An individual’s accountability to oneself leads to self-regulatory behaviour. A field experiment afforded an opportunity to test this relation, given that external accountability conditions were absent. A single group pre-test/post-test design was used to test the hypothesis. A group of full-time resident management students, n ≈ 550, take four meals during the day in the institute mess. As a part of the experiment, food wastage in the form of leftovers on the plates of subjects was measured. As a pre-test, the (...) measurement occurred at two levels. Subjects could see how much they are adding to the total waste by looking at a weighing scale placed under a waste basket, and they could also see the total waste data for each of the four meals for the day and a day earlier displayed at a prominent place. After 105 days, the weighing scale under the basket was removed, and as a post-test measurement, the total waste data for the four meals were noted down for another 72 days. A manipulation test indicated that the experiment has had the desired effect of invoking self-accountability in subjects during the pre-test phase, and diluting it during the post-test phase. Time series analysis of pre-test and post-test data indicated that the wastage data decreased in the pre-test phase. However, the post-test waste data showed an increase over a period of time. The results indicate that accountability conditions like social norms invoke self-accountability cognition leading to self-regulatory behaviours in individuals. (shrink)

The paper considers two-agent order acceptance scheduling problems with different scheduling criteria. Two agents have a set of jobs to be processed by a single machine. The processing time and due date of each job are known in advance. In the order accepting scheduling problem, jobs are allowed to be rejected. The objective of the problem is to maximize the net revenue while keeping the weighted number of tardy jobs for the second agent within a predetermined value. A mixed-integer linear (...) programming formulation is provided to obtain the optimal solution. The problem is considered as an NP-hard problem. Therefore, MILP can be used to solve small problem instances optimally. To solve the problem instances with realistic size, heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms have been proposed. A heuristic method is used to determine and secure a quick solution while the metaheuristic based on particle swarm optimization is designed to obtain the near-optimal solution. A numerical experiment is piloted and conducted on the benchmark instances that could be obtained from the literature. The performances of the proposed algorithms are tested through numerical experiments. The proposed PSO can obtain the solution within 0.1% of the optimal solution for problem instances up to 60 jobs. The performance of the proposed PSO is found to be significantly better than the performance of the heuristic. (shrink)

This paper delves into a two-agent scheduling problem in which two agents are competing for a single resource. Each agent has a set of jobs to be processed by a single machine. The processing time, release time, weight, and the due dates of each job are known in advance. Both agents have their objectives, which are conflicting in nature. The first agent tries to minimize the total completion time, while the second agent tries to minimize the number of tardy jobs. (...) The two agents’ scheduling problem, an NP-hard problem, has a wide variety of applications ranging from the manufacturing industry to the cloud computing service provider. Due to the wide applicability, each variation of the problem requires a different algorithm, adapted according to the user’s requirements. This paper provides mathematical models, heuristic algorithms, and two nature-based metaheuristic algorithms to solve the problem. The algorithm’s performance was gauged against the optimal solution obtained from the AMPL-CPLEX solver for both solution quality and computational time. The outlined metaheuristics produce a solution that is comparable with a short computational time. The proposed metaheuristics even have a better solution than the CPLEX solver for medium-size problems, whereas the computation times are much less than the CPLEX solvers. (shrink)

Finding the Raga is more than a book that tries to make sense of the raga, of Indian classical music, and of how Indian music challenges Western notions of what music might be. It is a work of self-inquiry, as might be expected from Amit Chaudhuri, a musician who is also a novelist; a novelist who is also a critic and essayist; a trained and recorded performer in the Indian classical vocal tradition who was also, once, a guitarist and (...) songwriter in the American folk music style and is now a composer and recorded performer in experimental music. Each one of these undertakings and selves signifies turns at different points in life, and each turn and change of direction brings a fresh perspective on music, writing, and what it means to take on and do these things. No category-Indian, Western-is a given in this book. Partly a record of one of the most important turns in the author's life, toward North Indian music, and of its long aftermath, Finding the Raga is also part autobiography set in 1970s Bombay, part essay, and part detailed analysis of how we might grasp the conceptual underpinnings as well as the experience of music. It explores the different ways in which music relates to the world-whether it's through representation or evocation, as in Western music, or through the raga being sung at different times of day and in different seasons, as in Indian music-and also tries to understand what the act of listening involves for individuals and cultures. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

