Background: The castor bean is a large grassy or semi-wooden shrub or small tree. Any part of the castor plant parts can suffering from a disease that weakens the ability to grow and eliminates its production. Therefore, in this paper will identify the pests and diseases present in castor culture and detect the symptoms in each disease. Also images is showing the symptom form in this disease. Objectives: The main objective of this expert system is to obtain appropriate diagnosis of (...) the disease. Methods: In this paper, the expert system is designed for the ability of agricultural engineers to detect and diagnose disease of castor like as: seeding blight, alternaria blight, cercospora leaf spot, powdery mildew and wilt. This system presents the disease symptoms, survival and spread, favorable conditions and image for each disease. Clips and Delphi expert system languages are used for designing and implementing the proposed expert system. Results: The expert system in the diagnosis of castor diseases was assessed by farmers and agricultural engineers and they were satisfied and accepted with its quality of performance. Conclusions: The expert system is easy for farmers and people have experience in the plant of castor to detect and diagnosis the symptoms that may face this plant from several disease. (shrink)

Monitoring and assistive technologies (MATs) are being used more frequently in healthcare. A central ethical concern is the compatibility of these systems with the moral preferences of their users—an issue especially relevant to participatory approaches within the ethics-by-design debate. However, users’ incapacity to communicate preferences or to participate in design processes, e.g., due to dementia, presents a hurdle for participatory ethics-by-design approaches. In this paper, we explore the question of how the value preferences of users in the field of dementia (...) care can be integrated into AI-based MATs. First, we briefly introduce different ethics-by-design approaches and explain the challenges they face in dementia care. Next, we introduce a novel approach for addressing these challenges. Through a qualitative content analysis of interviews with persons with dementia and their family caregivers (n = 27), we identified multiple ideal–typical value preference profiles. We then applied these profiles in a computer simulation, by which we also introduce the concept of ethical compliance quantification to scale the moral preferences of the interviewees for the simulation. Finally, we discuss study results, the advantages of using computer simulations, and general study limitations before drawing conclusions for further research. The study contributes to the ongoing debate on participatory ethics-by-design by defining on the basis of empirical data ideal–typical value preference frameworks that can be used to guide MAT actions and their outcomes. Going forward, MAT end-users with dementia and other communication-impaired persons could be enabled to choose a value profile that best fits their moral preferences. (shrink)

This study has examined the problems’ related to communicativeecology of pilgrim sojourners in Saudi Arabia and its impact on the levelsof their satisfaction with the services provided in a probability sample of439 Pakistani pilgrims. The sojourners’ communication ecology in problemsituations comprises eleven communication sources. Of these, contactswith family/friends and co-pilgrims made top of the list followed by suchcommunity organization sources like information counters, tour operators, andthe Pakistani Hajj mission officials. The mediated sources of contacts with theethnic newspaper, and the mainstream (...) Saudimass media ranked the 3rd and the 4th. The Internet and the digital billboardswere each cited in less than 10 percent of the responses. Stepwise multipleregressions revealed that the most important sources of impact on satisfactionwere: contact with community organizations, family/friends and co-pilgrims,the ethnic newspaper, and the digital screens. Implications of the impact onsatisfaction are discussed for communicating with the pilgrims. (shrink)

