BackgroundInnovations in technology have contributed to rapid changes in the way that modern biomedical research is carried out. Researchers are increasingly required to endorse adaptive and flexible approaches to accommodate these innovations and comply with ethical, legal and regulatory requirements. This paper explores how Dynamic Consent may provide solutions to address challenges encountered when researchers invite individuals to participate in research and follow them up over time in a continuously changing environment.MethodsAn interdisciplinary workshop jointly organised by the University of Oxford (...) and the COST Action CHIP ME gathered clinicians, researchers, ethicists, lawyers, research participants and patient representatives to discuss experiences of using Dynamic Consent, and how such use may facilitate the conduct of specific research tasks. The data collected during the workshop were analysed using a content analysis approach.ResultsDynamic Consent can provide practical, sustainable and future-proof solutions to challenges related to participant recruitment, the attainment of informed consent, participant retention and consent management, and may bring economic efficiencies.ConclusionsDynamic Consent offers opportunities for ongoing communication between researchers and research participants that can positively impact research. Dynamic Consent supports inter-sector, cross-border approaches and large scale data-sharing. Whilst it is relatively easy to set up and maintain, its implementation will require that researchers re-consider their relationship with research participants and adopt new procedures. (shrink)

Topological index is a mathematical coding of the molecular graphs that predicts the physicochemical, biological, toxicological, and structural properties of the chemical compounds that are directly associated with the molecular graphs. The Zagreb connection indices are one of the TIs of the molecular graphs depending upon the connection number appeared in 1972 to compute the total electron energy of the alternant hydrocarbons. But after that, for a long period, these are not studied by researchers. Recently, Ali and Trinajstic Mol. Inform. (...) 372018,1−7 restudied the Zagreb connection indices and reported that the Zagreb connection indices comparatively to the classical Zagreb indices provide the better absolute value of the correlation coefficient for the thirteen physicochemical properties of the octane isomers. In this paper, we compute the general results in the form of exact formulae & upper bounds of the second Zagreb connection index and modified first Zagreb connection index for the resultant graphs which are obtained by applying operations of corona, Cartesian, and lexicographic product. At the end, some applications of the obtained results for particular chemical structures such as alkanes, cycloalkanes, linear polynomial chain, carbon nanotubes, fence, and closed fence are presented. In addition, a comparison between exact and computed values of the aforesaid Zagreb indices is also included. (shrink)

The notion of 'natural kinds' has been central to contemporary discussions of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Although explicitly articulated by nineteenth-century philosophers like Mill, Whewell and Venn, it has a much older history dating back to Plato and Aristotle. In recent years, essentialism has been the dominant account of natural kinds among philosophers, but the essentialist view has encountered resistance, especially among naturalist metaphysicians and philosophers of science. Informed by detailed examination of classification in the natural and social sciences, (...) this book argues against essentialism and for a naturalist account of natural kinds. By looking at case studies drawn from diverse scientific disciplines, from fluid mechanics to virology and polymer science to psychiatry, the author argues that natural kinds are nodes in causal networks. On the basis of this account, he maintains that there can be natural kinds in the social sciences as well as the natural sciences. (shrink)

The understanding of ḥadīth as a part of the problem that develops in society becomes the most important part of ḥadīth study. Its existence becomes an interesting study and produces a variety of certain thoughts studied in various scientific works. One of the thoughts on the understanding of the ḥadīth is examined by Suryadi in his dissertation that has been published under the title of contemporary methods of understanding the ḥadīth Prophet’s perspective Muḥammad al-Ghazālī and Yūsuf al-Qarḍāwī. This article discusses (...) Suryadi’s reading about Muhammad al-Gazali’s and Yusuf Qardawi’s thoughts on Ḥadīth. Using a descriptive-analytic method this study scrutinizes how both discuss ḥadīth in modern context. Based on the collected and analized data, this study finds that both scholars introduce new method of understanding a ḥadīth considering the important of modern context. It also finds that both relate their discussion to the maqasid of Islam, that is raḥmatan li-al-’ālamīn. (shrink)

Action theory has given rise to some perplexing puzzles in the past half century. The most prominent one can be summarized as follows: What distinguishes intentional from unintentional acts? Thanks to the ingenuity of philosophers and their thought experiments, we know better than to assume that the difference lies in the mere presence of an intention, or in its causal efficacy in generating the action. The intention might be present and may also cause the intended behavior, yet the behavior may (...) not be an intentional action; it may not be an action at all. The classic example is that of the nervous nephew who intends to kill his uncle to inherit his estate, and whose intention makes him so nervous as to drive recklessly, thereby running over a pedestrian... who happens to be his very uncle. The intention to kill is present and it causes the killing, yet the killing is not an intentional action. Rather, what appears to distinguish intentional from non-intentional action is voluntary control of the proper sort, and what distinguishes action from non-action is behavior caused in a particular manner. But spelling out the sort and specifying the manner have proven vexing tasks. (shrink)

