This paper examines the role of mutual funds in corporate social responsibility. Using a fund-level, holdings-based CSR score, we find that CSR-friendly mutual funds improve firms’ CSR standings. This effect is more pronounced for firms with higher mutual fund ownership and stronger corporate governance. We further show that while CSR-friendly mutual funds have influence on almost all CSR categories, they focus on increasing CSR strengths rather than reducing CSR concerns. We also discover that CSR-friendly funds are more likely to vote (...) in favor of CSR proposals, and that firms owned by CSR-friendly funds are more likely to link their CEO compensation to CSR outcomes. These results suggest that actively managed mutual funds, which were previously thought to be indifferent to social and ethical issues, play a significant role in corporate social outcomes of the firms they invest in. (shrink)

This study examines the endogenous relation between corporate social responsibility and tax avoidance by focusing on a common strategy of corporate tax avoidance, i.e., establishing entities in offshore tax havens. Using hand-collected data on a sample of U.S. firms, we find that firms’ CSR ratings increase substantially in the two years after they first open tax haven affiliates. We provide evidence by using the controlled foreign corporations look-through rule enacted by Congress in 2006 that facilitates offshore profit shifting. We find (...) that firms that are affected by the CFC legislation increase their CSR practices in response. Overall, our results are consistent with the risk management theory, which argues that firms hedge against the potential negative consequences of aggressive tax avoidance practices through an increase in positive CSR activities. (shrink)

While ethics in publishing has been increasingly debated, there seems to be a lack of a theoretical framework for making sense of existing rules of behavior as well as for designing, managing and enforcing such rules. This letter argues that systems-oriented disciplines, such as complexity science and human factors, offer insights into new ways of dealing with ethics in publishing. Some examples of insights are presented. Also, a call is made for empirical studies that unveil the context and details of (...) both retracted papers and the process of writing and publishing academic papers. This is expected to shed light on the complexity of the publication system as well as to support the development of a just culture, in which all participants are accountable. (shrink)

The value and significance of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on Obedience to Authority have been the subject of a controversy that we propose to analyze in the light of the role played by the reference to cybernetics Milgram introduced in his 1974 work. This reference is part of the series of theoretical analyses proposed by Milgram in the core of his book Obedience to Authority (1974). It constitutes the central basis for the formulation of the concept of the “agentic state”. And (...) yet, only a few direct analyses have been performed on this reference in the framework of studies of Milgram’s work. It nevertheless plays a central role in several ways. Firstly, it provides Milgram with a consistent and generalizing framework which allows him to integrate certain elements, which could otherwise have appeared to diverge from the general explanation proposed, into a unified and apparently consistent interpretation. Secondly, the specific use of this reference allows him to strengthen his obedience paradigm as a general social human behavioral trend. Indeed, the way Milgram presents this cybernetic paradigm is not neutral in that he opts for a paradigm promoting the vertical and hierarchical. Our work is twofold. Firstly, we analyze the way Milgram’s successive presentations of his experiment translates into a radicalization and a unification of the paradigm of obedience to authority by lateralizing explanatory elements, even though such elements were considered by Milgram. Secondly, we highlight why the reference to cybernetics allows for this radicalization and provides his work with a theoretical basis while at the same time discussing certain limits and problems with this reference. (shrink)

The Lord of the Fourteen worlds is manifest here. Questioner: For whom is the title 'Dada Bhagwan' used? Dadashri: For 'Dada Bhagwan.' Not for me. I am a 'Gnani Purush A. M. Patel.' 'Dada Bhagwan' is the Lord of the fourteen worlds. He dwells within you also, but He has not awakened yet, he remains unmanifested. Here within me, He is fully awakened and manifest. He is capable of awakening the Lord within you.

