In the United States, healthcare providers, institutions, and society have failed to ensure the conditions necessary for racial and ethnic minority communities to be in good health. Many scholars and federal government officials consider racial and ethnic disparities in health to be an injustice and have called for national attention and strategies to eliminate them. Several of these strategies, including cultural competency, focus on addressing deficiencies within the health care system. Cultural competency is the ability of a healthcare provider to (...) function effectively in the context of cultural differences with the clients they serve. Increasing cultural competency among healthcare providers has been shown to improve the quality of healthcare received by racial and ethnic minorities, which contributes to reducing health disparities. Achieving equity in the quality of healthcare received is a necessary strategy, but is insufficient for eliminating disparities in the health status of racial and ethnic minority populations. A growing body of literature reveals that health disparities are determined, not only by inequities in health care, but by social factors. The implication is that strategies that focus solely on healthcare perpetuate the misconception that health status is determined by access to or quality of healthcare. To eliminate racial and ethnic disparities in health status, the fundamental conditions for good health, which include but are not limited to healthcare equity, must be acknowledged and ensured for all people. (shrink)

In this work, we focus on the problem of selecting low-level heuristics in a hyperheuristic approach with offline learning, for the solution of instances of different problem domains. The objective is to improve the performance of the offline hyperheuristic approach, identifying equivalence classes in a set of instances of different problems and selecting the best performing heuristics in each of them. A methodology is proposed as the first step of a set of instances of all problems, and the generic characteristics (...) of each instance and the performance of the heuristics in each one of them are considered to define the vectors of characteristics and make a grouping of classes. Metalearning with statistical tests is used to select the heuristics for each class. Finally, we used the Naive Bayes to test the set instances with k-fold cross-validation, and we compared all results statistically with the best-known values. In this research, the methodology was tested by applying it to the problems of capacitated vehicle routing and graph coloring. The experimental results show that the proposed methodology can improve the performance of the offline hyperheuristic approach, correctly identifying the classes of instances and applying the appropriate heuristics in each case. This is based on the statistical comparison of the results obtained with those of the state of the art of each instance. (shrink)

The problems and the history of contacts between distant continents in bygone ages and long before the age of fast and easy travel, have always fascinated both professional scholars and the interested public. Was ancient history really nothing but the history of co-existing and isolated geographic, cultural and political “islands?” Already at school we learned too much about migrations of peoples, economic contacts, influences on art styles, conquests, and the rise, expansion and fall of empires to believe that. The (highly (...) improbable) theory that certain archaeological finds in America suggest, or even prove, Mediterranean influence (e.g., the arrival of Phoenician ships), or the alleged Viking discovery of America centuries before Columbus, or Thor Heyerdahl's adventurous journey to prove South American influence on remote Pacific islands did not fail to cause widespread interest and even excitement (although many scholars still feel that Heyerdahl's epic adventure, thrilling as it is, failed to prove what it set out to prove). The island of Madagascar is pretty close to the African continent, but its language exhibits more points of contact with Polynesian than with African tongues. And the blow-bellows used by Malagache smiths are similar to those used in Malaysia and unlike those known to African metalworkers. Clearly the Polynesians, those great ancient mariners, sailed further than originally seemed likely. Musicologists studying the cantillation of the Hebrew Bible in the liturgy of the ancient Jewish communities on the Malabar coast in India discovered to their surprise that it was similar to the cantillation not of the Babylonian but of the Yemenite Jews! This surprise was, of course, no surprise to those who knew anything about trade-winds and shipping routes between South Arabia and the Indian coast. Historians of religion, even more than general historians, studying the spread and expansion of religious ideas and movements have realised long ago that the beginning of all wisdom is a basic knowledge of economic geography. (shrink)

The formal oversight of medical education in India occurred with the promulgation of the Indian Medical Degrees Act in 1916. Despite an awareness of the need to train ethical doctors and the formal discussion of this as early as 1955, the formal teaching of medical ethics has been restricted to a few colleges as it has not been part of a mandated requirement. In August, 2019, all medical colleges in India will adopt a new Medical Council of (...) class='Hi'>India mandated curriculum. An embedded AETCOM module across all years of training is a part of this curriculum and is the first attempt to introduce medical ethics uniformly in close to 500 medical colleges in the country. This paper traces the historical attempts to include medical ethics in medical education in India, and describes the current plan to implement ethics teaching in the undergraduate medical curriculum in India. (shrink)