In this interview, which took place in July 2020, Muhammad Asghari, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Tabriz, asked eleven questions to Professor Susan Haack, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. This American philosopher eagerly and patiently emailed me the answers to the questions. The questions in this interview are mainly about analytic philosophy and pragmatist philosophy.This interview was conducted via personal email between me and Professor Susan Haack in (...) July 2020. This interview, which Professor Hawk eagerly accepted, includes eleven questions about her biography and roles of various philosophers in her thought and finally about the influence of the philosophy of pragmatism on her thought. Of course, it goes without saying that the Haack's book Philosophy of Logic in Iran has been translated into Persian and he has published two articles in the quarterly journal of Philosophical Investigations and I also have translated one of her articles into Persian. What was most interesting to me was the influence of pragmatism on Haack's thought that Charles Sanders Pierce, among classical American pragmatists, had as much influence on this philosopher's thought as John Dewey had in Rorty's thought. Here I thank Professor Susan Haack for answering my questions patiently and eagerly. (shrink)

This paper discusses inheritance discourse based on verses of the Koran according to modern interpreters, Muḥammad Shaḥrūr with Munawir Sjadzali. Both interpreters are appointed because they can be considered to have tried in their respective contexts to answer the emergence of ambiguous attitudes in implementing inheritance law from Muslim societies. Muḥammad Shaḥrūr understands and applies it in a way that is different from the opinions and concepts, as seen in the 'four classical patterns of calculation' as well as in social (...) aspects, such as the concept of patrilinialism in society and the spirit of kinship and family spirit and ethnicity which became the benchmark for the distribution of inheritance in the past century or in political aspects, such as overlapping concepts of inheritance law which confuse ownership, law and prophetic authority. From this there is a clear relevance between the boundary theory proposed by Shaḥrūr and the efforts to reform Islamic law which are expected to grow with justice and be able to answer the needs of the community. Whereas Sjadzali developed the concept of inheritance contained in the Qur'an, to look for the relevance of Islamic teachings to the times, especially in the context of Modern Indonesia. Since al-Qur'an is multidimensional, as hudan li al-nās, the concept of Sjadzali's inheritance law has its own value, namely by teaching the principle of equality as the division of men is twice as large as women is no longer relevant. He also did not explain the division of inheritors who have an upward line adequately. This is because Sjadzali only sees from the side of the historicity of the region as the birth of his 1: 1 inheritance concept, without regard to other aspects such as heirs and heirs. (shrink)

This paper discusses inheritance discourse based on verses of the Qur’an according to modern interpreters, Muḥammad Shaḥrūr with Munawir Sjadzali. Both interpreters are appointed because they can be considered to have tried in their respective contexts to answer the emergence of ambiguous attitudes in implementing inheritance law from Muslim societies. Muḥammad Shaḥrūr understands and applies it in a way that is different from the opinions and concepts, as seen in the 'four classical patterns of calculation' as well as in social (...) aspects, such as the concept of patrilinialism in society and the spirit of kinship and family spirit and ethnicity which became the benchmark for the distribution of inheritance in the past century or in political aspects, such as overlapping concepts of inheritance law which confuse ownership, law and prophetic authority. From this there is a clear relevance between the boundary theory proposed by Shaḥrūr and the efforts to reform Islamic law which are expected to grow with justice and be able to answer the needs of the community. Whereas Sjadzali developed the concept of inheritance contained in the Qur'an, to look for the relevance of Islamic teachings to the times, especially in the context of Modern Indonesia. Since al-Qur'an is multidimensional, as hudan li al-nās, the concept of Sjadzali's inheritance law has its own value, namely by teaching the principle of equality as the division of men is twice as large as women is no longer relevant. He also did not explain the division of inheritors who have an upward line adequately. This is because Sjadzali only sees from the side of the historicity of the region as the birth of his 1: 1 inheritance concept, without regard to other aspects such as heirs and heirs. (shrink)

Although written consent forms are standard in clinical research, there is little regulatory or empirical guidance regarding how to most effectively review consent forms with potential participants. We developed an algorithm for embedding five questions with corrective feedback while reading consent forms with potential participants, and then applied it in the context of seven clinical research studies. A substantial proportion of participants within each protocol displayed initially inadequate responses to at least one question, but after the protocol elements were explained (...) again, most people demonstrated adequate understanding of them. These data illustrate the need for more attention not just to the content of consent forms, but also to the manner in which the forms are incorporated into the consent process. Embedding explicit inquiries about key protocol elements during consent form review and giving corrective feedback appears to be a simple yet effective way to foster better understanding of disclosed information. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a unified causal account of natural kinds. Using as a starting point the widely held view that natural kind terms or predicates are projectible, I argue that the ontological bases of their projectibility are the causal properties and relations associated with the natural kinds themselves. Natural kinds are not just concatenations of properties but ordered hierarchies of properties, whose instances are related to one another as causes and effects in recurrent causal processes. The resulting account (...) of natural kinds as clusters of core causal properties that give rise to clusters of derivative properties enables us to distinguish genuine natural kinds from non-natural kinds. For instance, it enables us to say why some of the purely conventional categories derived from the social domain do not correspond to natural kinds, though other social categories may. (shrink)

