Gestures can serve as external representations of abstract concepts which may be otherwise difficult to illustrate. Gestures often accompany verbal statement as an embodiment of mental models that augment the communication of ideas, concepts or envisioned shapes of products. A gesture is also an indicator of the subject and context of the issue under discussion. We argue that if gestures can be identified and formalized they can be used as a knowledge indexing and retrieval tool and can prove to be (...) useful access point into unstructured digital video data. We present a methodology and a prototype, called I-Gesture that allows users to (1) define a vocabulary of gestures for a specific domain, (2) build a digital library of the gesture vocabulary, and (3) mark up entire video streams based on the predefined vocabulary for future search and retrieval of digital content from the archive. I-Gesture methodology and prototype are illustrated through scenarios where it can be utilized. The paper concludes with results of evaluation experiments with I-Gesture using a test bed of design-construction projects. (shrink)

This study examines the influence of women’s board representation on the proportion of women senior managers in the United Kingdom (UK) from 1999 to 2019. We take a multi-theoretic approach, drawing on the trickle-down effect, critical mass theory, and agency theory, to explore several aspects of this topic. We find that more women on boards is associated with more women in senior management as suggested by the trickle-down perspective. We also find support for a critical mass effect; while one or (...) two women on a board is beneficial for advancing women into senior management, three or more women directors is more advantageous. Consistent with agency theory expectations, the relationship between women on boards and senior management gender diversity is driven almost entirely by women in non-executive, rather than executive, board positions, presumably as a result of the relative independence non-executive directors have compared to their executive director counterparts. Our study suggests that increasing women’s board appointments is a potential solution to the underrepresentation of women senior managers and may assist in building a pipeline for future CEO and board appointments. (shrink)

Introduction: Pharmaceutical companies offer various gifts to physicians to encourage them to prescribe their products. This collaboration has some negative and positive aspects. Different countries have established guidelines to limit the collaboration and reform such relationships. This study aims to determine the attitude of Bangladeshi medical students towards pharmaceutical gifts, physician-pharmacist collaboration, and associated factors. Methods: An online cross-sectional and correlational study was conducted through email and Google-Forms among Bangladeshi medical students. A total of 435 students from different medical colleges (...) completed the questionnaires in May and June, 2016. Results: Monthly parental income was moderate among the majority of medical students. Less than 16% had a physician or pharmacist parent. Most of the students were taught about medical ethics, but 73% were not taught about the ethics of physician-pharmacist collaboration. About 85% did not have any experience of interaction with marketing representatives. Drug samples and pennotepads were the most appreciated pharmaceutical gifts. Jewelry and gifts costing more than 100 thousand were said to be the least appreciated pharmaceutical gifts. Attitudes towards drug companies and representatives were assessed by fifteen statements. Medical students had a variety of attitudes regarding its ethical justification. Attitudes were correlated with gender, parental income, physician parents, academic years, and having been taught about pharmaceutical collaboration with physicians. Conclusion and Recommendations: medical students should elaborate on ethical reasoning before accepting pharmaceutical gifts. Medical colleges and curriculums should teach them about the interaction. A national guideline may be needed. (shrink)

The Original Work Presents A Totally New Methodology For Understanding The Concept Of Aesthetic Experience Through The Medium Of Dialogue A Dialogue Between The Subject And Object, I And Thou.

In recent years, universities have been urged to restructure and re-evaluate their ability to trace and monitor their students as the “smart campus” is being built upon datafication, while networked apps and sensors serve as the means through which its constituents are connected and governed. This paper advances a dialectical and communication-centered approach to the Internet of Things campus ecosystem and provides an empirical investigation into the tensions experienced by students and the ways that these students envision alternative practices that (...) support their digital engagement. Drawing upon student focus group interviews in a large American research and innovation intensive university, dialectical tensions identified include convenience–annoyance, integration–independence, and safety–insecurity, brought upon by students’ ongoing and prospective negotiations with Internet of Things. Furthermore, in a bid to understand students’ alternative data imaginaries, this project examined students’ preferred Internet of Things-related communication practices with campus digital application platforms, analog and older forms of digital media, as well as in-person interactions with traditional authorities within classroom and group settings. Finally, this contribution presents a discussion of the findings for theory and praxis, particularly for smart campus innovation and social data governance, in terms of potential growing challenges involving complexifying student privacy concerns, data normalization and coercion, and tertiary digital divides and inequalities. (shrink)

A natural heme deficiency that exists in cells outside of the circulation broadly compromises the heme contents and functions of heme proteins in cells and tissues. Recently, we found that the signaling molecule, nitric oxide (NO), can trigger or repress the deployment of intracellular heme in a concentration‐dependent hormetic manner. This uncovers a new role for NO and sets the stage for it to shape numerous biological processes by controlling heme deployment and consequent heme protein functions in biology.

