This study aimed to analyze the effect of deviant workplace behaviors, such as mistreatment, bullying, and incivility on employee turnover intention and identify the transformational leadership role as a moderator. The data was collected through a survey questionnaire with the help of a purposive sampling technique. A total of 318 respondents’ data was gathered from university academic and general staff in China. The results were analyzed through SPSS and structural equation modeling structural equation modeling software. The findings indicate that deviant (...) workplace behavior, i.e., mistreatment, bullying, and incivility, significantly affect employee turnover intention. Moreover, a result shows that transformational leadership has a significant moderating role on the relationship between turnover intention and workplace bullying and incivility but was insignificant between turnover intention and workplace mistreatment. Lastly, implications and limitations were also discussed in this article. (shrink)

Traditionally, mainstream psychology mostly presented religion in a negative light. However, recent years have witnessed a growing realization that religion has a substantial role to play in improving physical and mental health. Given the importance of religion, the American Psychological Association has division 36 “Psychology of religion.” But the perspective of mainstream psychology does not acknowledge the spiritual nature of human beings and their connection to God. Islamic psychology is one of the religion-based perspectives which acknowledges it. This perspective has (...) also attracted the attention of Western psychologists. Three different trends have been identified in this area: the Islamic filter approach, the comparison approach, and the Islamic psychology approach. However, despite more than 40 years of work, there is a considerable lack of progress in the development of this paradigm. The present article discussed the emergence and challenges in the development of this new perspective. Moreover, we suggest that the research paradigms of Western social and behavioral sciences are useful for developing Islamic psychology. (shrink)

In this paper, we deal with an alternative analytical analysis of fractional-order partial differential equations with proportional delay, achieved by applying Yang decomposition method, where the fractional derivative is taken in Caputo sense. The suggested series results are discovered to quickly converge to an exact solution. The computation of three test problems of fractional-order with proportional delay partial differential equations was presented to confirm the validity and efficiency of suggested method. The system appears to be a very dependable, effective, and (...) powerful method for solving a variety of physical problems that arise in engineering and science. (shrink)

Technology permeates all walks of life. It has emerged as a global facilitator to improve learning and training, alleviating the temporal and spatial limitations of traditional learning systems. It is imperative to identify enablers or inhibitors of technology adoption by employees for sustainable change in education management systems. Using the theoretical lens of organizational support theory, this paper studies effect of institutional support on education management information systems use along with two individual traits of self-efficacy and innovative behavior of academic (...) employees in British higher educational institutions. Data for this cross-sectional study were collected through a questionnaire completed by 591 academic employees of 23 universities from 10 cities in the United Kingdom. Partial Least Square structural equation modeling was used to analyze data with smartPLS 3.2.9 software. Results indicate that institutional support promotes self-efficacy and innovative behavior that help develop positive employee perceptions. The model explains a 52.9% variance in intention to use. Post-hoc mediation analysis shows that innovativeness and self-efficacy mediate between institutional support and employee technology adoption behavior. As opposed to student samples in past studies on educational technology, this study adds to the literature by focusing on academic employees. (shrink)

Psychology has been the significant discipline since the time of antiquity which becomes more consolidated during the medieval age of Islam. It had a strong foundation in the professional writings of polymaths from the Islamic Middle Ages that were eventually transmitted to the West. However, the unique psychological contributions of these medieval polymaths remained largely unexplored. Despite the growing interest in their work, which is partly due to Islamic psychology, only a handful of them have been investigated for their unique (...) psychological contributions, and a complete examination of psychological work has not been done, separately from an Islamic perspective. The majority of them have only been examined in terms of their medical value, neglecting psychological issues in their all-encompassing approaches to care. Therefore, it was quintessential to extensively explore all those scholars who contributed to the various fields of psychology and to fill a gap of information that has been left by the previous researchers. (shrink)