Could some social kinds be natural kinds? In this paper, I argue that there are three kinds of social kinds: 1) social kinds whose existence does not depend on human beings having any beliefs or other propositional attitudes towards them ; 2) social kinds whose existence depends in part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them, though attitudes need not be manifested towards their particular instances ; 3) social kinds whose existence and that of their instances depend in (...) part on specific attitudes that human beings have towards them . Although all three kinds of social kinds are mind-dependent, this does not make them ontologically subjective or preclude them from being natural kinds. Rather, what prevents the third kind of social kinds from being natural kinds is that their properties are conventionally rather than causally linked. (shrink)

Two main theories of concepts have emerged in the recent psychological literature: the Prototype Theory (which considers concepts to be self-contained lists of features) and the Theory Theory (which conceives of them as being embedded within larger theoretical networks). Experiments supporting the first theory usually differ substantially from those supporting the second, which suggests that these the· ories may be operating at different levels of explanation and dealing with different entities. A convergence is proposed between the Theory Theory and the (...) intentional stance in the philosophy of language and mind. From this stance, concepts should not be thought of as concrete physical entities. (shrink)

Features new to the second edition include a foreword by Tynnetta Muhammad, wife and student of Elijah Muhammad; opening comments by world renowned mathematician Dr. Abdulalim Sahabazz; a new chapter co-authored with Dr. Dorothy Blake Fardan; plus guided questions and power point notes to stimulate discourse around Elijah Muhammad's educational ideas.

Flying ad hoc sensor network for Internet of Things consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with high mobility, quick changes in topology, and diverse direction. The flying multi-UAVs were operated remotely by human beings or automatically by an onboard system. The applications of multi-UAVs are remote sensing, tracking, observing, and monitoring. It has a different nature compared to ordinary ad hoc network. The speed and diverse directions of multi-UAVs make it harder to route information in a desired way. Different issues (...) may arise due to differences in unmanned aerial vehicle mobility, speed, diverse direction, and quick changes in topology. The researchers proposed conventional ad hoc routing protocols which has poor aspects for the flying ad hoc networks. They tried to tackle the issue by using the clustering approach that divides the network structure into multiple clusters, each with its own cluster head. During the selection of CH and balance cluster formation, they consider only location awareness, neighborhood range, residual energy, and connection to the base station while ignoring the multi-UAVs distance, speed, direction, degree, and communication load. In this paper, we proposed bioinspired mobility-aware clustering optimization scheme based on bee intelligence foraging behavior for routing, considering relative mobility, residual energy, degree, and communication load during CH selection and balanced cluster formation. First, the clustering problem in network is formulated to dynamic optimization problem. An algorithm is designed based on bee intelligence, applied to select optimal UAVs CH and balanced cluster. The simulation results show that the proposed BIMAC-FASNET scheme performs better among existing clustering protocols in terms of link-connection lifetime, reaffiliation rate, communication load, number of UAVs per cluster, CH lifetime, and cluster formation time. (shrink)

This paper examines the phenomenon of ‘interactive kinds’ first identified by Ian Hacking. An interactive kind is one that is created or significantly modified once a concept of it has been formulated and acted upon in certain ways. Interactive kinds may also ‘loop back’ to influence our concepts and classifications. According to Hacking, interactive kinds are found exclusively in the human domain. After providing a general account of interactive kinds and outlining their philosophical significance, I argue that they are not (...) confined to the human realm, but that they can also occur elsewhere. Hence, I conclude by arguing that interactive kinds pose a challenge to scientific realism about kinds by making it difficult to make a distinction between real and non-real kinds. (shrink)

There are many ways of construing the claim that some categories are more “natural" than others. One can ask whether a system of categories is innate or acquired by learning, whether it pertains to a natural phenomenon or to a social institution, whether it is lexicalized in natural language or requires a compound linguistic expression. This renders suspect any univocal answer to this question in any particular case. Yet another question one can ask, which some authors take to have a (...) bearing on the issue of the naturalness of categories, is whether a system of categories constitutes a unique way of organizing a particular set of entities or phenomena, or whether there are other legitimate classification schemes that can coexist with it. Another way of putting this is by asking whether systems of categories can cut across one another, and if so, under what circumstances. Some philosophers have claimed that crosscutting systems of categories cannot exist as genuine natural kinds. This paper examines that claim and puts forward some counterexamples, concluding that this notion of natural kind is not in tune with scientific classification and ought to be rejected in favor of an alternative. (shrink)