Improvements in the health capital of citizens are central to the development of countries. By exploiting steep decreases in antiretroviral drug prices and the subsequent increases in antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage, we test whether the resulting improvements in the health of the population are associated with the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity and whether entrepreneurial activity strengthens the relationship between ART coverage and a country’s development. Drawing on a sample of 87 low- and middle-income countries (2006–2019), we find that a 1% (...) increase in ART coverage is associated with a 1.5% increase in the number of newly registered limited liability firms; however, there is no significant relationship with (male or female) self-employment. Higher ART coverage is particularly associated with development—as proxied by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and the Human Development Index—in countries with low levels of new business formation and high proportions of self-employment. (shrink)

This book is the first to bring together an interdisciplinary collection of essays on surrogacy and egg donation from three socially, legally and culturally distinct countries - India, Israel and Germany. It presents contributions from experts in the field of social and cultural sciences, bioethics, law as well as psychology and provides critical-reflective comparative analysis of the socio-ethical factors shaping surrogacy and egg donation practices across these three countries. This book highlights the importance of a comparative perspective to ‘make sense’ (...) of controversies and transitions in this highly contested area of artificial reproductive technologies. It demonstrates how local developments cannot be isolated from global events and vice versa. Therefore, this volume can be used as a standard reference for anyone seeking to understand surrogacy and egg donation from a macro-perspective in the next decade. (shrink)

Theorists have found it difficult to reconcile the unity of inner speech as a mental state kind with the diversity of its manifestations. I argue that existing views concerning the content of inner speech fail to accommodate both of these features because they mistakenly assume that its content is to be found in the ‘speech processing hierarchy’, which includes semantic, syntactic, phonemic, phonetic, and articulatory levels. Upon rejecting this assumption, I offer a position on which the content of inner speech (...) is determined by voice processing, of which speech processing is but one component. The resulting view does justice to the idea that inner speech is a motley assortment of episodes that nevertheless form a kind. (shrink)

“Learning To Live Together” (LTLT) has been proposed as one of the four UN pillars of education. Several Indian educationists including Aurobindo, Gandhi, Krishnamurti, and Tagore have emphasized equivalents like ‘education of the heart’ and founded schools that have pursued these goals, some for more than a century. This paper explores teachers’ perspectives on conflict, satyagraha/dissent, and dialogue and their role in education for LTLT. The paper draws upon a three year-long, multiple-embedded case-study that studied 14 teachers at five Indian (...) schools founded or inspired by the educationists through ethnographic observations and interviews. The paper finds that LTLT should be perceived as a form of active harmony, which includes disagreements, dissent, and conflicts. The findings suggest that teachers differentiated conflicts from violence, perceived disagreements and conflicts as forms of pluralism, and created space for voicing dissent and resolving conflicts. They drew on dialogue, empathetic understanding, democratic decision-making, and social action to leverage dissent as a tool for building an equitable and engaged community. (shrink)

As a neo-liberal economy, India has become one of the new health tourism destinations, with commercial gestational surrogacy as an expanding market. Yet the Indian Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill has been pending for five years, and the guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research are somewhat vague and contradictory, resulting in self-regulated practices of fertility clinics. This paper broadly looks at clinical ethics in reproduction in the practice of surrogacy and decision-making in various procedures. Through empirical research in (...) New Delhi, the capital of India, from December 2011 to November 2012, issues of decision-making on embryo transfer, fetal reduction, and mode of delivery were identified. Interviews were carried out with doctors in eighteen ART clinics, agents from four agencies, and fourteen surrogates. In aiming to fulfil the commissioning parents’ demands, doctors were willing to go to the greatest extent possible in their medical practice. Autonomy and decision-making regarding choice of the number of embryos to transfer and the mode of delivery lay neither with commissioning parents nor surrogate mothers but mostly with doctors. In order to ensure higher success rates, surrogates faced the risk of multiple pregnancy and fetal reduction with little information regarding the risks involved. In the globalized market of commercial surrogacy in India, and with clinics compromising on ethics, there is an urgent need for formulation of regulative law for the clinical practice and maintenance of principles of reproductive ethics in order to ensure that the interests of surrogate mothers are safeguarded. (shrink)

