In diesem Aufsatz wird der Begriff „Technik“ bis zu seinem griechischen Ursprung, τέχνη, zurückverfolgt. Wir erkennen seine erste Bedeutung als eine geistige Aktivität, die auf Wissen und systematischer Erforschung beruht und auf die Schaffung eines technischen oder eines moralischen Werks abzielt. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz wird argumentiert, dass der Hauptunterschied zwischen der Technik, wie sie von den klassischen griechischen Philosophen gesehen wurde, und unserer heutigen Technik, in dem Ziel liegen könnte, welches der Mensch für die Technik setzt.

This paper describes the central role of peace in the Bahá’í Faith. For Bahá’ís, peace begins at the level of the individual and migrates outward to the community, nation, and the world. The article explains how the Bahá’í Faith outlines a covenant – an agreement between Bahá’ís and between Bahá’ís and the world – made manifest in an Administrative Order in which the ascertainment of peaceful principles and the establishment of peaceful practices are developed. The paper explains how concepts like (...) the oneness of humanity, the symbiosis between science and religion, and the unity of religion and God combine with ideals like justice, equality, and consultation to form a Bahá’í approach to the creation and maintenance of peace. Integration and disintegration – broad-structured, dynamic effects that shift societies and the world – will help to usher in two main aspects of a present and future Bahá’í order: the Lesser Peace and the Most Great Peace. The Lesser Peace is defined by the efforts of nations and international actors to form a broad-based, global peace. The Most Great Peace describes the arrival and ascendance of the Bahá’í Administrative Order, which will result in an unprecedented level of global peace and security. (shrink)

Emotion recognition systems have been of interest to researchers for a long time. Improvement of brain-computer interface systems currently makes EEG-based emotion recognition more attractive. These systems try to develop strategies that are capable of recognizing emotions automatically. There are many approaches due to different features extractions methods for analyzing the EEG signals. Still, Since the brain is supposed to be a nonlinear dynamic system, it seems a nonlinear dynamic analysis tool may yield more convenient results. A novel approach in (...) Symbolic Time Series Analysis for signal phase space partitioning and symbol sequence generating is introduced in this study. Symbolic sequences have been produced by means of spherical partitioning of phase space; then, they have been compared and classified based on the maximum value of a similarity index. Obtaining the automatic independent emotion recognition EEG-based system has always been discussed because of the subject-dependent content of emotion. Here we introduce a subject-independent protocol to solve the generalization problem. To prove our method’s effectiveness, we used the DEAP dataset, and we reached an accuracy of 98.44% for classifying happiness from sadness. It was 93.75% for three, 89.06% for four, and 85% for five emotional groups. According to these results, it is evident that our subject-independent method is more accurate rather than many other methods in different studies. In addition, a subject-independent method has been proposed in this study, which is not considered in most of the studies in this field. (shrink)

Building design based on principles of architecture in harmony with the climate of each region, in addition to creating thermal comfort in building interiors, reduces fuel consumption and more important it will demonstrate a clean and green environment. This issue becomes more intense in some geological areas like Khoramshahr in Iran, which has a warm, tropical and critical climate, since if this issue is not taking into account, using air conditioning utilities would be necessary in most periods of the year. (...) According to the studies, buildings in harmony with the climate of Khorramshahr will be able to adjust the thermal conditions of their interiors naturally to the human comfort level in 82 % of cases during a year. In such a building, only in 18% of cases during a year, using mechanical systems for cooling the internal spaces is essential. The main problem in this climate is cooling the interior spaces in hot season but in winter these spaces can be kept warm at the level of comfort by using passive or active solar energy or by using simple thermal devices in some situations. This all issues give a good answer to the rules of green architecture which they were carried out by traditional architects as well. Research method of this paper is mainly descriptive and analytical which study the traditional housing of Khorramshahr has been considered for achieving climatic design principles. The results of the studies show that the most problematic issue in this climate is the dry and dusty wind in summer. Since in winter, using solar cooling systems perform a situation that restricts unfavorable climatic factors. In this paper both of above mentioned issues were solved through some guidelines in the area of green architecture. (shrink)