This study employs a newly developed methodology called the variational homotopy perturbation transformation method to study fractional acoustic wave equations. The motivation for this study is to extend the variational homotopy perturbation technique to the variational homotopy perturbation transformation technique in the sense of the Yang–Caputo–Fabrizio operator. The suggested method demonstrated a straightforward and accurate technique for investigating fractional-order partial differential equations. The technique’s validity is demonstrated through the use of several illustrative instances. The obtained answers were found to be (...) extremely near to the precise solutions. Additionally, the proposed strategy achieves the best degree of accuracy. Indeed, the current technique can be seen as one of the analytic strategies for solving nonlinear fractional partial differential equations compared to other analytical techniques. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship and its influence on the development of the economy are significant in competitive global advancement. Entrepreneurs need entrepreneurial intentions to improve the commercial environment of the country. Therefore, studying entrepreneurial intentions’ influencing predictors is vital for business development. We collected data from small and medium-sized enterprises employees of the developing country and used partial least square structured equation modeling to analyze the proposed relationships. The results assist the literature extension and practically contribute to developing entrepreneurs’ intentions through education and (...) opportunity recognition. The findings aid the institutions in improving course planning and establishing practical business setups. This study facilitates the government’s ideas of commencing entrepreneurial businesses through proper resource provisions for the entrepreneurs. (shrink)

This seventh volume of Collected Papers includes 70 papers comprising 974 pages on (theoretic and applied) neutrosophics, written between 2013-2021 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 122 co-authors from 22 countries: Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Abdel-Nasser Hussian, C. Alexander, Mumtaz Ali, Yaman Akbulut, Amir Abdullah, Amira S. Ashour, Assia Bakali, Kousik Bhattacharya, Kainat Bibi, R. N. Boyd, Ümit Budak, Lulu Cai, Cenap Özel, Chang Su Kim, Victor Christianto, Chunlai Du, Chunxin Bo, Rituparna Chutia, Cu Nguyen Giap, Dao The (...) Son, Vinayak Devvrat, Arindam Dey, Partha Pratim Dey, Fahad Alsharari, Feng Yongfei, S. Ganesan, Shivam Ghildiyal, Bibhas C. Giri, Masooma Raza Hashmi, Ahmed Refaat Hawas, Hoang Viet Long, Le Hoang Son, Hongbo Wang, Hongnian Yu, Mihaiela Iliescu, Saeid Jafari, Temitope Gbolahan Jaiyeola, Naeem Jan, R. Jeevitha, Jun Ye, Anup Khan, Madad Khan, Salma Khan, Ilanthenral Kandasamy, W.B. Vasantha Kandasamy, Darjan Karabašević, Kifayat Ullah, Kishore Kumar P.K., Sujit Kumar De, Prasun Kumar Nayak, Malayalan Lathamaheswari, Luong Thi Hong Lan, Anam Luqman, Luu Quoc Dat, Tahir Mahmood, Hafsa M. Malik, Nivetha Martin, Mai Mohamed, Parimala Mani, Mingcong Deng, Mohammed A. Al Shumrani, Mohammad Hamidi, Mohamed Talea, Kalyan Mondal, Muhammad Akram, Muhammad Gulistan, Farshid Mofidnakhaei, Muhammad Shoaib, Muhammad Riaz, Karthika Muthusamy, Nabeela Ishfaq, Deivanayagampillai Nagarajan, Sumera Naz, Nguyen Dinh Hoa, Nguyen Tho Thong, Nguyen Xuan Thao, Noor ul Amin, Dragan Pamučar, Gabrijela Popović, S. Krishna Prabha, Surapati Pramanik, Priya R, Qiaoyan Li, Yaser Saber, Said Broumi, Saima Anis, Saleem Abdullah, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Abdulkadir Sengür, Seyed Ahmad Edalatpanah, Shahbaz Ali, Shahzaib Ashraf, Shouzhen Zeng, Shio Gai Quek, Shuangwu Zhu, Shumaiza, Sidra Sayed, Sohail Iqbal, Songtao Shao, Sundas Shahzadi, Dragiša Stanujkić, Željko Stević, Udhayakumar Ramalingam, Zunaira Rashid, Hossein Rashmanlou, Rajkumar Verma, Luige Vlădăreanu, Victor Vlădăreanu, Desmond Jun Yi Tey, Selçuk Topal, Naveed Yaqoob, Yanhui Guo, Yee Fei Gan, Yingcang Ma, Young Bae Jun, Yuping Lai, Hafiz Abdul Wahab, Wei Yang, Xiaohong Zhang, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Lemnaouar Zedam. (shrink)

