. Epochs present in the voiced speech are defined as time instants of significant excitation of the vocal tract system during the production of speech. Nonstationary nature of excitation source and vocal tract system makes accurate identification of epochs a difficult task. Most of the existing methods for epoch detection require prior knowledge of voiced regions and a rough estimation of pitch frequency. In this paper, we propose a novel method that relies on time-order representation based on short-time Fourier–Bessel series (...) expansion which can be employed on entire speech signal to detect epochs without any prior information. The proposed method automatically detects voiced regions in the speech signal by computing the marginal energy density with respect to time in the low frequency range from the energy distribution in the time-frequency plane. An estimate of pitch frequency for each detected voiced region is then obtained by computing the marginal energy density with respect to frequency in the LFR from the energy distribution in the time-frequency plane. Epochs are located for each detected voiced region as peaks in the derivative of the low pass filtered signal corresponding to falling edges of peak negative cycles in the LPF signal synthesized from TOR coefficients corresponding to LFR. Experimental results obtained by the proposed method on speech signals taken from the CMU-Arctic database are found to be promising. The proposed method detects epochs with high accuracy and reliability. (shrink)

According to Arti Dhand, it can be argued that all Indian ethics have been primarily virtue ethics. Many have indeed jumped on the virtue bandwagon, providing prima facie interpretations of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist canons in virtue terms. Others have expressed firm skepticism, claiming that virtues are not proven to be grounded in the nature of things and that, ultimately, the appeal to virtue might just well be a mere façon de parler. In this paper, we aim to advance (...) the discussion of Indian virtue ethics. Our intent is not to provide a catch-all interpretation of the different Indian schools. Our goal is, more modestly, to offer a theory of virtues in Indian philosophies, as a framework for theorists and interpreters who see these diverse traditions as amenable to systematic virtue analysis. Our theory grounds virtues in the reality of genuine moral dispositions and in a system of beliefs where morality is understood as transformative in nature. (shrink)

Cloud computing paradigm is growing rapidly, and it allows users to get services via the Internet as pay-per-use and it is convenient for developing, deploying, and accessing mobile applications. Currently, security is a requisite concern owning to the open and distributed nature of the cloud. Copious amounts of data are responsible for alluring hackers. Thus, developing efficacious IDS is an imperative task. This article analyzed four intrusion detection systems for the detection of attacks. Two standard benchmark datasets, namely, NSL-KDD and (...) UNSW-NB15, were used for the simulations. Additionally, this study highlights the proliferating challenges for the security of sensitive user data and gives useful recommendations to address the identified issues. Finally, the projected results show that the hybridization method with support vector machine classifier outperforms the existing techniques in the case of the datasets investigated. (shrink)

Earlier evidence suggests that besides humans, some species of mammals and birds demonstrate visual self-recognition, assessed by the controversial “mark” test. Whereas, there are high levels of inter-individual differences amongst a single species, some species such as macaques and pigeons which do not spontaneously demonstrate mirror self-recognition can be trained to do so. We were surprised to discover that despite being widely used as a model system for avian research, the performance of zebra finches on the mark test had not (...) been studied earlier. Additionally, we studied the behavioral responses of another species of passerine songbirds to a mirror and the MSR mark test. Although a small number of adult male zebra finches appeared to display heightened responses toward the mark while observing their reflections, we could not rule out the possibility that these were a part of general grooming rather than specific to the mark. Furthermore, none of the house crows demonstrated mark-directed behavior or increased self-exploratory behaviors when facing mirrors. Our study suggests that self-directed behaviors need to be tested more rigorously in adult male zebra finches while facing their reflections and these findings need to be replicated in a larger population, given the high degree of variability in mirror-directed behaviors. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAdults use a variety of strategies to reason about fraction magnitudes, and this variability is adaptive. In two studies, we examined the relationships between mathematics anxiety, working memory, strategy variability and performance on two fraction tasks: fraction magnitude comparison and estimation. Adults with higher mathematics anxiety had lower accuracy on the comparison task and greater percentage absolute error on the estimation task. Unexpectedly, mathematics anxiety was not related to variable strategy use. However, variable strategy use was linked to more accurate (...) magnitude comparisons, especially among adults with lower working memory performance or those who use mathematics less frequently, as well as lower PAE on the estimation task. These findings shed light on the role of strategy variability in fraction problem solving and demonstrate a link between mathematics anxiety and fraction magnitude reasoning, a key predictor of general mathematics achievement. (shrink)

