Twitter is a virtual social network where people share their posts and opinions about the current situation, such as the coronavirus pandemic. It is considered the most significant streaming data source for machine learning research in terms of analysis, prediction, knowledge extraction, and opinions. Sentiment analysis is a text analysis method that has gained further significance due to social networks’ emergence. Therefore, this paper introduces a real-time system for sentiment prediction on Twitter streaming data for tweets about the coronavirus pandemic. (...) The proposed system aims to find the optimal machine learning model that obtains the best performance for coronavirus sentiment analysis prediction and then uses it in real-time. The proposed system has been developed into two components: developing an offline sentiment analysis and modeling an online prediction pipeline. The system has two components: the offline and the online components. For the offline component of the system, the historical tweets’ dataset was collected in duration 23/01/2020 and 01/06/2020 and filtered by #COVID-19 and #Coronavirus hashtags. Two feature extraction methods of textual data analysis were used, n-gram and TF-ID, to extract the dataset’s essential features, collected using coronavirus hashtags. Then, five regular machine learning algorithms were performed and compared: decision tree, logistic regression, k-nearest neighbors, random forest, and support vector machine to select the best model for the online prediction component. The online prediction pipeline was developed using Twitter Streaming API, Apache Kafka, and Apache Spark. The experimental results indicate that the RF model using the unigram feature extraction method has achieved the best performance, and it is used for sentiment prediction on Twitter streaming data for coronavirus. (shrink)

Trump’s foreign policy outlook and his rhetorical predispositions suggest that the American foreign policy is about to undergo drastic changes in terms of substance matter of policy. The arrival of Trump at the helm of affairs has built a conventional perception of gradual American retreat from the Obama’s rebalancing policy and its pacific-centric outlook. Any abrupt change in this policy of rebalancing will have serious repercussions for the regional economic, political and security architecture designed by America since world-war II. In (...) this context, Offensive Realism, that takes system level variables as the primary determinants of foreign policy of great powers, offers a valuable framework to understand and explain the future course of Obama’s policy of rebalancing under the incumbent administration. To this end, this article is aimed at delving into the theoretical and historical reservoirs related to the US foreign policy along with the current practices of Trump administration to test the claims of continuity or transformation in the US foreign policy of rebalancing in the Asia Pacific region. This article asserts that Obama’s rebalancing policy would continue in the future with certain tactical adjustments related to the implementation of policy. (shrink)

En el presente artículo se afirma que la humanidad enfrenta dos grandes desafíos: reconciliar nuestro ser material con el ser espiritual y reconciliar las necesidades individuales con las necesidades colectivas. Al no haber reconciliado estas dos dimensiones de la vida humana, nos encontramos en guerra, exclusión social, sufrimiento, desilusión, ira, incapacidad de avanzar, y muchos otros males. Tras aportar un marco de referencia de la sociedad globalizada, el autor el autor plantea algunos aspectos del desafío, tales como el contraste entre (...) una sociedad materialmente rica y espiritualmente pobre y la necesidad de la integración de valores humanistas y espirituales en la economía que derivarían en una “economía espiritual”. (shrink)