This book reflects upon the political philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, a towering intellectual figure in South Asian history, revered by many for his poetry and his thought. He lived in India in the twilight years of the British Empire and, apart from a short but significant period studying in the West, he remained in Punjab until his death in 1938. The book studies Iqbal's critique of nationalist ideology and his attempts to chart a path for the development of (...) the 'nation' by liberating it from the centralizing and homogenizing tendencies of the modern state structure. Iqbal frequently clashed with his contemporaries over his view of nationalism as 'the greatest enemy of Islam'. He constructed his own particular interpretation of Islam - forged through an interaction with Muslim thinkers and Western intellectual traditions - that was ahead of its time, and since his death both modernists and Islamists have continued to champion his legacy. (shrink)

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across (...) first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded. (shrink)

Includes an introd. of 49 p. by S. G. Abbas.

In this paper, we critically interrogate the benefits of an interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse dialogue between ‘local food’ and ‘alternative food networks’ and outline how this dialogue might be enriched by a closer engagement with discourses of food sovereignty and the politics of scale. In arguing for a shift towards a greater emphasis on food sovereignty, we contend that contemporary discourses of food security are inadequate for the ongoing task of ensuring a just and sustainable economy of food. Further, rather (...) than treating the local and the global as ontologically given categories around which to contest the politics of food, it is our contention that recognising the socio-spatial aspects of the politics of scale has the potential to reinvigorate discourses of food security, food sovereignty and AFNs. Understanding scale as both fixed to a degree as well as contingent and dynamic has implications for an understanding of the role of food systems, for how the rescaled state privileges certain food systems and the possibilities for resistance through ‘jumping scale’ and food utopias. All of these aspects are significant if we are to fully comprehend and contest the challenges of envisioning and enacting real utopias of food sovereignty. (shrink)

Among the exciting prospects raised by advocates of predictive processing [PP] is the offer of a systematic description of our neural activity suitable for drawing explanatory bridges to the structure of conscious experience. Yet the gulf to cross seems wide. For, as critics of PP have argued, our visual experience certainly doesn’t seem probabilistic.While Clark proposes a means to make PP compatible with the experience of a determinate world, I argue that we should not rush to do so. Two notions (...) of determinacy are conflated in the claim that perception is determinate: ‘univocality’ and ‘full detail’. The former, as Clark argues, is only to be expected in any PP agent that models its world for the purpose of acting on it. But as Husserl argued, and as perceptual psychology has borne out, we significantly overestimate the degree of detail with which we perceive a univocal world.This second form of indeterminacy is due not to the probabilistic nature of PP’s model, but rather to its hierarchical structure, with increasingly coarse-grained representations as we move further from the sensory periphery. A PP system may, or may not, deliver a univocal hypothesis at each of these levels. An action-oriented PP system would only be expected to do so only at the level needed for successful action guidance. A naïve reporter’s overestimation of the degree of determinate detail in their visual experience can thereby be accounted for with a more gradual version of the ‘refrigerator light’ effect: we experience determinate details just to the degree that they’re needed – immediately as they’re needed. (shrink)

This study aims to investigate the influence of psychological biases on the investment decision of Chinese individual investors after the pandemic of COVID-19 with a moderating role of information availability. A cross-sectional method with a quantitative research approach was employed to investigate the hypothesized relationships among variables. The snowball sampling technique was applied to collect the data through a survey questionnaire from individual investors investing in the Chinese stock market. Smart-PLS statistical software was used to analyze the data and for (...) the estimation of hypotheses. Results indicated that overconfidence, representative bias, and anchoring bias have a significant and positive influence on investment decisions during the post-Covid-19 pandemic; however, the availability bias has insignificant and negative effects on the investment decision during the post-COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, findings indicated that information availability has a significant moderating role in the relationship of psychological biases with the investment decision during the post-COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the body of knowledge regarding behavior finance, psychological biases, and investment decision in emerging stock markets. The findings of the present study improve the understanding that how investors’ psychology affects their investment decisions. (shrink)

