its central core - both its driving force and its ultimate goal. Beginning with the individual and the physical world, (...) the author's exploration progresses from the simple to the complex. Tuan starts by examining the building blocks of aesthetic experience - sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste - and gradually expands his analysis to include the most elaborate of human constructs, including art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and landscape. This leads him to the realm of politics, where he grapples with the fundamental question of the relationship between goodness and beauty, and of how the aesthetic can become a moral force within society. To guide the reader along this journey, the author describes how the aesthetic operates in four widely disparate cultures: Australian aboriginal, Chinese, medieval European, and modern American. Yi-Fu Tuan, one of our most influential and original thinkers, brilliantly conveys the profound fascination of multisensory reality, and in so doing enables us to make connections among even the most diffuse elements of our lives. While Tuan does not ignore human folly, Passing Strange and Wonderful is a celebration of the world around us, our experiences, and our creations. (shrink)

How is time framed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) talk? The literature mostly fails to analyze how multiple CSR activities are framed from a temporal perspective. Moreover, those researchers who undertake temporal framing tend to overlook the role of home-country cultural characteristics. Using a mixed-method analysis of 2,720 CSR reports from developing country companies, we show that CSR talk is mostly framed in the future tense when firms communicate complex human rights issues such as slavery or child labor, while the (...) past and present tenses are more frequent when they report on philanthropy and other cause-related activities. We find that these effects are stronger when firms are from countries characterized by greater uncertainty avoidance. We contribute to the CSR communication literature by showing that temporal references in CSR talk tend to differ, depending on the company-level control of CSR activities, and by highlighting uncertainty avoidance’s role as a boundary condition for aspirational talk’s performativity. (shrink)

We argue that the main results of scientific papers may appropriately be published even if they are false, unjustified, and not believed to be true or justified by their author. To defend this claim we draw upon the literature studying the norms of assertion, and consider how they would apply if one attempted to hold claims made in scientific papers to their strictures, as assertions and discovery claims in scientific papers seem naturally analogous. We first use a case study of (...) William H. Bragg’s early 20th century work in physics to demonstrate that successful science has in fact violated these norms. We then argue that features of the social epistemic arrangement of science which are necessary for its long run success require that we do not hold claims of scientific results to their standards. We end by making a suggestion about the norms that it would be appropriate to hold scientific claims to, along with an explanation of why the social epistemology of science—considered as an instance of collective inquiry—would require such apparently lax norms for claims to be put forward. (shrink)

In a volume that represents the culmination of his life's work in considering the relationship between culture and landscape, Tuan argues that "cosmos" and "hearth" are two scales that anchor what it means to be fully and happily human.

In his many best-selling books, Yi-Fu Tuan seizes big, metaphysical issues and considers them in uniquely accessible ways. _Human Goodness_ is evidence of this talent and is both as simple, and as epic, as it sounds. Genuinely good people and their actions, Tuan contends, are far from boring, naive, and trite; they are complex, varied, and enormously exciting. In a refreshing antidote to skeptical times, he writes of ordinary human courtesies, as simple as busing your dishes after eating, (...) that make society functional and livable. And he writes of extraordinary courage and inventiveness under the weight of adversity and evil. He considers the impact of communal goodness over time, and his sketches of six very different individuals—Confucius, Socrates, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, John Keats, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, and Simone Weil—confirm that there are human lives that can encourage and lead us to our better selves. Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association. (shrink)

For more than fifty years, Yi-Fu Tuan has carried the study of humanistic geography—what John K. Wright early in the twentieth century called _geosophy_, a blending of geography and philosophy—to new heights, offering with each new book a fresh and often unique intellectual introspection into the human condition. His latest book, _Humanist Geography_, is a testament of all that he has learned and encountered as a geographer. In returning to and reappraising his previous books, Tuan emphasizes how the (...) study of humanist geography can offer a younger generation of students, scholars, and teachers a path toward self-discovery, personal fulfillment, and even enlightenment. He argues that in the study of place can be found the wonders of the human mind and imagination, especially as understood by the senses, even as we human beings deal with nature's stringencies and our own deep flaws. (shrink)