This research, titled "The Triliteral Root (ʿAgnosia) in the Holy Quran: This paper aims at offering both linguistic and semantic analysis of the triliteral root “ʿ-Agnosia” in the Quran: A Linguistic Study. Incredibly, the language study of The Holy Quran is an academic interest to date, with the Holy Scripture being an ocean of knowledge. This research resulted from the need to be more precise in understanding some of the suras and certain features of Arabic and the Quran in particular (...) some aspects of the root “ʿ-Agnosia” which is mentioned in some verses of the Quran with different meaning in Arabic. The work is divided into three sections each discussing a facet of the root ‘ʿAgnosia’ In the first place, the morphological and phonological properties of the root ‘ʿ ʿAgnosia’ with reference to the Quran. This is how this root expands the quantitative and qualitative meaning sphere of Quranic Arabic and adds its variety to the language, in general. The second section is therefore concerned with the phonic properties of the root: the place and the manner of articulation of the letters making up the root, and the phonological regularity which may be gleaned from the use of the root. The present analysis proves useful to throw the light on the auditory profile and the rhythm pattern of the root and how it is intoned in quranic recital with harmony and precision. The third section is devoted to the relations of this root with the internal structure of the words and phrases of the Quranic text: analysis of the morphological aspect of “ʿ- ʿAgnosia” In addition, identification and differentiation of number of forms and derivations of the root and correlation with the variables of the verses where it is used to determine the significance of the root in the verses of QURAN. When this analysis is done, not only works of classical and modern linguistics in reference to the root are reviewed and discussed and but also interpretations of the Quran. In the final section of the study, the authors reiterate the findings of investigation also bringing out the major ideas regarding the centrality of the root for enhancing the proclamatory task of the Quran as the Word of God. It is in this light, then, that this study aims at contributing to the existing body of knowledge on Quranic linguistics through a word by word examination of a particular root, the lack of which greatly hinders meaning construction in the Quran. It serves at making the reader to be appreciate on the difficulty in the language of the Quran and that the writers took their time to pen down the Quran. The study concludes by tabulating the basic findings in addition to identifying the sources that have been used in the course of the study. I pray to Allah, the Almighty Allah to shower his blessings to this work and any other further research to be made on the linguistic miracles of the Holy Quran. (shrink)

The aim of our study is to show the ways in which family members coordinate their minds, bodies and language in a functional and goal-oriented manner when they are jointly remembering shared events that they had experienced together as a group. So far, little attention has been paid to the influence that the interplay of multiple behavioral channels have in collaborative remembering in small groups. Our goal is to specifically examine the central role that direct questions have when they act (...) as embodied reminders through the interanimation of multiple behavioral channels in family interactions. The video data for analysis comes from an ongoing project on how collaborative remembering takes places among small groups of Argentinean Spanish speakers as each group recalls a vacation taken together several years ago. (shrink)

Objective: To measure the stability of life-sustaining treatment preferences amongst older people and analyse the factors that influence stability. Design: Longitudinal cohort study. Setting: Primary care centres, Granada (Spain). Eighty-five persons age 65 years or older. Participants filled out a questionnaire with six contexts of illness (LSPQ-e). They had to decide whether or not to receive treatment. Participants completed the questionnaire at baseline and 18 months later. Results: 86 percent of the patients did not change preferences. Sex, age, marital status, (...) hospitalisation, and self-perception of health and pain did not affect preferences. Morbidity and the death of a relative did. Conclusion: Stability of preferences of older persons in relation to end-of-life decisions seems to be more probable than instability. Some factors, such as the death of a relative or the increase in morbidity, can change preferences. These findings have implications for advance directives (ADs) and advance care planning. (shrink)

Responding to a major pandemic and planning for allocation of scarce resources under crisis standards of care requires coordination and cooperation across federal, state and local governments in tandem with the larger societal infrastructure. Maryland remains one of the few states with no state-endorsed ASR plan, despite having a plan published in 2017 that was informed by public forums across the state. In this article, we review strengths and weaknesses of Maryland’s response to COVID-19 and the role of the Maryland (...) Healthcare Ethics Committee Network in bridging gaps in the state’s response to prepare health care facilities for potential implementation of ASR plans. Identified “lessons learned” include: Deliberative Democracy Provided a Strong Foundation for Maryland’s ASR Framework; Community Consensus is Informative, Not Normative; Hearing Community Voices Has Inherent Value; Lack of Transparency & Political Leadership Gaps Generate a Fragmented Response; Pandemic Politics Requires Diplomacy & Persistence; Strong Leadership is Needed to Avoid Implementing ASR … And to Plan for ASR; An Effective Pandemic Response Requires Coordination and Information-Sharing Beyond the Acute Care Hospital; and The Ability to Correct Course is Crucial: Reconsidering No-visitor Policies. (shrink)

Objective To develop an ethically, legally, and clinically appropriate ventilator allocation policy for AdventHealth Tampa and AdventHealth Carrollwood in Tampa, Florida, which could be enacted swiftly during the Covid-19 pandemic. Methods During Spring 2020, a subcommittee of the Medical Ethics Committee established consensus on the fundamental principles of the policy, then built on existing ethical, legal, and clinical guidance. Results The plan was finalized in May 2020. The plan triages patients based on exclusion criteria (imminent mortality), prognosis and expected benefit (...) of ventilation (using the Sequential Organ Failure Assessment), and change in prognosis over time. Decisions are made by committee in order to minimize moral distress among individual patient care providers. Conclusions Due to international concerns about healthcare resource shortages during the Covid-19 pandemic, hospitals need allocation policies informed by the crisis standard of care, the hospital’s ethical duty to plan for an emergency, and federal civil rights laws Policy Implications: This type of policy can serve as a model for other institutions to develop crisis standards of care resource allocation policies, which are a necessary component of disaster planning. (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