La posición de Vico sobre el antiguo Egipto tenía origen en el debate seicentesco sobre la supremacía del saber egipcio . En línea con la historiografía protestante, Vico muestra que los egipcios habían desarrollado sólo un saber civil y que sus conocimientos filosóficos eran aquéllos aprendidos de los hebreos.PALABRAS CLAVE: Vico, hebreos, egipcios, sabiduría antigua, historiografía protestante.Vico’s attitude towards the ancient Egypt had its roots in the Seventeenth Century debate on the supremacy of Egyptian wisdom . In agreement with protestant (...) historiography, Vico shows that Egyptians had only developed a kind of civil knowledge, whereas their philosophical knowledge had been received from Hebrews.KEYWORDS: Vico, Hebrews, Egyptians, ancient wisdom, protestant historiography. (shrink)

Based on our prior work (Neuman and Nave, in press [a]) we proceed from the notion that the mind has the capacity to generate and use concepts through themediation of signs. This mediation constrains the vast potential for confusion, given the incalculable number of similarities between objects in the world and therefore has important adaptive value. Despite the ubiquity of sign-mediated concept formation (SMCF), a rigorous formalization of this phenomenon is rare. Following the work of Neuman and Nave (in press (...) [a]), here we present a formal description of sign-mediated concept formation and discuss the relevance of this theory to certain outstanding issues in biology, psychology and Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

In this article, I use ethnographic and historical evidence to consider marriage as a particular locus of what Maria Lugones has called “the colonial/modern gender system.” By bringing specific research on marriage among the matrilineal Asante of Kumasi, Ghana, together with a consideration of global ideals of marriage and gender, I argue that marriage and the family are key sites through which the subjugation of women in Africa can be understood, but that this requires local and historical contextualization. To do (...) this, I trace the emergence and current local expression of “companionate marriage,” an ideal of marriage that is associated with romantic love and personal choice, and that is often seen as a gender-progressive marriage ideal. In Kumasi, “companionate” ideals began to emerge during the colonial period, not as an empowering force, but in complicated interactions with other gendered changes that limited wives' claims to husbands' reciprocal support and isolated women from their matrilineal kin. Today, customary marriage is often considered harmful to women and distinct from other forms of marriage; however, I show that such assumptions impose categorial differences where none may exist, and occlude the complexities of women's lives and struggles. (shrink)

Predictive processing has begun to offer new insights into the nature of conscious experience—but the link is not straightforward. A wide variety of systems may be described as predictive machines, raising the question: what differentiates those for which it makes sense to talk about conscious experience? One possible answer lies in the involvement of a higher-order form of prediction error, termed expected free energy. In this paper we explore under what conditions the minimization of this new quantity might underpin conscious (...) experience. Our suggestion is that the minimisation of Expected Free Energy is not in itself sufficient for the occurrence of conscious experience. Instead, it is relevant only insofar as it helps deliver what Ward et al. ( 2011 ) have previously described as a _sense of our own poise over an action space_. Perceptual experience, we will argue, is nothing other than the process that puts current actions in contact with goals and intentions, enabling some creatures to know the space of options that their current situation makes available. This proposal fits with recent work suggesting a deep link between conscious contents and contents computed at an ‘intermediate’ level of processing, apt for controlling action. (shrink)

Given that personal source of information is preferred by the customers over company-generated marketing communications, promoting advocacy behavior among customers is of much importance for every organization. Literature suggests that an organization's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities significantly influence individual behavior. However, the advocacy behavior of customers (ADB), from a CSR perspective, did not receive due attention. To address this literature gap, the current study attempts to explore the relationship among CSR and ADB with the intervening role of brand admiration (...) (BA). To collect the data, customers of a large fast-food service organization in Pakistan were approached. The proposed relationships were tested through the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The statistical evidence verifies a positive link between CSR and ADB, while BA mediated this relationship. These findings will be supportive to the fast-food business to realize the critical role of CSR for a meaningful customer-company relationship in the face of competition. (shrink)

