Telecommunications equipment suppliers play an important role in the functioning of corporations with large-scale distributed computer networks such as system integrators, Internet service providers and others. An important condition of sustainable development for these companies is effective and reasonable decision making concerning the choice of suppliers. At the same time, the amount of information to be considered in many industries for making decisions has grown several times. In accordance with the above, decision making support systems for the reliable choice of (...) suppliers started to be developed. At the same time, the approaches to designing such systems possess some disadvantages. In order to overcome these disadvantages this article suggests an approach to decision making support for choosing telecommunication equipment suppliers based on the Choquet Integral and minimization of fuzzy measure variance. It deals with the task of criteria normalization, fuzzy measure identification, gives examples of expert estimations for criteria and also the results of supplier assessments based on which the decision is made. (shrink)

Background: The magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists is reportedly high, yet no peer-review published studies addressing this issue could be found. Therefore, it was decided to conduct a pilot study to assess the degree of the problem, the types of bullying/harassment and to provide some insights into the situation.Methods and Principal Findings: Following multiple focus group meetings, a yes/no response type questionnaire was developed to assess the degree and type of bullying and harassment experienced by psychiatrists. Over a (...) 3-month period the questionnaire was administered to a random sample of 60 psychiatrists. 57 out of the 60 psychiatrists reported harassment and bullying. Frequencies of the following response variables are presented in descending order: rumours 40% ; defamation 20% ; passing remarks 20% ; false accusations 15% ; threats 13.3% ; verbal abuse 13.3% ; unjustified complaints 13.3% ; promotion blocked 13.3% ; humiliation 13% ; bad reference given 10% ; credentials questioned 8.3% ; physical attacks 5% ; termination 5% ; derogatory remarks 1.7% and 1.7% were subjected to personal work. As a result of being subjected to harassment, 66.7% of the psychiatrists did not take any action, whereas 33.3% confronted the person they believed responsible. Asked whether the bullying and harassment caused distress, 18.3% of the psychiatrists did not report any effect, 30% reported mild distress, 40% moderate distress and severe distress was reported by 11.7%.Conclusions: It was concluded that the magnitude of bullying and harassment among psychiatrists may be quite high, as evidenced by this pilot study. There is a need for extensive systematic studies on this subject and to establish strategies to prevent and address this issue at a national and regulatory level. (shrink)

Volume 46, Issue 6, November 2020, Page 727-743.

This study aimed to understand the expressions of fear in the journeys of health professionals who worked in the confrontation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19), in the city of Manaus, in the Brazilian Western Amazon. This is an exploratory qualitative study that adopts interpretive description as a method to generate informed knowledge responsive to the needs of the practice. We included 56 participants, comprising 23 health managers and 33 health workers (middle and higher level) of different professional categories. The results (...) revealed three circles of experience: (1) knowledge and professional experience in dealing with the disease (unknown–known–experienced); (2) the growing proximity to death and loss (predicted–witnessed–suffered); and (3) the involvement and proximity to whatever affects the individual, their emotions, and personal transformations in the face of the threat (the collective, the neighbor, and oneself). Our results suggest that health professionals who worked during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Manaus experienced insecurity, dread, and fear, illustrating the complexity of developing their activities in the front line of care and management during the different phases of the pandemic. A contribution of the study is precisely that of capturing this complexity, which suggests the impossibility of analyzing fear only in its simple manifestation, or in each circle of experience. (shrink)

This monograph is the first integral study of the views of the Austro-English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to appear in Soviet literature, and it is presented in close connection with an analysis of his relations with his contemporaries. The book sheds light on the sociocultural sources of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and it analyzes his book On Certainty for the first time, gives a new reading of his Notebooks, 1914-1916 and a number of other sketches, and very exhaustively treats his lectures on the (...) foundations of mathematics. The book is a critical analysis of the evolution of the philosophical views of Wittgenstein and sheds light on the personal motives behind his philosophical ideas and conceptions. (shrink)

I have enjoyed my six years as editor of this journal. I was pleased to be able to bring the journal to Purdue University Press and learn how to produce a first-rate academic journal. From the early days of choosing a cover design, to supervising my graduate assistant Jiwon Kim as she expertly sought indexing services, to acquiring an ISSN number, to being lucky to convince David Granger to become the book review editor and, with the next issue, editor, I (...) have been fortunate to work with excellent colleagues. I particularly want to thank the staff at Purdue University Press, especially its former director, Thomas Bacher, who agreed to publish the journal in 2004. Tom later moved the management of the journal's .. (shrink)

The concept of service found in Christian theism and related religious perspectives offers robust support for a political defense of nonhuman animal rights, both in the eschaton and in the present state. By adapting the political theory defended by Donaldson and Kymlicka to contemporary theological models of the afterlife and of human agency, I defend a picture of heaven as a harmoniously structured society where humans are the functional leaders of a multifaceted, interspecies citizenry. Consequently, orthodox religious believers (concerned with (...) promoting God’s will “on Earth as it is in Heaven”) have a duty to promote and protect the interests of nonhuman creatures in the present, premortem state. (shrink)