Pt. 1. The individual and his creator. The fear of God in our time -- Natural morality -- In-depth Torah study -- Levels of mitzvot -- The personal element in serving God -- Religious experience -- Naturalness in the worship of God -- The significance of Torah values -- Tension vs. tranquility in the worship of God -- Pt. 2. The individual and society. Fundamentals of prayer -- Derekh eretz, being a mensch -- "I dwell among my people" -- The (...) obligation to sanctify God's name -- Attending to the needs of the community -- The message beyond mere words -- How to relate to one who has lost his faith -- Pt. 3. The individual and his life. Humanity -- Dealing with crisis -- Adhering to values -- Independent decision-making. (shrink)

Brings together the most recent discoveries in quantum physics and provides a powerful argument for transforming not only the way we view nature, but also how we view our own personal reality. The book also challenges readers to give up their prejudices regarding material realism.

The neurophysiological evidence from the Miyashita group's experiments on monkeys as well as cognitive experience common to us all suggests that local neuronal spike rate distributions might persist in the absence of their eliciting stimulus. In Hebb's cell-assembly theory, learning dynamics stabilize such self-maintaining reverberations. Quasi-quantitive modeling of the experimental data on internal representations in association-cortex modules identifies the reverberations (delay spike activity) as the internal code (representation). This leads to cognitive and neurophysiological predictions, many following directly from the language (...) used to describe the activity in the experimental delay period, others from the details of how the model captures the properties of the internal representations. (shrink)

This text is the introduction to V. Amit & N. B. Salazar, Pacing Mobilities. Timing, Intensity, Tempo & Duration of Human Movements, New York/Oxford, Berghahn, 2020, 202 p. It is also available on Berghahn publisher website.

We usually think nothing of our practice of ‘giving up’ on someone who has behaviors or attitudes that are morally criticizable—after all, it is my prerogative to choose with whom I will associate, and exclusion seems to be an unobjectionable part of my toolkit of social sanctions. However, this paper will argue that it is in many cases impermissible to give up on a morally unpleasant person—in fact, it would be to make an unjustified exception for oneself.

In the collectivist culture of India, family occupies a central place in organizing social and personal lives of the people. However, the forces of industrialization and urbanization are changing the life style and leading to reprioritization of values. Against this backdrop this study examined the pattern of actual and desired family values in the context of ecology, family type and generation. The sample was drawn from urban, semi-urban and rural areas in central India representing parent–child pairs belonging to joint and (...) nuclear families. Using an indigenously developed measure of family values the study revealed that ecological setting and generation significantly influenced the family value of positive interaction. The type of family emerged as a significant factor for three major values, that is, social order, manners and helping. The interaction of ecology, family type and generation were significant for the values of social order and helping. In general, the type of family and ecological setting yielded major influence in shaping values. The implications of the findings for parenting are discussed. (shrink)

The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that inputs from internal states in obsessive–compulsive individuals are attenuated, which could be one source of the pervasive doubting and checking in OCD. Participants who were high or low in OC tendencies were asked to produce specific levels of muscle tension with and without biofeedback, and their accuracy in producing the required muscle tension levels was assessed. As predicted, high OC participants performed more poorly than low OC participants on this task when (...) biofeedback was not available. When biofeedback was provided, the difference between the groups was eliminated, and withdrawing the monitor again reversed this effect. Finally, when given the opportunity, high OC participants were more likely than low OC participants to request biofeedback. These results suggest that doubt in OCD may be grounded in a real and general deficiency in accessing internal states. (shrink)

