An important application of cognitive architectures is to provide human performance models that capture psychological mechanisms in a form that can be “programmed” to predict task performance of human–machine system designs. Although many aspects of human performance have been successfully modeled in this approach, accounting for multitalker speech task performance is a novel problem. This article presents a model for performance in a two-talker task that incorporates concepts from psychoacoustics, in particular, masking effects and stream formation.

Meditations.--Some views on Paul Deussen's "Elements of metaphysics."--The fundamentals of Vedanta.--Uma's mirror.--The drum-beat of angels.--Heroes of ancient Ind.--The spirit of Vedic Ind.--Was Śaṅkara a crypto-Buddhist?--Vedic support for non-dualism.--The system of Ramanuja with side-lights on those of Madhava and Śaṅkara.--The system of Sankhya.--The system of thought revealed in the Bhagavad-gītā.--The philosophy of Advaita or non-dualism.--"Tiger" Varadachar.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented, major challenges to the ethical conduct of research including challenges for the rapid and robust ethical review of biomedical research. The Indian...

Making decisions is an important component of everyday living, and issues surrounding autonomy and self-determination are crucial for persons with intellectual disabilities. Adults with intellectual disabilities are characterized by the limitations in their intellectual functioning and in their adaptive behavior, which compromises three skill types, and this starts before the age of 18. Though persons with intellectual disabilities are characterized by having these limitations, they are thought to face significant decisionmaking challenges due to their disability. Moving away from this generalization, (...) Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities addresses this issue of decision-making for persons with disabilities, recognizing the right to legal capacity. (shrink)

Study on knowledge and logic in Nyaya and Vaiśeṣika philosophy with comaparative aspects of Vedanta and Buddhist philosophy.

The world of the Hindi heroes of the 1970s, while decked in battle gear, largely belonged to the official state apparatus, either as members of vigilante self-defence squads – of which Bahadur was a pioneer – or bonafide members of the police force, like Inspector Vikram. The costumed superhero only emerged at the end of the Nehruvian period, gradually coming to defy its signature science and rationality. My article seeks to explore questions of the political economy of the superhero genre (...) and the affective valences of the supernatural in imaging/negotiating the national and transnational, through this conjunctural moment of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (shrink)

This article featuring India constitutes one of five articles in a collection of essays on local capacity-building in research ethics by graduates from the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics MHSc in Bioethics, International Stream program funded by the Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences. Research ethics is a growing area of work and interest in India. Ethics review remains the weakest component in the mechanism of good clinical practice, and there is a severe dearth (...) of professionals trained in ethics who can provide leadership. Although the Indian Good Clinical Practice Guidelines, the Indian Medical Council Act, and the Drugs and Cosmetics Act require that the Indian Council of Medical Research’s ethical guidelines be followed as a mandatory requirement for physicians who conduct research, there is a pervasive lack of awareness of basic requirements guiding the ethical conduct of research. There is a great need to strengthen India’s research ethics capacity and regulatory framework for research. (shrink)

The practice of sending and receiving sexually explicit images via mobile phones has grown exponentially in recent years with the accessibility of cellular technology. This essay examines this practice, when conducted by teenagers, in light of a Christian feminist approach to justice. Without harmfully exhorting girls' sexual "purity", we must nevertheless develop a moral framework that challenges the practice of sexting while simultaneously empowering young women to claim primary control over their own sexual experience. For Christians, justice, addressed to sexting, (...) must attend to sexual injustice even as it promotes genuine freedom, embodiment, mutuality and relational intimacy, and equality. (shrink)

In a raucous debut that summons up Britain's fabled Goon Squad comedies, writer and philosopher Lars Iyer tells the story of someone very like himself with a "slightly more successful" friend and their journeys in search of more palatable literary conferences and better gin. One reason for their journeys: the narrator's home is slowly being taken over by a fungus that no one seems to know what to do about. Before it completely swallows his house, the narrator feels compelled (...) to solve some major philosophical questions (such as "Why?") and the meaning of his urge to write, as well as the source of the fungus... before it is too late. Or, he has to move. (shrink)