This paper describes the topological aspect of a logic-based, artificial intelligence approach to formalising the qualitative description of spatial properties and relations, and reasoning about those properties and relations. This approach, known as RCC theory, has been under development for several years at the University of Leeds. The main rationale for this project is that qualitative descriptions of spatial properties and relationships, and qualitative spatial reasoning, are of fundamental importance in human thinking about the world: even where quantitative spatial data (...) are most important, they must be attached to the components of a perceived spatial structure if we are to make use of them. RCC theory covers other qualitative aspects of spatial description and reasoning, but the topological properties and relations of spatially extended entities are fundamental to our work. The topological formalisms used by mathematicians are, in general, not well suited to the task of formalising the kinds of ‘common-sense’ or ‘everyday’ qualitative spatial description and reasoning which are our primary interest. Nevertheless, we must come to grips with the concepts of topology as practised by mathematicians if we are not to risk constantly ‘reinventing wheels’. (shrink)

At the present stage, the problem of human ecology is determined, for all practical purposes, by the response of man to the conditions of the environment he has himself modified and created.

Материалы конференции предназначены для специалистов.

Mitchell et al.'s claim, that their propositional theory is a single-process theory, is illusory because they relegate some learning to a secondary memory process. This renders the single-process theory untestable. The propositional account is not a process theory of learning, but rather, a heuristic that has led to interesting research.

Adolescence methamphetamine use is an issue of considerable concern due to its correlation with later delinquency, divorce, unemployment and health problems. Understanding how adolescents initiate methamphetamine abuse is important in developing effective prevention programs. We formulate a mathematical model for the spread of methamphetamine abuse using nonlinear ordinary differential equations. It is assumed that susceptibles are recruited into methamphetamine use through imitation. An epidemic threshold value, Ra\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {R}}_a$$\end{document}, termed the abuse reproduction (...) number, is proposed and defined herein in the drug-using context. The model is shown to exhibit the phenomenon of backward bifurcation. This means that methamphetamine problems may persist in the population even if Ra\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {R}}_a$$\end{document} is less than one. Sensitivity analysis of Ra\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {R}}_a$$\end{document} was performed to determine the relative importance of different parameters in methamphetamine abuse initiation. The model is then fitted to data on methamphetamine users less than 20 years old reporting methamphetamine as their primary substance of abuse in the treatment centres of Cape Town and parameter values that give the best fit are chosen. Results show that the proportion of methamphetamine users less than 20 years old reporting methamphetamine as their primary substance of abuse will continue to decrease in Cape Town of South Africa. The results suggest that intervention programs targeted at reducing adolescence methamphetamine abuse, are positively impacting methamphetamine abuse. (shrink)

I am now sitting in La Antigua, Guatemala. It's 6:00 a.m. Ancient church bells compete with their clanging. Some with a clear ringing, others of dead metal. For centuries this tiny town of some 20 square blocks was the very center of Christianity in the "new" world. Its philosophy was brought to this place, lock, stock, and barrel. And, from here it was funneled south to Peru and north to Mexico. Not a philosophy of "liberation." Just ask the Maya who (...) remain. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: chronological snobbery (CS). First described by the Christian academic Owen Barfield in the 1920s and later popularized by his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, the fallacy of CS presupposes that cultural, philosophical, or scientific ideas from later time periods are necessarily superior to those from earlier ages. Grounded on the Enlightenment's concept of “progress”, this informal fallacy stems from the assumption that the ever‐increasing amount of knowledge in society (...) naturally and perpetually replaces all outdated, disproven ideas with updated, better‐justified beliefs, therefore making old ideas incorrect or irrelevant simply because they are old. Essentially the opposite of the appeal to ancient authority, CS relates to guilt by association, hasty generalization, and poisoning the well fallacies whenever it references unrelated false beliefs held by individuals from the originating time period. (shrink)

In recent years, the pages of our journal have carried a number of discussion articles dealing primarily with one question: the essence of the concept of "ethical category" and the concrete place that each ethical category should occupy in the socio-cultural complex denoted by the terms: morality, morals, ethics. The need for discussion of such questions in our scholarly literature on ethics has long been present. The immediate impetus for opening the discussion was publication of L. M. Arkhangel'skii's interesting and (...) significant monograph, The Categories of Marxist-Leninist Ethics [Kategorii marksistsko-leninskoi etiki], and his article "The Essence of Ethical Categories" [Sushchnost' eticheskikh kategorii], in Filosofskie nauki, 1961, No. 3. These writings indisputably represent a step forward in the study of a number of specific ethical categories. However, both in Arkhangel'skii's definition of the concept of "ethical category" and in his interpretation of that definition, there are, in the opinion of a number of participants in the discussion, spots that are weak both in terms of science and of logic. Arkhangel'skii understands ethical categories as "the principal key concepts of ehtical theory, reflecting the fundamental characteristics of morality in general , constituting social reflection of objectively operative concrete historical criteria of moral evaluation , as well as of requirements presented with respect to moral obligations , moral responsibility , dignity , and moral satisfaction , the content of which is determined by the principles of a given morality". (shrink)