Purpose This research aims to study the coping experience of visually impaired bankers in India after they have received reasonable accommodation from their employers, that is, the work process or environment has been suitably modified to ensure a barrier-free environment for them. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 VI bankers working with public sector banks in India. A phenomenological approach was adopted during data analysis. Findings Despite the provision of reasonable accommodations, VI employees often find it difficult (...) to fulfill their job responsibilities. This is on account of extensive paperwork required for completion of their jobs and the partially accessible information systems available to them. As a result, these VI employees are found resorting to workarounds to carry out their jobs, with the nature of workarounds adopted varying with the type and extent of visual impairment. Furthermore, it is observed that VI employees require social support not only from their superiors and peers but also from their subordinates and customers to carry out their tasks. Research limitations/implications Data collection was done through snowball sampling which could have resulted in sampling bias. Due to confidentiality issues, observation of workarounds in practice by VI employees could not be carried out as part of the study. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature on integration of persons with disabilities by examining their coping experience after provision of reasonable accommodations. It emphasizes the role of workarounds, an under-studied area in PwD integration, as well as support of other stakeholders in the experience. (shrink)

Some recent surveys of the modern philosophical debate over the existence of non-conceptual perceptual content have concluded that the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual representations is largely terminological. To remedy this terminological impasse, Robert Hanna and Monima Chadha claim that non-conceptualists must defend an essentialist view of non-conceptual content, according to which perceptual states have representational content whose structure and psychological function are necessarily distinct from that of conceptual states. Hanna and Chadha additionally suggest that non-conceptualists should go “back to (...) Kant” to find the most defensible version of an essentialist content non-conceptualism. I propose instead that non-conceptualists go back even further to the seventh-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, so that they may not only find historical precedent for an essentialist content view, but also some better arguments in its favor. This essay reconstructs Dharmakīrti's essentialist non-conceptualism about the contents of conscious sensory representations and the refined theory of conceptualization that it presupposes. In particular, I examine his arguments from the proprietary phenomenology of sensory experience, the cognitive encapsulation of sensory processing, as well as the iconic format of sensory representations, and assess the strength of these arguments relative to their modern counterparts. (shrink)

Background: This article aims to review research manuscripts in the past 5 years that focus on the effects of debt on depression, anxiety, stress, or suicide ideation in Asian countries.Methods: A search for literature based on the PRISMA guidelines was conducted on Medline, PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect, resulting in nine manuscripts meeting inclusion criteria. The studies were conducted in Thailand, Korea, Singapore, Pakistan, India, Cambodia, and China.Results: The findings of the studies show that there is evidence to (...) support that being in debt is related to Asian participants experiencing depression, anxiety, stress, or suicide ideation. However, the studies are limited to quantitative studies only. The definition of debt is also unclear in most manuscripts. Few manuscripts also examined how other factors influence the relationship between debt and mental illness.Conclusion: There are limited studies on the psychological effects of debt on the Asian population. Future studies should focus on the relationship between debt and psychological well-being among this population. (shrink)

