Nielsen Busch and Mjaaland (2023) raise important considerations, but confuse certain critical issues and overlook others, and questions emerge about how these decisions should be made in our socie...

Through corporate social responsibility activities, a firm can develop the capability for managing and benefiting from stakeholder relationships. This study refers to such a capability as stakeholder influence capacity. In a host country, locally sourcing parts and/or materials can generate economic value and improve social welfare. Moreover, local sourcing provides opportunities for a foreign firm to apply and advance SIC while closely interacting with host-country stakeholders. Accordingly, we expect that a firm, having gained SIC through CSR activities in its home (...) country, will be more likely to source parts and/or materials in the host country. We also expect that the relationship between SIC and host-country sourcing is conditional upon a foreign firm’s intangible resources and liabilities of foreignness. Our empirical analysis, using Korean datasets, supports the positive relationship between CSR and local sourcing. We find that this positive relationship is more pronounced either when the firm is committed to technology development or when its home and host countries are geographically or culturally distant. (shrink)

Given i, j, k ∈ {1,2,3,4}, the notion of -length neutrosophic subalgebras in BCK=BCI-algebras is introduced, and their properties are investigated. Characterizations of length neutrosophic subalgebras are discussed by using level sets of interval neutrosophic sets. Conditions for level sets of interval neutrosophic sets to be subalgebras are provided.

When once-successful physical theories are abandoned, common wisdom has it that their characteristic theoretical entities are abandoned with them: examples include phlogiston, light rays, Newtonian forces, Euclidean space. But sometimes a theory sees ongoing use, despite being superseded. What should scientific realists say about the characteristic entities of the theories in such cases? The standard answer is that these ‘theoretical relicts’ are merely useful fictions. In this paper we offer a different answer. We start by distinguishing horizontal reduction (in which (...) a superseded theory approximates the successor theory) from vertical reduction (in which a higher-level theory abstracts away from the lower-level theory, but nonetheless can be constructed from it); these are usually regarded as having different ontological consequences. We describe a ‘verticalization’ procedure which transforms horizontal reductions into vertical reductions. The resulting verticalized theories are abstractions rather than approximations, with restricted domains. We identify a sense in which the higher-level theory describes distinct subject matters from the lower-level theory, enabling in certain cases the higher-level theory to retain distinctive explanatory power even in the presence of reduction. We suggest that theoretical entities from superseded theories should be retained in a scientific realist worldview just when, reinterpreted as higher-level abstractions, those theories and their characteristic entities continue to perform distinctive explanatory work in providing the best explanation for less-fundamental phenomena of interest. In slogan form: a good relict is an emergent relict. (shrink)

Examining the quality perceptions of consumers has often been recommended as an international research paradigm. This study is grounded in the Pakistani consumer market to evaluate the impact of food packaging cues on perceived product quality. The moderating effect of consumer knowledge was also taken into consideration in the study. A signaling theory was used in the study for its established predictive power in consumer behavior, marketing, and various fields of research. Based on the essence of the signaling theory, this (...) study hypothesized that food packaging cues cast a positive impact on perceived product quality and consumer knowledge moderates these relationships. By using the sample of 504 consumers, data were gathered using the mall intercept method following a multi-stage sampling technique. The responses were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social sciences and Smart Partial Least Square. The findings of this study unveil that the extrinsic cues' brand name, price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels were positively and significantly related to the perceived product quality. However, the country of origin cast no impact on the perceived product quality. Consumer knowledge reflected a moderation effect on the relationships between brand name and country of origin with the perceived product quality whereas it exerted no moderation impact on the relationships of price, nutritional labels, and precautionary labels with the perceived product quality. As the results exhibit that Pakistani consumers rely on food packaging cues for perceiving a product, hence it is recommended that marketers and policymakers develop appropriate marketing strategies focused on the significance of food packaging cues. (shrink)

The idea of splitting off cells from embryos to clone human beings sounds so bizarre and dangerous that one would think the practice should not be permitted. A closer look reveals its ethical acceptability.

Unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly quadcopters, have several medical, agriculture, surveillance, and security applications. However, the use of this innovative technology for civilian applications is still very limited in low-income countries due to the high cost, whereas low-cost controllers available in the market are often tuned using the hit and trial approach and are limited for specific applications. This paper addresses this issue and presents a novel proof of concept low-cost quadcopter UAV design approach using a systematic Model-Based Design method for (...) mathematical modeling, simulation, real-time testing, and prototyping. The quadcopter dynamic model is developed, and controllers are designed using Proportional Integral, and Derivative, Pole Placement, and Linear Quadratic Regulator control strategies. The stability of the controllers is also checked using Lyapunov stability analysis. For verification and validation of the design, Software-in-the-Loop, Processor-in-the-Loop, Hardware-in-the-loop testing, and Rapid Control Prototyping have been performed. The V&V methods of the MBD approach showed practically valid results with a stable flight of the quadcopter prototype. The proposed low-cost POC quadcopter design approach can be easily modified to have enhanced features, and quadcopters with different design parameters can be assembled using this approach for a diverse range of applications. (shrink)