Libertarians are an increasingly prominent ideological group in U.S. politics, yet they have been largely unstudied. Across 16 measures in a large web-based sample that included 11,994 self-identified libertarians, we sought to understand the moral and psychological characteristics of self-described libertarians. Based on an intuitionist view of moral judgment, we focused on the underlying affective and cognitive dispositions that accompany this unique worldview. Compared to self-identified liberals and conservatives, libertarians showed 1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding (...) principle, and weaker endorsement of all other moral principles; 2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional cognitive style; and 3) lower interdependence and social relatedness. As predicted by intuitionist theories concerning the origins of moral reasoning, libertarian values showed convergent relationships with libertarian emotional dispositions and social preferences. Our findings add to a growing recognition of the role of personality differences in the organization of political attitudes. (shrink)

Extant business ethics literature available for application to international business demonstrates some variety but no comprehensive principles. While the domains of both international business and business ethics are expanding, they are also becoming increasingly divergent. At the same time, the primacy accorded to the multinational enterprise in both fields ignores the socio-cultural and political embeddedness of economic activities, and multiple agencies in international business (individuals, firms, nations, etc.). Some international business theorists have offered the view that international exchange should be (...) the central building block for theories on international business. In this paper, it is argued that international exchange could be the fundamental unit of analysis for international business ethics as well. The potentially unifying features of exchange norms and ethical principles leads the author to develop some core exchange ethics principles that are tested on three recent international business practices. (shrink)

Embryos and microscopes share a long, remarkable history and biologists have always been intrigued to watch how embryos develop under the microscope. Here we discuss the advances in microscopy which have greatly influenced our current understanding of embryogenesis. We highlight the evolution of microscopes and the optical technologies that have been instrumental in studying various developmental processes. These imaging modalities provide mechanistic insights into the dynamic cellular and molecular events which drive lineage commitment and morphogenetic changes in the developing embryo. (...) We begin the journey with a brief history of microscopy to study embryos. First, we review the principles and optics of light, fluorescence, confocal, and electron microscopy which have been key techniques for imaging cellular and molecular events during embryonic development. Next, we discuss recent key imaging modalities such as light‐sheet microscopy, which are suitable for whole embryo imaging. Further, we highlight imaging techniques like multiphoton and super resolution microscopy for beyond light diffraction limit, high resolution imaging. Lastly, we review some of the scattering‐based imaging methods and techniques used for imaging human embryos. (shrink)

The advent of pharmacogenomics—the study of how the human genome influences drug response within a person or population—has begun to drive the development of pharmaceuticals in Western medicine today. Although pharmacogenomics promises dramatic improvement in drug safety and efficacy, the field also raises a host of ethical questions. The need to protect informed consent and confidentiality and to promote justice and equity—both nationally and globally—requires that one approach pharmacogenomics with an enthusiastic, yet critical, eye. Drawing on the normative values of (...) respect for persons (as both autonomous and relational), human well-being, socioeconomic justice, and human solidarity and the common good, this article offers several concrete suggestions for public policy to help ensure that pharmacogenomics develops in a way that promotes the good of both individuals and the broader society. (shrink)

The total electron content in the ionosphere widely influences Global Navigation Satellite Systems especially for critical applications by inducing localized positional errors in the GNSS measurements. These errors can be mitigated by measuring TEC from stations located around the world at various temporal and spatial scales and using them for advanced forecasting of TEC. The TEC can be used as a tool in understanding space weather phenomena such as geomagnetic storms which cause disruptions in the ionosphere. This paper examines the (...) causal relationship between perturbations in TEC caused by geomagnetic storms. The causality between two geomagnetic indices auroral electrojet and disturbed storm index and TEC is investigated using Granger causality at two low-latitude stations, Bangalore and Hyderabad. The outcomes of this study strengthen the regional understanding and modeling of ionospheric parameters which can contribute towards the global efforts for modeling and reducing the ionospheric effects on trans-ionospheric communication and navigation. The causal inferences combined with the data-driven model can be useful in identifying the correct and informative physical quantities to improve the forecasting models. (shrink)

This book focuses on moral and political education and critically engages with educational issues from a philosophical perspective. It engages with questions of moral education as well as questions about citizenship education, to address apprehensions on learning in a liberal democracy while parallelly invoking issues from within the curriculum, the school environment and teacher-student relationship. With contributions from renowned philosophers and educationists, this volume discusses themes like civic education and liberal democracy; toleration and freedom; Tagore's conception of the moral and (...) political self; key issues in moral education; cosmopolitanism, compassion, care ethics and moral purpose of schooling; to revisit and rethink some foundational questions related to education, curriculum and pedagogy. This volume will be essential reading for educationists and educators, and will be important for scholars and researchers of philosophy of education, education, teacher education and school education. (shrink)

On philosophy, religion, education, culture, etc.