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930) is Muhammad Iqbal's major philosophic work: a series of profound reflections on the perennial conflict among science, religion, and philosophy, culminating in new visions of the unity of human knowledge, of the human spirit, and of God. Iqbal's thought contributed significantly to the establishment of Pakistan, to the religious and political ideals of the Iranian Revolution, and to the survival of Muslim identity in parts of the former USSR. It now (...) serves as new bridge between East and West and between Islam and the other Religions of the Book. With a new Introduction by Javed Majeed, this edition of The Reconstruction opens the teachings of Iqbal to the modern, Western reader. It will be essential reading for all those interested in Islamic intellectual history, the renewal of Islam in the modern world, and political theory of Islam's relationship to the West. (shrink)

This article provides an introduction to plagiarism and the numerous negative aspects associated with it. Some examples from history have also been provided along with their outcomes. There are different types of plagiarism with varying legal and social aspects. The taxonomy of plagiarism is built by classifying it, with respect to the method involved in plagiarism, the form in which it happens or the intention of the plagiarist. The strategies suggested in the literature to avoid plagiarism are organized into individual (...) and organizational levels. Individuals can adopt strategies to build habits of avoiding plagiarism and focus on their original and innovative way of thinking. Similarly, institutions can make policies to cope with plagiarism and hence maintain their reputation. In this paper, the focus is not on mentioning the plagiarism detection methods; rather we believe that building awareness in the people about plagiarism outcomes is more important than teaching them about the different methodologies used for detection. Some students avoid plagiarism detection as if playing a game and it can be only avoided by educating them in ethics. (shrink)

Current organizations are underpinned by utilitarian ethics of Modernity. Pure economic motive driven organizations detach themselves from larger societal interest. Rising number of corporate scandals and intraorganizational income inequalities are breeding similar trends in society at large. Current organizations base their competitive advantage on resources and capabilities which boils down to economic supremacy at all cost whether it is named I/o or RBV of the firm. This theoretical article posits Ethics-based Trust as the main competency and capability for attaining sustained (...) competitive advantage. It in no way condemns utility view of the firms but treats it as a natural yet secondary outcome of genuine ethicality of the firm. Cultivating an ethical culture in the firm through identifying antecedents, organizational practices, and the outcomes where profitability is an automatic but secondary outcome under the supremacy of ethics is detailed in the multilevel model presented in this article. The main call of this article is to posit ethics and morality over and above short-term profits so that organizations fulfill their trustee role for society through enacting socio-humanistic theories within organizations. A brief analysis of the proposed ethical theory of firm is undertaken in light of the “schooling” notion in the contemporary organization theory literature. (shrink)

BackgroundValue-driven career attitude is considered a dimension of a protean career attitude. Individuals with this attitude seek out personally meaningful experiences and set their own psychological career success standards. This study investigates the association between value-driven career attitude and job performance. It looks at how organizational citizenship behavior affects the relationship between value-driven career attitudes and job performance.MethodsA self-reported questionnaire was used to collect data from 400 random employees of SMEs in Pakistan during the early pandemic. We chose Cochran’s formula (...) to determine the appropriate sample size, and PLS-SEM was used to analyze the model. P-O fit and self-determination theory is the theoretical lenses used in this study. The underpinning theories to this study enable the researchers to establish a link between VDCA, OCB, and job performance.ResultsBy analyzing a sample of 400 employees from active enterprises, we discover that VDCA contributes to an improvement in job performance. Furthermore, OCB plays an intervening effect in the relationship between VDCA and job performance. Thus, the study provided evidence for the underpinning models of P-O fit and self-determination theory.ConclusionThis study adds to the body of knowledge by investigating the connections between VDCA, OCB, and job performance in SMEs. The existing literature sheds scant light on these linkages, leaving a gap that this study will address. The current study expands on other themes to provide an in-depth analysis of many under-explored PCA outcomes, which may open up new avenues for future researchers to broaden and strengthen PCA with other constructs. (shrink)