Coronavirus disease 2019 is a fast-developing viral pandemic spreading across the globe. Due to lack of availability of proven medicines against COVID-19, physicians have resorted to treatments through large trials of investigational drugs with poor evidence or those used for similar diseases. Large trials randomize 100–500+ patients at multiple hospitals in different countries to either receive these drugs or standard treatment. In order to expedite the process, some regulatory agencies had also given permission to use drugs approved for other diseases, (...) despite a lack of evidence of efficacy in COVID-19. In this review, we highlight the potential ethical issues that should be addressed during the use of investigational drugs with little prior evidence as a treatment options during a pandemic. We discuss the impact of design of randomized clinical trials using LOTUS trial as an example and that of off-label use of drugs like chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine on the safety of patients during COVID-19. We conclude that the adaptive randomized clinical trial designs offer a flexible and efficient approach, enabling patients to quickly switch to successful treatments, while minimizing the number of patients on standard of care. Randomized clinical trial design should consider blinding of investigators and only representative patients who can provide consent should be included. We also conclude the emergency approvals of drugs should be carefully issued and off-label use should be restricted in pandemics. Streamlined regulatory guidelines for emergency drug use in a pandemic can also help in providing benefit and minimizing harm to patients in the future. (shrink)

"This book... is the English translation of the Hindi book Tattvārthasūtra with Upādhyāya (now Ailācārya) Srutasāgarji, as the principal commentator and edited by Dr Sudeep Jain in Hindi"--P. 3.

Bacteria use trans‐translation to rescue stalled ribosomes and target incomplete proteins for proteolysis. Despite similarities between tRNAs and transfer‐messenger RNA (tmRNA), the key molecule for trans‐translation, new structural and biochemical data show important differences between translation and trans‐translation at most steps of the pathways. tmRNA and its binding partner, SmpB, bind in the A site of the ribosome but do not trigger the same movements of nucleotides in the rRNA that are required for codon recognition by tRNA. tmRNA‐SmpB moves from (...) the A site to the P site of the ribosome without subunit rotation to generate hybrid states, and moves from the P site to a site outside the ribosome instead of to the E site. During catalysis, transpeptidation to tmRNA appears to require the ribosomal protein bL27, which is dispensable for translation, suggesting that this protein may be conserved in bacteria due to trans‐translation. These differences provide insights into the fundamental nature of trans‐translation, and provide targets for new antibiotics that may have decrease cross‐reactivity with eukaryotic ribosomes. (shrink)

An ongoing debate in the United States relating to COVID-19 features the purported tension between containing the coronavirus to save lives or opening the economy to sustain livelihoods, with ethical overtones on both sides. Proponents of opening the economy argue that sustaining livelihoods should be prioritized over virus containment, with ethicists asking, “What about the risk to human life?” Defendants of restricting the spread of the virus endorse saving lives through virus containment but contend with the ethical concern “What about (...) people’s livelihoods and individual freedoms?” A commonly held belief is that political ideology drives these differential preferences: liberals are more focused on saving lives, whereas conservatives favor sustaining livelihoods with no additional government intervention in the free-market economy. We examine these lay beliefs among US residents in four studies and find that economic system justification (ESJ), an ideology that defends the prevailing economic system when under threat, is a reliable psychological predictor beyond political ideology. Specifically, compared to those who scored low on ESJ, people who scored high on ESJ judged China as more justified in downplaying the spread of virus to protect its interest in the global free-market economy, supported in-person over online learning, viewed shelter in place as less desirable, and perceived the opening of the Texas economy as more legitimate. We also find that multiple psychological mechanisms might be at work—resistance to market interventions, perceived legitimacy of opening the economy, perceived seriousness of the health crisis, and violation of human rights. (shrink)

Although Indic perspectives toward nature are now well documented, climate engineering discussions seem to still lack the views from Indic or other non‐Western sources. In this article, I will apply some of the Hindu and Jain concepts such as karma, nonviolence (Ahiṃsā ), humility (Vinaya ), and renunciation (Saṃnyāsa ) to analyze the two primary climate geoengineering strategies of solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). I suggest that Indic philosophical and religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, (...) and Jainism offer ethical concepts to call for humility in all acts of climate engineering leading to a favoring of CDR over SRM and a favoring of lifestyle changes (particularly vegetarianism) over both. I demonstrate these concepts by introducing the five great elements from the Hindu philosophy, two Hindu legends from Hindu mythology, the Indic ethical ideas of karma, renunciation, and humility, and the moral authority of Gandhi. (shrink)

