Preface. Quest for reality -- The history that vanished -- From zero to infinity -- Nanocosm. Quantum revolution -- Subatomic world -- Quantum mysticism -- Secrets -- Macrocosm. Fabric of space-time -- Elegant universe -- Conscious universe -- Secrets -- Microcosm. Biocosm -- Circle of life -- Blueprint of life -- Secrets -- Reality. Self-aware universe -- Perception -- Karmic footprints -- Secrets.

This article focuses on three recent controversies in which Žižek has been embroiled and for which he has taken positions that rest on the notion of antagonism. His views on Eurocentrism, the European refugee crisis and trans politics have been the subject of notable disapproval, if not denunciation. Critics reproach him for being Eurocentric, racist and transphobic, charges which he has repeatedly countered. The article will examine the differing theoretical and political positions in these debates, underlining what Žižek’s critics miss (...) or misunderstand about his notion of antagonism. While I side firmly with Žižek on the substance of these issues, I nonetheless consider the extent to which at least part of the disagreement here centres on the performative rather than the strictly “theoretical”: Might his critics be reacting to his overexposure? Could such overexposure be interpreted as an attempt at having the last word? And to what extent does the antagonistic form of Žižek’s interventions militate against their theoretical content? (shrink)

We present evidence that preschool children oftentimes understand disjunctive sentences as if they were conjunctive. The result holds for matrix disjunctions as well as disjunctions embedded under every. At the same time, there is evidence in the literature that children understand or as inclusive disjunction in downward-entailing contexts. We propose to explain this seemingly conflicting pattern of results by assuming that the child knows the inclusive disjunction semantics of or, and that the conjunctive inference is a scalar implicature. We make (...) two assumptions about implicature computation in the child: that children access only a proper subset of the adult alternatives, and that children possess the adult capacity to strengthen sentences with implicatures. As a consequence, children are expected to sometimes not compute any implicatures at all, but in other cases they are expected to compute an implicature that is different from the adult implicature. We argue that the child’s conjunctive strengthening of disjunctive sentences realizes the latter possibility: the adult infers that the conjunction is false but the child infers that the conjunction is true. This behaviour is predicted when our assumptions about child development are coupled with the assumption that a covert exhaustive operator is responsible for strengthening in both the child and the adult. Specifically, children’s conjunctive strengthening is predicted to follow from the same mechanism used by adults to compute conjunctive free choice implicatures in response to disjunctive permission sentences. We furthermore argue that this parallel between the child and the adult extends to disambiguation preferences. In particular, we present evidence that children prefer to strengthen disjunctions to conjunctions, in matrix and embedded positions ; this result mirrors previous findings that adults prefer to compute free choice, at the root and under every. We propose a disambiguation strategy that explains the preference for conjunctive strengthening – by both the child and the adult – even though there is no general preference for exhaustification. Specifically, we propose that the preference for a conjunctive strengthening follows from a pragmatic preference for a complete answer to the Question Under Discussion. (shrink)

Maximize Presupposition! is an economy condition that adjudicates between contextually equivalent competing structures. Building on data discovered by O. Percus, I will argue that the constraint is checked in the local contexts of embedded constituents. I will argue that this architecture leads to a general solution to the problem of antipresupposition projection, and also allows I. Heim’s ‘Novelty/Familiarity Condition’ to be eliminated as a constraint on operations of context change.

Hurford’s Constraint (Hurford, Foundations of Language, 11, 409–411, 1974) states that a disjunction is infelicitous if its disjuncts stand in an entailment relation: #John was born in Paris or in France. Gazdar (Pragmatics, Academic Press, NY, 1979) observed that scalar implicatures can obviate the constraint. For instance, sentences of the form (A or B) or (Both Aand B) are felicitous due to the exclusivity implicature of the first disjunct: A or B implicates ‘not (A and B)’. Chierchia, Fox, and Spector (...) (Handbook of semantics, 2008) use the obviation of Hurford’s Constraint in these cases to argue for a theory of local implicature. I present evidence indicating that the constraint needs to be modified in two ways. First, implicatures can obviate Hurford’s Constraint only in earlier disjuncts, not later ones: #(Both A and B) or (A or B). Second, the constraint rules out not only disjuncts that stand in an entailment relation, but also disjuncts that are even mutually consistent: #John is from Russia or Asia. I propose to make sense of these facts by providing an incremental evaluation procedure which checks that each new disjunct to the right is inconsistent with the information to its left, before the disjunct can be strengthened by local implicature. (shrink)