Background: Health systems globally face ncreasing challenges from health crises and epidemic threats, necessitating the pivotal role of epidemiological teams in emergency response. This study investigates the significance of collective competence within these teams, focusing on their ability to collect, analyze, and manage laboratory data effectively. Methods: A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used to survey epidemiological teams in Saudi Arabia. A structured questionnaire was developed based on existing literature and distributed electronically to participants. Data analysis was performed using the (...) Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), using descriptive and inferential statistics to summarize participant characteristics and explore associations between variables. Results: A total of 208 epidemiological teams member completed the questionnaire, yielding insights into their The Role of Collective Competence in Epidemiological Teams. The findings reveal high levels of agreement regarding the effectiveness of management approaches, knowledge sharing, and team collaboration, with the average score exceeding 4.0 on a 5-point scale. Notably, team efficacy was found to significantly enhance the efficiency of laboratory data collection and analysis, accounting for approximately 25.9% of the variance in efficacy. Discussion: These findings underscore the need to invest in developing team competencies within epidemiological teams to improve emergency response capabilities. The study provides practical insights into enhancing team collaboration and coordination, ultimately contributing to more effective public health interventions in future health crises. (shrink)

This study aims to create an integrated geographical information system database of natural resources represented by mining activities in the Red Sea area in Sudan. GIS is a vital tool to help the decision-makers in managing and classifying these resources in terms of quantity and quality within the concept of sustainable development. The paper extracts some models of investment map indicators. In addition to that, it conducts a study and research aimed at developing a mineral resources management and discovering and (...) identifying the new areas of mineral wealth in GIS database. The motivation of this study stems from the fact that countries with these types of wealth can greatly grow their gross domestic product through the optimum management and governance. Most of the least development countries can focus on the search for alternative natural resources to support their economy. Red Sea region is one of the great regions full of natural and mineral resources, beside its strategic location on the way of most of the global trade transaction path. This paper designs and implements GIS multiple database layers. The multiple layers were modelled to overcome the technical difficulties that result from processing of large quantities of tempospatial information. The database was built by using an Oracle database system due to its capability of multilayer design. (shrink)

RESUMO Este artigo contempla nosso estudo de práticas socioculturais que demonstram que/como o sujeito contemporâneo dialoga online com enunciados advindos de acontecimentos do universo off-line. Nosso corpus apresenta postagens circuladas publicamente em páginas diversas no Facebook em que se lê: “É verdade esse bilete”. A afirmativa, proveniente de um bilhete escrito por uma criança em sua esfera familiar e divulgado em redes sociais, foi apropriada por múltiplos interlocutores no ciberespaço a fim de produzir efeitos de humor e dizeres contraditórios em (...) diferentes instâncias discursivas. Para a análise, recorremos a elementos constitutivos do dialogismo de proposição bakhtiniana; aos conceitos de meme e remix e às discussões foucaultianas acerca da vontade de verdade. Nossas interpretações apontam que é possível rastrear, nas réplicas ativas analisadas, posições axiológicas que nos remetem ao sujeito contemporâneo, o qual, usando a ironia e efeitos de humor, constitui/compartilha enunciados no intuito de estabelecer sua vontade de verdade na ágora digital. ABSTRACT This paper presents a study of sociocultural practices that exemplify how subjects interact online with offline events. We analyse selected posts collected from social media profiles supported by Facebook. Each excerpt shows the affirmative “It’s true this notte,” a rough translation of a written message addressed by a four-year-old Brazilian boy to his mother stating that there would “supposedly” be a school holiday the following day. The note went viral after his teacher posted it publicly on her social media timeline and the reassuring assertion was appropriated multiple times in the cyberspace so as to as trigger a humour effect in different discourse instances. Grounded on the concepts of meme; remix; Bakhtinian dialogism and Foucauldian’s ideas on truth, we perform a discursive analysis. Our results point to track marks of axiological positions of contemporary subjects that resort to irony to construct/share utterances in order to establish their will to truth in the digital landscape. (shrink)

