Automatic moving object detection and tracking is very important task in video surveillance applications. In the present work the well known background subtraction model and use of Gaussian Mixture Models have been used to implement a robust automated single object tracking system. In this implementation, background subtraction on subtracting consecutive frame-by-frame basis for moving object detection is done. Once the object has been detected it is tracked by employing an efficient GMM technique. After successful completion of tracking, moving object recognition (...) of those objects using well known Principal Component Analysis, which is used for extracting features and Manhattan based distance metric is used for subsequent classification purpose. The system is capable of handling entry and exit of an object. Such a tracking system is cost effective and can be used as an automated video conferencing system and also has applications like human tracking, vehicles monitoring, and event recognition for video surveillance. The proposed algorithm was tested on standard database on complex environments and the results were satisfactory. (shrink)

Employee theft is costly to any business, especially to big retail chain organizations. This research is to study the perception of retail employees on the impact of the individual and organizational factors contributing to workplace theft behavior in supermarkets in Malaysia and to study the mediating effect of intention to steal and the moderating effect of internal control systems. The results proved that individual and organizational factors do influence workplace theft behavior. It is also established that internal control systems moderate (...) the relationship between the intention to steal and workplace theft behavior. (shrink)

Contributed articles on Vedanta, Mimamsa and Nyaya philosophy; previously published in Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

ABSTRACTApproach-avoidance training has been shown to be effective in both clinical and laboratory research. However, some studies have failed to show the effects of AAT. Therefore, finding m...

BackgroundDiagnostic ultrasound has long been a part of a physician’s armamentarium, but transcranial focused ultrasound (FUS) is an emerging treatment of neurological disorders. Consequently, the literature in this field is increasing at a rapid pace.ObjectiveThis analysis was aimed to identify the top-cited articles on FUS to discern their origin, spread, current trends highlighting future impact of this novel neurosurgical intervention.MethodsWe searched the Web of Science database on 28th May 2021 and identified the top 100 cited articles. These articles were analyzed (...) with various scientometric parameters like the authors, corresponding authors, country of corresponding author, journal of publication, year of publication. Citation based parameters including total citations, mean citations per article and mean citations, citation count, and the citation per year, citations per year and co-authors per document were studied as well in addition to Hirsch h-index, g-index, m-index, Bradford’s Law, Lotka’s law and Collaboration index.ResultsThe 100 top-cited articles were published between 1998 and 2019 in 45 different journals. The average citations per document and citations per document per year were 97.78 and 12.47, respectively. The most prolific authors were Hynynen K (Medical Biophysics—Toronto), Elias WJ (Neurosurgery—Virginia), Zadicario (InSightec). The Journal of Neurosurgery published the most top-cited articles (n = 11), and most articles originated from the United States, followed by Canada. Among individual institutions, the University of Toronto was the most productive.ConclusionFUS is an emerging treatment of neurological disorders. With its increasing application, the FUS literature is increasing rapidly. Eleven countries contributed to the top 100 cited articles, with the top 2 countries (the United States and Canada) contributing to more than half of these articles. (shrink)

This comparative analysis of The Da Vinci Code and The Krishna Key by Ashwin Sanghi attempts to scrutinize the portrayal of institutionalized religions in the novels. The paper endeavours to trace the process of demythologization in relation to organized religion and gods of Hinduism and Christianity. The study also focuses on the exploitation of faith and religious beliefs as presented in the novels. The works are different in terms of social, economic and cultural factors, but can be gathered under (...) theological thrillers. The influence of Dan Brown upon Ashwin Sanghi is evident in terms of theme, style and narration. But the works divulge in the methodology used for the dislocation of myths. Christianity, Jesus Christ and Holy Grail are reinterpreted by Dan Brown by denouncing early Christian Church. The Krishna Key states and glorifies the technological supremacy of Indus valley civilization thereby suggesting that Krishna might have been a historical character. Dan Brown foregrounds rational understanding of religion by accusing early Church but Sanghi propagates the same by means of glorifying the past. (shrink)

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is an essential part of public health programmes. Since M&E is the backbone of public health programmes, ethical considerations are important in their conduct. Some of the key ethical considerations are avoiding conflicts of interest, maintaining independence of judgement, maintaining fairness, transparency, full disclosure, privacy and confidentiality, respect, responsibility, accountability, empowerment and sustainability. There are several ethical frameworks in public health, but none focusing on the monitoring and evaluation process. There is a need to institutionalise the (...) ethical review of M&E proposals. A theoretical framework for ethical considerations is proposed in this paper. This proposed theoretical framework can act as the blueprint for building the capacity of ethics committees to review M&E proposals. A case study is discussed in this context. After thorough field testing, this practical and field-based ethical framework can be widely used by donor agencies, M&E teams, institutional review boards and ethics committees. (shrink)

Monitoring and evaluation is an essential part of public health programmes. Since M&E is the backbone of public health programmes, ethical considerations are important in their conduct. Some of the key ethical considerations are avoiding conflicts of interest, maintaining independence of judgement, maintaining fairness, transparency, full disclosure, privacy and confidentiality, respect, responsibility, accountability, empowerment and sustainability. There are several ethical frameworks in public health, but none focusing on the monitoring and evaluation process. There is a need to institutionalise the ethical (...) review of M&E proposals. A theoretical framework for ethical considerations is proposed in this paper. This proposed theoretical framework can act as the blueprint for building the capacity of ethics committees to review M&E proposals. A case study is discussed in this context. After thorough field testing, this practical and field-based ethical framework can be widely used by donor agencies, M&E teams, institutional review boards and ethics committees. (shrink)