Some have argued that a subject has an inner awareness of its conscious mental states by virtue of the non-introspective, reflexive awareness that any conscious state has of itself. But, what exactly is it like to have a ubiquitous and reflexive inner awareness of one’s conscious states, as distinct from one’s outer awareness of the apparent world? This essay derives a model of ubiquitous inner awareness (UIA) from Sebastian Watzl’s recent theory of attention as the activity of structuring consciousness into (...) an experiential center and periphery. I develop Watzl’s theory into an account of UIA by suggesting that a subject is acquainted with its own conscious mental states through being reflexively aware of how these states are structured by attention into a unified subjective perspective. I favorably compare this Watzl-inspired account of UIA against other contemporary analytic and classical Buddhist accounts of reflexive awareness and subjective character, which variously ground the inner awareness of conscious states on their intrinsic phenomenal quality of “for-me-ness,” their affective/hedonic valence, or a subject’s disposition to introspect them. The Watzl-inspired account also accommodates possible counter-examples to Watzl’s theory posed by states of minimal phenomenal experience such as lucid dreamless sleep and non-dual meditative awareness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Five Poems AMIT MAJMUDAR Observing Orpheus I hear the meaning turn back in his throat like Eurydice on the way up from the darkness. Music’s meaning is its making. As for me, I am one more animal in his entourage, learning a new thirst, finding a new south. None of us knew we had this instinct in us. If deserts hide wildflowers until first rain, bright ears are (...) blossoming out of our skulls. He doesn’t have much longer. I know this myth. A God douses the fire with a beehive. The Maenads smear their faces with a warpaint made of stoneground fireflies and pine sap. Hands—hands like his, that drew music through lyre strings into our forest like pieces of bread through a prison fence— are reaching for his body now, his lyre. Their weapons are hands, nothing but hands. They are infinite. They are enough. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 Her Metamorphoses First a beetle, body armor forged of chitin, exoskeleton he’ll never bruise, Undiscovered, unapologetically hermetic on her own Galapagos. Next a fruit bat, echolocating tangerines like a blind woman singing up at stars. Then a patio lizard, sunning herself for as long as she needs, A better place for keeping warm than bed with him. Next a sleek water moccasin, quick to make out another woman’s heat signature on his neck, Even quicker to strike. A caterpillar to poke holes in his lying roses And from that destruction to fashion two beautiful wings for herself. A buzzard, to clean up the roadside pile he left of her. A woman in full with no more soft blind pupa stages of her life cycle left, No more forms to force herself to fit for the sake of his pleasure, No more shapeshifts, no more slimming stripes, no more abdominal crunches: Just this body, just this last name, just this apartment, just this bowl of midnight cereal. Just her. 106 five poems Sisyphus Shove hard, shove, shove hard, eyes bloodshot, knees bent Till your boulder goes weightless and races ahead in descent. Force its dark door open inch by grim inch, Shove hard, shove, shove hard, eyes bloodshot, knees bent, Heels dug deep in hell’s steep hillside, teeth clenched. What gravity strips from you, gravity grants you again. Shove hard, shove, shove hard, eyes bloodshot, knees bent Till your body goes weightless and races ahead in ascent. Amit Majmudar 107 A Trinket for Persephone A deathwatch beetle burrows in the pale hall of your marrow, your underground, your tube of bone on which you’re riding home alone. This blackwinged locket with your soul emerges rattling from a hole, a rattle in your emptied throat, the diva’s final, graceless notes, a clicking echoed in the rafters, this bugbear insect coming after to scuttle across the marshy chest, sinkhole navel, and pubic nest out to the yard, below the porch untrackable by any torch until this bug with you inside has burrowed to the other side. It drops into the underworld, as if from some cocoon unfurled, to scale a queenly wrist and rest your brooch of black upon her breast. 108 five poems Four Ways of Looking at Argus 1. His Vigil These hundred eyes, these hundred balloons Tied to the boy-small wrist of my mind Are down to ninety-nine. I lost one to a bee sting late last June— I never thought of them as fragile Until that pinprick broke my vigil. I’m slowing down. I didn’t blink in time. I have no inkling why I keep This vigil—surely not to watch, Panoptic from this mountaintop, A heifer drifting off to sleep? I’m here, I must be here, to see A signal fire from the east That warns of Olympus under siege And Ares gory from a rout, Athena’s owl’s eyes gouged out, The naiads naked in a pen, The whole world given up to men. The Gods will need a monster then. 2. After Martial Hermes was in a fix: He needed lullabies To shutter Argus’s one hundred eyes And get the tethered heifer—coal-eyed Io—free Of Hera’s... (shrink)

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant to questions concerning human language processing. However, such models are often limited to syntactic factors. This restriction is unrealistic in light of experimental results suggesting interactions between syntax and other forms of linguistic information in human sentence processing. To address this limitation, this article introduces two sentence processing models that augment a syntactic component with information about discourse co-reference. The novel combination of probabilistic syntactic components with co-reference classifiers permits them to more (...) closely mimic human behavior than existing models. The first model uses a deep model of linguistics, based in part on probabilistic logic, allowing it to make qualitative predictions on experimental data; the second model uses shallow processing to make quantitative predictions on a broad-coverage reading-time corpus. (shrink)

It is shown that if quantum physics is interpreted according to the philosophy of monistic idealism--that consciousness is the ground of all being--then some of the important dualisms of philosophy can be integrated.