O presente artigo consiste no registro de memórias de um diretor e de uma diretora que atuaram em escolas públicas de M inas Gerais, e na análise de suas narrativas. O objetivo foi captar suas representações sobre as práticas administrativas e pedagógicas rememoradas dos anos de exercício profissional. Com a metodologia da história oral, nossa investigação buscou construir uma interpretação a respeito de atitudes, posturas e práticas enraizadas nos rituais da escola contemporânea. Pudemos observar que no período estudado havia uma (...) política extremamente centralizada, cujas diretrizes eram difundidas pelos órgãos centrais da administração burocrática. O trabalho de gestão das unidades escolares era pautado, principalmente, pelo controle do cumprimento das normas estabelecidas pela política pública de educação. (shrink)

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

This article discusses the role of moment-to-moment affect dynamics in mental disorder and aims to integrate recent literature on this topic in the context of complex dynamical system theory. First, we will review the relevance of temporal and contextual aspects of affect dynamics in relation to psychopathology. Related to this, we will discuss recent insights resulting from a network view on affect dynamics in psychopathology. Next, we explore how we can reconcile literature findings from a perspective of complex dynamical system (...) theory. Finally, future directions with regard to personalized assessment of risk and diagnostic use are discussed. (shrink)

From pre-Christian times until the present day, philosophers have discussed whether, given evil, belief in God can logically be maintained. Theists and non-theists remain unconvinced by one another's arguments. This study re-examines the question of God and evil from a neutral standpoint and claims that neither side has come to adequate grips either with the question itself or with the other side's case, chiefly because of failure to distinguish the kinds of problem raised by evil.

Writing involves risks—the risk that one will be misunderstood, the risk of being persecuted, the risks of being made a champion for causes in which one does not believe, this risk of inadvertently supporting a reader’s prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is true, the writer must “clear a passage within the agitated world of passions,” an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers are never the master of their own speech. In _Writing: (...) The Political Test, _France’s leading political philosopher, Claude Lefort, illuminates the process by which writers negotiate difficult path to free themselves from the ideological and contextual traps that would doom their attempts to articulate a new vision. Lefort examines writers whose works provide special insights into this problem of risk, both literary artists and political philosophers. Among them are Salman Rushdie, Sade, Tocqueville,m Machiavelli, Leo Strauss, Orwell, Kant, Robespierre, Guizot, and Pierre Clastres. In Tocqueville, for example, Lefort finds that the author’s improvisatory and open-ended expression represents the character of the democratic experience. Orwell’s work on totalitarianism shows up the totalitarian subject’s complicity in this political regime. And Rushdie is remarkable for his solid attack on relativism. With the character and fate of the political forms of modernity, democracy, and totalitarianism a central theme, Lefort concludes with some reflections on the collapse of the Soviet Union. This intriguing and accessible exploration of literature’s political aspects and political philosophy’s literary ones will be welcomed by those who have been stymied by current efforts to bridge these two fields. Taken together, the essays in this volume also stand as an intellectual autobiography of Lefort, making it an excellent introduction to his work for less experience students of political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

The Birkhoff-Maltsev problem asks for a characterization of those lattices each of which is isomorphic to the lattice L(K) of all subquasivarieties for some quasivariety K of algebraic systems. The current status of this problem, which is still open, is discussed. Various unsolved questions that are related to the Birkhoff-Maltsev problem are also considered, including ones that stem from the theory of propositional logics.

