This book offers the first comparative account of the changes and stabilities of public perceptions of science within the US, France, China, Japan, and across Europe over the past few decades. The contributors address the influence of cultural factors; the question of science and religion and its influence on particular developments (e.g. stem cell research); and the demarcation of science from non-science as well as issues including the incommensurability versus cognitive polyphasia and the cognitive (in)tolerance of different systems of knowledge.

A large number of articles have been devoted to the application of “texture synthesis” for large regions and “inpainting” algorithms for small cracks in an image. A new approach that allows the simultaneous filling in of different structures and textures is discussed in this present study. The combination of structure inpainting and patch-based texture synthesis carried out for filling and updating the target region shows additional advantages over earlier approaches. The algorithm discussed here uses the patch-based inpainting with isophote-driven patch-based (...) texture synthesis at the core. In this algorithm, once the user selects the regions to be restored, the algorithm automatically searches and fills in these regions with the best matching information surrounding them. We have assigned high priorities to the pixels on the boundary and the structure by computing data terms D, and the texture and corners are prioritized by computing the confidence C of the pixel. We also regularized and weighted the confidence of the pixels, RC, to achieve a balance of the two. The patch search area near the pixel patch to be filled is bounded for algorithm speed improvement. Patch-based filling significantly improve execution speed compared with pixel-based filling. Filling in is done in such a way that the structure information arriving at the region boundaries is propagated inside. A number of examples on real and synthetic images are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. Robustness with respect to the shape of the selected target region is also demonstrated. (shrink)

With the advent of logical positivism metaphysics has faced a challenge of sheer survival. This book brings forth, for the first time, an Indian defence of metaphysics against the onslaught of the positivist movement. The way Strawson, Davidson, Putnam and others have tried to encounter the anti-metaphysical move cannot be treated as a genuine defence of metaphysics. It is by analyzing the nature, meaning, purposeand relevance of metaphysics from Indian perspective that the contemporary Indian philosophers have explored a greater possibility (...) of defending metaphysics. For a consolidated,systematic and critical presentation of this uppermost philosophical issue, this volume contains the writings of T.R.V. Murti, K.D. Bhattacharya, Yashdeva Shalya, Y. Masih, G.C. Pandey, A.K Chatterjee, D.N. Dwivedi and other contemporary eminent Indian scholars. -/- This work is Peer Reviewed in Darshanik Traimasika, Year 54, volume IV, October- December 2009 by Prof. R.P. Pandey, Philosophy Department, Raipur University. 2. Peer Reviewed in JICPR, Volume XXVII, No. 2, April- June 2011 by Prof. Bijoy Barua, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT, Delhi. (shrink)

The present work, "Indian Philosophers of the Recent Past" , reflects and deliberates over recent Indian scholarship in philosophy. It is to get the present and future generations of philosopher-scholars acquainted with the rich Indian philosophical heritage. This is going to deepen our insights into the nature of philosophical consciousness and into the act of philosophizing. It makes an attempt to analyse the philosophies of outstanding philosophers such as K.C. Bhattacharyya, S. Radhakrishnan, R.D. Ranade, A.C. Mukerji, T.R.V. Murti, N.K. Devraja, (...) J.L. Mehta, J.N. Mohanty, Daya Krishna and S.L. Pandey. The post-Independent Indian philosophy is said to have unique tendencies and trends; some of them can be easily identified as existentialist and phenomenological, idealistic, realistic, humanistic, linguistic and analytico-philosophical comparative philosophy and Indian defence of metaphysics. The volume is unique in its conceptual clarity, lucid expression, systematic presentation and critical exposition of the subject matter. It is undoubtedly a valuable contribution for the seekers of Indian philosophical system which should evoke keen interest among scholars and students of philosophy. (shrink)