The question of the ethical life is arguably one of the most compelling, and urgent, questions of our time. As Peter Singer, among others, has pointed out, almost 10 million children die each year due to poverty, some of whom would not die if the amount of aid that we now offer increases significantly. As Singer has also pointed out, the exploitation of human beings and other animals is a major ethical and practical concern. There can be little reasonable doubt (...) that pain and suffering abound, in the world today, due to many causes such as poverty, disease, environmental degradation and destruction and anthropocentrism among others, just as there can be little reasonable doubt that some of the pain and suffering is preventable. So, what does it mean to live ethically today? Does it mean taking the point of view of the universe, as Sidgwick put it, memorably, rather than a narrow anthropocentric or speciesist view? Does it mean living in accordance with duties or obligations, or in light of recognised virtues, or with the minimisation of pain and suffering primarily in mind? Does it entail a consideration of the interests of other species and a rejection of the principle of the sanctity of human life? Does it mean not eating animals when other healthy alternatives are available, especially when those animals have been treated in ways that are inconsistent with their interests, whatever they may be? Does it mean taking active steps to reduce poverty on our part on a day to day basis? Is ethics exhausted in some sense today? And if we could reach some consensus on these questions, what difference would the ethical life make? Some argue that speciesism and the exploitation of human beings and other animals might diminish; that pain and suffering, especially gratuitous pain and suffering, would decrease, or at the very least, not increase; or that we will become more aware of the limitations of things such as "the traditional ethic of the sanctity of life", as Singer calls it. Some argue that the ethical life is closely related to a life of relationships, reflection and deliberation, all of which deepen our understanding and enrich us personally. Others argue that the ethical life is closely related to our search for a meaningful life - that the ethical life can help us to find meaning in a world in which "meaning", defined broadly, can seem elusive, enigmatic or unsubstantial. These and related issues and questions are explored in this collection, which illustrates the relevance, vitality and dynamism of ethics today. (shrink)

This article expands Kandiyoti's concept of patriarchal bargaining to include men's negotiations. It analyzes how marginalized groups within a dominant sociocultural knowledge regime strategize to advance change while trying to maximize security and optimize their life options. The case study analyzes primaries held within kin-based groupings— hamulas among Palestinian Arabs in Israel—to determine the candidates for municipal elections. Based on interviews and analysis of newspaper articles, the authors claim that the turn to primaries by hamulas was an attempt to resolve (...) disputes that were undermining the patriarchal system. The primaries provided entry to those of lower ranking in the hierarchy of hamula political leadership, while retaining the exclusion of women from the political sphere. Thus, while bargaining with patriarchy, gender identities and hierarchies are contested, re/produced, and negotiated as both a political means and an anchor for social identities. (shrink)

The question of the limits of reason, not just within philosophy but also in the modern sciences, is arguably more important than ever given numerous recent commentaries on “life,” “reality,” meaning, purpose, pointlessness and so on, emanating not from philosophers or metaphysicians, but rather from physicists and biologists such as Steven Weinberg and Richard Dawkins. It will be argued that such commentaries concerning the “pointlessness” of the universe, or the purpose of “life,” and other such things, are flawed and unconvincing, (...) not least because they seem to overlook or forget a number of well known and significant philosophical contributions on the question of limits, particularly by Kant, but also by Hume, Russell and Sir A J Ayer. (shrink)

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

In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of a robust sampled-data H ∞ load frequency control scheme for power systems with randomly occurring time-varying delays. By using the input-delay technique, the sampled-data LFC model is reformulated as a continuous time-delay representation. Then, Bernoulli-distributed white noise sequences are used to describe randomly occurring time-varying delays in the sampled-data LFC model. Some less conservative conditions are achieved by utilizing the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional and employing Jensen inequality and reciprocal convex combination lemma to ensure (...) the considered power system has mean-square asymptotic stability under the designed control scheme. The derived results are based on linear matrix inequalities that can readily be solved using the MATLAB LMI toolbox. The criteria obtained are used to analyze the upper bounds for time delays, and a comparison study to validate the efficacy of the presented method is presented. (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)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (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)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (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)

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (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)

There has been much debate recently about the meaning, place and function of “character” and “character traits” in Virtue Ethics. For example, a number of philosophers have argued recently that Virtue Ethics would be strengthened as a theory by the omission of talk of character traits; recent neuroscientific studies have suggested that there is scope for scepticism about the existence of such traits. I will argue that both approaches are flawed and unconvincing: in brief, the first approach tends to be (...) predicated on a narrow or insufficient conception of “character” and “character traits”; the second approach tends to go well beyond the available (empirical) evidence. Finally, I will argue that it is possible to point to a philosophy of education that is deeply informed by an understanding of virtue and ethics in which the concept of character has a coherent and meaningful role. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

A critical account of Russell's understanding of the relationship between science and religion.

A critical account of "Humanism" and some of its extreme forms and manifestations; reflection on some of the important challenges these raise in relation to higher education in the 21st century.