carrington places race and racism at the center of his densely written analysis of science fiction, fantasy, utopia, and other forms of popular culture. He moves easily between a broad range of forms, which include memoirs, television series, comic books, novels, novelizations, fandom and fanzines, and short fiction and fiction circulated on the Internet. Popular culture helps us to construct notions of identity and race, and for carrington many constituent groups, notably fans, develop its key concepts and values.Speculative fiction is (...) for carrington a framework that links these various forms of popular culture. Here, SF is a genre different from literature, as it is situated closer to, and is more deeply... (shrink)

The prevailing discourse around AI ethics lacks the language and formalism necessary to capture the diverse ethical concerns that emerge when AI systems interact with individuals. Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum's capability approach, we present a framework formalizing a network of ethical concepts and entitlements necessary for AI systems to confer meaningful benefit or assistance to stakeholders. Such systems enhance stakeholders' ability to advance their life plans and well-being while upholding their fundamental rights. We characterize two necessary conditions for morally (...) permissible interactions between AI systems and those impacted by their functioning, and two sufficient conditions for realizing the ideal of meaningful benefit. We then contrast this ideal with several salient failure modes, namely, forms of social interactions that constitute unjustified paternalism, coercion, deception, exploitation and domination. The proliferation of incidents involving AI in high-stakes domains underscores the gravity of these issues and the imperative to take an ethics-led approach to AI systems from their inception. (shrink)

Background and objectivesThe study of brain functional connectivity alterations in children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder has been the subject of considerable investigation, but the biological mechanisms underlying these changes remain poorly understood. Here, we aim to investigate the brain alterations in patients with ADHD and Typical Development children and accurately classify ADHD children from TD controls using the graph-theoretical measures obtained from resting-state fMRI.Materials and methodsWe investigated the performances of rs-fMRI data for classifying drug-naive children with ADHD from TD controls. Fifty (...) six drug-naive ADHD children and 56 age matched TD controls were included in this study. The graph measures extracted from rs-fMRI functional connectivity were used as features. Extracted network-based features were fed to the RFE feature selection algorithm to select the most discriminating subset of features. We trained and tested Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting using Peking center data from ADHD-200 database to classify ADHD and TD children using discriminative features. In addition to the machine learning approach, the statistical analysis was conducted on graph measures to discover the differences in the brain network of patients with ADHD.ResultsAn accuracy of 78.2% was achieved for classifying drug-naive children with ADHD from TD controls employing the optimal features and the GB classifier. We also performed a hub node analysis and found that the number of hubs in TD controls and ADHD children were 8 and 5, respectively, indicating that children with ADHD have disturbance of critical communication regions in their brain network. The findings of this study provide insight into the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying ADHD.ConclusionPattern recognition and graph measures of the brain networks, based on the rs-fMRI data, can efficiently assist in the classification of ADHD children from TD controls. (shrink)

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...) substantive views about justice in outcome distributions. (shrink)

The philosophical literatures on models and thought experiments have been developing exponentially, and independently, for decades. This independence is surprising, given how similar models and thought experiments are. They each have “lives of their own,” they sit between theory and experience, they are important for both pedagogy and cutting-edge science, they galvanize conceptual changes and paradigm shifts, and they involve entertaining imaginary scenarios and working out what happens. Recently, philosophers have begun to highlight these similarities. This entry aims at taking (...) the idea further, by trying to systematically identify places where insights from one literature can be taken up in the other. Along the way, important differences will also be highlighted. (shrink)

Trust and trustworthiness are central concepts in contemporary discussions about the ethics of and qualities associated with artificial intelligence (AI) and the relationships between people, organisations and AI. In this article we develop an interdisciplinary approach, using socio-technical software engineering and design anthropological approaches, to investigate how trust and trustworthiness concepts are articulated and performed by AI software practitioners. We examine how trust and trustworthiness are defined in relation to AI across these disciplines, and investigate how AI, trust and trustworthiness (...) are conceptualised and experienced through an ethnographic study of the work practices of nine practitioners in the software industry. We present key implications of our findings for the generation of trust and trustworthiness and for the training and education of future software practitioners. (shrink)

In _Ibn Taymiyya on Reason and Revelation_, Carl Sharif El-Tobgui offers a comprehensive analysis of Ibn Taymiyya’s ten-volume magnum opus, _Darʾ taʿāruḍ al-ʿaql wa-l-naql_ (Refutation of the conflict of reason and revelation), elucidating its author’s foundational reconstitution of rationality through the multifaceted ontological, epistemological, and linguistic reforms he carries out.

