This study aimed to identify the learning and business incubation processes and their impact on developing the performance of business incubators in Gaza Strip, and the study relied on the descriptive analytical approach, and the study population consisted of all employees working in business incubators in Gaza Strip in addition to experts and consultants in incubators where their total number reached (62) individuals, and the researchers used the questionnaire as a main tool to collect data through the comprehensive survey method, (...) where (55) questionnaires were retrieved with a recovery rate of (88.7%). The results of the study showed that there is a high approval of the variables of the study, where the dimension of incubation operations came with a relative weight (84.89%), followed by the learning dimension which got a relative weight (82.50%), while the performance level of the incubators got a relative weight (80.12%) and as the study results showed There is a positive relationship statistically between the two dimensions of learning and business incubation processes and performance development in business incubators, and the linear regression analysis model showed that the main effect in improving the performance of business incubators is "after business incubation operations" while it showed weak effect after learning. The study came out with several recommendations, the most important of which is that business incubators seek to reinforce the learning process and incubation processes for business, and the need to periodically evaluate their performance, and that a more effective mechanism be designed to follow up with companies after the end of the incubation period and monitor the progress of these companies. (shrink)

Jonathan Y. Tsou examines and defends positions on central issues in philosophy of psychiatry. The positions defended assume a naturalistic and realist perspective and are framed against skeptical perspectives on biological psychiatry. Issues addressed include the reality of mental disorders; mechanistic and disease explanations of abnormal behavior; definitions of mental disorder; natural and artificial kinds in psychiatry; biological essentialism and the projectability of psychiatric categories; looping effects and the stability of mental disorders; psychiatric classification; and the validity of the DSM's (...) diagnostic categories. The main argument defended by Tsou is that genuine mental disorders are biological kinds with harmful effects. This argument opposes the dogma that mental disorders are necessarily diseases that result from biological dysfunction. Tsou contends that the broader ideal of biological kinds offers a more promising and empirically ascertainable naturalistic standard for assessing the reality of mental disorders and the validity of psychiatric categories. (shrink)

In psychiatry, pharmacological research has played a crucial role in the formulation, revision, and refinement of neurobiological theories of psychopathology. Besides being utilized as potential treatments for various mental disorders, pharmacological drugs play an important epistemic role as experimental instruments that help scientists uncover the neurobiological underpinnings of mental disorders (Tsou, 2012). Interventions with psychiatric patients using pharmacological drugs provide researchers with information about the neurobiological causes of mental disorders that cannot be obtained in other ways. This important source of (...) evidence for the biological causes of mental disorder is often overlooked in philosophical analyses of psychiatry, especially in skeptical analyses that debase the biological aspects of psychopathology (e.g., Szasz, 1960; Scheff, 1963; Laing, 1967). In discussing pharmacological interventions as a form of evidence for the physical basis of mental disorders, this paper aims to clarify the nature, reliability, and limitations of this evidence. In addition, it illustrates the central role that pharmacological findings in applied clinical contexts play in the acquisition of neurobiological knowledge in research contexts. (shrink)

In this article, I present a software architecture for intelligent agents. The essence of AI is complex information processing. It is impossible, in principle, to process complex information as a whole. We need some partial processing strategy that is still somehow connected to the whole. We also need flexible processing that can adapt to changes in the environment. One of the candidates for both of these is situated reasoning, which makes use of the fact that an agent is in a (...) situation, so it only processes some of the information – the part that is relevant to that situation. The combination of situated reasoning and context reflection leads to the idea of organic programming, which introduces a new building block of programs called a cell. Cells contain situated programs and the combination of cells is controlled by those programs. (shrink)

This is a study of the development of Christian symbolic use of the Cross. Early depictions were anastasic, the empty cross symbolizing the resurrection and hiding the manner of Jesus’ death. As the Christian community itself became more violent, and first practiced and then justified the practice of war, the Crucifix showed Christ on the Cross increasingly graphically. The writer compares this with a set of images in and around the chapel at Central American University in San Salvador. The images (...) record a memory of suffering and terror. The article ends by locating the experience of writing about these images in the context of global grass-roots protest against the war in Iraq. (shrink)

Purpose. The dynamics and pace of social and economic transformations that are characteristic of modern society, lead to an increase in tension and the destruction of habitual stereotypes – ideals, values, norms, patterns of behaviour that unite people. These moments encourage us to rethink the understanding of "security" essence, in particular, psychological, which emphasizes the urgency of its study in the philosophical and sociocultural coordinates. Theoretical basis of the research is based on the philosophical methodology of K. Jaspers, E. Fromm (...) and the A. Maslow’s psychological approach to understanding of a person. Originality. Psychological security is considered at different levels: first and foremost, society is a characteristic of social security, that is an analysis of how today’s social technologies, social changes affect the quality of life of the country’s population; secondly, the social environment – the family, the immediate environment, reference groups, training teams; thirdly, a person is an experience of his own security-insecurity, when it is possible to talk about the manifestations of psychological violence, when certain behavioral acts contribute to the violation of the security of the other or to self-destruction. It is found out that the knowledge of psychological security is closely connected with the socio-historical conditions of being, with the level of development of material and spiritual culture, with the interests and values prevailing in society, which determines its ontological, epistemological and axiological features. The presented issue is considered in the correlation of psychological security with types of scientific rationality – classical, nonclassical and post-nonclassical approaches, within the framework of which various perspectives, aspects, forms and types of psychological security are studied. Conclusions. The concept of security requires a systematic description of its manifestations, types, levels, concepts: security as the absence of dangers ; security as a certain activity to ensure or to prevent any threats or dangers ; security as a conscious necessity, the value of the individual. The study systematizes various ideas about psychological security in accordance with the logic of scientific knowledge: in the mainstream of classical, non-classical and post-nonclassical approaches. (shrink)