Academic research studies examining the ethical attitudes and behaviors of salespeople have produced several frameworks that explore the ethical decision-making processes to which salespeople adhere when faced with ethical dilemmas. Past literature enriches our understanding; however, a critical review of the relevant literature suggests that an emotional route to salesperson ethical decision-making has yet to be explored. Given the fact that individuals’ emotional capacities play an important role in decision-making when faced with an ethical dilemma, there is a need for (...) empirical research in this area. We address this issue by outlining and testing an emotion-based model to study the ethical attitudes and behaviors of salespeople in a relational selling context. Building on the cognitive-affective model proposed by Gaudine and Thorne (J Bus Ethics 31:175–187, 2001 ), we outline a framework that incorporates higher order prosocial emotions: capacity for concern and capacity for guilt. We include salesperson’s role clarity within the organization as a moderator to examine person–situation interaction. (shrink)

After China, India has the most skewed sex ratio at birth. These two Asian countries account for about 90 to 95% of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million missing female births annually, worldwide, due to gender-biased sex selection. To understand this extreme discrimination against girls, this article examines the gendered biopolitics embedded in population policies, new sex selection technologies, and in the social reproduction of patriarchal society. The ethical consequences of advanced reproductive technologies, which remove the moral turpitude around gender-based (...) sex selection by reformulating it into a “modern”, “scientific” endeavour, facilitating the rise of “missing girls”, make this an issue of gender justice, as noted by the World Population Report 2020. This article argues that unpacking gendered biopolitics within the household is crucial to understanding the reproduction of son preference and daughter aversion since it is here that reproduction and parenthood are subjected to biopolitical governance. We discuss how “biosocial” strategies of the household aimed at producing the “desired” and “right” family of more sons at the cost of daughters are operationalized through women’s bodies with a view to family mobility. While women and girls continue to bear the burden and costs of social reproduction that lie at the heart of the patriarchal capitalist system of accumulation, a perusal of more recent studies suggests the beginning of an equalizing trend of parental investments, especially in the health and education of daughters who are “allowed” to be born. We suggest that familial enhancement of girls’ human capital can help as a means of developing girls’ capabilities and agency, enhancing their power in the biopolitics of the family and increasing their “bio-value” in parents’ eyes. (shrink)

P-hacking or data dredging involves manipulation of the research data in order to obtain a statistically significant result. The reasons behind P-hacking and the consequences of the same are discussed in the present manuscript.

While the concepts of race and ethnicity have been abused historically, they are potentially invaluable in epidemiology and public health. Epidemiology relies upon variables that help differentiate populations by health status, thereby refining public health and health care policy, and offering insights for medical science. Race and ethnicity are powerful tools for doing this. The prerequisite for their responsible use is a society committed to reducing inequalities and inequities in health status. When this condition is met, it is irresponsible not (...) to utilize these concepts. (shrink)

Race and ethnicity are closely related, contentious concepts that have been abused and misinterpreted through history, but have a vast potential for good, at least in the health sciences. This article is not intending to elaborate on the conceptual foundations of race and ethnicity; I have addressed that elsewhere and summarized my stance in the glossary reprinted below in the Appendix. The terminology used here follows the glossary. Assuming that the conceptual foundations of my stance are reasonable, the questions addressed (...) here focus on public health and its primary health science, epidemiology, in a European context. The questions are simple ones:1.In epidemiology and public health what are we trying to achieve when we use the concepts of race and ethnicity?2.What would we lose by rejecting these concepts?3.If we do not reject them, how do we put the concepts into operation to help achieve our goals?4.What practical actions can result from the application of these concepts in order to improve the health and well-being of populations? (shrink)