Nowadays, mobile telephony interruptions in our daily life activities are common because of the inappropriate ringing notifications of incoming phone calls in different contexts. Such interruptions may impact on the work attention not only for the mobile phone owners, but also for the surrounding people. Decision tree is the most popular machine-learning classification technique that is used in existing context-aware mobile intelligent interruption management model to overcome such issues. However, a single-decision tree-based context-aware model may cause over-fitting problem and thus (...) decrease the prediction accuracy of the inferred model. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an ensemble machine-learning-based context-aware mobile telephony model for the purpose of intelligent interruption management by taking into account multi-dimensional contexts and name it “E-MIIM”. The experimental results on individuals’ real-life mobile telephony data sets show that our E-MIIM model is more effective and outperforms existing MIIM model for predicting and managing individual’s mobile telephony interruptions based on their relevant contextual information. (shrink)

We propose a new hybrid data mining method for predicting protein-protein interactions combining Likelihood-Ratio with rule induction algorithms. In essence, the new method consists of using a rule induction algorithm to discover rules representing partitions of the data, and then the discovered rules are interpreted as “bins” which are used to compute likelihood ratios. This new method is applied to the prediction of protein-protein interactions in the Saccharomyces Cerevisiae genome, using predictive genomic features in an integrated scheme. The results show (...) that the new hybrid method outperforms a pure likelihood ratio based approach. (shrink)

A critique of Karl Friston's "Free Energy Principle" from a bioenactive perspective.

Inquiry into the felt dimension of experience can be deeply transformative, but more than promoting transcendence it can help us make contact with the intricacy of our open and embodied self-….

The article argues that a critical encounter with pre-modern literatures from the national past is long overdue under the impact of a globalized discourse of sexuality. Its effects are already felt at the level of both pedagogy and literary reading, one reconstituting the other, in the ‘global classroom’, a self-conscious pedagogical space imagined by the new educational policy to bring about a globally accredited cultural homogeneity. The case study comes from teaching erotic poetry at an Indian university, from the joint (...) literary complex of Hindi and Urdu in South Asia, a theme uncomfortably located in national culture not just because of its sexuality but its association with non-national linguistic elements which the article terms ‘Indo-Islamic’. The overlapping of the sexual modern with the Indo-Islamic resurfaces a tension in the nationalized body of literary writing in Hindi/Urdu, the major ‘national’ languages of South Asia. This encounter of erotic poetry in old Hindi and Urdu with globalized sexuality, the article shows, offers a chance to reflect on how literary studies are being reshaped by the assumptions of a monolingual, monocultural global sexuality in our nationalist times. (shrink)

Why Are We Here? This profound and timeless question echoes through the corridors of human existence, transcending gender, race, and creed. It is a question that every human being, at some point in their life, confronts. This book ventures to propose common sense answers that resonate with the majority, irrespective of their religious or philosophical beliefs. Though religious texts are employed to elucidate certain points, the discourse remains inclusive, ensuring that even those without religious inclinations can find agreement with the (...) arguments presented. The central thesis of this book is both bold and enlightening: our creation is an ongoing process, and our presence on this earth is an integral part of that creative journey. To support this idea, a rich tapestry of philosophical, scientific, and religious arguments is woven, inviting the reader to analyze the issue from multiple viewpoints. As the reader delves deeper, they will learn to examine the various stances on "God"—whether atheistic, agnostic, or theistic—from a rational perspective. In doing so, they might discover that the apparent differences between these positions often stem from the rigid definitions of concepts such as "God," "Heaven," "Hell," "Predestination," and "Satan." Through the lens of reason, these concepts can be reinterpreted to accommodate a wide spectrum of beliefs. From the Muslim perspective, this book holds particular significance as it offers a fresh illumination of the Qur’an’s teachings. In today's world, the concept of "religion"—and Islam in particular—is frequently perceived as being synonymous with rigid rules, legalistic governance, intolerance, and even terrorism. This perception has led both Muslims and non-Muslims to view Islam predominantly as a legalistic religion focused on political dominance. However, this narrow vision obscures the deeper, more philosophical teachings of the Qur’an, which address the fundamental questions of life. This book aims to unveil this often-hidden dimension of Islam. It encourages readers to see the Qur’an not merely as a manual of ritualistic worship and political directives but as a profound guide that addresses the most essential questions: Why do we exist here? Why do we suffer? What is true success? In doing so, it seeks to shift the focus from the contentious and often violent aspects of religious expression to a more spiritual and rational understanding of Islam, one that appeals to reason and common sense. In a world fraught with religious conflict and intolerance, the need for such a shift is urgent. By drawing upon the Qur’an, alongside other revered scriptures like the Bible and the Buddhist Dhammapada, this book aspires to unite people in their quest for answers to life's fundamental questions. It is a call to transcend the barriers of rigid definitions and divisive ideologies, fostering a shared journey towards understanding the essence of our existence. (shrink)