Proponents of Veritism believe that truth is the sole non-instrumental epistemic good. This view is often taken to entail that all truths should be of equal epistemic value. Hence, it is put under stress by the presence of trivial truths: truths to which we attach relatively little or no epistemic value. Pritchard, in the defense of Veritism, has tried to argue that the best way to understand the implications of Veritism is to think in terms of how an intellectually virtuous (...) inquirer would pursue truth. Furthermore, he thinks that such an inquirer would prefer weighty truths and set aside trivial ones. As such, he thinks that our epistemic disregard for trivial truths is just to be expected given Veritism. We argue that Pritchard’s defense of Veritism fails, and the problem of trivial truths remains a significant challenge for Veritism. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been playing a significant role in acoustic modeling. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the advanced version of DNNs that achieve 4–12% relative gain in the word error rate (WER) over DNNs. Existence of spectral variations and local correlations in speech signal makes CNNs more capable of speech recognition. Recently, it has been demonstrated that bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) produces higher recognition rate in acoustic modeling because they are adequate to reinforce higher-level representations of acoustic (...) data. Spatial and temporal properties of the speech signal are essential for high recognition rate, so the concept of combining two different networks came into mind. In this paper, a hybrid architecture of CNN-BLSTM is proposed to appropriately use these properties and to improve the continuous speech recognition task. Further, we explore different methods like weight sharing, the appropriate number of hidden units, and ideal pooling strategy for CNN to achieve a high recognition rate. Specifically, the focus is also on how many BLSTM layers are effective. This paper also attempts to overcome another shortcoming of CNN, i.e. speaker-adapted features, which are not possible to be directly modeled in CNN. Next, various non-linearities with or without dropout are analyzed for speech tasks. Experiments indicate that proposed hybrid architecture with speaker-adapted features and maxout non-linearity with dropout idea shows 5.8% and 10% relative decrease in WER over the CNN and DNN systems, respectively. (shrink)

De Interpretatione is among Aristotle's most influential and widely read writings; C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system. He shows that De Interpretatione is not a disjointed essay on ill-connected subjects, as traditionally thought, but a highly organized and systematic treatise on logic, argument, and dialectic.

Given the comprehensive influence of mindfulness on human thought and behavior, and the importance of moral reasoning in business decisions, we examine the role of mindfulness as an antecedent to moral reasoning through two studies. In Study 1, we propose and test a theoretically derived model that links mindfulness and moral reasoning, mediated by compassion and egocentric bias using a survey design. In Study 2, we examine whether mindfulness training enhances moral reasoning using an experimental design with graduate students of (...) business management. The findings of Study 1 substantiate the positive association of mindfulness with moral reasoning. We found that this relationship is fully mediated by compassion and egocentric bias. The results of Study 2 suggest that mindfulness meditation training has a positive impact on individuals' states of mindfulness, compassion, and moral reasoning, and decreases egocentric bias. We relate the findings of the study with contemporary neurological research and discuss the theoretical, pedagogical, and managerial implications. (shrink)

This article casts in high relief the paradigmatic rigidity in strategy research by highlighting the underlying philosophical assumptions (ontological, epistemological, methodological), their advantages, and their limitations. The article discusses four philosophical paradigms that underpin strategy research. While positivism and constructivism are the dominant paradigms, critical realism and pragmatism as relevant philosophical perspectives are also discussed. Using entrepreneurial opportunity as an exemplar, the article explains how philosophical assumptions inform the researchers’ worldview and guide research within a paradigm. The article contends that (...) paradigmatic dogmatism is undesirable in any discipline, more so in a relatively young discipline such as strategic management. Rather than adhering to and nestling inside a single metatheoretical paradigm, the article calls for a more reflexive philosophical approach in strategy research to gain fresh perspectives. (shrink)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of explanations as given in both natural and social sciences. It discusses models of explanation adopted in natural and social sciences. The author also elaborates upon naturalistic and anti-naturalistic views and other types of explanations such as functional, purposive, etc in social science. The volume elaborates upon themes like bridge principle; functional explanation; purposive explanation; teleological explanation; prediction; methodological individualism; methodological collectivism; illocutionary redescription; principle of action; and dispositional explanations, to understand (...) whether the explanations given in the realm of social sciences are the same or different from the explanations that are given in the field of natural sciences. This introductory book is a must read for students and scholars of philosophy of science, logic, science and technology studies, social sciences, and philosophy in general. (shrink)

In this study, we develop a new theoretical framework of Coping Intelligence which examines relationships between coping strategies and organizational commitment among boundary spanning employees. We collected data from 452 boundary spanning salespeople using multiple sources. Results demonstrate that a formative model of Coping Intelligence is superior to a reflective model and that problem-focused coping contributes to CI which, in turn, is related to affective and normative commitment. Further, our more parsimonious formative model illustrates that positive problem-focused coping and negative (...) emotion-focused coping contribute to both affective and normative commitment. After controlling for gender and salespeople’s commission in separate analyses, results remain significant. We provide additional insights: Females are likely to use emotion-focused coping than males, but gender is not related to organizational commitment. Salespeople’s commission is positively related to both affective and normative commitment but unrelated to coping strategies. We shed new lights on boundary spanning employees’ Coping Intelligence and organizational commitment and offer theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to coping strategies and business ethics. (shrink)

The Indian language study tradition goes back to the Pāṇinian School of Grammar, which dates as back as the sixth century BCE. The study of language in ancient Indian Grammatical Tradition has its imprint on modern linguistic traditions across the world in general and in India in particular.

