In the development field, one of the major shortcomings of mainstream development theories and models is their relative indifference toward environmental concerns. However, the worsening environmental catastrophes and the growing environmental consciousness led to the emergence of a new model of development known as "sustainable development." The proponents of sustainable development tend to explore the environmental costs of development activities, prescribe environment-friendly policies, suggest institutional and legal measures for environmental protection, and publicize the principles of sustainable through international forums and (...) publications. Despite this recognition of environment-development relationship, the model of sustainable development suffers from certain serious shortcomings that need to be addressed. This article begins with a brief discussion on various forms of environmental challenges to development, followed by an analysis of how the model of sustainable development articulates the environment-development linkages in both practical and intellectual terms. The final section of the paper critically examines the major limitations of the model in dealing with the environmental question, and makes some suggestions in this regard. (shrink)

Background:Suicide remains an important cause of premature deaths and draws much media attention. However, unsafe reporting and portrayal of suicides by the media have been associated with increased risk of suicidal behavior. Current evidence suggests that media capacity-building could potentially prevent suicide. However, there are still knowledge gaps in terms of a lack of data on effective strategies for improving awareness and safe reporting of suicide-related media content. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a workshop conducted with members (...) of the media community on the safe reporting of suicide-related content.Methods:An interventional single-arm pre and post pilot study was conducted on a sample of the Malaysian media community recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. The media safe reporting workshop was conducted by a suicide prevention expert with a media industry background. Thirty participants completed a self-reported evaluation questionnaire on their awareness and knowledge of reporting on suicide-related media content; before and after the interventional workshop.Results:There was a significant difference between the total scores before and after the intervention, with a large effect size. Post-intervention scores were significantly improved in 8 items, namely those related to the reporting of: (i) the content of any suicide note; (ii) headlines with methods of suicide; (iii) headlines with the location of suicide; (iv) cases of suspected suicide despite the unconfirmed cause of death; (v) suicide news to cater to readers’ interests; (vi) cause of suicide; (vii) details of the location of suicide; and (viii) the negative impact to media community when reporting suicide stories. In particular, there was an improvement in the majority of items for people from the media community with no lived experience of suicidal behavior.Conclusion:The media safe reporting workshop is a potentially effective intervention for improving awareness and knowledge measures relating to safe reporting on suicide among the media community, with a more pronounced effect in those without lived experience of suicidal behavior. Limitations in the sample size, generalizability, short-term evaluation, and lack of a control group warrant future larger, longer-term controlled, and more representative studies. (shrink)

The most prominent form of human communication and interaction is speech. It plays an indispensable role for expressing emotions, motivating, guiding, and cheering. An ill-intentioned speech can mislead people, societies, and even a nation. A misguided speech can trigger social controversy and can result in violent activities. Every day, there are a lot of speeches being delivered around the world, which are quite impractical to inspect manually. In order to prevent any vicious action resulting from any misguided speech, the development (...) of an automatic system that can efficiently detect suspicious speech has become imperative. In this study, we have presented a framework for acquisition of speech along with the location of the speaker, converting the speeches into texts and, finally, we have proposed a system based on long short-term memory which is a variant of recurrent neural network to classify speeches into suspicious and nonsuspicious. We have considered speeches of Bangla language and developed our own dataset that contains about 5000 suspicious and nonsuspicious samples for training and validating our model. A comparative analysis of accuracy among other machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression, SVM, KNN, Naive Bayes, and decision tree is performed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. The experimental results show that our proposed deep learning-based model provides the highest accuracy compared to other algorithms. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of a systematic review conducted on articles examining the effects of daytime electric light exposure on alertness and higher cognitive functions. For this, we selected 59 quantitative research articles from 11 online databases. The review protocol was registered with PROSPERO. The results showed that both short-wavelength dominant light exposure and higher intensity white light exposure induced alertness. However, those influences depended on factors like the participants’ homeostatic sleep drive and the time of day the participants (...) received the light exposure. The relationship between light exposure and higher cognitive functions was not as straightforward as the alerting effect. The optimal light property for higher cognitive functions was reported dependent on other factors, such as task complexity and properties of control light. Among the studies with short-wavelength dominant light exposure, ten studies reported beneficial effects on simple task performances, and four studies on complex task performances. Four studies with higher intensity white light exposure reported beneficial effects on simple task performance and nine studies on complex task performance. Short-wavelength dominant light exposure with higher light intensity induced a beneficial effect on alertness and simple task performances. However, those effects did not hold for complex task performances. The results indicate the need for further studies to understand the influence of short-wavelength dominant light exposure with higher illuminance on alertness and higher cognitive functions. (shrink)

This collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam, these essays focus on women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. This book gathers Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora to explore how women negotiate identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights. This collection shows Islam to be a diverse set (...) of variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to many cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist projects, these critics debate controversial issues: Does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, revolutionary paradigm to Eurocentric liberal humanism and western feminism? Is Islam more oppressive to women than the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women constructed for local or western consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency producing contradictory effects for its participants. The essays in this book first appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Contributors: S. M. Shamsul Alam Amal Amireh Mary Elaine Heglund Shahnaz Khan Anouar Majid Val Moghadam Julia Peteet Elora Shehabbudin Gabriele vom Bruck. (shrink)