The online processing of both music and language involves making predictions about upcoming material, but the relationship between prediction in these two domains is not well understood. Electrophysiological methods for studying individual differences in prediction in language processing have opened the door to new questions. Specifically, we ask whether individuals with musical training predict upcoming linguistic material more strongly and/or more accurately than non-musicians. We propose two reasons why prediction in these two domains might be linked: Musicians may have greater (...) verbal short-term/working memory; music may specifically reward predictions based on hierarchical structure. We provide suggestions as to how to expand upon recent work on individual differences in language processing to test these hypotheses. (shrink)

The popularity of ‘food sovereignty’ to cover a range of positions, interventions, and struggles within the food system is testament, above all, to the term’s adaptability. Food sovereignty is centrally, though not exclusively, about groups of people making their own decisions about the food system—it is a way of talking about a theoretically-informed food systems practice. Since people are different, we should expect decisions about food sovereignty to be different in different contexts, albeit consonant with a core set of principles (...) (including women’s rights, a shared opposition to genetically modified crops, and a demand for agriculture to be removed from current international trade agreements). In this paper we look at the analytical points of friction in applying ideas of food sovereignty within the context of Indigenous struggles in North America. This, we argue, helps to clarify one of the central themes in food sovereignty: that it is a continuation of anti-colonial struggles, even in post-colonial contexts. Such an examination has dividends both for scholars of food sovereignty and for those of Indigenous politics: by helping to problematize notions of food sovereignty and postcoloniality, but also by posing pointed questions around gender for Indigenous struggles. (shrink)

There are a number of conflicting accounts of thought insertion, the delusion that the thoughts of another are inserted into one’s own mind. These accounts share the common assumption of realism: that the subject of thought insertion has a thought corresponding to the description of her thought insertion episode. I challenge the assumption by arguing for an anti-realist treatment of first-person reports of thought insertion. I then offer an alternative account, simulationism, according to which sufferers merely simulate having a thought (...) inserted into their heads. By rejecting realism, the paper undermines a widespread explanatory framework that unites otherwise competing cognitive models of thought insertion. (shrink)

The book called "Philosophy of the Gita," by Prof. Ramesh N. Patel, is a striking philosophical study of the celebrated Sanskrit text called the Bhagavad-gita which is known simply as the Gita. Patel's book proposes and develops a new hermeneutic called archaic coherentism and applies it to the Gita to distill and decode a comprehensive metaphysic and philosophy of action embedded in the text. A new conceptual translation of the Sanskrit text brings out this philosophy in clear detail. (...) Philosophical essays preceding the translation include analysis of the often-neglected background of war and morality, discussion of action, freedom and self-identity, delineation of a new synoptic philosophy of Hinduism, and unearthing of a strikingly original and innovative metaphysics of existence, energy and triple individuation. The translation of the Gita is followed by two critical essays called "Emerging Philosophy" and "Coherence and Exegesis." Patel's translation focuses on the conceptual rendering of every term, with no Sanskrit word left untranslated, even including the tough ones like guna and Brahman. The essay called "Emerging Philosophy" does away with all Sanskrit terms, to facilitate the understanding of the newly decoded Gita's philosophy as a whole. The essay called "Coherence and Exegesis" critically examines several scholarly standpoints on the Gita with Patel's sound philosophical reasoning. The innovative philosophy of the Gita that emerges through the book's analysis includes an original theory of individuation revealing a Platonic-type Form of individuation evolving at three levels: essential, actional and physical. The book is written for professional philosophers and Sanskritist Indologists. It generally assumes familiarity with logical problems of philosophy and with Sanskrit terms in Indian philosophy. The author has a rare dual training in Sanskrit and philosophy. He skillfully exploits both in this book to achieve an unusual outcome that should be of great interest and challenge to both professional philosophers as well as scholars of Indology. (shrink)

