Philosophers have established that certain ethically important val- ues are modally robust in the sense that they systematically deliver correlative benefits across a range of counterfactual scenarios. In this paper, we contend that recourse – the systematic process of reversing unfavorable decisions by algorithms and bureaucracies across a range of counterfactual scenarios – is such a modally ro- bust good. In particular, we argue that two essential components of a good life – temporally extended agency and trust – are under- (...) written by recourse. We critique existing approaches to the conceptualization, op- erationalization and implementation of recourse. Based on these criticisms, we suggest a revised approach to recourse and give ex- amples of how it might be implemented – especially for those who are least well off. (shrink)

Emphasizes The Integration Aspects And The Spiritual Foundations Of Music.

Shows that executive integrity is not merely a moral trait but a dynamic process of making empathetic, responsible, and sound decisions. Describes key features of executive integrity including effective social interaction, open dialogue, and responsive leadershipand explains how integrity can be developed and practiced in today's organizations.

In this paper, a fresh method is offered regarding training of particular neural networks. This technique is a combination of the adaptive genetic (AG) and cuckoo search (CS) algorithms, called the AGCS method. The intention of training a particular artificial neural network (ANN) is to obtain the finest weight load. With this protocol, a particular weight is taken into account as feedback, which is optimized by means of the hybrid AGCS protocol. In the beginning, a collection of weights is initialized (...) and the similar miscalculation is discovered. Finally, during training of an ANN, we can easily overcome the training complications involving ANNs and also gain the finest overall performance with training of the ANN. We have implemented the proposed system in MATLAB, and the overall accuracy is about 93%, which is much better than that of the genetic algorithm (86%) and CS (88%) algorithm. (shrink)

Research articles presented in various projects of Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

CSR in India is mandated through Section 135 of the Companies Act (2013), covering the practice and reporting of social responsibility projects. This paper examines India's CSR framework and reports findings on governance, planning, and implementation from a survey of and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Overall findings reveal several positive aspects and inform us of the challenges that companies and NGOs consider essential. First, an overwhelming majority of companies focused on three investment areas: health, education, and the environment. Second, 88% of (...) companies undertook long-term continuing projects, a positive signal from a social development perspective. Third, 68% reported that their CSR strategy was aligned with their core business strategy. Fourth, a significant majority of the companies have established the required structure for policy development, planning, and periodic monitoring from a governance perspective. Finally, findings on NGOs indicate several elements of preparedness; however, the retention of talented employees is a continual challenge. (shrink)

The primary argument against Rachlin's act-versus-pattern analysis of self-control is that it is wrong to think of a temptation as a solitary act while the alternative is conceived of as an element of a pattern. Either both are solitary acts or both are members of patterns, however different the patterns may be in their complexity and abstractness.

In this paper a theoretical framework is proposed for how the brain processes the information necessary for us to achieve the understanding of others that we experience in our social worlds. Our framework attempts to expand several previous approaches to more fully account for the various data on interpersonal understanding and to respond to theoretical critiques in this area. Specifically, we propose that social understanding must be achieved by at least two mechanisms in the brain that are capable of parallel (...) information processing. The first mechanism, based on research into mirror matching systems in the brain, suggests that representations of others are mapped onto an observer's representations of these same schemas in order to understand them. The second mechanism requires semantic analysis of a given social situation in order to understand the actions of others and most likely involves conscious processes. We suggest that experimental correlates of these systems should be dissociable using both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. (shrink)

