This paper seeks to understand the treatment effect of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on opioid prescription rates. Using county-level panel data on all opioid prescriptions in the U.S. between 2006 and 2015, we investigate whether state interventions like PDMPs have heterogeneous treatment effects at the sub-state level, based on regional and temporal variations in policy design, extent of urbanization, race, and income. Our models comprehensively control for a set of county and time fixed effects, countyspecific and time-varying demographic controls, potentially (...) endogenous time-series trends in prescription rates, and other state-level opioid interventions such as Naloxone Access and Good Samaritan laws, Medicaid expansion, and the provision of Methadone Assistance Treatment. We find that PDMPs are only effective in reducing prescription rates if they obligate doctors to check for patients' history prior to filling out a prescription, but the frequency at which a state requires its PDMP to be updated is irrelevant to its effectiveness. Moreover, the significant treatment effects of PDMPs are almost exclusively driven by urban and predominantly white counties, with the relatively more affluent regions showing greater responsiveness than their less affluent counterparts. (shrink)

An attempt has been made to find some valuable information for particle detection with the help of Solid State Nuclear Track Detectors. The detector is characterized by a critical value of the energy-loss rate by the charged particle. Only those charged particles which give up energy exceeding the critical value alone can produce teachable tracks. The detection thresholds of nuclear track detectors can be specified in terms of their energy loss rates. The findings have been found within a good agreement (...) with the other works. (shrink)

A new class of polynomials investigates the numerical solution of the fractional pantograph delay ordinary differential equations. These polynomials are equipped with an auxiliary unknown parameter a, which is obtained using the collocation and least-squares methods. In this study, the numerical solution of the fractional pantograph delay differential equation is displayed in the truncated series form. The upper bound of the solution as well as the error analysis and the rate of convergence theorem are also investigated in this study. In (...) five examples, the numerical results of the present method have been compared with other methods. For the first time, a -polynomials are used in this study to numerically solve delay equations, and accurate approximations have been displayed. (shrink)

Askeri bir darbeyle iktidara gelen Cemal Abdülnasır, hükümeti devraldıktan sonra sosyalizmle karışık Arap milliyetçiliği ideolojisini benimsedi. Nasır'ın Arap milliyetçiliğini ulusal sınırların ötesine etkili bir şekilde yayabilmesi için güçlü siyasi propaganda araçlarına sahip olması gerekiyordu. Bu anlamda Nasır döneminde, radyo yayınları ve müzik besteleri çok etkili propaganda araçları olarak ortaya çıktı ve Nasır mali ve maddi kaynaklara önemli yatırımlar yapılmasını teşvik etti. Özellikle de Ümmü Gülsüm'ün ses yeteneği, Nasır'ın Arap milliyetçiliğini yayma çabalarını desteklemede öne çıktı ve Ümmü Gülsüm’ün sesi, bu alanda (...) etkin ve ses yetenekleri kullanılan diğer sanatçıların etkisini geride bıraktı. Bu makale, 1950’ler ve 1960’lar boyunca Nasır’ın Arap milliyetçiliğini Ortadoğu’da yayma noktasında Ümmü Gülsüm'ün sesini ve Arapların Sesi Radyosu’nu yumuşak güç unsuru olarak kullandığını iddia etmektedir. Bu kapsamda çalışma, Ümmü Gülsüm'ün Nasırcı Arap milliyetçiliğinin yayılmasına yaptığı katkının çeşitli boyutlarını beş temel hususa odaklanarak incelemektedir. İlk olarak, yumuşak gücün siyasi idealleri yaymak ve ortak bir kimlik duygusu geliştirmek için bir araç olarak kullanımını araştırmaktadır. İkinci olarak, Nasır tipi milliyetçiliğin ve radyo yayınlarının bu süreçteki rolünü irdelemektedir. Üçüncüsü, radyonun Nasır'ı desteklemek için nasıl bir siyasi propaganda aracı olduğunu araştırmaktadır. Dördüncü olarak, Ümmü Gülsüm'ün Nasırcı Arap milliyetçiliğini teşvik etmedeki araçsal rolünü analiz etmektedir. Son olarak, Ümmü Gülsüm'ün ses yeteneğinin Arap dünyasında Nasırcı milliyetçiliğin yayılması üzerindeki etkisini değerlendirmektedir. (shrink)