Illusionists about consciousness boldly argue that phenomenal consciousness does not fundamentally exist — it only seems to exist. For them, the impression of having a private inner life of conscious qualia is nothing more than a cognitive error, a conjuring trick put on by a purely physical brain. Some phenomenal realists have accused illusionism of being a byproduct of modern Western scientism and overzealous naturalism. However, Jay Garfield has endorsed illusionism by explicitly drawing support from the classical Yogācāra Buddhist philosopher (...) Vasubandhu. In this paper, I assess the degree to which Garfield’s illusionist interpretation accurately captures the views of Vasubandhu and his commentator Sthiramati in their extant Sanskrit works. As it turns out, Vasubandhu and Sthiramati converge with contemporary illusionists in taking an unconscious causal basis of cognitive/linguistic processes to be responsible for generating the illusion of representational states with apparently phenomenal contents. Within their constitutive understanding of the mind as the “imagination of what is non-existent” (abhūtaparikalpa), I raise possible candidates for what might seem to be real instances of phenomenality — mental appearances (pratibhāsa), affective sensory experience (vedanā), and “intrinsic luminosity” (prakṛtiprabhāsvara) — and consider possible responses on behalf of an illusionist interpreter. I conclude that Vasubandhu and Sthiramati really do appear to be strong illusionists about phenomenal consciousness, particularly if phenomenal states are assumed to be essentially representational. (shrink)

The authors use the theoretical notion of anomie to examine the impact of top management's control mechanisms on the environment of the marketing function. Based on a literature review and in-depth field interviews with marketing managers in diverse industries, a conceptual model is proposed that incorporates the two managerial control mechanisms, viz. output and process control, and relates their distinctive influence to anomie in the marketing function. Three contingency variables, i.e., resource scarcity, power, and ethics codification, are proposed to moderate (...) the relationship between control mechanisms and anomie. The authors also argue for the link between anomic environments and the propensity of unethical marketing practices to occur. Theoretical and managerial implications of the proposed conceptual model are discussed. (shrink)

This article analyzes how the medical gaze made possible by MRI operates in radiological laboratories. It argues that although computer-assisted medical imaging technologies such as MRI shift radiological analysis to the realm of cyborg visuality, radiological analysis continues to depend on visualization produced by other technologies and diagnostic inputs. In the radiological laboratory, MRI is used to produce diverse sets of images of the internal parts of the body to zero in and visually extract the pathology. Visual extraction of pathology (...) becomes possible, however, because of the visual training of the radiologists in understanding and interpreting anatomic details of the whole body. These two levels of viewing constitute the bifocal vision of the radiologists. To make these levels of viewing work complementarily, the body, as it is presented in the body atlases, is made notational. (shrink)

Many kinds of multifunctional regulatory proteins have been identified that perform distinct biochemical functions in the nucleus, the cytoplasm, or both. Here we describe the recent discovery by Hall et al. (2004)1 of a new type of multifunctional protein: a metabolic enzyme that doubles as a transcription factor. This enzyme, Arg5,6, functions as a catalytic enzyme in ornithine biosynthesis and also binds and regulates the promoters of nuclear and mitochondrial genes. It may also regulate precursor mRNA metabolism. We discuss how (...) proteins that serve as both metabolic enzymes and transcription factors might have evolved. BioEssays 27:467–471, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

It is now a well-documented statistic that Asian women between the ages of 15–35 are two to three times more vulnerable to suicide and self-harm than their non-Asian counterparts (Soni-Raleigh, 1996). The article will summarize the findings of the research report Growing Up Young, Asian and Female in Britain (Newham Asian Women's Project, 1998), which aimed to explore the reasons why young Asian women self-harmed and to evaluate the service responses they were given. It also made recommendations aimed at decreasing (...) the high prevalence of suicide and self-harm among young Asian women. The article concludes by reflecting upon the impact and service developments that have been made since the report was published. (shrink)