This paper is intended as a gateway to two 2000-year-old manuscripts of the Analects. The first two sections discuss the archaeological context of the discoveries and analyse the manuscripts themselves, including characteristic features of the bamboo strips and the texts inked thereon and notable differences between these and other Analects versions. In these sections, I also critically evaluate present-day Analects studies and offer alternative hypotheses where there is room for debate. The third and final section of the paper discusses what (...) I consider the most fascinating (and most complex) issue regarding the manuscripts: their provenance. In that section, I examine when, where, and why the Analects was copied onto the bamboo strips. The ultimate goal of this paper is to present a nuanced understanding of the two bamboo manuscripts that conveys the fascinating insights they offer while also exploring the limitations of what these manuscripts can actually tell us. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic may affect the world severely in terms of quality of life, political, environmental, and economic sustainable development, and the global economy. Its impact is attested to by the number of research studies on it. The main aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on the psychology of sustainability, on sustainable development, and on the global economy. A computerized literature search was performed, and journal articles from authentic sources were extracted, including MEDLINE, Google Scholar, (...) Science Direct, ProQuest, and Emerald Insight. The references in selected articles were screened to identify any relevant studies. The following inclusion criteria were followed: research articles based on the COVID-19 pandemic, and articles, research papers, journals, and news articles published 2010 to 2020. The exclusion criteria were as follow: psychology research, articles, and journals published before 2010 and research articles having no link with the current pandemic’s impact on the psychology of sustainability, quality of life, and the global economy. Of the initial 350 articles identified, only 61 studies were found to be relevant and meet the inclusion criteria. Based on these articles, the review highlights that compared to developed countries, the developing nations and poor nations such as African countries with compromised health structures have been greatly affected. There are close associations between health, economic, environmental, and political issues globally. The pandemic can be managed if we follow new policies that implement economic and public health changes worldwide. A planned, coordinated approach between the public-private sector is required, designed according to each country’s health system and economy. We can come out of this crisis if we work together and support both developed and developing nations. (shrink)

Public and academic medical ethics debates surrounding justice and age discrimination often proceed from a problematic understanding of old age that ignores the diversity of older people. This article introduces the feminist perspective of intersectionality to medical ethical debates on aging and old age in order to analyze the structural discrimination of older people in medicine and health care. While current intersectional approaches in this field focus on race, gender, and sexuality, we thus set out to introduce aging and old (...) age as an additional category that is becoming more relevant in the context of longer life expectancies and increasing population aging. We analyze three exemplary cases on the individual, institutional, and public health level, and argue that considering the intersections of old age with other social categories helps to accommodate the diverse identities of older people and detect inequality and structural discrimination. (shrink)

Despite being a collection of holistic assessment tools, the comprehensive geriatric assessment primarily focuses on the social category of age during the assessment and disregards for example gender. This article critically reviews the standardized testing process of the comprehensive geriatric assessment in regard to diversity-sensitivity. I show that the focus on age as social category during the assessment process might potentially hinder positive outcomes for people with diverse backgrounds of older patients in relation to other social categories, such as race, (...) gender or socio-economic background and their influence on the health of the patient as well as the assessment and its outcomes. I suggest that the feminist perspective of intersectionality with its multicategorical approach can enhance the diversity-sensitivity of the comprehensive geriatric assessment, and thus improve the treatment of older patients and their quality of life. By suggesting an intersectional-based approach, this article contributes to debates about justice and diversity in medical philosophy and advocates for the normative value of diversity in geriatric medicine. (shrink)