There is currently great anxiety among literary critics and theorists about literary criticism’s loss of identity, both as an identifiable, coherent discipline with a recognizable set of problems and as a body of authoritative and well-founded convictions about literature and its history. Part of the reason for this anxiety is that everything that was until recently considered relatively unproblematical has now been rendered problematical. The hermeneutic of suspicion emerges as an interpretative strategy, pitting itself against the hermeneutic of belief; radical (...) indeterminacy of meanings challenges the certainty of traditional epistemology which authorized the objectivity of meaning, text, and context; and the whole of the Western metaphysical tradition is “inscribed” in any piece of writing which undermines the traditional notions of canon-formation, evaluation, and responsible criticism. Traditional literary theory assumes literary works to be structures of determinate meaning accessible by objective critical procedures. It is this assumption, and along with it a number of critical practices, which are challenged by the contemporary interest in the indeterminacy of meaning. In deconstruction, the thesis of indeterminacy takes its most radical and thoroughgoing form, so that all modernist critical stances from new Criticism to phenomenological, psychoanalytical, structuralist, marxist, and reader-response criticisms are put into question. This renders the scene of contemporary criticism and its theory highly volatile, since every theoretical claim or critical practice has become vulnerable to the deconstructive critique, even if this critique itself requires some form of certainty to question any critical theory or practice. (shrink)

Histopathological lung cancer segmentation using region of interest is one of the emerging research area in the field of health monitoring system. In this paper, the histopathological images were collected from the database Stanford Tissue Microarray Database (TMAD). After image collection, pre-processing was performed using a normalization technique, which enhances the quality of the histopathological image by eliminating unwanted noise. After pre-processing, segmentation was carried out using the modified kernel-based fuzzy c-means clustering (KFCM) approach along with the edge bridge and (...) fill technique (EBFT). It was a flexible high-level machine learning technique to localize the object in a complex template. The experimental result shows that the proposed approach segments the normal and abnormal cancer regions by means of precision, recall, specificity, accuracy, and Jaccard coefficient. The proposed methodology improved the classification accuracy in lung cancer segmentation up to 2.5–5% compared to the existing methods deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) and diffusion-weighted approach. (shrink)

This monograph deals with the controversy about determinism versus freedom of will. The book is addressed to scholars, especially in the areas of philosophy and psychology, and also to thinking and serious-minded laypersons who are interested in the implications of being human. The book attempts to help the reader understand and resolve the dilemma of determinism. The solution offered by this book has not been previously offered by any other book, even though the literature on this topic is vast. The (...) deterministic position is that all events are effects of previous events and causes of future events, in inexorable cause-effect sequences, which leave no room for intervention of anything outside of the stream of causal relationships, such as free will, thus rendering moral responsibility meaningless. Libertarians believe in freedom of will which is, for them, indispensable for moral responsibility. This controversy can be resolved only by making a clear distinction between two kinds of freedom. In common parlance, freedom means freedom from constraint or compulsion, which can be designated as contra-constraintual freedom. The second meaning of freedom is freedom from causation, which has been referred to as contra-causal freedom, and this is the meaning that is inherent in the concept of freedom of will. If we have contra-causal freedom, we can choose or decide to act irrespective of antecedent conditions including our own past. The distinction between contra-causal freedom and contra-constraintual freedom is the key to the resolution of the controversy between determinism and libertarianism. The absence of contra-causal freedom prevails at the theoretical, conceptual, objective, abstract, or as-is level, whereas contra-constraintual freedom functions at the practical, behavioral, subjective, concrete, or as-if level. All we need for moral responsibility is contra-constraintual freedom, and not contra-causal freedom. At the as-is level, there is neither freedom nor dignity, neither morality nor accountability, and neither purpose nor meaning for human existence. It is only at the as-if level that these terms make any sense at all. In theory there is no choice from alternative courses of action in light of the absence of contra-causal freedom; in practice there is, in direct proportion to contra-constraintual freedom. (shrink)

This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway's (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts (...) are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin. (shrink)