Indian philosophical thought has been deeply metaphysical, and it is no surprise that, faced with the anti-metaphysical thrust of contemporary philosophy, one of the issues uppermost in the minds of Indian thinkers is the question of the possibility of metaphysics. In recent philosophical literature, two tendencies are discernible: an attempt to defend metaphysics in the traditional grand style, and a concern with the idea of descriptive metaphysics as an alternative. For the former, we may turn to Kalidas Bhattacharyya and J. (...) N. Chubb; for the latter to J. N. Mohanty and S. N. Ganguly. (shrink)

Cadaver organs should be automatically availableThe shortage of donor organs and tissue for transplantation constitutes an acute emergency which demands radical rethinking of our policies and radical measures. While estimates vary and are difficult to arrive at there is no doubt that the donor organ shortage costs literally hundreds of thousands of lives every year. “In the world as a whole there are an estimated 700 000 patients on dialysis . . .. In India alone 100 000 new patients (...) present with kidney failure each year” . Almost “three million Americans suffer from congestive heart failure . . . deaths related to this condition are estimated at 250 000 each year . . . 27 000 patients die annually from liver disease . . .. In Western Europe as a whole 40 000 patients await a kidney but only . . . 10 000 kidneys”1 become available. Nobody knows how many people fail to make it onto the waiting lists and fail to register in the statistics. “As of 24th November 2002 in the United Kingdom 667 people have donated organs, 2055 people have received transplants, and 5615 people are still awaiting transplants.”2Conscious of the terrible and unnecessary tragedy that figures like these represent I have been advocating for more than 20 years now some radical measures to stem this appalling waste of human life. The measure which is the subject of Hamer and Rivlin’s paper 3 concerns the automatic availability of all cadaver organs—a measure, which I first advocated publicly in 1983.4THE AUTOMATIC AVAILABILITY OF DONOR ORGANSWe need to begin by being clear about just what it is I propose and why. At the moment in the United Kingdom we …. (shrink)

XLRI, in association with a few Tata Group companies, established the XLRI-JRD Tata Foundation in Business Ethics in 1991 to mark their long-standing commitment and contribution to business ethics in India. The foundation seeks to address this by publicly affirming the urgent need for ethics in business and the need to bring about a conducive culture in which it can thrive.

_The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill_ took thirty years to complete and is acknowledged as the definitive edition of J.S. Mill and as one of the finest works editions ever completed. Mill's contributions to philosophy, economics, and history, and in the roles of scholar, politician and journalist can hardly be overstated and this edition remains the only reliable version of the full range of Mill's writings. Each volume contains extensive notes, a new introduction and an index. Many of the (...) volumes have been unavailable for some time, but the _Works_ are now again available, both as a complete set and as individual volumes. (shrink)

In late August 2002, a general practitioner in London, Dr Bhagat Singh Makkar, 62, was struck off the medical register after he was discovered to have bragged to an undercover journalist about being able to obtain a kidney from a live donor in exchange for a fee. He told the journalist, who posed as the son of a patient with renal failure: “No problem, I can fix that for you. Do you want it done here, do you want it done (...) in Germany or do you want it done in India?” The price he quoted included payment to the donor and “my administration costs”. Dr Makkar said he regretted giving “stupid answers” to the journalist. He had been “tired, confused, and upset after a long day dealing with emotional patients”.1Deliberation about ethics is often muddied by the personalities involved in a particular issue. Many people are uninspired by Richard Seed or Jack Kevorkian. This contaminates their view about the much broader and important issues such as cloning or euthanasia that Seed and Kevorkian, whom some people might describe as mavericks, have shoved their finger in.Discussion of the sale of organs is …. (shrink)

Lang, B. Philosophy and the manners of art.--Hofstadter, A. Freedom, enownment, and philosophy.--Mehta, J. L. A stranger from Asia.--Fox, D. A. A passage past India.--Rucker, D. Philosophy and the constitution of Emerson's world.--Schneider, H. W. The pragmatic movement in historical perspective.--Barnes, H. E. Reflections on myth and magic.--Cauvel, J. The imperious presence of theater.--Seay, A. Musical conservatism in the fourteenth century.--Hochman, W. R. The enduring fascination of war.--Davenport, M. M. J. Glenn Gray and the promise of wisdom.