The objective of this research is to assess the impact of ethics on research productivity within laboratories of public universities. To achieve this objective, neural networks’ method is used to highlight impacting and impacted variable modalities. Findings show ethical variables having the greatest impact on research productivity are ethics supporting document and transparency, while the variables most impacted by ethics are publications and scientific projects. Finally, the originality of this work lies in the reconciliation of two dimensions that appear to (...) be irreconcilable a priori, namely, ethics which has a social connotation and productivity which has an economic connotation. It also resides in employing neural networks’ method, with is rarely used in social sciences. (shrink)

Recital 33 GDPR has often been interpreted as referring to ‘broad consent’. This version of informed consent was intended to allow data subjects to provide their consent for certain areas of research, or parts of research projects, conditional to the research being in line with ‘recognised ethical standards’. In this article, we argue that broad consent is applicable in the emerging field of Computational Social Science (CSS), which lies at the intersection of data science and social science. However, the lack (...) of recognised ethical standards specific to CSS poses a practical barrier to the use of broad consent in this field and other fields that lack recognised ethical standards. Upon examining existing research ethics standards in social science and data science, we argue that they are insufficient for CSS. We further contend that the fragmentation of European Union (EU) law and research ethics sources makes it challenging to establish universally recognised ethical standards for scientific research. As a result, CSS researchers and other researchers in emerging fields that lack recognised ethical standards are left without sufficient guidance on the use of broad consent as provided for in the GDPR. We conclude that responsible EU bodies should provide additional guidance to facilitate the use of broad consent in CSS research. (shrink)

Background and ObjectivesFocal cortical dysplasia is a type of malformations of cortical development and one of the leading causes of drug-resistant epilepsy. Postoperative results improve the diagnosis of lesions on structural MRIs. Advances in quantitative algorithms have increased the identification of FCD lesions. However, due to significant differences in size, shape, and location of the lesion in different patients and a big deal of time for the objective diagnosis of lesion as well as the dependence of individual interpretation, sensitive approaches (...) are required to address the challenge of lesion diagnosis. In this research, a FCD computer-aided diagnostic system to improve existing methods is presented.MethodsMagnetic resonance imaging data were collected from 58 participants. Morphological and intensity-based features were calculated for each cortical surface and inserted into an artificial neural network. Statistical examinations evaluated classifier efficiency.ResultsNeural network evaluation metrics—sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy—were 96.7, 100, and 98.6%, respectively. Furthermore, the accuracy of the classifier for the detection of the lobe and hemisphere of the brain, where the FCD lesion is located, was 84.2 and 77.3%, respectively.ConclusionAnalyzing surface-based features by automated machine learning can give a quantitative and objective diagnosis of FCD lesions in presurgical assessment and improve postsurgical outcomes. (shrink)

Ikhwan al-Safa' (The Brethren of Purity) were the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity of lettered urbanites that was principally based in Basra and Baghdad. This brotherhood occupied a prominent station in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia: Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa' (The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contained fifty-two epistles that offered synoptic explications of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age. Divided (...) into four classificatory parts, it treated themes in mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics and theology, in addition to moral and didactic fables. The Ikhwan were learned compilers of scientific and philosophical knowledge, and their Rasa'il constituted a paradigmatic legacy in the canonization of philosophy and the sciences in mediaeval Islamic civilization. -/- This present volume gathers studies by leading philosophers, historians and scholars of Islamic Studies, who are also the editors and translators of the first Arabic critical editions and first complete annotated English translations of the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa', which will be published in the OUP Series that this present volume initiates, as well as being members of the Editorial Board. -/- The chapters of this present volume explore the conceptual and historical aspects of the philosophical and scientific contents of the Rasa'il and their classification, as well as investigating the authorship and dating of this corpus and the impact that the Ikhwan's intellectual tradition exercised in the unfolding of the history of ideas in Islam. (shrink)