In this conceptual article, we look at the impact of culture on ethical decision making from a Douglasian Cultural Theory (CT) perspective. We aim to show how CT can be used to explain the diversity and dynamicity of ethical beliefs and behaviours found in every social system, be it a corporation, a nation or even an individual. We introduce CT in the context of ethical decision making and then use it to discuss examples of business ethics in the Indian business (...) context. We argue that the use of CT allows for a theoretically more sophisticated treatment of culture in ethical decision making and thus the avoidance of some common problems with existing cross-cultural studies of business ethics. In our discussion, we raise questions about the compatibility between management systems and processes created in one context and ethical behaviours in another. (shrink)

Emotion plays a crucial role, both in general human experience and in psychiatric illnesses. Despite the importance of emotion, the relative lack of objective methodologies to scientifically studying emotional phenomena limits our current understanding and thereby calls for the development of novel methodologies, such us the study of illustrative animal models. Analysis of Drosophila and other insects has unlocked new opportunities to elucidate the behavioral phenotypes of fundamentally emotional phenomena. Here we propose an integrative model of basic emotions based on (...) observations of this animal model. The basic emotions are internal states that are modulated by neuromodulators, and these internal states are externally expressed as certain stereotypical behaviors, such as instinct, which is proposed as ancient mechanisms of survival. There are four kinds of basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger, which are differentially associated with three core affects: reward (happiness), punishment (sadness), and stress (fear and anger). These core affects are analogous to the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) in that they are combined in various proportions to result in more complex “higher order” emotions, such as love and aesthetic emotion. We refer to our proposed model of emotions as called the “ Three Primary Color Model of Basic Emotions.”. (shrink)

The claim that perfect hallucination is introspectively indistinguishable from perception has been a centrepiece of philosophical theorizing about sense experience. The most common interpretation of the indistinguishability claim is modal: that it is impossible to distinguish perfect hallucination from perception through introspection alone. I run through various models of introspection and show that none of them can accommodate the modal interpretation. Rejecting the modal interpretation opens up two alternative interpretations of the indistinguishability claim. According to the generic interpretation, hallucination is (...) indistinguishable from perception despite the existence of possible exceptions, while according to the actuality interpretation, the indistinguishability of hallucination from perception consists in the actual failure to distinguish hallucination from perception. These alternative understandings of the indistinguishability claim have a number of significant implications for the problem of perception, including the rejection of perfect hallucination and illusion in favour of our ordinary, non-philosophical concepts of these states. (shrink)

This article describes a representation-based framework of distributed cognition. This framework considers distributed cognition as a cognitive system whose structures and processes are distributed between internal and external representations, across a group of individuals, and across space and time. The major issue for distributed research, under this framework, are the distribution, transformation, and propagation of information across the components of the distributed cognitive system and how they affect the performance of the system as a whole. To demonstrate the value of (...) this representation-based approach, the framework was used to describe and explain an important, challenging, and controversial issue — the concept of affordance. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on empirical work conducted to open up algorithmic interpretability and transparency. In recent years, significant concerns have arisen regarding the increasing pervasiveness of algorithms and the impact of automated decision-making in our lives. Particularly problematic is the lack of transparency surrounding the development of these algorithmic systems and their use. It is often suggested that to make algorithms more fair, they should be made more transparent, but exactly how this can be (...) achieved remains unclear. Design/methodology/approach An empirical study was conducted to begin unpacking issues around algorithmic interpretability and transparency. The study involved discussion-based experiments centred around a limited resource allocation scenario which required participants to select their most and least preferred algorithms in a particular context. In addition to collecting quantitative data about preferences, qualitative data captured participants’ expressed reasoning behind their selections. Findings Even when provided with the same information about the scenario, participants made different algorithm preference selections and rationalised their selections differently. The study results revealed diversity in participant responses but consistency in the emphasis they placed on normative concerns and the importance of context when accounting for their selections. The issues raised by participants as important to their selections resonate closely with values that have come to the fore in current debates over algorithm prevalence. Originality/value This work developed a novel empirical approach that demonstrates the value in pursuing algorithmic interpretability and transparency while also highlighting the complexities surrounding their accomplishment. (shrink)