The heart of this book is a dramatic love poem, the Rasa Lila, which is the ultimate focal point of one of the most treasured Sanskrit texts of India, the Bhagavata Purana. Judged a literary masterpiece by Indian and Western scholars alike, this work of poetic genius and soaring religious vision is one of the world's greatest sacred love stories and, as Graham Schweig clearly demonstrates, should be regarded as India's Song of Songs. The story presents the supreme deity as (...) the youthful and amorous cowherd, Krishna, who joins his beloved maidens in an enchanting and celebratory "dance of divine love." Schweig introduces this work of exquisite poetry and profound theology to the Western world in the form of a luminous translation and erudite scholarly treatment. His book explores the historical context and literary genre of the work and elucidates the aesthetic and emotional richness of the composition, highlighting poignant details of this drama of divine love. Schweig illuminates the religious dimensions and ethical nuances of the drama, drawing widely from the commentaries and esoteric vision of masters of the Caitanya school of Vaishnavism, a prominent devotional Hindu tradition. Themes such as transcendence of death through love, the yoga of devotion, the contrast between worldly love and passionate love for God, and the dialectical tension between ethical boundaries and boundless love are presented. The final event of the Rasa dance, the author concludes, presents a dynamic symbol of supreme love that provides the basis for a theological vision of genuine religious pluralism. (shrink)

Formalized by the tenth century, the expansive Bhāgavata Purāṇa resists easy categorization. While the narrative holds together as a coherent literary work, its language and expression compete with the best of Sanskrit poetry. The text's theological message focuses on devotion to Krishna or Vishnu, and its philosophical outlook is grounded in the classical traditions of Vedānta and Sāmkhya. This translation and detailed analysis of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa includes endnotes that explain unfamiliar concepts and essays that elucidate the rich debates (...) found in the Sanskrit commentaries. The book makes a central Hindu masterpiece more accessible to English-speaking audiences and more meaningful to scholars of Indian literature, philosophy, and religion. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Approaching comparison through attention to stories of gods rather than through explicit doctrines, and in particular to stories of gods in their infancy and childhood, is an arresting proposal in comparative theology. It was this unusual character which first drew my attention to Kristin Johnston Largen’s Baby Krishna, Infant Christ. Largen’s prose is fluid and clear, and the structure of the argument is also readily apparent. And thus the work held my attention and convinced me that it is deserving (...) of review here.An introduction and first chapter offer a description of and an apology for comparative theology. Part I, comprising chapters two and three, is focused on ‘Baby Krishna,’ first recounting some of the main stories of Krishna from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, before reflecting on the significance of those stories from the perspective of understanding how salvation is conceived and experienced in those Hindu traditions for which Krishna bhakti is crucial.The fourth and fifth chapters, .. (shrink)

On spiritual aspects of the Bhagavadgītā and Krishna, Hindu deity.

Classical Sanskrit poem on Krishna, Hindu deity, also, illustrating the rules of Sanskrit grammar as in Aṣṭādhyāyi of Pāṇini; based on rare manuscripts.

_In his book_ The Yogasūtra of Patañjali: A New Introduction to the Buddhist Roots of the Yoga System_, Pradeep Gokhale reveals a new picture of the Yogasūtra. He shows us, verse after verse, Buddhist influences on this classical text, which is usually seen as rooted in the Sā__ṃ__khya tradition. Gokhale does not merely argue that Patañjali borrows from Buddhist sources; he substantiates his argument with numerous detailed examples, traveling back and forth between Patañjali and Buddhist thinkers such as Asa__ṅ__ga and (...) Vasubandhu. Gokhale further argues that Vyāsa, Patañjali’s most authoritative commentator, makes a __political move in his commentary by distancing Patañjali from the Buddhists and situating him on the “right side” of the philosophical map, namely the __ā__stika side, the side of the loyalists of the Veda. __The implications are __far-reaching. First, __Patañjali and Vyāsa cannot be one and the same person, as claimed by solid Yogasūtra scholars such as Philipp Maas. __Second, the Patañjali of the Yogasūtra cannot be identified with his namesake, the __author of the Mahābhā__ṣ__ya, “The Great Commentary” on some of the themes discussed by Pā__ṇ__ini, the forefather of Indian linguistics. Patañjali, the linguist, is dated to the 2nd or 3rd century BCE; Patañjali of the Yogasūtra would now have to be pushed forward to the 5th century CE as Gokhale implies. Like Daya Krishna before him, Gokhale highlights the contribution of Buddhist texts and thinkers, often undermined or marginalized in the narrative of the history of Indian philosophy, at least as __it is __sketched in India. In this respect, I briefly visit Daya Krishna’s essay “Was Ācārya Śa__ṅ__kara responsible for the disappearance of Buddhist Philosophy from India?” (1999). Finally, I mention Karen O’Brien-Kop’s research. Like Gokhale, she makes an attempt to join the dots between Pātañjala-yoga and the Buddhist Yogācāra._. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

Early in his Essays on Intellectual Powers, Reid draws a distinction between mental power, mental operation, and mental capacity (EIP 21). To the untrained eye, these terms could probably be used interchangeably, and Reid believes this is correct, up to a point. He argues that, if we are interested in understanding exactly how the human mind works, we must use these terms with more precise meanings. This is part of his more general strategy of trying to always use the words (...) with their common meanings, as much as possible, but also pointing out that certain philosophical distinctions are needed to carry out the project of laying out the foundations of the science of the mind. This paper explains what the distinction between power, operation, and capacity is, according to Reid, with the goal of understanding why it is important to draw such a distinction, not only for the Reidian project, but for action theory, more generally. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)