The inconsistent findings of past board diversity research demand a test of competing linear and curvilinear diversity–performance predictions. This research focuses on board age and gender diversity, and presents a positive linear prediction based on resource dependence theory, a negative linear prediction based on social identity theory, and an inverted U-shaped curvilinear prediction based on the integration of resource dependence theory with social identity theory. The predictions were tested using archival data on 288 large organizations listed on the Australian Securities (...) Exchange, with a 1-year time lag between diversity (age and gender) and performance (employee productivity and return on assets). The results indicate a positive linear relationship between gender diversity and employee productivity, a negative linear relationship between age diversity and return on assets, and an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between age diversity and return on assets. The findings provide additional evidence on the business case for board gender diversity and refine the business case for board age diversity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to articulate a dispositional account of innateness that applies to cognitive capacities. After criticizing an alternative account of innateness proposed by Cowie (1999) and Samuels (2002), the dispositional account of innateness is explicated and defended against a number of objections. The dispositional account states that an innate cognitive capacity (output) is one that has a tendency to be triggered as a result of impoverished environmental conditions (input). Hence, the challenge is to demonstrate how the input can be (...) compared to the output and shown to be relatively impoverished. I argue that there are robust methods of comparing input to output without measuring them quantitatively. (shrink)

I will begin by proposing a taxonomy of taxonomic positions regarding the mind–brain: localism, globalism, revisionism, and contextualism, and will go on to focus on the last position. Although some versions of contextualism have been defended by various researchers, they largely limit themselves to a version of neural contextualism: different brain regions perform different functions in different neural contexts. I will defend what I call “environmental-etiological contextualism,” according to which the psychological functions carried out by various neural regions can only (...) be identified and individuated against an environmental context or with reference to a causal history. While this idea may seem innocuous enough, it has important implications for a structure-to-function mapping in the mind and brain sciences. It entails that the same neural structures can subserve different psychological functions in different contexts, leading to crosscutting psycho-neural mappings. I will try to illustrate how this can occur with reference to recent research on episodic memory. (shrink)

This paper advocates a dispositional account of innate cognitive capacities, which has an illustrious history from Plato to Chomsky. The "triggering model" of innateness, first made explicit by Stich ([1975]), explicates the notion in terms of the relative informational content of the stimulus (input) and the competence (output). The advantage of this model of innateness is that it does not make a problematic reference to normal conditions and avoids relativizing innate traits to specific populations, as biological models of innateness are (...) forced to do. Relativization can be avoided in the case of cognitive capacities precisely because informational content is involved. Even though one cannot measure output relative to input in a precise way, there are indirect and approximate ways of assessing the degree of innateness of a specific cognitive capacity. (shrink)

Innate cognitive capacities are widely posited in cognitive science, yet both philosophers and scientists have criticized the concept of innateness as being hopelessly confused. Despite a number of recent attempts to define or characterize innateness, critics have charged that it is associated with a diverse set of properties and encourages unwarranted inferences among properties that are frequently unrelated. This criticism can be countered by showing that the properties associated with innateness cluster together in reliable ways, at least in the context (...) of the study of cognition. Even though the causal connections between these cognitive properties are not always strict, they are robust enough to warrant considering innateness to be a natural kind as used in contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

We propose a texture-based interpretation workflow and apply it to delineate salt domes in 3D migrated seismic volumes. First, we compute an attribute map using a novel seismic attribute, 3D gradient of textures, which measures the dissimilarity between neighboring cubes around each voxel in a seismic volume across the time or depth, crossline, and inline directions. To evaluate the texture dissimilarity, we introduce five 3D perceptual and nonperceptual dissimilarity functions. Second, we apply a global threshold on the 3D-GoT volume to (...) yield a binary volume and demonstrate its effects on salt-dome delineation using objective evaluation measures such as receiver operating characteristic curves and the areas under the curves. Third, with an initial seed point selected inside the binary volume, we use a 3D region growing method to capture a salt body. For an automated 3D region growing, we adopt a tensor-based automatic seed point selection method. Finally, we apply morphological postprocessing to delineate the salt dome within the seismic volume. Furthermore, we also develop an objective evaluation measure based on the curvature and shape to compute the similarity between detected salt-dome boundaries and the reference interpreted by the geophysicist. Experimental results on a real data set from the North Sea show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for salt-dome delineation. (shrink)

Although informed consent is an integral part of clinical practice, its current doctrine remains mostly a matter of law and mainstream ethics rather than empirical research. There are scarce empirical data on patients’ perceived purpose of informed consent, which may include administrative routine/courtesy gesture, simple honest permission, informed permission, patient-clinician shared decision-making, and enabling patient’s self decision-making. Different purposes require different processes.