According to Bikas Chakrabarti (2005, p. 225), the term econophysics was neologized in 1995 at the second Statphys-Kolkata conference in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India by the physicist H. Eugene Stanley, who was also the first to use it in print (Stanley, 1996). Mantegna and Stanley (2000, pp. viii-ix) define “the multidisciplinary field of econophysics” as “a neologism that denotes the activities of physicists who are working on economics problems to test a variety of new conceptual approaches deriving from the (...) physical sciences.” The list of such problems has included distributions of returns in financial markets (Mantegna, 1991; Levy and Solomon, 1997; Bouchaud and Cont, 1998; Gopakrishnan, Plerou, Amaral, Meyer, and Stanley, 1999; Sornette and Johansen, 2001; Farmer and Joshi, 2004) the distribution of income and wealth (Drăgulescu and Yakovenko, 2001; Bouchaud and Mézard, 2000; Chatterjee, Yarlagadda, and Charkrabarti, 2005), the distribution of economic shocks and growth rate variations (Bak, Chen, Scheinkman, and Woodford, 1993; Canning, Amaral, Lee, Meyer, and Stanley, 1998), the distribution of firm sizes and growth rates (Stanley, Amaral, Buldyrev, Havlin, Leschhorn, Maass, Salinger, and Stanley, 1996; Takayasu and Okuyama, 1998; Botazzi and Secchi, 2003), the distribution of city sizes (Rosser, 1994; Gabaix, 1999), and the distribution of scientific discoveries (Plerou, Amaral, Gopakrishnan, Meyer, and Stanley, 1999; Sornette 1 and Zajdenweber, 1999), among other problems, all of which are seen at times not to follow normal or Gaussian patterns that can be described fully by mean and variance. The main sources of conceptual approaches from physics used by the econophysicists have been from models of statistical mechanics (Spitzer, 1971), geophysical models of earthquakes (Sornette, 2003), and “sandpile” models of avalanches, the latter involving self-organized criticality (Bak, 1996). An early physicist to assert the essential identity of statistical methods used in physics and the social sciences was Majorana (1942). A common theme among those who identify themselves as econophysicists is that standard economic theory has been inadequate or insufficient to explain the non-Gaussian distributions empirically observed for various of these phenomena, such as “excessive” skewness and leptokurtotic “fat tails” (McCauley, 2004).. (shrink)

Truth is a pathless land; you cannot approach it by any religion. . . . My only concern is to set men absolutely free. So said Jiddu Krishnamurti, one of the most influential spiritual leaders of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1905, as a teenager he was groomed by Theosophists C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant to become the next World Teacher. Yet later he broke from his mentors, refusing to play the messiah. For decades he traveled (...) the globe, urging his followers to pursue their own, individual freedom without dependence on any doctrine. Hence this book’s guiding purpose. Author Robert Epstein culls key quotations from Krishnamurti’s Commentaries on Living and other works. Conveniently organized from A to Z, topics range from acceptance and anger to consciousness, fear, fulfillment, God, hope, joy, love, nonviolence, reincarnation, relationship, self-understanding, sex, suffering, vegetarianism, war, and wisdom. “You are the world, and the world is you,” said Krishnamurti. “If there is a radical transformation in the structure of an individual’s psyche, it will affect the whole consciousness of man.” This small jewel of a book contains enormous power to inspire readers to just such a change. (shrink)

Talks 1952 -- Ojai, California 3 August -- August -- August -- Talks 1953 -- Bombay 4 March -- London 9 April -- Ojai, California 4 July -- Talks 1955 -- Amsterdam 26 May -- London 25 June -- Talks 1956 -- Madanapalle, India 26 February -- Brussels 24 June -- June -- Hamburg 6 September -- New Delhi 31 October -- Madras 26 December -- Talks 1957 -- Colombo, Sri Lanka 23 January -- January -- Talks 1958 -- (...) Poona, India 21 September -- Madras 26 October -- November -- Bombay 28 December -- Talks 1959 -- Madras 6 December -- December -- Bombay 23 December. (shrink)

An important book. This Festschrift presented to Professor Datta on the occasion of his 70 birthday, contains important contributions by a number of non-Eastern philosophers, including Edwin A. Burtt, "A Problem in Comparative Philosophy," William K. Frankena, "Ethics in an Age of Science," Cornelius Kruse, "Immanuel Kant," F. S. C. Northrop, "The Philosophical Roots and Validity of Tagore's Genius," and H. W. Schneider's, "Religious Diversity in America." Dr. D. M. Datta was both a scholarly and professional philosopher, as well as (...) a colleague of Gandhi in India's nonviolent struggle for freedom.--W. A. J. (shrink)

This volume marks the first English translation of Jnanasrimitra's Monograph on Exclusion, a careful, critical investigation into language, perception, and conceptual awareness.