Cultural Writing. "What was Orpheus dying to tell his wife, Eurydice? What was Judy dying to tell her beloved, Scottie, in Hitchcock's Vertigo? What were the previous one-night wives of King Shahrayar dying to tell Shahrazad? What was the Christian God "dying" to tell us? What were the faces of the candidates in the 2000 parliamentary election in Lebanon "dying" to tell voters and nonvoters alike? While writing (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film and Undying Love, or (...) Love Dies, I, a mortal to death, was dying to tell these books' readers and myself about diegetic silence-over, which produces a dead stop and reveals the occasional natural immobilization of the living as merely a variety of movement; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner, inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?"; as well as a significant number of other anomalies"--Jalal Toufic. "Resurrection through simulation-an end time fantasy in real time. The graves open...the dead walk...Toufic is a sort of postructuralist spiritualist, a critical medium for the peculiar specters that haunt the society of the spectacle." Ben Lerner "Jalal Toufic is an amazing writer. He documents the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse turning the trap of what can't be named' into a true paradise." Richard Forema". (shrink)

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a deeply enigmatic psychiatric condition associated with immense suffering worldwide. Efficacious therapies for OCD, like exposure and response prevention (ERP) are sometimes poorly tolerated by patients. As many as 25 percent of patients refuse to initiate ERP mainly because they are too anxious to follow exposure procedures. Accordingly, we proposed a simple and tolerable (immersive yet indirect) low-cost technique for treating OCD that we call “multisensory stimulation therapy.” This method involves contaminating a rubber hand during the (...) so-called “rubber hand illusion” (RHI) in which tactile sensations may be perceived as arising from a fake hand. Notably, Jalal and Ramachandran (2015), showed that such fake hand contamination during the RHI provokes powerful disgust reactions in healthy volunteers. In the current study, we explored the therapeutic potential of this novel approach. OCD patients (n = 29) watched as their hidden real hand was being stroked together with a visible fake hand; either synchronously (inducing the RHI) (i.e., the experimental condition; n = 16) or asynchronously (i.e., the control condition; n = 13). After 5 minutes of tactile stimulation, the rubber hand was contaminated with fake feces, simulating conventional exposure therapy. Intriguingly, results suggested sensory assimilation of contamination sensations into the body image via the RHI: patients undergoing synchronous stimulation did not report greater contamination sensations when the fake hand was initially contaminated relative to asynchronous stroking. But contrary to expectations, they did so after the rubber hand had been contaminated for 5 minutes; as assessed via disgust facial expressions (a secondary outcome) and in vivo exposure (upon discontinuing the illusion). Further to our surprise, synchronous and asynchronous stroking induced an equally vivid and fast emerging illusion, which helps explain why both conditions initially (5 minutes after initiating tactile stimulation) provoked contamination reactions of equal magnitude. This study is the first to suggest heightened malleability of body image in OCD. Importantly, it may pave the way for a tolerable technique for the treatment of OCD—highly suitable for poorly resourced and emergency settings, including low-income and developing countries with minimal access to high-tech solutions like virtual reality. (shrink)

Statistics show that in academic, as well as the conservative part of philosophical society of contemporary Iran, the considerable part of papers, theses and research projects are devoted to compar...