The interaction between static and dynamic facets in organizational ambidexterity produces “change” energy for the organization. The purpose of the research therefore is to examine the predicting role of organizational ambidexterity for entrepreneurial orientation and idiosyncratic deals. The moderating role of corporate social responsibility in the effect of organizational ambidexterity on entrepreneurial orientation was also investigated. The cross-sectional data for SEM-based analysis were garnered from 427 supervisor-subordinate dyads from software companies in Vietnam business setting. The research findings confirmed the positive (...) relationship between organizational ambidexterity and entrepreneurial orientation, which was moderated by CSR. Entrepreneurial orientation was also found as a strong predictor of i-deals. (shrink)

Which artificial intelligence (AI) systems are agents? To answer this question, I propose a multidimensional account of agency. According to this account, a system's agency profile is jointly determined by its level of goal-directedness and autonomy as well as is abilities for directly impacting the surrounding world, long-term planning and acting for reasons. Rooted in extant theories of agency, this account enables fine-grained, nuanced comparative characterizations of artificial agency. I show that this account has multiple important virtues and is more (...) informative than alternatives. More speculatively, it may help to illuminate two important emerging questions in AI ethics: 1. Can agency contribute to the moral status of non-human beings, and how? 2. When and why might AI systems exhibit power-seeking behaviour and does this pose an existential risk to humanity? (shrink)

This article explores the representation of the hand in three recent fiction films by Naomi Kawase: Sweet Bean (2015), Radiance (2017) and True Mothers (2020). Extending current scholarship that discusses the director’s use of haptic visuality, I argue that Kawase’s haptic cinema further exhibits its hapticity by framing the hand as both a Derridean trace and conduit that leaves behind traces in objects such as bean paste, letters, photo cameras, and photographs. Kawase’s framing of these objects in close-up shots emphasizes (...) not only their materiality and haptic texture but also their foreshadowed physical absence. By reading Kawase through Jacques Derrida’s notion of trace, the article highlights not only the relevance behind understanding Kawase’s recent fiction films through a Derridean lens but also how the director’s own attitude towards cinema, as one that aims to simultaneously frame absence and presence, can also be read as a Derridean approach to cinema. (shrink)

As narrativas sobre mulheres, mesmo dentro dos estudos feministas, podem ser entendidas como normativas e colonizadoras, especialmente quando se dão a partir de um olhar ocidental sobre as mulheres do terceiro mundo. A partir da análise do pensamento da autora indiana Chandra Talpade Mohanty, este artigo busca relacionar seu discurso com exemplos de mulheres fotógrafas que buscaram desconstruir essa estrutura hierárquica do olhar, como Claudia Andujar, Graciela Iturbide, Nair Benedicto e Susan Meiselas, além das reflexões da artista interdisciplinar Grada Kilomba, (...) em diálogo com outros autores do campo da imagem. A fotografia pode ser considerada, assim, uma ferramenta de escrita de novas narrativas de resistência.Palavras-chave: Feminismo. Fotografia. Mulheres fotógrafas. AbstractNarratives about women, even within feminist studies, can be understood as normative and colonizing, especially when they are done from a western perspective on third world women. Based on the analysis of the thought of Indian author Chandra Talpade Mohanty, this article seeks to relate her discourse to examples of female photographers who sought to deconstruct this hierarchical structure of the gaze, such as Claudia Andujar, Graciela Iturbide, Nair Benedicto and Susan Meiselas, in addition to the reflections of the interdisciplinary artist Grada Kilomba, in dialogue with other authors in the field of image. Photography can thus be considered a tool for writing new narratives of resistance.Keywords: Feminism. Photography. Women photographers. (shrink)

This paper is an illustration of the case study of trying to create an awareness of human values at the Malaysian Airlines System (MAS) as part of its work culture. Some of the principles of this intervention and the key process used in developing a values-based culture are highlighted. A brief background of why MAS undertook a values journey is given along with the approach and the process used, based on the values clarification process (VCP). The development of other internal (...) processes customized to design in-house modules through the values awareness programme (VAP) and the values inculcation programme (VIP) are also outlined. The paper combines two perspectives in this case study: one of the authors was an internal consultant with MAS and the other an external consultant to parts of the process. The objective is to share insights from such an intervention to enable other organizations to benefit from this experience. (shrink)

