Ecofeminism is a term coined by Françoise D’Eubonne in her book Feminism or Death to show the affinities between ecology and feminism. Both women and nature are perceived as passive elements and like women who complain about patriarchal constraints, ecologists shed light on the impacts of human exploitation over nature which is affected by pollution. Some dimensions of ecofeminism are present in Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Yellow Woman. The postmodern novel contains a female character who forges a link with the (...) natural surroundings and is in a direct contact with some natural elements like plants and animals. What is specific about the heroine is that she escapes her matriarchal society and goes back to nature in order to reconstruct her identity. At the end of the narrative, the female narrator leaves the natural setting and goes back to her family to replay social roles. The present article sets out to study the importance of Mother Nature for the female narrator and to examine the affinities between Earth Mother and the female protagonist. The first part will offer a theoretical background about the basic principles of ecofeminism. Then, my analysis will touch upon the aspects of ecofeminism in the novel. However, the last part will focus on the way the narrator goes beyond her matriarchal culture and reshapes female identity. (shrink)

This paper addresses the job shop scheduling problem including time lag constraints. This is an extension of the job shop scheduling problem with many applications in real production environments, where extra delays can be introduced between successive operations of the same job. It belongs to a category of problems known as NP-hard problem due to large solution space. Biogeography-based optimization is an evolutionary algorithm which is inspired by the migration of species between habitats, recently proposed by Simon in 2008 to (...) optimize hard combinatorial optimization problems. We propose a hybrid biogeography-based optimization algorithm for solving the job shop scheduling problem with additional time lag constraints with minimization of total completion time. In the proposed HBBO, the effective greedy constructive heuristic is adapted to generate the initial population of habitat. Moreover, a local search metaheuristic is investigated in the mutation step in order to ameliorate the solution quality and enhance the diversity of the population. To assess the performance of HBBO, a series of experiments on well-known benchmark instances for job shop scheduling problem with time lag constraints is performed. (shrink)

Based on an analysis of 44 cases in Canada, Tunisia, and Cameroon, this research attempts to determine the fundaments of sustainable entrepreneurship (SE) in an international perspective and to shed the light on the potential impact of economic, institutional, and cultural dimensions upon diverse levels of sustainability in smalland medium-size firms (SMEs). Neo-institutional and entrepreneurship theories were combined in an integrative conceptual model to fully embrace the meanings and practices of SE and to question the "culture free" argument of some (...) prescriptions as well as some international programs. The analysis of the rationale behind entrepreneurs committed to sustainability in the three countries compared to less engaged firms shows that entrepreneurs' individual values are crucial in all cases. Socio-cultural specificities and institutional realities can, however, be more or less inductive to the adoption of sustainable practices in SMEs. This study also demonstrates that external stimuli are needed in Tunisia and Cameroon to reach the same environmental involvement as found in Canada. Moreover, support programs to assist SMEs with the adoption of sustainable practices and communication about the issue have to be tailored to the entrepreneur's motives, the firms' levels of openness to sustainability, the socio-cultural practices already embedded, and the countries' priorities. Implications for policy, management, and research are also discussed. (shrink)

In Japan, income, authority, and prestige are unequally distributed between men and women, even if they share the same occupational level. These inequalities are perceived as an ethical issue because they go against the principle of equal treatment at work. Nowadays, Japanese companies are under growing political and regulatory pressure to increase the hiring, promotion, and empowerment of female employees. In this context, the first equity index that tracks the financial performance of the best Japanese companies in terms of gender (...) diversity performance—the MSCI Japan Empowering Women Index —was launched in 2010. It aims to satisfy the growing demand of investors who want to reduce gender discrimination in Japanese workplaces. This paper compares the financial performance of the WIN stock index to the conventional parent index over the period 2010–2018, offering a unique setting to assess the effects of gender diversity screens on portfolio risk-adjusted performance. Our results are robust to a battery of risk-adjusted performance indicators and clearly indicate that investing in the WIN equity index does not come at a cost compared to investing in its conventional peer. This evidence is expected to reinforce confidence of investors who have an appetite for justice in increasing their investment in financial products that support the participation and the advancement of women in the Japanese workforce. (shrink)

The enormous scale of the available information and products on the Internet has necessitated the development of algorithms that intermediate between options and human users. These algorithms attempt to provide the user with relevant information. In doing so, the algorithms may incur potential negative consequences stemming from the need to select items about which it is uncertain to obtain information about users versus the need to select items about which it is certain to secure high ratings. This tension is an (...) instance of the exploration–exploitation trade‐off in the context of recommender systems. Because humans are in this interaction loop, the long‐term trade‐off behavior depends on human variability. Our goal is to characterize the trade‐off behavior as a function of human variability fundamental to such human–algorithm interaction. To tackle the characterization, we first introduce a unifying model that smoothly transitions between active learning and recommending relevant information. The unifying model gives us access to a continuum of algorithms along the exploration–exploitation trade‐off. We then present two experiments to measure the trade‐off behavior under two very different levels of human variability. The experimental results inform a thorough simulation study in which we modeled and varied human variability systematically over a wide rage. The main result is that exploration–exploitation trade‐off grows in severity as human variability increases, but there exists a regime of low variability where algorithms balanced in exploration and exploitation can largely overcome the trade‐off. (shrink)

BackgroundFew studies have identified the willingness rate of developing countries population to be enrolled in clinical trials.MethodsAll participants including patients, healthy volunteers and doctors completed a questionnaire to examine factors affecting the consent to participate in medical research.ResultsOverall, 80 % of the included population agree to participate in health research. This rate was lower for trials dealing with life-threatening diseases. Altruism and perceived risk of harm were the main reason to respectively accept or refuse to participate in clinical trials. Factors (...) significantly associated with willingness were: age <40 years 1.6 [95 % Confidence Interval 1.2-2.1]) and prior history of blood donation.ConclusionMost participants expressed their willingness to be included in medical research especially if they are young or if they have history of blood donation. However, consent to participate is low when medical research required acute care. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: * 1 Introduction * 2 Historical Views of Human Nature * 3 Physicalism in Christian Scholarship * 4 Contributions from Contemporary Science * 5 Conclusion * Bibliography.