La quatrième de couverture indique : "Cet ouvrage analyse le rapport de Derrida à Levinas. Il analyse ce que la déconstruction doit à la doctrine lévinassienne de l'éthique comme philosophie première : la critique de l'ontologie à travers la notion de trace, la déconstruction de la métaphysique de la présence et la primauté du thème de l'altérité événementielle. Cet ouvrage rejette en revanche l'idée selon laquelle la destinée de la Déconstruction pourrait s'expliquer par les principes de l'éthique lévinassienne. Il montre (...) ainsi la spécificité de la pensée de Derrida par rapport à la philosophie de Levinas. Spécificité que nous préparerons à lire le texte de Derrida en 1980 "En ce moment même de cet ouvrage me voici", où Derrida propose une lecture déconstructive de l'oeuvre de Levinas. Pour accéder à ce texte, nous proposerons ce que nous pensons être la théorie de la Déconstruction, en y privilégiant la priorité du politique sur l'éthique. Selon ce privilège, nous proposerons une lecture de l'oeuvre de Derrida en essayant de montrer la continuité de cette oeuvre et, donc, de prouver l'invadilité de l'hypothèse de tournant dans la déconstruction, par laquelle on a coutume d'expliquer l'apparition tardive des thèmes politiques dans la pensée de Derrida. Tournant que les commentateurs expliquent par un repositionnement de la part de Derrida vis-à-vis de Levinas après ces critiques en 1964 dans "Violence et métaphysique". (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

Images are an important source of data and information in the agricultural sciences. The use of image-processing techniques has outstanding implications for the analysis of agricultural operations. Fruit and vegetable classification is one of the major applications that can be utilized in supermarkets to automatically detect the kinds of fruits or vegetables purchased by customers and to determine the appropriate price for the produce. Training on-site is the underlying prerequisite for this type of arrangement, which is generally caused by the (...) users having little or no expert knowledge. We explored various methods used in addressing fruit and vegetable classification and in recognizing fruit disease problems. We surveyed image-processing approaches used for fruit disease detection, segmentation and classification. We also compared the performance of state-of-the-art methods under two scenarios, i.e., fruit and vegetable classification and fruit disease classification. The methods surveyed in this paper are able to distinguish among different kinds of fruits and their diseases that are very alike in color and texture. (shrink)

This article probes the link between anti-colonial nationalist thought and a theory of jihad in early twentieth-century India. An emotive affinity to the ummah was never a barrier to Muslims identifying with patriotic sentiments in their own homelands. It was in the context of the aggressive expansion of European power and the ensuing erosion of Muslim sovereignty that the classical doctrine of jihad was refashioned to legitimize modern anti-colonial struggles. The focus of this essay is on the thought and politics (...) of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. A major theoretician of Islamic law and ethics, Azad was the most prominent Muslim leader of the Indian National Congress in pre-independence India. He is best remembered in retrospectively constructed statist narratives as a , who served as education minister in Jawaharlal Nehru's post-independence cabinet. Yet during the decade of the First World War he was perhaps the most celebrated theorist of a trans-national jihad. (shrink)

Whitehead’s understanding of efficient causation is developed in reaction against the prevailing worldview of his scientific and philosophical predecessors’ material abstraction, bodily sensationalism, subject-object bifurcation, and partial subjectivism. Whitehead believed these ideas precluded the development of any satisfactory account of causal relation and connectivity. His response is to offer a forensic account of the nature of subjective experience within which causal efficacy could be accommodated. Yet Whitehead’s position has its own problems. In response, this article argues for a primordial basis (...) to causal connectivity and for understanding physical causation in terms of conceptual realization. (shrink)

John Milbank’s theology argues for a return to the participatory ontology of the pre-moderns in which actuality is understood as rooted in intimate relation to the divine. He rejects modernity’s notion that finite reality can be understood as occupying its own space independent of God. In this context he develops the notion of finite “making” as coincident with the finite realization of the divine. This paper develops how the notion of “coincidence” can be applied to Whitehead’s thought, allowing for an (...) identification of God with creativity and finite “making,” seeking to provide a more theologically satisfying account of God’s relation to creativity. (shrink)

John Milbank contends that modernity's attempt to establish an autonomous and secular realm for finite reality derives from a theological error originating primarily in the thought of Duns Scotus. Here both divine and finite reality share in a transcendental univocal Being that understands the divine as merely an extrinsic presence. Addressing this error, Milbank seeks to return to a participatory orthodoxy. This article will argue that in such a return Milbank qualifies in important ways the classical understanding of God's relation (...) to creation and the divine attributes, allowing for a panentheist reading of his work that is both asymmetrical and dipolar in character. (shrink)

In establishing unexpected cross-connections between physics, the theory of perception, and logic, Hyder also makes a valuable contribution to the history of ...