Organizations have increasingly relied on team-based reward systems to boost productivity and foster collaboration. Drawing on the literature on ethics and justice as well as appraisal theories of emotion, we examine how team-based reward systems can have an insidious side effect: They increase the likelihood that employees remain silent when observing a team member engage in unethical behavior. Across four studies adopting different methods, measures, and samples, we found consistent evidence that people are less likely to report (i.e., speak up (...) or provide anonymous feedback about) a team member’s unethical behavior in team-based than in individual-based reward systems. Furthermore, our research reveals that this effect is primarily driven by a decrease in the experience of moral anger, which subsequently leads to a decreased likelihood of reporting unethical behavior when it benefits the team rather than the individual. We do not find support for perceived indirect benefit or envy as alternative explanations, suggesting that the decision to report a team member’s unethical behavior is not driven by calculative and selfish motives, but by moral motives. Finally, we establish that the effect is contingent on the observer and the perpetrator being members of the same team; it dissipates when the observer and the perpetrator are part of different teams. Our work contributes to research on reward systems and business ethics and provides practical implications for human resource practices. (shrink)

The capacity of cells and organisms to respond to external stimuli and to maintain stability in order to survive decreases progressively during ageing. The mitogenic and stimulatory effects of growth factors, hormones and other agents are reduced significantly during cellular ageing. The sensitivity of ageing cells to toxic agents including antibiotics, phorbol esters, radiations and heat shock increases. This failure of homeostasis during cellular ageing does not appear to be due to any quantitative and qualitative defects in the receptor systems. (...) Instead, metabolic defects in the pathways of macromolecular synthesis may be the basis of altered cellular responsiveness during ageing. (shrink)

. The problem of reconstructing digital images from degraded measurements is regarded as a problem of importance in various fields of engineering and imaging science. The main goal of denoising is to restore a noisy image to produce a visually high quality image. In this paper, we propose a novel transform domain technique that uses multispinning for image denoising. The proposed method uses multiple cyclic shifted versions of an image, where each of them would capture more detail information during decomposition. (...) Discrete wavelet transform and contourlet transform in association with multispinning is used. The results are compared with traditional transform and spatial domain techniques. The visual and quantitative evaluation suggests that the proposed method yields better results. (shrink)

Standalone corporate social responsibility reports vary considerably in the content of information released due to their voluntary nature. In this study, we develop a disclosure score based on the tone, readability, length, and the numerical and horizon content of CSR report narratives, and examine the relationship between the CSR disclosure scores and analyst forecasts. We find that CSR reporters with high disclosure scores are associated with more accurate forecasts, whereas low score CSR reporters are not associated with more accurate forecasts (...) than firms who do not issue CSR reports. The findings are robust to controlling for firm characteristics including CSR activity ratings and financial narratives. The findings are driven by experienced CSR reporters rather than first-time CSR reporters. Together, our findings suggest that the content of CSR reports helps to improve analyst forecast accuracy, and this relationship is more pronounced for CSR reports with more substantial content. (shrink)

Child welfare clinics established in a rural Jamaican community for research purposes are described. These special clinics were able to devote more resources to the care of their children than is usual, yet the growth and health of these children were very similar to those in another group to whom this service was not available and who attended routine government welfare clinics only infrequently.

The World Social Forum —a global gathering of social movements and a process of global change—has come to signify the global justice movements. Since its inception in 2001 in Brazil it has traveled across the Global South, with the 2016 WSF in Montreal. As the WSF has traveled across the world, it has reflected the particular geographies and histories of movement politics in each place. Yet everywhere it has demonstrated what I have called the gendered geographies of struggle. By gendered (...) geographies I mean the epistemic, spatial, and praxis divisions along gender lines evident in the marginalizing of feminist insights about the global political economy and global justice; low representation of women activists in public plenaries and private decision-making structures; and outsourcing of gender issues to women’s activists and movements. Without addressing these gendered geographies, I argue, there can be no global justice. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial, and recent global forces, as well as in conversation with discourses and (...) practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and draws upon local as well as transnational feminist theories and methodologies to enable sustainable collaborations for social and gender justice in the region. Thus, rather than reproducing the North/south binaries with its attendant erasures SANGAT seeks to go beyond them to develop place-based yet connected ‘solidarities of epistemologies’ and praxis. (shrink)

On classic Hindu Yoga philosophy; a study.