ABSTRACT What characterizes human reasoning is the ability of dealing with incomplete information. Incomplete logic is developed for modeling incomplete knowledge. The most distinctive feature of incomplete logic is its semantics. This is an alternative presentation of partial semantics. In this paper, we will introduce the general notion of incomplete logic (ICL), compare it with partial logic, and give the resolution method for it. We will also show how ICL can be applied to nonmonotonic reasoning. We define nonmonotonic derivation as (...) monotonic derivation in ICL from the database and some consistent assumptions. The mechanism of ICL makes it easy to assert the consistency of an assumption without asserting the assumption itself. (shrink)

Since Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) was introduced, methods of studying conceptual metaphor have kept improving to respond to methodological criticisms. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black (2004) has been considered as a “thought-provoking contribution” to metaphor analysis (Deignan, 2005) when approaching metaphor from various perspectives: critical discourse analysis, corpus analysis, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. CMA is originally applied to one conceptual level in metaphor – domain. However, this paper argues that CMA can be exploited at (...) four conceptual levels in Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor (Kövecses, 2017b) - image schema, domain, frame, and mental space. The combined framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis – CMA (Charteris-Black, 2004) and Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor – MLV (Kövecses, 2017b) can gain deeper insights into ideologies motivating metaphorical concepts for the Vietnam war as well as elucidate the conceptual structure of metaphor via the four levels. Hence, this combination fills the gap of lacking a framework with optimal balance of semantic, pragmatic, cognitive and critical dimensions. It also features the intriguing relationship between ideologies and conceptual structure, i.e., ideologies are embedded in all the four conceptual levels and systematically develop with increasing specificity from image schema to domain, frame and mental space. The focus of this paper is on our argument for an integrated framework of conceptual metaphor and the newspaper articles written by American war correspondents during the Vietnam war are used for illustration of how the integrated framework can help us better understand the conceptual metaphors in the articles. (shrink)

Can the individual and society be both moral and imaginative? In Western society the moral person tends to be regarded as either simple and naive or narrow and bigoted. In contrast, the imaginative person is looked on as someone not bound by the customs of the group and therefore likely to be fanciful and out of touch with reality.

Geography and religion -- Landscape of anxiety and fear -- Chinese cosmic space and places -- European sacred space and places -- A comparison with American Indian world-view -- Similar, yet different -- Apartness -- Order -- Wholeness and completion -- Sacred state -- Violence -- Ironies of piety -- God and morality -- From amoral energy to power for good -- Rise and fall of place specificity -- Traders and pilgrims -- Religious geography; or just human geography -- The (...) aesthetic sublime : vastness, place, and space -- Space vs. local place and custom -- Unbounded vastness and placelessness -- The aesthetic sublime : transiency and the eternal -- The ethical sublime : Buddhism -- The ethical sublime : Christianity -- Falling standard -- Geography and religion : fundamental questions -- From architectural and ritual to storytelling -- Community, self, and selflessness -- Placelessness and ethereality -- Religion of fear and privilege -- True religion -- Progress -- The ultimate test. (shrink)

Many researchers and intellectuals warn about extreme risks from artificial intelligence. However, these warnings typically came without systematic arguments in support. This paper provides an argument that AI will lead to the permanent disempowerment of humanity, e.g. human extinction, by 2100. It rests on four substantive premises which it motivates and defends: first, the speed of advances in AI capability, as well as the capability level current systems have already reached, suggest that it is practically possible to build AI systems (...) capable of disempowering humanity by 2100. Second, due to incentives and coordination problems, if it is possible to build such AI, it will be built. Third, since it appears to be a hard technical problem to build AI which is aligned with the goals of its designers, and many actors might build powerful AI, misaligned powerful AI will be built. Fourth, because disempowering humanity is useful for a large range of misaligned goals, such AI will try to disempower humanity. If AI is capable of disempowering humanity and tries to disempower humanity by 2100, then humanity will be disempowered by 2100. This conclusion has immense moral and prudential significance. (shrink)