Prior research suggests that the media plays an important information intermediary role in capital markets. We investigate the role of the media in influencing firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility activities. Using a large sample of 4396 unique firms from 42 countries over the period 2003–2012, we find strong evidence that firms engage in more CSR activities if located in countries where the media has more freedom. This relation is robust to using various proxies for media freedom, an alternative source (...) of CSR data, and to applying the instrumental variables approach to address endogeneity. In additional analyses, we find that the positive relation between media freedom and CSR engagement is stronger for better governed firms and for larger firms. Since the media have the ability to impact reputational capital, we conclude that media freedom affects firms’ incentives to engage in costly CSR activities. (shrink)

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

Drawing on evolutionary realism as a guiding framework and using relevant theoretical bases at macro-, meso-, and micro- levels, we investigate the relative variance explained by each level on selection and retention of Benefit Corporations. Based on a sample of 5052 observations of certified B-Corps and 1403 observations of decertified B-Corps, relative to the country and industry differences, firm-level differences explain most of the variance in non-economic performance, especially for workers and community impact areas. Industry-level differences explain small differences in (...) customers and environmental performance while country differences do not explain meaningful performance differences. The results also show a similar pattern in relative effects for decertified B-Corps. Our findings point to the value of disaggregating the relative effects of multilevel factors in further understanding drivers of non-economic performance and the decertification of B-Corps. (shrink)

We present a setting in which the search for a proof of B or a refutation of B can be carried out simultaneously: in contrast, the usual approach in automated deduction views proving B or proving ¬B as two, possibly unrelated, activities. Our approach to proof and refutation is described as a two-player game in which each player follows the same rules. A winning strategy translates to a proof of the formula and a counter-winning strategy translates to a refutation of (...) the formula. The game is described for multiplicative and additive linear logic . A game theoretic treatment of the multiplicative connectives is intricate and our approach to it involves two important ingredients. First, labeled graph structures are used to represent positions in a game and, second, the game playing must deal with the failure of a given player and with an appropriate resumption of play. This latter ingredient accounts for the fact that neither player might win. (shrink)

Answering important public health questions often requires collection of sensitive information about individuals. For example, our understanding of how HIV is transmitted and how to prevent it only came about with people's willingness to share information about their sexual and drug-using behaviors. Given the scientific need for sensitive, personal information, researchers have a corresponding ethical and legal obligation to maintain the confidentiality of data they collect and typically promise in consent forms to restrict access to it and not to publish (...) identifying data.The interests of others, however, can threaten researchers' promises of confidentiality when legal demands are made to access research data. In some cases, the subject of the litigation is tightly connected to the research questions, and litigants' interest in the data is not surprising. Researchers conducting studies on tobacco or occupational or other chemical exposures, for example, are relatively frequent targets of subpoenas. (shrink)

Female crested gibbons (genus Nomascus) perform conspicuous sequences of twitching movements involving the rump and extremities. However, these dances have attracted little scientific attention and their structure and meaning remain largely obscure. Here we analyse close-range video recordings of captive crested gibbons, extracting descriptions of dance in four species (N. annamensis, N. gabriellae, N. leucogenys and N. siki). In addition, we report results from a survey amongst relevant professionals clarifying behavioural contexts of dance in captive and wild crested gibbons. Our (...) results demonstrate that dances in Nomascus represent a common and intentional form of visual communication restricted to sexually mature females. Whilst primarily used as a proceptive signal to solicit copulation, dances occur in a wide range of contexts related to arousal and/or frustration in captivity. A linguistically informed view of this sequential behaviour demonstrates that movement within dances is organized in groups and follows an isochronous rhythm — patterns not described for visual displays in other non-human primates. We argue that applying the concept of dance to gibbons allows us to expand our understanding of communication in non-human primates and to develop hypotheses on the rules and regularities characterising it. We propose that crested gibbon dances likely evolved from less elaborate rhythmic proceptive signals, similar to those found in siamangs. Although dance displays in humans and crested gibbons share a number of key characteristics, they cannot be assumed to be homologous. Nevertheless, gibbon dances represent a striking model behaviour to investigate the use of complex gestural signals in hominoid primates. (shrink)