Imbalance in the pH of water reduces this precious resource as an extremely dangerous liquid for human health and plants’ growth. Change in the pH levels of the drinkable water has majorly raised concern towards diverse health issues like heart problems, infant mortality rates, pigmentation of skin, and cholera outbreaks. Therefore, it is necessary to keep a check on essential water quality components that include acidic/basic nature of water. As per the US Environmental Protection Agency, the drinkable water should have (...) a pH level ranging from 6.5 to 8.5. Two sample situates have been identified wherever highly reported pollutants levels were found and have been analyzed through artificial intelligence techniques. It can be observed that wavelet denoised signals fed into the least squares support vector regression and M5 prime regression tree predicted more accurately on the basis of the performance errors that are as follows: root mean squared error ; mean squared error ; mean absolute error. On the basis of these errors, the coefficient of determination/goodness of fit simulated for the prototypes is developed in this study. RMSE outcomes diminish on the whole on applying the training and forecasting data-division via WLSSVR and WM5pRT as compared with fitting the normalized data through LSSVR and M5pRT. These performance measures are essential to analyze the concentration levels of pH in the river streams at the identified sites of study. Thus, the observed pattern from this study may help for future estimation of the quality of water at their sources so that it prohibits the further increase in either acidic or basic salts which prove to be lethal for the environment. Thus, these predictors would be helpful towards formulation of strategies for protection of ecosystem and human health. (shrink)

We consider the structures $$, $$, $$, and $$ where $\mathbb {Z}$ is the additive group of integers, $\mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Z}}$ is the set of $a \in \mathbb {Z}$ such that $v_{p} < 2$ for every prime p and corresponding p-adic valuation $v_{p}$, $\mathbb {Q}$ and $\mathrm {SF}^{\mathbb {Q}}$ are defined likewise for rational numbers, and $<$ denotes the natural ordering on each of these domains. We prove that the second structure is model-theoretically wild while the other three structures are (...) model-theoretically tame. Moreover, all these results can be seen as examples where number-theoretic randomness yields model-theoretic consequences. (shrink)

In the wake of the current financial crises triggered by risky mortgage-backed securities, the question of ethics and risk-taking is once again at the front and center for both practitioners and academics. Although risk-taking is considered an integral part of strategic decision-making, sometimes firms could be propelled to take risks driven by reasons other than calculated strategic choices. The authors argue that a firm's risk-taking propensity is impacted by its ethical climate (egoistic or benevolent) and its emphasis on output control (...) to manage its marketing function. The firm's long-term orientation is argued to moderate the control–risk propensity relationship. The authors also extend research on risk and performance and argue that the association of risk-taking propensity and firm performance is contingent on the ownership (publicly traded versus privately held) structure of the firm. Based on survey data from a sample of manufacturing industries in the United States, the results show significant impact of ethical climate and marketing output control on a firm's risk-taking propensity; also risk-taking propensity shows a stronger association with firm performance in privately held firms than in publicly traded firms. (shrink)

Recent success of Indian engineers, businessmen, as well as other technically qualified professionals has created an obsession with knowledge and creativity. Documents like India as a Knowledge Superpower have proliferated and we continually hear the mantra of investing in and harnessing of human capital. There are, however, several strands of human capital in India and not all of them harness knowledge and creativity. People on whom drugs are being tested represent one such human capital, which, even though it is being (...) energetically mobilized to provide India with a strategic advantage in the world market, also highlights the contradictions within India’s shifting imaginary, economy and politics. Drug trials in India, in the context of neoliberal globalization, not only challenge and complicate, but also operate within a constellation of divisions — labor/capital, west/non-west, colonial/sovereign, national/global and so on. In this article I analyze how the people on whom drug testing is being done in India are being ‘harnessed’ as human capital, which leads to politicization of ‘bare life’ through ‘inclusive-exclusion’. (shrink)

Recent studies in psychiatry reveal an acceptance of trauma through the media. Traditionally restricted to immediate experience, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is now expanding to include mediated experience. How did this development come about? How does mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its consequences? This essay addresses these questions through three cases: ‘trauma film paradigm’, an early 1960s research program that employed films to simulate traumatic effects; the psychiatric study into the clinical effects of watching catastrophic events on television, culminating with (...) the September 11 attacks; reports on drone operators who exhibit PTSD symptoms after flying combat missions away from the war zone. The recognition of mediated trauma marks a qualitative change in the understanding of media effects, rendering the impact literal and the consequences clinical. What informs recent speculations about the possibility of trauma through media is a conceptual link between visual media and contemporary conceptions of trauma. (shrink)