According to an orthodox view, the capacity for conscious experience (sentience) is relevant to the distribution of moral status and value. However, physicalism about consciousness might threaten the normative relevance of sentience. According to the indeterminacy argument, sentience is metaphysically indeterminate while indeterminacy of sentience is incompatible with its normative relevance. According to the introspective argument (by François Kammerer), the unreliability of our conscious introspection undercuts the justification for belief in the normative relevance of consciousness. I defend the normative relevance (...) of sentience against these objections. First, I demonstrate that physicalists only have to concede a limited amount of indeterminacy of sentience. This moderate indeterminacy is in harmony with the role of sentience in determining moral status. Second, I argue that physicalism gives us no reason to expect that introspection is unreliable with respect to the normative relevance of consciousness. (shrink)

Numerous authors have expressed concern that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) poses an existential risk to humanity. These authors argue that we might build AI which is vastly intellectually superior to humans (a ‘superintelligence’), and which optimizes for goals that strike us as morally bad, or even irrational. Thus this argument assumes that a superintelligence might have morally bad goals. However, according to some views, a superintelligence necessarily has morally adequate goals. This might be the case either because abilities for moral (...) reasoning and intelligence mutually depend on each other, or because moral realism and moral internalism are true. I argue that the former argument misconstrues the view that intelligence and goals are independent, and that the latter argument misunderstands the implications of moral internalism. Moreover, the current state of AI research provides additional reasons to think that a superintelligence could have bad goals. (shrink)

Which animals have conscious experiences? Many different, diverse and unrelated behaviors and cognitive capacities have been proposed as tests of the presence of consciousness in an animal. It is unclear which of these tests, if any, are valid. To remedy this problem, I develop a list consisting of eight desiderata which can be used to assess putative tests of animal consciousness. These desiderata are based either on detailed analogies between consciousness-linked human behavior and non-human behavior, on theories of consciousness or (...) on methods from human consciousness science. If a test or set of tests satisfies more of these desiderata, passing it provides stronger evidence of consciousness. Moreover, one can design future tests of animal consciousness with the intention of satisfying these desiderata to ensure their evidential strength. (shrink)

I argue that collaborators do not need to reach broad agreement over the justification of a consensus claim. This is because maintaining a diversity of justifiers within a scientific collaboration has important epistemic value. I develop a view of collective justification that depends on the diversity of epistemic perspectives present in a group. I argue that a group can be collectively justified in asserting that P as long as the disagreement among collaborators over the reasons for P is itself justified. (...) In conclusion, I make a case for multimethod collaborative research and work through an example in the social sciences. (shrink)

How can one build AI systems such that they pursue the goals their designers want them to pursue? This is the alignment problem. Numerous authors have raised concerns that, as research advances and systems become more powerful over time, misalignment might lead to catastrophic outcomes, perhaps even to the extinction or permanent disempowerment of humanity. In this paper, I analyze the severity of this risk based on current instances of misalignment. More specifically, I argue that contemporary large language models and (...) game-playing agents are sometimes misaligned. These cases suggest that misalignment tends to have a variety of features: misalignment can be hard to detect, predict and remedy, it does not depend on a specific architecture or training paradigm, it tends to diminish a system’s usefulness and it is the default outcome of creating AI via machine learning. Subsequently, based on these features, I show that the risk of AI alignment magnifies with respect to more capable systems. Not only might more capable systems cause more harm when misaligned, aligning them should be expected to be more difficult than aligning current AI. (shrink)

The science of animal consciousness investigates (i) which animal species are conscious (the distribution question) and (ii) how conscious experience differs in detail between species (the quality question). We propose a framework which clearly distinguishes both questions and tackles both of them. This two-tier account distinguishes consciousness along ten dimensions and suggests cognitive capacities which serve as distinct operationalizations for each dimension. The two-tier account achieves three valuable aims: First, it separates strong and weak indicators of the presence of consciousness. (...) Second, these indicators include not only different specific contents but also differences in the way particular contents are processed (by processes of learning, reasoning or abstraction). Third, evidence of consciousness from each dimension can be combined to derive the distinctive multi-dimensional consciousness profile of various species. Thus, the two-tier account shows how the kind of conscious experience of different species can be systematically compared. (shrink)