Background It is widely acknowledged that there is a global divide on health care and health research known as the 10/90 divide. Methods A retrospective survey of articles published in the BMJ, Lancet, NEJM, Annals of Internal Medicine & JAMA in a calendar year to examine the contribution of the developing world to medical literature. We categorized countries into four regions: UK, USA, Other Euro-American countries (OEAC) and (RoW). OEAC were European countries other than the UK but including Australia, New (...) Zealand and Canada. RoW comprised all other countries. Results The average contribution of the RoW to the research literature in the five journals was 6.5%. In the two British journals 7.6% of the articles were from the RoW; in the three American journals 4.8% of articles were from RoW. The highest proportion of papers from the RoW was in the Lancet (12%). An analysis of the authorship of 151 articles from RoW showed that 104 (68.9%) involved authorship with developed countries in Europe or North America. There were 15 original papers in these journals with data from RoW but without any authors from RoW. Conclusions There is a marked under-representation of countries in high-impact general medical journals. The ethical implications of this inequity and ways of reducing it are discussed. (shrink)

Adaptive immunity provides the unique ability to respond to a nearly infinite range of antigenic determinants. Given the inherent plasticity of the adaptive immune system, a series of tolerance mechanisms exist to reduce reactivity toward self. While this reduces the probability of autoimmunity, it also creates an important gap in adaptive immunity: the ability to recognize microbes that look like self. As a variety of microbes decorate themselves in self‐like carbohydrate antigens and tolerance reduces the ability of adaptive immunity to (...) react with self‐like structures, protection against molecular mimicry likely resides within the innate arm of immunity. In this review, we will explore the potential consequences of microbial molecular mimicry, including factors within innate immunity that appear to specifically target microbes expressing self‐like antigens, and therefore provide protection against molecular mimicry. (shrink)

Although in Drosophila pair‐rule genes play crucial roles in the genetic hierarchy that subdivides the embryo into segments, the extent to which pair‐rule patterning is utilized by different arthropods and other segmented phyla is unknown. Recent data of Dearden et al.1 and Henry et al.,2 however, hint that a pair‐rule mechanism might play a role in the segmentation process of basal arthropods and vertebrates. BioEssays 25:425–429, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This chapter gives a brief overview of the composition of the volume and explains why it is important to undertake a detailed scholarly analysis and comparison of the following ethico-legal regimes of surrogacy and egg donation: the permissive-unregulated but transitory regime of India; the permissive regime of Israel, although highly regulated by professional, medical and religious norms, and the extremely restrictive regime of Germany, being legally permeable for particular forms of cross-border reproductive practice despite the non-permissive national law. It uses (...) an interdisciplinary lens to examine how the ethical, social, legal and cultural issues are interwoven in each regime. Moreover, we highlight the importance of a comparative analysis to understand how local developments cannot be isolated from each other, but deeply influence each other through transnational markets, modern media and the transfer of knowledge, people and body parts. (shrink)

Patients with advanced Alzheimer's disease experience cognitive impairment and physical disabilities in daily life. Currently, there are no treatments available to slow down the course of the disease, and limited treatments exist only to treat symptoms. However, deep brain stimulation of the nucleus basalis of Meynert has been reported to improve cognitive function in individuals with AD. Here, we report the effects of NBM-DBS on cognitive function in a subject with severe AD. An 80-year-old male with severe AD underwent surgery (...) for bilateral NBM-DBS electrode placement. After 10 weeks of stimulation, Mini-Mental State Examination assessment improved from a score of 5 to 9 points, and assessment using the Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale–Cognitive Subscale showed a marked reduction in total score from 43 to 33 points, suggesting cognitive benefits from NBM-DBS. The patient's postoperative course was complicated by a subdural effusion that occurred several days after surgery, with complete recovery. Interestingly, the subject also displayed abnormal thermoregulation with stimulation initiation and stimulation parameter modifications. NBM-DBS may serve as a potential therapy for severe AD patients.Clinical Trial Registration: ChiCTR1900022324. (shrink)