This book addresses a wide range of aspects of the study of language in a variety of domains such as cognition, change, acquisition, structure, philosophy, politics, and education. It offers a renewed discussion on normative understanding of these concepts and opens up avenues for a fresh look at these concepts. Each contribution in this book captures a wide range of perspectives and underlines the vigorous role of language, which happens to be central to the arguments contained therein. The uniqueness of (...) this book lies in the fact that it presents simplified perspective on various complex aspects of language. It addresses a wide range of audiences, who do not necessarily need to have a technical background in linguistics. It focuses on complex relations between language and cognition, politics, education to name a few with reference to cognition, change, and acquisition. This book is for researchers with an interest in the field of language studies, applied linguistics, and socio-linguistics. (shrink)

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic was soon declared a global health threat and had significant economic and health implications. Unprecedented government measures brought massive shifts in teaching-learning pedagogy in nursing to curb the infection. The study was conducted to explore the predictors of pandemic fatigue among nursing undergraduates and mediating role of individual resilience and coping styles during the third wave in India.MethodsThis online survey included 256 undergraduate nursing students studying at Tertiary Care Teaching Hospital in North India. Lockdown/Pandemic Fatigue Questionnaire, Brief (...) Resilience Scale, and Coping Behavior Questionnaire were used to collect the information. Appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics were applied to compute the results.ResultsNursing undergraduates reported a moderate level of fatigue during the restrictions imposed at the time of the third wave. Students’ year of study, tested positive during pandemic, and post-COVID-19 hospitalization were found associated with higher fatigue status. Advanced age and higher personal resilience status were associated with lower fatigue levels. Resilience status and second year of study were reported as independent predictors of pandemic fatigue in students.ConclusionFindings suggest that lockdown-related fatigue was common in nursing undergraduates. Considering negative consequences on mental health, routine psychosocial screening of the nursing students should be conducted. Recommending stress-relieving measures should be enforced to help nursing undergraduates to combat lockdown-induced exhaustion. (shrink)

Positive Polarity indefinites, such as some in English, are licensed in simplex negative sentences as long as they take wide scope over negation. When it surfaces under a clausemate negation, some can in principle take wide scope either by movement or by some semantic mechanism; e.g., it can take pseudoscope if it is interpreted as a choice function variable. Therefore, there is some uncertainty regarding the way in which PPI indefinites get licensed: can pseudoscope suffice? In this article we show, (...) using novel data from Hindi-Urdu and English, that pseudoscope is not sufficient, and that it is the syntactic position of PPI indefinites at LF, rather than their actual scope, which is relevant for licensing. These facts support a unified view of PPI indefinites as generalized quantifiers, and disfavor analyses where they are, or can be, interpreted as choice function variables. (shrink)

Purpose: Studies of reactive and proactive modes of inhibitory control tend to show age-related declines and are accompanied by abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex. We explored which mode of inhibitory control would be more amenable to change and accrue greater benefits following engagement in a 4-week theater acting intervention in older adults. These gains were evaluated by performance on the AX-CPT task. We hypothesized that an increase in proactive control would relate to an increase in AY errors and a decrease (...) in BX errors. In contrast, an increase in reactive control would be associated with a decrease in AY errors, no change in AY reaction time, and an increase in BX response time. Further, we posited that an increase in behavioral proactive control would accompany greater cue versus probe activity for previously identified regions in the prefrontal cortex. In contrast, an increase in behavioral reactive control would be accompanied by greater probe activation in these identified brain areas.Materials and Methods: The participants were 179 community-dwelling adults aged 60–89 years who were on average, college-educated. Participants were pseudo-randomly assigned to either an active-experiencing acting intervention condition or the active control condition ; participant assignment was subject to time of enrollment. Participants in both groups were trained by theater-actor researchers with expertise in acting interventions. In contrast to the active control participants who attended a course on theater acting, the acting-intervention group was required to consistently deploy proactive and reactive control mechanisms. Both groups met two times/week for 75-min for 4 weeks. Participant brain-behavioral performance on the AX-CPT task was evaluated prior to and after this four-week period.Results: No intervention effects were found in favor of proactive control. Behavioral evidence in favor of reactive control was weak. Brain-related benefits to reactive control was illustrated by greater probe-activation in Brodmann areas 6 and 8, relative to controls and pre-intervention.Conclusion: We found some evidence for improvements in reactive control via brain measures, attributed to engagement in the acting intervention. (shrink)