If a machine attains consciousness, how could we find out? In this paper, I make three related claims regarding positive tests of machine consciousness. All three claims center on the idea that an AI can be constructed “ad hoc”, that is, with the purpose of satisfying a particular test of consciousness while clearly not being conscious. First, a proposed test of machine consciousness can be legitimate, even if AI can be constructed ad hoc specifically to pass this test. This is (...) underscored by the observation that many, if not all, putative tests of machine consciousness can be passed by non-conscious machines via ad hoc means. Second, we can identify ad hoc AI by taking inspiration from the notion of an ad hoc hypothesis in philosophy of science. Third, given the first and the second claim, the most reliable tests of animal consciousness turn out to be valid and useful positive tests of machine consciousness as well. If a non-ad hoc AI exhibits clusters of cognitive capacities facilitated by consciousness in humans which can be selectively switched off by masking and if it reproduces human behavior in suitably designed double dissociation tasks, we should treat the AI as conscious. (shrink)

1. 1.1. Suffering is bad. This is why, ceteris paribus, there are strong moral reasons to prevent suffering. Moreover, typically, those moral reasons are stronger when the amount of suffering at st...

According to a common view, sentience is necessary and sufficient for moral status. In other words, whether a being has intrinsic moral relevance is determined by its capacity for conscious experience. The _epistemic objection_ derives from our profound uncertainty about sentience. According to this objection, we cannot use sentience as a _criterion_ to ascribe moral status in practice because we won’t know in the foreseeable future which animals and AI systems are sentient while ethical questions regarding the possession of moral (...) status are urgent. Therefore, we need to formulate an alternative criterion. I argue that the epistemic objection is dissolved once one clearly distinguishes between the question what determines moral status and what criterion should be employed in practice to ascribe moral status. Epistemic concerns are irrelevant to the former question and—I will argue—criteria of moral status have inescapably to be based on sentience, if one concedes that sentience determines moral status. It follows that doubts about our epistemic access to sentience cannot be used to motivate an alternative criterion of moral status. If sentience turns out to be unknowable, then moral status is unknowable. However, I briefly advocate against such strong pessimism. (shrink)

Though there are many factors that contribute to the perceived legitimacy of business ethics education, this research focuses on one factor that is given great attention both formally and informally in many business schools: student satisfaction with the course. To understand the nature of student satisfaction, the authors draw from multiple theories with central claims relating expectations with satisfaction. The authors then compare student expectations of business ethics courses with instructor objectives and discover that business ethics courses are not necessarily (...) designed to meet student expectations. The authors speculate that this general mismatch between student expectations and instructor objectives has material consequences. As one example, the authors analyze student evaluations from three business schools and identify a “business ethics course effect”: a negative association between business ethics courses and student evaluations. The authors discuss the implications for business ethics education of a situation where pedagogical objectives and market prescriptions point in different directions. (shrink)