BackgroundThe concept of ‘successful ageing’ has been a prominent focus within the field of gerontology for several decades. However, despite the widespread attention paid to this concept, its intersectional implications have not been fully explored yet. This paper aims to address this gap by analyzing the potential ageist and ableist biases in the discourse of successful ageing through an intersectional lens.MethodA critical feminist perspective is taken to examine the sensitivity of the discourse of successful ageing to diversity in societies. The (...) paper analyzes how ageist and ableist biases can manifest in the ways we conceptualize ageing, drawing on examples in the context of mental health.ResultsWe argue that the conventional approach to successful ageing is limited in its ability to account for the experiences of people who have faced intersectional discrimination throughout their lives. Drawing on examples in the context of mental health, we explore among others the link between depression and disabilities. Furthermore, we shed light on the negative impact of ageist and ableist attitudes concerning the diagnosis and treatment of dementia.DiscussionWe demonstrate how diversity is often overlooked in discussions of ageing well, and how ageist and ableist biases can manifest in the ways we conceptualize ageing. We argue that focusing solely on the health status as a means of achieving success fails to adequately counter ageism for all people. We further emphasize the role of structural factors, such as ageist attitudes, in shaping the experience of ageing and exacerbating health inequalities.ConclusionOverall, our findings emphasize the need for a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of ageing and therefore an intersectional approach to conceptions of ageing well that recognizes and addresses the biases and limitations of current discourses. Thereby, this paper offers valuable insights into the complex intersections between age and disabilities from a bioethical perspective, highlighting the need for a more inclusive and intersectional approach to ageing. (shrink)

The basic methodology of rough set theory depends on an equivalence relation induced from the generated partition by the classification of objects. However, the requirements of the equivalence relation restrict the field of applications of this philosophy. To begin, we describe two kinds of closure operators that are based on right and left adhesion neighbourhoods by any binary relation. Furthermore, we illustrate that the suggested techniques are an extension of previous methods that are already available in the literature. As a (...) result of these topological techniques, we propose extended rough sets as an extension of Pawlak’s models. We offer a novel topological strategy for making a topological reduction of an information system for COVID-19 based on these techniques. We provide this medical application to highlight the importance of the offered methodologies in the decision-making process to discover the important component for coronavirus infection. Furthermore, the findings obtained are congruent with those of the World Health Organization. Finally, we create an algorithm to implement the recommended ways in decision-making. (shrink)

The present work is a critical edition of a commentary by Ibn Wāṣil (d.1298) on his teacher Khūnajī’s (d.1248) handbook on logic _al-Jumal_. The work was an influential contribution to a particularly dynamic chapter in the history of Arabic logic.

Sixteenth century text with commentary on Vedanta.

BackgroundBurnout is a recognized challenge among the oncology workforce. It affects both genders with a higher frequency among women. This study examined the factors contributing to the development of burnout among female oncologists from the Middle East and North Africa.MethodsAn online cross-sectional survey was distributed to oncology professionals from different countries in the MENA region. The validated Maslach Burnout Inventory of emotional exhaustion, Depersonalization, and Personal Achievement plus questions about demography/work-related factors and attitudes toward oncology were included. Data were analyzed (...) to measure BO prevalence and related factors.ResultsBetween 10 February and 15 March 2020, 545 responses were submitted by female oncologists. The responses pre-dated the COVID-19 pandemic emergence in the region. BO prevalence was 71% among female professionals. Women aged 25% on administrative work daily. Nearly half of the respondents expressed a recurring thought of quitting oncology and 70% had no burnout support or education. Inability to deliver optimal care was reported as distressing for career development in 82%. Factors significantly influencing the BO risk were identified. Marital status, having children, academia and years in practice did not impact the risk of BO among female oncologists from MENA.ConclusionFemale oncologists from the Middle East and North Africa were found to have a high prevalence of BO. In this cohort, the majority of women oncology workers were young and in their early to mid-career stages. Burnout was linked to being younger, practicing in North African nations, having a heavy administrative load, and having persistent thoughts of quitting. Practicing a hobby and engaging in oncology communication, on the other hand, reduced the chance of BO. Burnout support and education, specifically for oncology women, is required. (shrink)