This paper explores the psychological motivations behind collectivist behavior in Japan and the U.S. Using data from a large-scale questionnaire survey, we examine the causes of collectivist behavior (i.e., group conformity) at workplaces and at home. Our key findings are as follows: (i) in Japan, people conform to their groups, both at work and at home, because they consider that cooperation with others will result in greater achievement; (ii) in both Japan and the U.S., people conform to their groups, both (...) at work and at home, because behaving similarly to others makes them feel comfortable; and (iii) in both Japan and the U.S., people conform to their family’s opinion at home because they value cooperation with family members. Our findings suggest that institutional differences between Japan and the U.S. give rise to the differences in psychological motivations for collectivist behavior. (shrink)

Using the corpus of JSTOR articles, we investigate the role of gender in collaboration patterns across the scholarly landscape by analyzing gender-based homophily--the tendency for researchers to co-author with individuals of the same gender. For a nuanced analysis of gender homophily, we develop methodology necessitated by the fact that the data comprises heterogeneous sub-disciplines and that not all authorships are exchangeable. In particular, we distinguish three components of gender homophily in collaborations: a structural component that is due to demographics and (...) non-gendered authorship norms of a scholarly community, a compositional component which is driven by varying gender representation across sub-disciplines, and a behavioral component which we define as the remainder of observed homophily after its structural and compositional components have been taken into account. Using minimal modeling assumptions, we measure and test for behavioral homophily. We find that significant behavioral homophily can be detected across the JSTOR corpus and show that this finding is robust to missing gender indicators in our data. In a secondary analysis, we show that the proportion of female representation in a field is positively associated with significant behavioral homophily. (shrink)

Planteamiento de la naturaleza, de la filosof a y de su raz n hist rica, al contemplar panor micamente la totalidad de su pasado e intentar reconstruir el dram tico suceso de su origen.

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood data collection (...) technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

In this text presented here, it has been tried to Show the difference between Heidegger’s first and second era understanding of language. In his first era, to manifest Heidegger’s understanding of language, outlines of Being and Time has been discussed and concerned chapter is read carefully. To manifest his understanding of language in second era, the work of On the Way to the Language has been taken as a base. With this comparative study, it has been tried to shown the (...) change that “language” has undergone in Heidegger philosophy. (shrink)

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015. When reasoning about knowledge of procedures under imperfect information, the explicit representation of epistemic possibilities blows up the S5like models of standard epistemic logic. To overcome this drawback, in this paper, we propose a new logical framework based on compact models without epistemic accessibility relations for reasoning about knowledge of procedures. Inspired by the 3-valued abstraction method in model checking, we introduce hyper models which encode the imperfect procedural information. We give a highly non-trivial 2-valued (...) semantics of epistemic dynamic logic on such models while validating all the usual S5 axioms. Our approach is suitable for applications where procedural information is ‘learned’ incrementally, as demonstrated by various examples. (shrink)

Autobiography and phenomenology: Preface for Germans (1934).--Phenomenology and theory of knowledge: Sensation, construction, and intuition (1913). On the concept of sensation (1913). Consciousness, the object, and its three distances (1916).--Phenomenology and esthetics: An essay in esthetics by way of a preface (1914). Esthetics on the streetcar (1916).--An esthetics of historical reason: The idea of theater: an abbreviated view (1946). Reviving the paintings (Velázquez, chapter I) (1946).

Rather than regarding dreams as "things" or property, and grammatically treating them as nouns, the suggestion is to formulate a dream as an activity, label it "dreaming" and more specifically accept dreaming as interactional. For dreaming to be of importance, several psychological factors must be considered, including retention and selection, as well as external factors, such as to whom dreams are reported and their style of communication. Examples from anthropological writers on dreams are provided. It is noted that societal beliefs (...) about dreams tend to influence the amount and types of dreams that are communicated. (shrink)

Let ≤r and ≤sbe two binary relations on 2ℕ which are meant as reducibilities. Let both relations be closed under finite variation and consider the uniform distribution on 2ℕ, which is obtained by choosing elements of 2ℕ by independent tosses of a fair coin.Then we might ask for the probability that the lower ≤r-cone of a randomly chosen set X, that is, the class of all sets A with A ≤rX, differs from the lower ≤s-cone of X. By c osure (...) under finite variation, the Kolmogorov 0-1 aw yields immediately that this probability is either 0 or 1; in case it is 1, the relations are said to be separable by random oracles.Again by closure under finite variation, for every given set A, the probability that a randomly chosen set X is in the upper ≤r-cone of A is either 0 or 1; let Almostr be the class of sets for which the upper ≤r-cone has measure 1. In the following, results about separations by random oracles and about Almost classes are obtained in the context of generalized reducibilities, that is, for binary relations on 2ℕ which can be defined by a countable set of total continuous functionals on 2ℕ in the same way as the usual resource-bounded reducibilities are defined by an enumeration of appropriate oracle Turing machines. The concept of generalized reducibility comprises a natura resource-bounded reducibilities, but is more general; in particular, it does not involve any kind of specific machine model or even effectivity. The results on generalized reducibilities yield corollaries about specific resource-bounded reducibilities, including several results which have been shown previously in the setting of time or space bounded Turing machine computations. (shrink)