Energy poverty is a problem that affects developed and developing economies, and its mitigation is of great significance to social welfare. EP affects Latin American countries, and policymakers have recently attempted to address this issue, particularly in the aftermath of the recent economic crisis. It is essential to measure and evaluate EP to implement strategies and policies effectively. Using a panel quantile regression approach, we investigate the heterogeneous impact of green finance, renewable energy, and energy efficiency on EP for 33 (...) Latin American countries from 2000 to 2018. Furthermore, certain associated control variables are incorporated into our model to avoid an omitted variable bias. According to empirical results, the impact of independent variables on EP is heterogeneous. Specifically, green finance is an essential source of alleviating EP, and it has a significant positive effect across all quantiles, but it is especially strong in the middle quantiles. RE and EE significantly mitigate EP, with the strongest effects occurring at higher quantiles. By including green finance, RE, and EE as the main explanatory determinants of EP, the findings urge policymakers in Latin American countries to design a comprehensive energy conservation policy to minimize the effects of massive EP. (shrink)

For efficient energy distribution, microgrids provide significant assistance to main grids and act as a bridge between the power generation and consumption. Renewable energy generation resources, particularly photovoltaics, are considered as a clean source of energy but are highly complex, volatile, and intermittent in nature making their forecasting challenging. Thus, a reliable, optimized, and a robust forecasting method deployed at MG objectifies these challenges by providing accurate renewable energy production forecasting and establishing a precise power generation and consumption matching at (...) MG. Furthermore, it ensures effective planning, operation, and acquisition from the main grid in the case of superior or inferior amounts of energy, respectively. Therefore, in this work, we develop an end-to-end hybrid network for automatic PV power forecasting, comprising three basic steps. Firstly, data preprocessing is performed to normalize, remove the outliers, and deal with the missing values prominently. Next, the temporal features are extracted using deep sequential modelling schemes, followed by the extraction of spatial features via convolutional neural networks. These features are then fed to fully connected layers for optimal PV power forecasting. In the third step, the proposed model is evaluated on publicly available PV power generation datasets, where its performance reveals lower error rates when compared to state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)

Automatic incident detection plays a vital role among all the safety-critical applications under the parasol of Intelligent Transportation Systems to provide timely information to passengers and other stakeholders in smart cities. Moreover, accurate classification of these incidents with respect to type and severity assists the Traffic Incident Management Systems and stakeholders in devising better plans for incident site management and avoiding secondary incidents. Most of the AID systems presented in the literature are incident type-specific, i.e., either they are designed for (...) the detection of accident or congestion. While traveling along the road, one may come across different types of traffic incidents, such as accidents, congestion, and reckless driving. This necessitates that the AID system detects and classifies not only all the popular traffic incident types, but severity as well that is associated with these incidents. Therefore, this study aims to propose an efficient incident detection and classification framework for smart cities, by incorporating the efficacy of model stacking, to classify the incidents with respect to their types and severity levels. The experimental results showed that the proposed E-IDC framework achieved performance gains of 5%–56% in terms of incident severity classification and 1%–14% in terms of incident type classification when applied with different classifiers. We have also applied the Wilcoxon test to benchmark the performance of our proposed framework that reflects the significance of our approach over existing individual incident predictors in terms of severity and type classification. Moreover, it has been observed that the proposed E-IDC framework outperforms the existing ensemble technique, such as XGBoost used for the classification of incidents. (shrink)

Building on the landmark O’Regan and Noë (Behav Brain Sci 24:939–973, 2001) that introduced us to the sensorimotor theory of perception, Alva Noë has continued to develop and defend a highly influential enactivist account of perception. Said account takes perceptual experience to be mediated by sensorimotor knowledge (knowledge of the law-like relations that hold between bodily movements and sensory changes). In recent work, Noë has argued that we should construe sensorimotor knowledge as a kind of conceptual knowledge. One significant theoretical (...) advantage of his account, he contends, is that it allows us to better characterize our embodied coping skills by way of showing how they are manifestations of a conceptual-and-yet-not-representational kind of understanding. He argues that both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist accounts of skill alike assume that conceptual understanding must be wedded to explicit judgement, and therefore have failed to correctly characterize the role of understanding in skilled performance. This paper argues against Noë’s contention that skilled action is always permeated with understanding. It argues additionally that Noë’s of unorthodox notion of conceptual understanding is unstable and, if it were adopted, would over-intellectualize the role of perception in action. The paper concludes by arguing that doing so frees us up to take more seriously the enactivist options for understanding skilled performance without introducing notions of conceptual understanding at all. (shrink)