The popularity of ‘food sovereignty’ to cover a range of positions, interventions, and struggles within the food system is testament, above all, to the term’s adaptability. Food sovereignty is centrally, though not exclusively, about groups of people making their own decisions about the food system—it is a way of talking about a theoretically-informed food systems practice. Since people are different, we should expect decisions about food sovereignty to be different in different contexts, albeit consonant with a core set of principles. (...) In this paper we look at the analytical points of friction in applying ideas of food sovereignty within the context of Indigenous struggles in North America. This, we argue, helps to clarify one of the central themes in food sovereignty: that it is a continuation of anti-colonial struggles, even in post-colonial contexts. Such an examination has dividends both for scholars of food sovereignty and for those of Indigenous politics: by helping to problematize notions of food sovereignty and postcoloniality, but also by posing pointed questions around gender for Indigenous struggles. (shrink)

For medical interventions there is a gap between what clinical scientific research has established as likely to carry clinical benefit and what the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has judged as cost-effective. This gap is the affordability gap. It is created by a value judgement made by NICE and affirmed by the Secretary of State for Health. This value judgement operates to affect other value judgements made in actual clinical situations where at least one choice of treatment falls into (...) the affordability gap. This paper considers how the creation of this affordability gap impacts upon actual clinical decisions. It explores these issues in the context of the choice between a drug-eluting stent and a bare metal stent for elective coronary angioplasty. It also argues that the option of an NHS procedure with a top-up fee to cover the cost of the affordability gap is a genuine one; that this option could improve clinical outcomes; that it is morally acceptable; and that the rules that prevent the utilization of this option should be relaxed. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an abrupt change in routines and livelihoods all around the world. This public health crisis amplified a number of systemic inequalities that led to populations needing to grapple with universally difficult truths. Yet some individuals, firms, and countries displayed resilient and creative responses in coping with pressing demands on healthcare and basic sanity. Past work has suggested that engaging in creative acts can be an adaptive response to a changing environment. Therefore, the purpose of this (...) paper is to describe how entities at the personal, community, and national levels cultivated and expressed creativity in an effort to make meaning during COVID-19. By overlaying the Four C model of creativity on such responses, we aim to to connect mini, little, Pro, and Big creative behaviors with our attempts to make meaning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and to suggest how engaging in creative expression can be used to guard against the adverse consequences of this outbreak. Acknowledging that this time has been and continues to be distressing and filled with uncertainty, we propose some ways of making sense of current events by applying original thinking across domains. Further, we propose how engaging in creativity can serve to buffer against the negative effects of living through the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper aims to understand the kind of activities that industrial actors develop in order to protect their enterprises during industrial crisis conditions. A series of political unrest, insurgency, economic turmoil, deadly earthquakes, and economic embargo at the Indo- Nepal boarder escalated the industrial crisis in Nepal. The quest for sustainability of enterprises during the enduring nature of the crisis stimulated for a more detail conversation and survey. A perceptual survey of industrial actors accompanying conversation therein indicates that trade union (...) and association leaders develop positive attitude and advance specific activities for protecting their enterprises during industrial crisis conditions. The study finds that an empathic nature helps to develop a positive attitude among the industrial actors, which seems contributory for enterprises to survive during crisis conditions. The actors tend to positively perceive significance of specific activities under the conditions of difficulties and hardships and enhance immunity to the industrial crisis. This paper argues that the empathic nature of the industrial actors becomes more effective to safeguard the pluralistic interests of the stakeholders of the enterprise than the self- centric nature of the actors. The actors are not only engaged in safeguarding their claims on the industry but are also contributing—beyond their routine work—positively to strengthen the enterprise immunity during difficulties. This paper concludes with an insight of shifting managerial attention from the generic concepts like cost minimisation and product differentiation to the concepts of regularity in supply of goods and services in the business network by expanding the scope of industrial relations vertically and horizontally. The empathic nature of industrial actors enhances the effectiveness of the general system theory and social network theory by developing understanding of the role of industrial actors’ relations in sustaining and operationalizing a business network under organizational crisis conditions. (shrink)