This article looks at some of the salient analyses of moderation in the ancient Greek and the Islamic traditions and uses them to develop a contemporary view of the matter. Greek ethics played a huge role in shaping the ethical views of the Muslim philosophers and theologians, and thus the article starts with an overview of the revival of contemporary western virtue ethics--in many ways an extension of Platonic-Aristotelian ethics--and then looks at the place of moderation or temperance in Platonic-Aristotelian (...) ethics. This sets the stage for an exposition of the position taken by Ibn Miskawayh and al-Ghazali, which is then used as a backdrop for suggesting a revival of the Quran's virtue ethics. After outlining a basis for its virtue ethics, the Quranic view of wasatiyya or moderation is discussed briefly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Location of CultureJuniper EllisThe Location of Culture, by Homi K. Bhabha; 285 pp. New York: Routledge, 1994, $49.95.This book assembles several of Homi Bhabha’s most significant essays, allowing for an examination of his contribution to contemporary literary theory. As a self-described postcolonial critic, often compared with Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak, Bhabha is perhaps most well-known for his theory of cultural hybridity, which he develops in “Signs (...) Taken For Wonders” and several other essays included in this collection. Bhabha argues that hybridity results from various forms of colonization, which lead to cultural collisions and interchanges. In the attempt to assert colonial power in order to create anglicized subjects, “[t]he trace of what is disavowed is not repressed but repeated as something different—a mutation, a hybrid” (p. 111). This hybrid trace contradicts both the attempt to fix and control indigenous cultures and the illusion of cultural isolation or purity. His project thus adapts poststructuralist challenges to stable or fixed identities, attempting to “rename” postmodernism from a postcolonial perspective (p. 175), and allowing sustained attention to the ways in which race, gender, community, and nationality converge. One of his major contributions to theories of cultural production and identity is that he examines these various intersections closely, and avoids simply listing them or elevating one aspect of his analysis over others.Eight of the twelve chapters in this volume have been published previously, though some contain significant revisions. Throughout, Bhabha provides a nonteleological series of readings from the Enlightenment to the present. He draws most often upon psychoanalytic approaches, with particular attention to Frantz Fanon, in his focus upon documents from British missionaries and colonial administrators in India, and upon such writers as Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Joseph Conrad, and E. M. Forster. Paraphrasing his arguments risks simplifying them, and also requires translating some of his frequent neologisms. Though Bhabha’s narrative is at times opaque, at their best these terms convey a new framework for describing cultures and their productions. Bhabha emphasizes what he describes as culture’s “in-between,” for instance, the interstitial spaces within and among individuals and cultures, which do not maintain a single position but form identities in an on-going process.One of Bhabha’s significant stances is his defense of the ways theory may be transformative. Rather than viewing theory as only an élite Occidental production or as apolitical, in Chapter One, “The Commitment to Theory,” he suggests that politics work with and through theory and that theory and politics cannot be separated. He endeavors to establish a “committed theoretical perspective,” accounting for postcolonial positions, while evading “the politics of polarities” that deny hybrid cultures and histories (p. 21, 39). The entire collection expands upon these claims, and three essays in particular—“Sly [End Page 196] Civility,” “Signs Taken for Wonders,” and “Articulating the Archaic”—develop the most extended discussions of agency on the part of the colonized, suggesting that culture’s “in-between” can be employed in ways that reveal contradictions within narratives that would uphold a linear, progressive model of Western history and civilization.In this way, his discussion of contact between cultures revises the narrative of progress or modernity, associated particularly with the Enlightenment. Bhabha reads the atrocities that were knowingly committed and sanctioned in the colonies as the “contramodernity” that belies traditional arguments about increasing civility and development of modernity. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” and “By Bread Alone,” in particular, confront teleological versions of history with a recognition of the colonial involvement and complicity of modernity.His argument can be extended to evaluate divergent movements within modernity and postmodernity and to revise the major models of both by revealing their stakes in colonial practices. Bhabha’s work suggests that the process of making modernity and the past is continual and partial, and that political action (which would include writing theory, in his argument), can be effective if not total. The pleasure of his work, as well as its difficulty, lies in his refusal to simplify cultures or endorse easy assumptions.Juniper EllisVanderbilt UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Como forma de pensar a educação brasileira na efeméride dos 200 anos de independência do Brasil, elegemos como objeto de analise a trajetória da educação pública no Brasil a partir da expansão da sua rede escolar. Com base no método de investigação histórica a partir de pesquisa bibliográfica e documental e tendo por fontes, leis, decretos e dados estatísticos, o artigo foi dividido em duas partes: A primeira, dedicada aos irresolutos percursos da Educação pública do Brasil, depois de sua anunciada (...) Independência política do Reino Português. Na sequência, discorre sobre o longo trajeto de conquista da universalização do ensino fundamental no século XX. O resultado nos faz questionar o futuro da educação pública frente as eleições do emblemático ano de 2022. (shrink)