This article offers an understanding of the law of negligence which explains its concern with both interpersonal justice and community welfare. It argues that close attention to the structure of the duty of care inquiry and the reasoning in duty cases suggests that the law of negligence has an underlying community welfare purpose, but that purpose is not to be found in notions of deterrence, compensation or the improvement of standards of behaviour. The community welfare purpose underlying the law of (...) negligence must be one that is more directly served by doing interpersonal justice. The best available explanation is that the law of negligence functions to maintain civil peace by providing an avenue of recourse for certain interpersonal wrongs. This analysis explains why the duty inquiry focuses primarily on considerations of interpersonal justice but, like other private law doctrines, also attends to the community welfare effects of imposing liability. (shrink)

The February 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly, the sheep cloned from a mammary cell of an adult ewe, has drawn attention to the growing ability to select, alter, or otherwise manipulate the genome of offspring. Prior to Dolly, ethical discussion of genes in reproduction had focused on negative selection: carrier screening, prenatal diagnosis, and abortion or embryo discard. After Dolly, ethical debate will have to consider the direct or positive use of genetic selection or alteration technology.The principal use (...) of genetic selection techniques in human reproduction likely will be to treat or prevent disease in offspring. In the future, however, such techniques might also be used to enhance or even diminish expected characteristics of progeny. Techniques to accomplish these goals are likely to include: selection of the nuclear genome, as occurs in somatic cell cloning; chromosomal transplants; or direct insertion or deletion of specific genes. (shrink)

The February 1997 announcement of the birth of Dolly, the sheep cloned from a mammary cell of an adult ewe, has drawn attention to the growing ability to select, alter, or otherwise manipulate the genome of offspring. Prior to Dolly, ethical discussion of genes in reproduction had focused on negative selection: carrier screening, prenatal diagnosis, and abortion or embryo discard. After Dolly, ethical debate will have to consider the direct or positive use of genetic selection or alteration technology.The principal use (...) of genetic selection techniques in human reproduction likely will be to treat or prevent disease in offspring. In the future, however, such techniques might also be used to enhance or even diminish expected characteristics of progeny. Techniques to accomplish these goals are likely to include: selection of the nuclear genome, as occurs in somatic cell cloning; chromosomal transplants; or direct insertion or deletion of specific genes. (shrink)

There are resources in Heidegger’s work for identifying and mitigating pervasive modes of misrecognition that are characteristic of modern society, and, by identifying them, we become capable of attending to “supplementary” aspects of authenticity: terms of identity should apply to all in the same way, and, because these terms are a product of all, they are the responsibility of each individual. The first section analyses Being-guilty, Dasein-with, and Being-with to emphasise Dasein’s dependence on others, arguing that the dynamic of recognition (...) characteristic of Dasein implies a responsibility for recognising the other adequately. The second identifies common modes of misrecognition, arguing that these modes imply a shared responsibility for the contexts of recognition in which we participate. The third turns to Sartre’s work, arguing that our interpersonal relations offer resources for correcting our inadequate ways of recognizing one another and for recognizing the fundamental place of communication in the realization of human freedom. (shrink)

Bishop Desmond Tutu's call, in 2013, for former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to be tried for war crimes, led to much reporting and comment in the online pages of UK newspapers. At first sight, it was a topic that seemed particularly conducive to the attraction of trolling, flaming and Ebile in the comments posted below journalistic pieces. Both Tutu and Blair are controversial and divisive characters, and the context of the Iraq War seemed fertile ground for heated exchanges. A (...) content analysis of 2,476 comments and 27,970 likes/dislikes offered a fairly substantial for identification of and evaluation of the value this discourse. In the event, trolling, flaming and Ebile were rare in the context of this political discourse, suggesting, at least a form of discourse closer to the ideals of Habermas. (shrink)

This paper sees intelligence as certainly not a thing which is the sole prerogative of man but rather as a category of skill, natural to all organisms, integral with their capacity for handling their environment, and increasingly well developed in the higher animals. Intelligence is seen as a natural property of living organisms at their highest levels: a characteristic of living things which is emergent in the same way as, and essentially in parallel with, perception, consciousness, and moral and spiritual (...) sensitivities. (shrink)

Question processing involves parsing, memory retrieval, question categorization, initiation of appropriate answer‐retrieval heuristics, answer formulation, and output. Computational and psychological models have traditionally treated these processes as separate, sequential, independent, and in pursuit of a single answer type at a time. Here this view is challenged and the implications of a theory in which question processes operate simultaneously on multiple question interpretations are explored. A highly interactive model is described in which an expectation‐driven parser generates multiple question candidates, including partially‐specified (...) candidates. Question candidates act as constraints for a matcher which activates memory items. An answer retrieval process examines question candidates and the active portions of memory in an attempt to generate answer candidates. Answer candidates are examined by an output process that derives the final answer. These processes run simultaneously and interact. Three experiments on human question answering are also described which provide evidence that working memory load during question reading is affected by processes related to answer retrieval. (shrink)