A discussion of the psychological aspects of love, marriage, and divorce.

As scholars integrate empirical approaches to ethical questions in healthcare, relational autonomy theory must inform research design and change practice. Qualitative approaches are well suited to issues where patient values play a central role, and they can be combined with relational autonomy theory to investigate the factors influencing autonomy-rich experiences. This paper draws upon my experience conducting bioethics research related to clinical trial decision-making to develop a systematic method for applying relational autonomy as a theoretical lens to qualitative health research. (...) The resultant practical guide utilizes Susan Sherwin’s theory of relational autonomy and presents an empirical method responsive to autonomy-relevant questions. (shrink)

A study of the tradition of ethical socialism, its successes, its failures, and its relevance to contemporary Britain. It focuses on a group of writers who, although separated by time, all promoted this brand of socialism. It chronicles their thoughts and theories, and examines their intentions.

'Uncertainty and chance' is a subject with a broad span, in that there is no academic discipline or walk of life that is not beset by uncertainty and chance. In this book a range of approaches is represented by authors from varied disciplines: natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences and medical sciences. At one extreme, this volume is concerned with the foundations of probability. At the other extreme, we have scholars who acknowledge the concept of chance and uncertainty but do not (...) cope with it by means of systematic measurement or quantative analysis. (shrink)

كل ما أعنيه في مؤلفي، هو التعبير عن وجهات نظر تجاه آراء، طرحها بعض الفلاسفة والمفكرين والمنظرين والمبدعين الذين تناولوا جانباً حساساً في ما يتعلق بدور الوعي الفـني والجمالي في عملية إستلهام الحقائق الجمالية، والإفصاح عنها بواسطة الفن، والكشف عن البِنى القاعدية والتاريخية والمعرفية والفنية والتراثية والروحية والفكرية والجمالية.. سواء في تطابق وجهات النظر، أم دحض وتفنيد الأفكار التي رأت الفن والجمال في الوجود رؤية ســـطحية، وتوضيح الآراء المتباينة وتعددية المناهج المختلفة، التي حددت وظيفة الفن في بنائية الحياة. ويجدر الانتباه (...) إلى أن ما أعنيه من جمالي الفن، يشمل كافة الإشراقات الإبداعية العظيمة (أسطورية، أدبية، طقسية، تصوير، رسوم، لغة كتابية، عقائد دينية، أيديولوجية، دراما، نحت، عمارة، موسيقا، إعلام، رياضة، تكنولوجيا..إلخ) في حياتنا الأناسية. فوددت أن أستعرض بلمحة موجزة بدايات نشوء الفن كمقدمة منطقية، تفرضها ضرورات البحث، وذلك لما للفن من أثـر عميق في نشوء الحضارة والتاريخ، ولما له من قدرة نفاذية إلى الأثر الإلهي المتماهي في كينونة الوجود، ومبيناً أيضاً دور الدين في إبراز جلال الفن عـبر التاريخ، والإفصاح عن الإشكالية التي تتعلق به، بوصفه وعياً جمالياً ما وراء الواقع العياني. (shrink)

According to the World Health Organisation, three to five million individuals are infected by influenza, and around 250,000 to 500,000 people die of this infectious disease worldwide. Influenza epidemics pose a serious public health threat. Moreover, graver dangers are encountered with influenza subtypes against which there is little or no preexisting human immunity. Such subtypes of influenza have the potential to cause devastating epidemics. Thus, enhancing surveillance systems for the purpose of detecting influenza epidemics in an early stage can quicken (...) response times and save millions of lives. This paper presents three adapting intelligence models: support vector machine regression, artificial neural network using particle swarm optimisation, and our intelligent time series to predict influenza epidemics. The novelty of the current study is that it proposes a new intelligent model to predict influenza outbreaks. The INTS model combines clustering with a time series model to enhance the prediction of influenza outbreaks. The innovation of our proposed model integrates the results obtained from the existing weighted exponential smoothing model with centroids obtained from clustering. We developed a surveillance system for influenza epidemics using Google search queries. The current research is based on a weighted version of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention influenza-like illness activity level obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention data, as well as query data obtained from the Goggle search engine in the USA. The influenza-like illness data was collected from January 4, 2009, to December 27, 2015, stretching across a total time span of 312 weeks. Google Correlate was used to select search queries related to influenza epidemics. In total, 100 search queries were obtained from Google Correlate, 10 of which were better and more relevant search queries selected in this study. The model was evaluated using online Google search queries collected from Google Correlate. Standard measure performance MSE, RMSE, and MAE were employed to estimate the results of the proposed model. The empirical results of the INTS model showed MSE = 0.003, RMSE = 0.036, and MAE = 0.0185, indicating that the errors of the proposed model are very limited. A comparative model of predicting results between the INTS model, alternative Google Flu Trend, and autoregression with Google search data is also presented. The proposed model outperformed the existing models. (shrink)