This essay is conceived as a contribution to the academic debate on the ethical status of mystical traditions with regard to Jain asceticism in particular and—through comparison of Jain with Advaita Vedanta asceticism—to ideologies of radical quietism more generally. For both Jain and Advaita Vedantic ascetic traditions, the material world, and particularly the body, are the primary obstacles to spiritual development. We deal with the social, physical, and environmental implications of such a worldview, rather than with the (...) practice or the phenomenology or the doctrine of mysticism, which we grant to be an accurate reflection of a particular kind of cosmic experience. We address ethical issues, not metaphysical ones. In our discussion of Jain asceticism, we demonstrate that the basic problem (and promise) of quietism, in almost any cultural form, is the shocking realization it can occasion that the Real has absolutely nothing to do with the social or with any sort of ethical action. We argue that Jain asceticism cannot function as an adequate resource for contemporary ethics. Our normative concerns lie exclusively with the adequacy of Jain quietism in supporting a stable global community and a sustainable natural environment. One can be mystical without being ethical, and ethical without being a mystic. We conclude that the truths of quietism are both very profound and profoundly nonethical. (shrink)

This Is A Concise Narrative Of The Beginnings, History, Schisms, Social Organization And Cosmology Of The Living Jain Tradition. The Study Is Covered In 7 Chapters - Atheistic Jainism? - Textual Sources And Ethnographic Literature - The Grand Transition In Jainism: Digambar And Shvetambar As Continuity And Change - The Shvetambar `Church` - The Digambar Case Reconsidered: Contemporary Period - The Digambar Jains Of North India: Society And Religion In Baraut, Uttar Pradesh - The Kanji Swami Panth: Contestation, Cosmology (...) And Confrontation. Condition Good. (shrink)

On the life and philosophy of Kundakunda, 2nd century exponent of Jainism.

The appropriate understanding and fast processing of lengthy legal documents are computationally challenging problems. Designing efficient automatic summarization techniques can potentially be the key to deal with such issues. Extractive summarization is one of the most popular approaches for forming summaries out of such lengthy documents, via the process of summary-relevant sentence selection. An efficient application of this approach involves appropriate scoring of sentences, which helps in the identification of more informative and essential sentences from the document. In this work, (...) a novel sentence scoring approach DCESumm is proposed which consists of supervised sentence-level summary relevance prediction, as well as unsupervised clustering-based document-level score enhancement. Experimental results on two legal document summarization datasets, BillSum and Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), reveal that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art approaches. More specifically it achieves ROUGE metric F1-score improvements of (1−6)% and (6−12)% for the BillSum and FIRE test sets respectively. Such impressive summarization results suggest the usefulness of the proposed approach in finding the gist of a lengthy legal document, thereby providing crucial assistance to legal practitioners. (shrink)

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthesis trope cannot account.

Lochlann Jain's debut non-fiction graphic novel, Things That Art, playfully interrogates the order of things. Toying with the relationship between words and images, Jain's whimsical compositions may seem straightforward. Upon closer inspection, however, the drawings reveal profound and startling paradoxes at the heart of how we make sense of the world. Commentaries by architect and theorist Maria McVarish, poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, musician and English Professor Drew Daniel, and the author offer further insight into the drawings in (...) this collection. A captivating look at the fundamental absurdities of everyday communication, Things that Art jolts us toward new forms of collation and collaboration. (shrink)

America now is home to approximately three million Hindus and Jains. Their contribution to the economic and intellectual growth of the country is unquestionable. Dharma in America aims to explore the role of Hindu and Jain Americans in diverse fields such as: education and civic engagements medicine and healthcare music. Providing a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries, Dharma in America also gives some insights into the ongoing issues and challenges these (...) important ethnic and religious groups face in the America today. (shrink)

As Acharya Vidyanand writes in the Foreword of Samayasara, it is the ultimate conscious reality. The enlightened soul has infinite glory. It has the innate ability to demolish the power of karmas, both auspicious as well as inauspicious, which constitute the cycle of births and deaths, and are an obstacle in the path of liberation of the soul. Samayasara is an essential reading for anyone who wishes to lead a purposeful and contented life. It provides irrefutable and lasting solutions to (...) all our problems, concerning worldly ways as well as spiritual curiosities and misgivings. (shrink)