Prior research has used an Interactive Landslide Simulator tool to investigate human decision making against landslide risks. It has been found that repeated feedback in the ILS tool about damages due to landslides causes an improvement in human decisions against landslide risks. However, little is known on how theories of learning from feedback would account for human decisions in the ILS tool. The primary goal of this paper is to account for human decisions in the ILS tool via computational models (...) based upon reinforcement learning and to explore the model mechanisms involved when people make decisions in the ILS tool. Four different reinforcement-learning models were developed and evaluated in their ability to capture human decisions in an experiment involving two conditions in the ILS tool. The parameters of an Expectancy-Valence model, two Prospect-Valence-Learning models, a combination EV-PU model, and a random model were calibrated to human decisions in the ILS tool across the two conditions. Later, different models with their calibrated parameters were generalized to data collected in an experiment involving a new condition in ILS. When generalized to this new condition, the PVL-2 model’s parameters of both damage-feedback conditions outperformed all other RL models. We highlight the implications of our results for decision making against landslide risks. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a childist reading of school strikes for climate in an overheated world. We argue that school strikes can be understood as offering a dynamic counterweight to formal education, by providing opportunities for children to self-educate, and for others, especially adults, to learn from them. We suggest that taking school strikes seriously as sites of political appearance—which highlight interdependencies and vulnerabilities in the face of crises in Anthropocene neoliberalism requires rethinking the boundaries of democratic participation and (...) education. In particular, we highlight that school strikes for climate serve as an invitation for adults to let children contribute to their own ongoing formation. A childist philosophical attitude that emphasises mutual teaching—i.e. the adult capacity to see and hear what children show and say—can expand through an engagement with, rather than against school strikes. Children’s political appearance on streets to influence political priorities from an intergenerational global justice point of view is a gift for adults and adultist structures. It is a passage to grasp deep interdependence and to assume appropriate responsibility. If ‘education’ is a beacon of hope in times of overheated despair, then the hope is in educational philosophies that have room for mutual teaching. The philosophical assumption that it is adults who must always, and necessarily, teach children to prepare them for a better future would have to be discarded. (shrink)

Arguments for a just transition are integral to debates about climate change and the drive to create a carbon-neutral economy. There are currently two broad approaches rooted in ethics and justice for framing just energy transitions. The first can be described as internal to the transition and emphasizes the anticipation, assessment, and redressing of harms created by the transition itself and the inclusion in transition governance of groups or communities potentially harmed by its disruptions. In this article, we propose a (...) second approach to ethics and justice in an energy transition, which we describe as systemic or societal in scope. This approach complements attention to the proximate dynamics and impacts of the transition process with a focus on the distant societal and economic outcomes the transition brings into being and how they compare to conditions prior to the transition. It poses the question: do the transformative social, economic, and technological changes wrought by energy systems create more just societies and economies, or do they instead reinforce or recreate long-standing injustices and inequalities? We illustrate this approach with an assessment of one of the most significant existing forms of energy injustice: the energy-poverty nexus. We argue that the energy-poverty nexus reflects configurations of socio-energy systems that create complex, extractive feedbacks between energy insecurity and economic insecurity and, over time, reinforce or exacerbate poverty. We further argue that just energy transitions should work to disentangle these configurations and re-design them so as to create generative rather than extractive feedbacks, thus ending the energy-poverty nexus and creating long-term outcomes that are more just, equitable, and fair. (shrink)

This essay attempts to outline a philosophical anthropology with dialogicality as its key concept. It argues that it is impossible to explicate this concept with any bias toward the ontological primacy of either the subject or the knowable object. The essay develops from the philosophy of Martin Buber who vindicated the need for subject-object binarism to be superseded by a relational ontology of human existence, that is, a space between the dialoguing I and Thou. From this point of view, different (...) sectors of human studies – including those involving politics or socio-political crafting of human states of affairs – must be approached according to their unique dimension. The essay’s envisioning of knowledge of humans by human being beyond any subject-object dichotomy implies a new perspective of self-other relationship whereby the phenomenological notion of intentionality is apprehended in its dialogical mode. (shrink)