This study examines the micro-level consequences of perceived corporate social responsibility and hypothesizes that perceived CSR affects the perception-emotion-attitude-behavior sequence. We hypothesized that perceived CSR affects organizational pride, affects affective commitment, and enhances the employees’ creative behaviors by using the lens of appraisal theory of emotion. This study also hypothesizes that the association of perceived CSR and employee creative behaviors is serially mediated by OP and AC. The time-lagged data were collected from employees of only those companies participating in CSR (...) activities to analyze the sequential mediation effect. We have tested the hypotheses of this study through Hayes approach. Results showed that perceived CSR kindles the employees’ creative behaviors. Furthermore, “organizational pride” and “affective commitment” serially mediate the association of perceived CSR and ECB. Hence, the hypothesized perception-emotion-attitude-behavior model received a significant support and demonstrated that micro-level positive consequences of CSR could be created through emotional, attitude, and behavioral mechanisms. The organization should promote their CSR activities using documentaries and contents to improve their perception of environmental and social issues, and it enhances employees’ pride and creativity. (shrink)

Cognitive dimensions of creativity: What makes the difference between creative and non-creative university students? This paper analyses the contribution of specific cognitive functions on creative performance. The main question was which cognitive variables differentiate extreme levels of creative performance and therefore can characterize highly creative college students. A sample of Portuguese university students of Fine Arts and Literature took part in this study. A battery of verbal and figural cognitive tasks, as well as two kinds of creative tasks have been (...) considered. Results showed that there were mostly the same cognitive dimensions, which differentiate extreme levels of creative performance in both text and poster productions. These results are discussed considering the relevance of the cognitive approach to explain creativity. Some practical ideas, possible to put into the educational context, are also discussed. (shrink)

Notwithstanding fears of overly permissive approaches and related pleas to refuse euthanasia for psychological suffering, some Belgian hospitals have declared that such requests could be admissible. However, some of these hospitals have decided that such requests have to be managed and carried out outside their walls. Ghent University Hospital has developed a written policy regarding requests for euthanasia for psychological suffering coming from patients from outside the hospital. The protocol stipulates several due care criteria that go beyond the requirements of (...) the Belgian Euthanasia Law. For instance, the legally required first and second consulted physicians should all be psychiatrists and be affiliated with a psychiatry department of a Flemish university hospital. Moreover, euthanasia for psychological suffering can only be performed if the advices of these consulted physicians are positive. Importantly, preliminary reflection by the multidisciplinary Hospital Ethics Committee was introduced to discuss every request for euthanasia for psychological suffering coming from outside the hospital. In this way, the protocol supports psychiatrists faced with the complexities of assessing such requests, improves the quality of euthanasia practice by ensuring transparency and uniformity, and offers patients specialised support and guidance during their euthanasia procedure. Nevertheless, some concerns still remain. (shrink)

Philosophical Thought in Russia in the Second Half of the 20th Century is the first book of its kind that offers a systematic overview of an often misrepresented period in Russia's philosophy. Focusing on philosophical ideas produced during the late 1950s – early 1990s, it reconstructs the development of genuine philosophical thought in the Soviet period and introduces those non-dogmatic Russian thinkers who saw in philosophy a means of reforming social and intellectual life. Covering such areas of philosophical inquiry as (...) philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, the history of philosophy, activity approach as well as communication and dialogue studies, the volume presents and thoroughly discusses central topics and concepts developed by Soviet thinkers in that particular fields. Written by a team of internationally recognized scholars from Russia and abroad, it examines the work of well-known Soviet philosophers (such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Evald Ilyenkov and Merab Mamardashvili) as well as those important figures (such as Vladimir Bibler, Alexander Zinoviev, Yury Lotman, Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Genrich Batishchev, Sergey Rubinstein, and others) who have often been overlooked. By introducing and examining original philosophical ideas that evolved in the Soviet period, the book confirms that not all Soviet philosophy was dogmatic and tied to orthodox Marxism and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. It shows Russian philosophical development of the Soviet period in a new light, as a philosophy defined by a genuine discourse of exploration and intellectual progress, rather than stagnation and dogmatism. In addition to providing the historical and cultural background that explains the development of the 20th-century Russian philosophy, the book also puts the discussed ideas and theories in the context of contemporary philosophical discussions showing their relevance to nowadays debates in Western philosophy. With short biographies of key thinkers, an extensive current bibliography and a detailed chronology of Soviet philosophy, this research resource provides a new understanding of the Soviet period and its intellectual legacy 100 years after the Russian Revolution. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es realizar una retrospectiva de 15 años (2004-2019) sobre la evolución de las propuestas de trabajo, líneas de investigación y docencia que, con respecto a la enseñanza de las Ciencias Sociales con perspectiva de género, se ha desarrollado en nuestro contexto y su transferencia a las aulas de educación obligatoria, bachillerato y universidad. Se reflexiona sobre el trabajo realizado, el contexto actual y las líneas futuras.