There are two opposing views on the nature of corporations in contemporary debates on corporate social responsibility. Opponents of corporate personhood hold that a corporation is nothing but a group of individuals coming together to achieve certain goals. On the other hand, the advocates of corporate personhood believe that corporations are persons in their own right existing over and above the individuals who comprise them. They talk of corporate decision-making structures that help translate individual decisions and actions into corporate decisions (...) and actions. Importantly both the advocates and the opponents of corporate personhood rely on a contractual model of corporate–social interaction to explain corporate social responsibilty. However, this contractual model misses crucial aspects of the relationship between corporations and societies. Economic history reveals that the relationship between corporations and societies is essentially dynamic and heterogeneous and so extremely difficult to characterise in terms of a contract. The economic and the political aspects of this relationship are so finely intertwined with each other and it is impossible to extricate the one from the other. We need to be more conscious of the actual nature of corporate–social interaction in order to deal more comprehensively with issues of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This article is a phenomenological analysis of the Urdu poem Tum ek gōrakh dhandā hō by the Pakistani Sufi poet Nāz Khayālawī (d. 2010). It approaches the poet's engagement with perplexity ( ḥayrah ), as an ontological feature of reality, through the lens of Heidegger's understanding of truth where concealment ( lēthe ) is central to the event of unconcealment ( alētheia ). The article demonstrates how a Heideggerianphenomenological exploration enables us to uncover the dynamic of un/concealment (or un/veiling) in (...) the Sufi tradition's understanding of Being and intelligibility. The rich possibilities of interpretative pluralism and polysemy—through the explorative nonfinality evoked by Being as ḥayrah —are explored as well. The article's argument not only allows for fresh extensions of Heidegger's phenomenological approach to unexplored cultural and historical territory, but also adds to Heidegger scholarship's recent tentative attempts at bringing together Heidegger and Sufi poetry. (shrink)

This journal's well-intentioned consideration of the arts has turned out to be quite the Pandora's box. As soon as we broach the subject of aesthetics, we are already in the realm of ideology; as soon as we impose the frame of scientific inquiry upon any subject, we invoke another kind of ideology. The previous issues in this series have depicted the unfolding of an ideological clash of cultures between sciences and the humanities, enough to make C.P. Snow blush. For the (...) time being, this is an unavoidable condition; yet the more we remain aware of it, the further we may push our insights. (shrink)

Aristotle considered moral beauty to be the telos of the human virtues. Displays of moral beauty have been shown to elicit the moral emotion of elevation and cause a desire to become a better person and to engage in prosocial behavior. Study 1 (N = 5380) shows engagement with moral beauty is related to several psychological constructs relevant to moral education, and structural models reveal that the story of engagement with moral beauty may be considered a story of love and (...) connectedness; it is uniquely predictive of caring for, being empathic of, loving, and valuing benevolence toward others. Study 2 (N = 542) demonstrates that the personality trait of engaging with moral beauty moderates susceptibility to elevation. These studies suggest that encouraging students to engage with moral beauty might increase their desire to become better persons and to do good. Convergent with other research showing that moral emotions motivate moral behavior, we suggest that moral education programs increase their focus on developing engagement with moral beauty. (shrink)

Although arguments are a good way of exploring the limitations and complexities of a concept or a theory we may find ourselves faced with a real phenomenon that challenges the existing formulations of a concept or a theory so strongly and reveals its limitations to us so starkly that we are forced to break away from the current discussion and start anew. Such is the challenge posed by the phenomenon of farmer suicides on our existing theories of corporate social responsibility. (...) Contemporary discussions in corporate ethics are replete with many theories of corporate social responsibility which in one way or the other rely on the concept of the social contract. For the most part these theories have gone unchallenged and no fundamental limitations have been revealed. However, the phenomenon of farmer suicides in central India poses a serious challenge to them. This article attempts to show how the phenomenon of farmer suicides in central India starkly exposes some of the fundamental limitations of the contractarian formulations of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)