Students display resistance in the classroom in numerous ways, often in the form of academic misconduct. Some argue that resistance can reflect cleverness and creativity, rather than apathy. This investigation aimed to develop a psychometric tool to examine classroom resistance as well as identify individual and situational determinants of the same. Data from 853 participants was collected on measures of resistance behaviors in educational contexts and their environmental contributors, creativity, personality, and deception. Further, participants indicated their frequency of resistance across (...) two time periods: kindergarten through middle school, and high school through college. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses identified a robust three-factor structure for the Classroom Resistance Scale, comprising Test-Oriented Cheating, Blatant Academic Dishonesty, and Unethical Shortcuts. The person-situation analysis indicated that students who engaged in resistance shared some consistent characteristics: they were more likely to be closed to new experiences, unimaginative, more extraverted, and highly influenced by their peers. Moreover, the frequency of classroom resistance increased in higher grades as compared to lower ones. Implications of spillover effects of academic dishonesty into the workplace are discussed, in addition to suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Reasoning about concurrent programs involves representing the information that concurrent processes manipulate disjoint portions of memory. In sophisticated applications, the division of memory between processes is not static. Through operations, processes can exchange the implied ownership of memory cells. In addition, processes can also share ownership of cells in a controlled fashion as long as they perform operations that do not interfere, e.g., they can concurrently read shared cells. Thus the traditional paradigm of distributed computing based on locations is replaced (...) by a paradigm of concurrent computing which is more tightly based on program structure. Concurrent Separation Logic with Permissions, developed by O’Hearn, Bornat et al., is able to represent sophisticated transfer of ownership and permissions between processes. We demonstrate how these ideas can be used to reason about fine-grained concurrent programs which do not employ explicit synchronization operations to control interference but cooperatively manipulate memory cells so that interference is avoided. Reasoning about such programs is challenging and appropriate logical tools are necessary to carry out the reasoning in a reliable fashion. We argue that Concurrent Separation Logic with Permissions provides such tools. We illustrate the logical techniques by presenting the proof of a concurrent garbage collector originally studied by Dijkstra et al., and extended by Lamport to handle multiple user processes. (shrink)

We revisit a typological puzzle due to Horn (Doctoral Dissertation, UCLA, 1972) regarding the lexicalization of logical operators: in instantiations of the traditional square of opposition across categories and languages, the O corner, corresponding to ‘nand’ (= not and), ‘nevery’ (= not every), etc., is never lexicalized. We discuss Horn’s proposal, which involves the interaction of two economy conditions, one that relies on scalar implicatures and one that relies on markedness. We observe that in order to express markedness and to (...) account for a bigger typological puzzle, namely the absence of lexicalizations of ‘XOR’ (= exclusive or), ‘all-or-none’, and many other imaginable logical operators, one must restrict the basic lexicalizable elements to a small set of primitives. We suggest that an ordering based perspective, following Keenan and Faltz (Boolean semantics for natural language, 1985), makes the stipulated primitives that we arrive at more natural. We also propose a modification to Horn’s proposal, based on recent work on implicatures, in which only the implicature condition is operative and in which markedness is part of the definition of the alternatives for scalar implicatures rather than an independent condition. (shrink)

When Annie Besant landed in India she disavowed all political intent, but she soon became a militant nationalist — the only Western woman ever elected President of Congress. This essay explains her entry into politics by tracing the way her secular and socialist heritage informed her intellectual challenge to the ruling discourse of the Raj. In Britain, her theosophy acted as an alternative religious discourse, combining aspects of a secularist critique of Christianity with a defence of Eastern religions. In India, (...) it acted as a religious and social discourse that asserted the legitimacy, even superiority, of the indigenous culture. More generally, a study of Besant's opposition to the Raj illuminates the logic of a view of India shared by many nationalists. It shows how this view of India arose in dialectical opposition to the legitimating discourse of empire. (shrink)