It's often said that it's highly improbable that evolution should produce complex beings such as ourselves. But is it? Here is a welcome clarification of how to weigh up probabilities — particularly when it comes to evolution.

Unlike machines, living systems are distinguished by the continual destruction and regeneration of their boundaries and other components. Stable Markov blankets may be a real feature of the world, or they may be merely a construction of particular models, but they are neither a feature of organisms nor of any model that can capture the necessary conditions of their existence.

This essay analyzes a silent short film portraying an urban canoeist. The film suggests that it is possible to make conscious choices about one’s means of conveyance through the city. Using a critical theoretical framework to unpack the implications of the film, this paper argues for the need to imagine unconventional modes of transportation and examine the power structures of automotive hegemony.

This paper is a study of the intersection between aviation and diplomacy in the semi-autonomous Indian state of Jodhpur in the final decades of British colonial rule in India. Jodhpur's Maharaja Umaid Singh established a major international aerodrome, patronized one of India's first flying clubs and collaborated with British authorities to make aviation laws for the Indian states. He would also serve in the Royal Air Force during the war and placed Jodhpur state's aviation resources at the disposal of the (...) king-emperor. This paper argues that Jodhpur was able to leverage its aviation resources to wield substantial influence both within and beyond the British Empire through both war and peace. An analysis of Jodhpur's engagement with aviation diplomacy is also revealing of some of the limitations as well as possibilities for the deployment of science diplomacy frameworks, especially in non-Western contexts. (shrink)

This article examines crowds, leaders, and media after the 1979 Revolution of Iran. It focuses on media that contests hegemonic power by acting as a “guide” for an otherwise “leaderless movement,” especially in contexts where conventional “guides” are illegitimate or absent. It argues that such media reveals the partisan reality of political order obscured by the myth of leadership, the idea that the presence of a leader implies a political order. I focus on International Women’s Day 1979 when crowds protesting (...) the Ayatollah Khomeini’s decision to enforce the mandatory veil were caught in a paradox: as subjects of history and objects of representation. With focus on the non-partisan newspaper _Ayandegan_, the article shows how the crowds, objects of representation, became political subjects, as potential guides. Despite its efforts to remain neutral, _Ayandegan_ became partisan when it unwittingly challenged the “charismatic leader” by giving presence to the partisan crowds. The mediated relation between leader and led on 8 March 1979 and after is instructive for our understanding of the role media can play in leaderless movements. (shrink)

The current research investigates the interplay of board gender diversity, the quality of corporate social responsibility disclosure, and the green innovation performance of a firm. It examines the moderation effect of the CSRD on the relationship between corporate GIP and BGD. The study inculcates 3,736 firm-year observations of A-share listed Chinese firms from 2010 to 2019. Least square dummy variables method, generalized method of moments, and 2SLS are employed for the analysis of the study. The findings foster an affirmative and (...) significant impact of BGD on corporate GIP in terms of green innovation patents. Moreover, the quality of CSRD is also detected for a significant moderating effect on the relationship between BGD and corporate GIP. The quality of CSRD emerges to be an indicator for social resilience and female role congruence under the purview of the social resilience theory and the role congruence theory, respectively. This research would help managers and policymakers of developing nations in formulating environmental innovation strategies for corporate sustainability. (shrink)