Illusionism about consciousness entails that phenomenal consciousness doesn’t exist. The distribution question concerns the distribution of consciousness in the animal kingdom. Skepticism of animal consciousness is the view that few or no kinds of animals possess consciousness. Thus, illusionism seems to imply a skeptical view on the distribution question. However, I argue that illusionism and skepticism of animal consciousness are actually orthogonal to each other. If illusionism is true, then phenomenal consciousness does not ground intrinsic value so that the non-existence (...) of phenomenal consciousness would not have ethical implications. In this case, the adequate reaction is to reformulate the distribution question in terms of the quasi-phenomenal functional features associated with the illusion of phenomenal consciousness which do ground intrinsic value. Hence, either illusionism is false or the distribution question does not concern phenomenal consciousness. In any case, illusionism does not directly tell us anything about the distribution question. However, since illusionism forces us to revise our traditional conception of consciousness, it indirectly affects research on animal consciousness by questioning that consciousness is a unified and an all-or-nothing property. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education by John P. Miller, with Xiang Li and Tian RuanJing Dang (bio)Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education. By John P. Miller, with Xiang Li and Tian Ruan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Pp. 134, Paperback $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4875-4095-1.John Miller’s Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education (hereafter Taoism, Teaching, and Learning) develops (...) a nature-based account of modern education grounded in Daoism (or Taoism), a school of thought often misunderstood in the West. Daoism has historically been categorized both as a religion (dao jiao 道教) and as a philosophy (dao jia zhe xue 道家哲學); in many cases the spiritual and mystical side of Daoism impresses itself on the reader at the expense of its scientific and philosophical side--as happened with the European missionaries who first exported Daoism to the West. Yet Daoism, especially in relation to pedagogy, cuts across this philosophical/mystical distinction. Happily, Miller and his students, Xiang Li and Tian Ruan, betray no such tendency to pigeon-hole Daoism into one or the other of these categories. The authors adopt a connected and holistic concept of Daoism, which they use to inform and justify their approach to modern education. As such, in the eight chapters of this book, we can see a natural and sensible connection between a holistic Daoism--spiritual, mystical and philosophical--and modern philosophical and educational theories, including Montessori’s cosmic education, Steiner Education, holistic education, and the pedagogical practices of meditation and mindfulness.Miller’s modus operandi is to apply Daoist concepts to contemporary (especially Western) educational issues, both theoretically and practically. In terms of the Daoist belief in the interconnectedness of all things, Miller questions modern subject divisions. When we divide education into geometry, mathematics and so on, we fragment the natural oneness of knowledge and reality as the Daoists would have it. Instead, Miller advocates faith in nature and looks to curricula that reflect the wholeness of nature, such as “cosmic education” and “holistic education” (Chapters 2 and 6). Through such education “we see the relationship between the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life” (p. 27), and feel the support from the invisible and unproven world.Miller makes excellent use of the Daoist concepts of yin (陰) and yang [End Page 1] (陽), which signify the complementary balance and interplay between opposites. He uses the yinyang paradigm to explore the need for balance in a wide range of interesting and important pedagogical situations; for instance, group collaboration versus individual competition, knowledge versus imagination, intuition versus reason, qualitative versus quantitative, etc. (Chapter 5). He also implements yinyang to unpack the model of creative thinking laid down by Graham Wallace (pp. 66 -70); here, yin and yang are applied to a process within the individual. As we move from confusion to enlightenment, we enact within ourselves a dance between our yin and yang factors.Under the heading “Self-Cultivation” (Chapter 3), Miller attempts to evaluate a number of pedagogical strategies with broad ties to Daoism; namely, “silence,” “contemplation,” “calmness,” “sincerity,” “non-violence and embracing the feminine,” and “humility”. These are informed by Miller’s own personal experience of teaching and applying meditation at the University of Toronto. This provides a useful connection between the spiritual and philosophical dao 道, the mystical and the practical. More generally, these strategies recall Daoist wuwei 無爲 (non-coercive or spontaneous action) and ziran 自然 (spontaneity), which Miller subsequently applies to teaching and mindfulness in Chapter 4 (more on which below).Whereas Miller’s contribution is more theoretical, the two chapters written by his students showcase concrete examples of Daoist pedagogy in the classroom. Li’s chapter (Chapter 1) details a class of high school students learning from nature. Here we find a student club centered around a garden, where the students are allowed to wander in the direction of their interests, rather than imbibing the lessons of the teacher according to a top-down lesson plan. Ruan’s chapter (Chapter 7) looks to the various ways play can be utilized in kindergartens for children’s holistic development, including their social, intellectual, spiritual, physical... (shrink)

I develop the anticipatory argument for the view that it is nomologically possible that some non-biological creatures are phenomenally conscious, including conventional, silicon-based AI systems. This argument rests on the general idea that we should make our beliefs conform to the outcomes of an ideal scientific process and that such an ideal scientific process would attribute consciousness to some possible AI systems. This kind of ideal scientific process is an ideal application of the iterative natural kind (INK) strategy, according to (...) which one should investigate consciousness by treating it as a natural kind which iteratively explains observable patterns and correlations between potentially consciousness-relevant features. The relevant AI systems are psychological duplicates. These are hypothetical non-biological creatures which share the coarse-grained functional organization of humans. I argue that an ideal application of the INK strategy would attribute consciousness to psychological duplicates because this gives rise to a simpler and more unifying explanatory account of biological and non-biological cognition. If my argument is sound, then creatures made from the same material as conventional AI systems can be conscious, thus removing one of the main uncertainties for assessing AI consciousness and suggesting that AI consciousness may be a serious near-term concern. (shrink)