Merleau-Ponty hat in keiner seiner Schriften eine systematische Hermeneutik ausgearbeitet, doch finden sich in fast allen seinen Arbeiten Bemerkungen über hermeneutisch relevante Sachverhalte. Dies gilt vornehmlich für Passagen über die Erfahrung anderer Subjektivität, über die dialogische Erfahrung und über das Produzieren und Verstehen sprachlicher Äusserungen. In diesem Beitrag wird versucht, Merleau-Ponty's Auffassungen hinsichtlich der Fragen nach Sinn, Genesis und Struktur des Verstehens vorzustellen. Hierbei wird in erste Linie das Problem berücksichtigt, was sich eigentlich vollzieht, wenn man als Leser die Bekanntschaft (...) eines klassischen, bzw. ursprünglichen Werkes macht. Das Werk spricht eine neue Sprache (parole parlante, langage conquérante), die die vorgegebene Sprache (parole parlée, langage institué) neugestaltet, so wie auch die in der neuen Sprache sich niederschlagende Erfahnings- und Gedankenwelt unsere alten Gedanken auflöst und uns eine neue Sicht auf die Wirklichkeit vermittelt. Hermeneutisch relevant ist, dass der Sinn dieser parole pensante, bzw. der pensée parlante niemals vollständig gegeben ist, noch auch durch welche Auslegung dann auch je erschöpft werden kann. Das bei der Lektüre eines solchen ursprünglichen Werkes sich bildende primäre Verständnis ist als Grundlage einer sekundären Verstehensleistung anzusehen, die das Thema der Hermeneutik, insofern sie Auslegungskunst ist, darstellt. Die Rekonstruktion des ursprünglichen Sinnes eines solchen Werkes ist in den Augen Merleau-Ponty's nicht nur in ihrer Möglichkeit beschränkt, sie ist vielmehr auch nur von untergeordneter Bedeutung. Was das erste betrifft, so sieht sich jeder solcher Rekonstruktionsversuch, (der bei der Restitution des ursprünglichen Textsinnes auch die Biographie des Autors und den historischen Kontext zu berücksichtigen hat – das Werk muss ja als Antwort auf Fragen verstanden werden, die sich im Lebenszusammenhang einer Zeit gestellt haben –) mit der Tatsache konfrontiert, dass die Gedanken und Erfahrungen, die sich in einem Werk niedergeschlagen haben, häufig so sehr miteinander verwoben sind, zum andern sich im Laufe des Lebens ihres Urhebers sich verändern, dass ihre völlige Inventarisierung zu einer unmöglichen Aufgabe wird. Zudem gehört zum Sinn eines solchen Werkes auch die Wirkung, die es in der Nachwelt hervorgerufen hat. So ist der „Wahre Descartes” keine gleichsam sich selbst erhellende Ganzheit, kein absoluter Entwurf im Sinne Sartres – sondern das Ganze von Leben, Werk und Interpretationen, das niemals definitiv entziffert werden kann. Für Merleau-Ponty ist der Sinn in fortwährendem Werden begriffen. Hierin ist jedoch auch die Bedeutung der wahren Interpretation, bzw. des wahren Denkens gelegen. Wichtiger als die in sich begrenzte Möglichkeit der Rekonstruktion ist dann auch das „penser derechef”. Merleau-Ponty beruft sich ausdrücklich auf einen Gedanken von Heidegger, demzufolge der Sinn des Denkens vor allem darin gelegen ist, das noch Ungesagte und Ungedachte in einem klassischen Werk zu entfalten. In der Tat prägt dies auch die Weise, in der Merleau-Ponty mit dem Werk Husserls oder anderer Denker umgeht. Es ist Merleau-Ponty leider nicht mehr gegeben gewesen, die rudimentären Bemerkungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, die sich in seinem letzten Werk finden, weiter auszuarbeiten, noch auch alle Konsequenzen seiner Hermeneutik zu durchdenken, in der das Fundament der Wahrheit sowohl in der Zeit lokalisiert bleibt als auch zugleich einer die Zeit überspannenden Teleologie eingefügt ist. (shrink)