Women and children have often been affected by conflicts taking place in India’s Northeast. Although human rights abuse by armed forces and militias has been addressed in academia time and again, the weaponisation of ‘rape’ has not declined in the region as evinced by the recent incident in Manipur. As such this essay argues that solidarity among women can not only prevent such heinous crimes but can also dismantle the patriarchal structures that breed rape cultures. Further, literature can work as (...) an agency through which such consciousness of protest and solidarity can be generated. By taking into account the political and cultural discourses of this region and its manifestation in literary works with reference to Arupa Patangia Kalita’s novel The Story of Felanee the essay argues that ethnic assertions diminish the rights of women due to the patriarchal nature of these societies. Since the inter-ethnic conflicts are engineered by the patriarchs of a community in which the women are hapless sufferers, Felanee’s resilience, like the grannies of Shaheen Bagh, exemplifies resistance against oppressive structures. The essay explores the literary representation of patriarchal conditioning of ethnic resurgence, its contestation with cultural hybridisation, and the subsequent dehumanisation of women. (shrink)

Customarily, reflections on the need to educate sensory and bodily enactments with the world, take for granted that it is the child who must be educated. However, the educational passage of becoming 'rational' and 'grown up' often leaves the adult divorced from her own embodied self. As part of my engagement with childism in this article, I ask: Who needs sensory education? In response, I propose that it is adults who need sensory education more than their temporal others Reimagining childhood (...) studies, Bloomsbury Academic, London, pp 57–74 2018) i.e. children. As Merleau-Ponty has shown, the richness of embodied perception that children experience, is relatively distant for adults. The particular lived-experience I reflect on is the sense of temporality. Accompanied by two distinct, yet interconnected examples of encounters with Baby Ole and Captain Duke, I suggest that being-with-children can enable philosophical clearings for adults to re-cognise plural temporalities, as opposed to a singular clock-time perception of Time. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 2, Page 546-561, April 2022.

In 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter introduced his study of Nietzsche as an investigation into the history of modern nihilism in which “contradiction” forms the central thread of the argument. For Müller-Lauter, the interpretive task is not to demonstrate the overall coherence or incoherence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to examine Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradiction.” Against those such as Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith and Martin Heidegger, Müller-Lauter argued that contradiction is the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, and not a problem to be corrected or (...) cast aside for exegetical or political purposes. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction qua incompatibility (not just mere opposition) holds a key to Nietzsche’s affective vision of philosophy. Beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, in this paper I examine aspects of Müller-Lauter’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith, in order to confirm Müller-Lauter’s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming which enables the subject to be revealed as a “multiplicity” ( BGE §12) and as a “fiction” (KSA 12:9[91]). Following Müller-Lauter’s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power, this paper interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life (rather than in terms of logical incoherences or ontological inconsistencies). Against the backdrop of nihilism, the “self” (and its related place holder the “subject”), I will argue, becomes the psycho-physiological battlespace for the struggle and articulation of “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought. (shrink)

This study reviewed and analysed the phenomenon of employer branding. We began with a review of recent research in employer branding. Next, drawing the theoretical knowledge from OB, HRM, and marketing, a framework is developed depicting the antecedents of employer branding and its impact on the company performance. For this, primary data were collected administering a questionnaire survey on 347 top-level executives in 209 companies in India, and secondary data were collected on financial performance. The results revealed that realistic job (...) previews, perceived organizational support, equity in reward administration, perceived organizational prestige, organizational trust, leadership of top management, psychological contract obligations, and corporate social responsibility influence employer branding, which in turn impact non-financial and financial performance of companies. Furthermore, leadership of top management is the most potent predictor of employer branding. Greater deviation of the existing state from the ideal state of antecedents adversely affects employer branding. Management can use this framework for developing strategy towards implementation of employer branding. (shrink)

The paper attempts to evaluate whether corporate social responsibility can contribute towards achievement of inclusive growth in India. Using content analysis of annual reports belonging to 42 non-financial companies across 8 years, the study identifies company disclosures under areas that fall within the purview of both inclusive growth, as conceptualised by the Indian government and themes of CSR subject indices mentioned in corporate social disclosure literature. The study is unique in its attempt to address the relation between CSR and inclusiveness (...) through a longitudinal analysis of 322 annual reports, in a timeframe when governmental intervention regarding CSR was negligible and the disclosures were primarily voluntary. The findings revealed that company CSR efforts are in congruence with some requirements for inclusive growth, like CSR activities in areas such as health, education, infrastructure, environment and energy and can contribute to the welfare of special interest groups such as women, children and backward sections. Apart from contributing to CSR literature in India, the paper will be of interest to corporations, government and other stakeholders of the CSR process. (shrink)

BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE: Evidence based medicine is the present backbone of rational and objective, modern medical problem solving and is a meeting ground for quantitative and qualitative researchers alike as it culminates into applying the fruits of clinical research to the individual patient. A systematic enquiry into the evolving paradigms in EBM is a need of the hour. AIMS AND METHODS: A qualitative enquiry examining the impact of different methodologies in EBM and their role in generating meaning interpretable at individual (...) levels. RESULTS: Present day outcome based research deals less with patients as individuals than as populations. Evidence based medicine struggles to apply the fruits of population based research to individuals who are often not as predictable as linear quantitative research would like them to be. The present EBM literature neglects a lot of events it doesn't believe to be statistically significant and perhaps here is an area that needs to be improved on - it assumes that because associations are demonstrated between interventions and outcomes in RCTs/meta-analysis, these associations are linear and causal in the real world. While they may be demonstrated repeatedly in highly controlled environments, in the real 'uncontrolled' world of clinical practice with real people, their validity breaks down. CONCLUSIONS: One needs to make the EBM standard model patient-individual (a projection of collective patient event data) resemble the real human individual patient so that optimal EBM individual data that matches our query can be easily and quickly spotted from the dense jungle of information that has grown over the years. This hints at rethinking our entire research methodology and modifying it to suit the needs of the individual patient. (shrink)

"El baile cambió mi vida. Por primera vez sentí que hacía algo que me gustaba", recuerda Shampa Roy, de 18 años. Shampa , nacida en Calcuta, capital del estado indio de Bengala Occidental, creció entre orfanatos desde los cinco años, tras la muerte de sus padres. "Siempre estaba enfadada, no sé por qué. Pegaba a las otras niñas a la mínima provocación, la gente me evitaba. No respetaba ni a los profesores ni a la gente mayor", confiesa. Hasta que descubrió (...) la danza. Shampa se dio cuenta de que podía expresar sus inquietudes internas a través de pasos de baile. Explica que fue un descubrimiento que la llenó de alegría. (shrink)

Newtonian gravity is modified minimally to obtain a Lorentz covariant theory of gravity in a background flat space. Gravity is assumed to appear as a potential. Constraint Hamiltonian dynamics is used to determine particle trajectories in a manifestly covariant fashion. The resulting theory is significantly different from the general theory of relativity. However, all known experimental results (precession of planetary orbits, bending of the path of light near the sun, and gravitational spectral shift) are still explained by this theory.

Following Nietzsche’s call for a philosopher-physician and his own use of the bodily language of health and illness as tools to diagnose the ailments of the body politic, this book offers a reconstruction of the concept of political physiology in Nietzsche’s thought, bridging gaps between Anglo-American, German and French schools of interpretation.

The collapse of the wavefunction is arguably the least understood process in quantum mechanics. A plethora of ideas—macro-micro divide, many worlds and even consciousness—have been put forth to resolve the issue. Contrary to the standard Copenhagen interpretation, objective collapse models modify the Schrödinger equation with nonlinear and stochastic terms in order to explain the collapse of the wavefunction. In this paper we propose a collapse model in which a particle’s wavefunction has a possibility of collapsing when it interacts with macroscopic (...) objects, without the intervention of a conscious observer. We propose four possible conditions of collapse of the wavefunction and make testable predictions which differ from standard quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Corrupt regulatory environment encourages firms to deploy middlemen for speedy and assured acquisition of different services from regulatory agencies. Using a World Bank dataset of 2210 Indian manufacturing firms, this article examines how firms with middlemen deal with corrupt governmental agencies for its operational efficiency. Our results demonstrate that deployment of middlemen by the firms is often accompanied by a substantial increase in operational delay, relatively trigger more consumption of senior management’s time on regulatory disentanglement, enhance the likelihood/tendency to pay (...) bribe, and likely to face more court cases as a means of restitution of legal rights. As firm-specific attributes may contaminate our preliminary results, we utilized the propensity score framework to examine relationships among variables of interests. Our study contributes to the inconspicuous part of the corruption literature by attempting to present a comprehensive but indirect assessment of the functions of middlemen that predominantly remained unattended except some scattered descriptive, case-based anecdotal presentations. (shrink)