On rencontre en consultation en cmpp ou en pédopsychiatrie des enfants qui, dès la crèche, inquiètent leur environnement du fait de conduites témoignant souvent de traumas interactifs qui sidèrent toute tentative d’élaboration et complexifient tous les projets de soin. Pour ces enfants pour qui l’élaboration en consultation de type classique est difficilement accessible, il s’agit de travailler autour des liens parents/enfants les problématiques qui renvoient aux premières expériences d’attachement et d’appropriation subjective. À partir d’une consultation parents/enfant avec une petite fille (...) de 3 ans, les auteurs, psychologues cliniciens, mettent en perspective ce travail où il est question de cheminer avec les parents et l’enfant pour progressivement scénariser et historiciser les recouvrements traumatiques. Il devient possible alors de se figurer un vécu jusqu’alors informe ouvrant petit à petit la voie à une symbolisation et donc à des changements dans les liens parents/enfant. (shrink)

On rencontre en consultation en cmpp ou en pédopsychiatrie des enfants qui, dès la crèche, inquiètent leur environnement du fait de conduites témoignant souvent de traumas interactifs qui sidèrent toute tentative d’élaboration et complexifient tous les projets de soin. Pour ces enfants pour qui l’élaboration en consultation de type classique est difficilement accessible, il s’agit de travailler autour des liens parents/enfants les problématiques qui renvoient aux premières expériences d’attachement et d’appropriation subjective. À partir d’une consultation parents/enfant avec une petite fille (...) de 3 ans, les auteurs, psychologues cliniciens, mettent en perspective ce travail où il est question de cheminer avec les parents et l’enfant pour progressivement scénariser et historiciser les recouvrements traumatiques. Il devient possible alors de se figurer un vécu jusqu’alors informe ouvrant petit à petit la voie à une symbolisation et donc à des changements dans les liens parents/enfant. (shrink)

The Semantic-Pragmatic Analysis of Persian Modal Verbs Based on Papafragou's Model This paper aims at analyzing the semantics and pragmatics of Persian modal verbs based on Papafragou's relevance-theoretic model. Persian modals are defined in terms of logical relations and propositional domains. According to the findings of the research, two of the three modals, namely, šodan and tavân express the logical relation of compatibility with respect to different propositional domains: the three forms mišavad, mišod and mišode are unspecified with respect to (...) their propositional domains and take them directly from the context, whereas betavân and bešavad accept the desirability domain. Mitavân also expresses compatibility in relation to the propositions in the factual domain. However, bˇyad is the only modal that encodes the logical relation of entailment and is unspecified with respect to the type of propositional domain it accepts. (shrink)

The threat simulation theory of dreaming states that dream consciousness is essentially an ancient biological defence mechanism, evolutionarily selected for its capacity to repeatedly simulate threatening events. Threat simulation during dreaming rehearses the cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and threat avoidance, leading to increased probability of reproductive success during human evolution. One hypothesis drawn from TST is that real threatening events encountered by the individual during wakefulness should lead to an increased activation of the system, a threat simulation (...) response, and therefore, to an increased frequency and severity of threatening events in dreams. Consequently, children who live in an environment in which their physical and psychological well-being is constantly threatened should have a highly activated dream production and threat simulation system, whereas children living in a safe environment that is relatively free of such threat cues should have a weakly activated system. We tested this hypothesis by analysing the content of dream reports from severely traumatized and less traumatized Kurdish children and ordinary, non-traumatized Finnish children. Our results give support for most of the predictions drawn from TST. The severely traumatized children reported a significantly greater number of dreams and their dreams included a higher number of threatening dream events. The dream threats of traumatized children were also more severe in nature than the threats of less traumatized or non-traumatized children. (shrink)

This book offers a new interpretation of Hermann von Helmholtz's work on the epistemology of geometry. A detailed analysis of the philosophical arguments of Helmholtz's Erhaltung der Kraft shows that he took physical theories to be constrained by a regulative ideal. They must render nature "completely comprehensible", which implies that all physical magnitudes must be relations among empirically given phenomena. This conviction eventually forced Helmholtz to explain how geometry itself could be so construed. Hyder shows how Helmholtz answered this question (...) by drawing on the theory of magnitudes developed in his research on the colour-space. He argues against the dominant interpretation of Helmholtz's work by suggesting that for the latter, it is less the inductive character of geometry that makes it empirical, and rather the regulative requirement that the system of natural science be empirically closed. (shrink)