The resource-based model of self-regulation provides a pessimistic view of self-regulation that people are destined to lose their self-control after having engaged in any act of self-regulation because these acts deplete the limited resource that people need for successful self-regulation. The cognitive control theory, however, offers an alternative explanation and suggests that the depletion effect reflects switch costs between different cognitive control processes recruited to deal with demanding tasks. This account implies that the depletion effect will not occur once people (...) have had the opportunity to adapt to the self-regulatory task initially engaged in. Consistent with this idea, the present study showed that engaging in a demanding task led to performance deficits on a subsequent self-regulatory task only when the initial demanding task was relatively short but not when it was long enough for participants to adapt. Our results were unrelated to self-efficacy, mood, and motivation. (shrink)

Using a nationwide survey of provincial institutional quality and a sample of private manufacturing small and medium scale enterprises, this paper contributes to the literature by considering for the first time the effects of corruption on the financial performance of Vietnamese private SMEs. Interestingly, contrary to previous findings, we find that corruption when measured by a dummy variable, does not affect firms’ financial performance after controlling for heterogeneity, simultaneity and dynamic endogeneity. However, the intensity of bribery and the majority of (...) the forms of corruption were found to have negative impacts on firms’ financial performance. Hence, a typical approach using only a dummy variable for bribery might not adequately evaluate the impact of bribe intensity or even ignores the negative impacts of some types of bribes on firms’ financial performance. The findings suggest that anti-corruption measures are vital for the development of the Vietnamese private SMEs. (shrink)

How do firms make sense of creating shared value projects? In their sense-making processes, do they extend the meaning spectrum to include human rights? What are the dominant cognitive frames through which firms make sense of CSV projects, and are some frames more likely to have transformative power? We pose these questions in the context of small-scale firms in a low-to-middle income country—a context where CSV policies have been promoted extensively over the last decade in the expectation of improved economic (...) competitiveness, growth, and sustainable development processes. We employ a grounded theory approach to identify three dominant cognitive frames used by our respondents to make sense of CSV. The most prevalent frame prioritizes economic over social and environmental goals, and considers social, environmental, and human rights benefits to trickle down from economic growth and wealth generation. In the second frame, economic actors follow a win–win logic according to which environmental sustainability is pursued only if there are clear and foreseeable economic payoffs. The third frame is a niche that emphasizes the attainment of certain human rights goals, despite a perceived lack of immediate economic returns. Our work casts doubt on the capacity of CSV projects to stimulate sustainable development processes without radically changing entrepreneurs’ cognitive frames from growth first to humanizing the business. (shrink)

Implementationalism maintains that conventional, silicon-based artificial systems are not conscious because they fail to satisfy certain substantive constraints on computational implementation. In this article, we argue that several recently proposed substantive constraints are implausible, or at least are not well-supported, insofar as they conflate intuitions about computational implementation generally and consciousness specifically. We argue instead that the mechanistic account of computation can explain several of the intuitions driving implementationalism and noncomputationalism in a manner which is consistent with artificial consciousness. Our (...) argument provides indirect support for computationalism about consciousness and the view that conventional artificial systems can be conscious. (shrink)

It is plausible that there is a contrast between the rich emotional content which is often connected to laypeople’s interest in philosophy and the emotional austerity of doing academic philosophy. We propose the hypothesis that this contrast is one cause of the disappointment some students experience when they begin to study philosophy in college. We also propose a more demanding hypothesis, according to which this emotional contrast is confused with a semantic difference, which misleads students to think that the questions (...) which initially caused their interest in philosophy are not even considered by academic philosophy research. Moreover, we provide a list of concrete empirical research questions which need to be answered to establish whether these hypotheses are true, and we argue that, if they are true, they give rise to a hitherto unnoticed and important challenge to the teaching of philosophy. (shrink)