We developed an integrated method that can better constrain subsalt tomography using geology, thermal history modeling, and rock-physics principles. This method, called rock-physics-guided velocity modeling for migration uses predicted pore pressure as a guide to improve the quality of the earth model. We first generated a rock-physics model that provided a range of plausible pore pressure that lies between hydrostatic and fracture pressure. The range of plausible pore pressures was then converted into a range of plausible depth varying velocities as (...) a function of pore pressure that is consistent with geology and rock physics. Such a range of plausible velocities is called the rock-physics template. Such a template was then used to flatten the seismic gathers. We call this the pore-pressure scan technique. The outcome of the pore-pressure scan process was an “upper” and “lower” bound of pore pressure for a given earth model. Such velocity bounds were then used as constraints on the subsequent tomography, and further iterations were carried out. The integrated method not only flattened the common image point gathers but also limited the velocity field to its physically and geologically plausible range without well control; for example, in the study area it produced a better image and pore-pressure prognosis below salt. We determined that geologic control is essential, and we used it for stratigraphy, structure, and unconformity, etc. The method had several subsalt applications in the Gulf of Mexico and proved that subsalt pore pressure can be reliably predicted. (shrink)

The possible differential effects of ABO blood group materno-paternal (fetal) incompatibility on completed reproductive performance were investigated on a sample of 100 couples (100 fathers and 100 mothers) from three villages in the Jind district of Haryana state, India. The average number of live births per mating couple was slightly higher for the incompatible matings (5·32) than the compatible ones (5·05). This advantage was offset by higher postnatal mortality in the former. Consequently, the average number of living children in the (...) compatible matings (4·64) was higher than in the incompatible ones (4·18). With reference to individual ABO matings, the index of relative fertility (Irf) was the highest in A×AB followed by B×A type of incompatible matings. No decrease in live births in O×A and O×B incompatible matings was observed compared with their reciprocal compatible ones, i.e. A×O and B×O matings, as has been hypothesized in previous studies. The total pregnancy wastage was substantially higher in ABO-incompatible matings (24·59%) than compatible matings (8·45%). About 71% of the postnatal deaths took place within one year of the birth in the case of incompatible matings compared with 50% in the case of compatible matings. The study supports the hypothesis that selection is operative at the ABO locus as revealed by the measures of selection intensity. The loss of fitness in the present sample was associated with differential mortality. There were no differences in the proportions of average number of male live births in the compatible (0·55) and incompatible matings (0·58). However, in the individual mating types, there was some evidence of higher or lower proportions of male live births. (shrink)

Bhakti is a remarkable feature and tendency of human existence having to do with one's devoted involvement with a person, object, deity, or a creative project. Bhakti and Philosophy aims to trace the larger meanings and roles of bhakti as it historically emerged in some of the well-known thought systems of India, such as Vedanta and Buddhism.

English to Indian language machine translation poses the challenge of structural and morphological divergence. This paper describes English to Indian language statistical machine translation using preordering and suffix separation. The preordering uses rules to transfer the structure of the source sentences prior to training and translation. This syntactic restructuring helps statistical machine translation to tackle the structural divergence and hence provides better translation quality. The suffix separation is used to tackle the morphological divergence between English and highly agglutinative Indian languages. (...) We demonstrate that the use of preordering and suffix separation helps in improving the quality of English to Indian language machine translation. (shrink)

This paper presents and examines the interreligious philosopher-theologian Raimon Panikkar’s proposal of ‘Cosmic Confidence’ in interreligious spirituality and another dialogue theologian Paul Knitter’s critique on it. Their conversation is to be situated in a wider issue of the relation between pluralism and justice. The paper proceeds in three parts. The first part summarily presents the context and direction of Panikkar’s pluralistic vision, particularly with a focus on his central insight of cosmic confidence. The second part indicates a challenge to Panikkar’s (...) cosmic confidence in terms of a preferential option for the poor – a spirit, of course, of liberation theology, but also that gets reflected in the challenge thrown by Knitter. And the final part deals with some implications of their mutual dialogue for the issue of pluralism, justice and reconciliation. (shrink)

In the nineteenth century, Christian evangelists in India played a major role in influencing the majority Hindu population; although most of their listeners did not know the God they preached about, the listeners knew what values the evangelists stood for. The reverse is true today. Modern Christian preaching tends to emphasise a spiritual commercialism. The respect of the nation and the right to be heard need to be regained.