We examine how corporate social responsibility (CSR) perceptions (association and participation) affect manager creativity at the workplace and its mediating link through organisational identification. We collected data from the National Forum of Environment and Health (NFEH) 2019 that awarded 52 companies in Pakistan. NFEH is a purely non-profit, non-governmental, and voluntary organisation registered under the Voluntary Social Welfare Agencies Ordinance 1961. We employed convenience sampling to collect data from managers of 52 CSR performing organisations in Pakistan. We analyse the data (...) with structural equation modelling (SEM) via R. Findings reveal that CSR association does not affect creativity. In contrast, CSR participation has a significant positive effect on manager creative performance. Furthermore, the decomposition analysis indicated that only in the case of CSR participation, OI has a mediating effect. (shrink)

The Islamic Republic of Iran is unsecular and follows religious interpretations from Shia Islam in deciding the laws of the land. In recent decades, the strengthening of civil society in the country has shaped various political debates on human rights among secular intellectuals and reflected in the discourse of some religious figures as well. While the regime has officially adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam (CDHRI) since 1990, different views on the Islamic human rights and its social (...) implications still exist among the conservative and reformist Shia clergy within the country. This paper examines the view of an influential conservative pro-regime clergy, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who has been concerned about the Western interpretation of human rights and engaged in its theorization based on his interpretation of Shia Islam. He has criticized the theoretical and philosophical foundations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and its each single item and has also proposed his own version of the Islamic Declaration of Human Rights and Obligations. While Islamic fundamentalists have no concrete theoretical support for their negative view of the Western conceptions regarding human rights, Mesbah Yazdi’s approach is based on a reading of Shia theology and Sadraean ontology. He engages in a dialogue with the Western ideologies and rejects UDHR after philosophical and theological reasoning. His stance can be viewed as a reflection of the unsecular political Shia Islam as the main characteristic of the conservative faction within the Islamic Republic of Iran which results in serious policy and social implications on the rights of the people living in the country. (shrink)

Brand Blanshard is one of the contemporary famous philosophers, especially because of his Ideas on religious epistemology. He defends rationalism and evidentialism in religious epistemology and therefore criticizes fideism. He holds that rationality is the main character of all kinds of beliefs, including religious belief. But, in his Idealism, Blansahrd finds a place for the source of being and universe, which stands in sharp contradiction with traditional concept of God. In this paper we show that some times, his evidentialism is (...) very radical and in compatible with contemporary steams. Some of his claims are not acceptable, such as this assertion that today scientific approach is absolutely dominate and religious approach is absolutely condemn. (shrink)

ArgumentHermann von Helmholtz’s distinction between “pure intuitive” and “physical” geometry must be counted as the most influential of his many contributions to the philosophy of science. In a series of papers from the 1860s and 70s, Helmholtz argued against Kant’s claim that our knowledge of Euclidean geometry was an a priori condition for empirical knowledge. He claimed that geometrical propositions could be meaningful only if they were taken to concern the behaviors of physical bodies used in measurement, from which it (...) followed that it was posterior to our acquaintance with this behavior. This paper argues that Helmholtz’s understanding of geometry was fundamentally shaped by his work in sense-physiology, above all on the continuum of colors. For in the course of that research, Helmholtz was forced to realize that the color-space had no inherent metrical structure. The latter was a product of axiomatic definitions of color-addition and the empirical results of such additions. Helmholtz’s development of these views is explained with detailed reference to the competing work of the mathematician Hermann Grassmann and that of the young James Clerk Maxwell. It is this separation between 1) essential properties of a continuum, 2) supplementary axioms concerning distance-measurement, and 3) the behaviors of the physical apparatus used to realize the axioms, which is definitive of Helmholtz’s arguments concerning geometry. (shrink)