In this modern world, a massive amount of data is processed and broadcasted daily. This includes the use of high energy, massive use of memory space, and increased power use. In a few applications, for example, image processing, signal processing, and possession of data signals, etc., the signals included can be viewed as light in a few spaces. The compressive sensing theory could be an appropriate contender to manage these limitations. “Compressive Sensing theory” preserves extremely helpful while signals are sparse (...) or compressible. It very well may be utilized to recoup light or compressive signals with less estimation than customary strategies. Two issues must be addressed by CS: plan of the estimation framework and advancement of a proficient sparse recovery calculation. The essential intention of this work expects to audit a few ideas and utilizations of compressive sensing and to give an overview of the most significant sparse recovery calculations from every class. The exhibition of acquisition and reconstruction strategies is examined regarding the Compression Ratio, Reconstruction Accuracy, Mean Square Error, and so on. (shrink)

‘You bastard’ is insulting because ‘bastard’ is an expletive, but what’s wrong with ‘You Hoboken’ or ‘You big wet noodle’? This paper explores the semantics of a vocative construction that is particularly efficient at coining what I call ‘expressive labels’; these are affect-transmitting expressions that present themselves as apt for identifying their discourse target via speaker affect. Building on work by Portner On information structure, meaning and form. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007) and Gutzmann, I show how discourse properties direct and constrain (...) the conversion to expressive label, and offer a semantics for this construction that unifies these cases with more conventional evaluative vocatives, like ‘you bastard’. (shrink)

The initial online publication contained a typesetting mistake. The original article has been corrected.

This volume is based on innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies.

Nationwide, almost 11% of women abuse drugs during their pregnancy. In some communities, these numbers are as high as 25–30%. Drug abuse is not limited to the poor or to African Americans, but is seen among affluent and white Americans as well. It is widespread, irrespective of race or social class. Annually, nearly 375,000 infants are exposed to drugs in America. Because of the terrible suffering caused by these births, and the conflicts caregivers experience in the treatment of these infants, (...) Trollope's quote is very apropos. Although caregivers have good motives in trying to rescue these babies and helping place them in a nurturing environment, despair about this objective is always close to the surface. (shrink)

We appreciated the important commentary provided by Michelle Oberman on our paper, “Discontinuing Life Support in an Infant of a Drug-Addicted Mother: Whose Decision Is It?” . For the most part we agree with Oberman's analysis of the issues, but there are seven points of variance, either of conception, emphasis, or accuracy. We wish to clarify these and welcome the chance her commentary provided to offer aspects of the social situation surrounding the case we presented.

Despite ample research on corporate governance (CG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a lack of consensus on the nature of the relationship between these two concepts and on how this relationship manifests across institutional contexts. Drawing on the national business systems approach, this article systematically reviews 218 research articles published over a 27-year period to map how CG–CSR research has evolved and progressed theoretically and methodologically across different institutional contexts. To shed light on the full gamut of the (...) CG–CSR relationship, we categorize and explore the nature of this relationship along two strands: (a) CSR as a function of CG and (b) CG as a function of CSR. Through this review, we identify key themes where CG–CSR research has lagged and account for under-explored contexts in this domain. Finally, we put forth a comprehensive agenda for progressing future research in the field. (shrink)

Writings on Deleuze and Guattari's twin volumes, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, have often focused on questions about desire, body without organs, the schizophrenic etc. There have been a few notable exceptions that have attempted to articulate and expound upon the numerous political problems that Deleuze and Guattari attempt to resolve through analyses of concepts such as de-/re-territorialization, coding and re-coding etc, however a specter is haunting Deleuze and Guattari that has yet to be explained, articulated and debated; the specter of Karl (...) Marx. This volume attempts to analyze the relationship between Deleuze and Marx and their respective works. This volume is an intervention into the fields of Deleuze Studies, Marxist and Marxian philosophy and political economy, and critiques of capitalism through an examination of the relationship between Deleuze and Marx. Themes that will be covered in this volume include hegemony and theories of imperialism, the role of philosophy in changing the world, surplus, tensions between the virtual and the potential, ideology and noology, modes of production, and the very nature of anti-capitalist politics in Deleuze's work. This volume will be of interest to people interested in Deleuze Studies who are interested in questions of politics and critiques of capitalism, Marxist theory and philosophy and people interested in political economy. Key Features:*offers new perspectives on Deleuze's early work*illuminates new connections between Deleuze's and Marx's work*includes a critical re-reading of Deleuze's work*foregrounds a critique of Capitalism in Deleuze's workContributors include: Bruno Bosteels, Alberto Toscano, Jason Read, Jeremy Gilbert Simon Choat and Aidan Tynan. (shrink)