O artigo oferece uma breve exposição da biografia e do contexto histórico do filósofo neoplatônico Damáscio (c. 458 - c. 538) para, na sequência, apresentar a tradução de um dos seus poemas líricos do período final de sua vida. O procedimento adotado justifica-se pelo caráter lutuoso e decididamente pessoal dos versos, nos quais Damáscio lamenta consigo próprio as perdas sofridas no decorrer de sua longa e fascinante vida. Como veremos, tais perdas estão, em verdade, diretamente ligadas ao colapso do mundo (...) antigo e ao derradeiro golpe proferido por Justiniano contra a filosofia helênica pagã. (shrink)

This analytical study explores the nature of scientific progress connected to current philosophical definitions and the role of institutional governance in promoting this progress. This paper examines how public and private initiatives intersect to create a wartime level of scientific progress during peacetime, as promoted in detail by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) from 1941-47. This study suggests that the public benefit from the war footing approach to scientific progress should outweigh the losses (...) to the public good that accumulate due to wartime restrictions on scientific discourse during times of peace. The interaction and dependence of scientific progress on military development, public health and public needs in general, the tax code and the patent system form the foundation of Bush’s program for sustaining wartime levels of scientific progress during peacetime. This study references the COVID-19 period and the solutions that were applied to emergent public needs through scientific programs. Justice of the United States (U.S.) Supreme Court Neil Gorsuch noted in May 2023 that “…we may have experienced the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country.” This study proposes that the dilution of scientific truth in public policy is the result of a collective institutional mindset among scientists. This mindset endorses public programs that provide society with a wartime risk response in peacetime. In this study, from an epistemological standpoint and considering the work of other researchers in this field, these developments in scientific progress will be analyzed. (shrink)

The article attempts to show how the dialog Charmides is a skillful and subtle response by Plato to the contradictions and challenges of his time and not, as one could assume, a fruitless search for a definition or a vain intellectual exercise. To do that, we’ll contextualize the dialog through a reconstruction of the historical and political conjuncture of the archaic and classical periods, using the notion of temperance (σωφροσύνη) as our guide.

It is proposed that our memory is made up of individual, unconnected Records, to each of which is attached a Heading. Retrieval of a Record can only be accomplished by addressing the attached Heading, the contents of which cannot itself be retrieved. Each Heading is made up of a mixture of content in more or less literal form and context, the latter including specification of environment and of internal states (e.g. drug states and mood). This view of memory allows an (...) easy account of a number of natural memory phenomena as well as a variety of laboratory findings such as the differences between recall and recognition. The theory further proposes that Headed Records can neither be deleted nor modified. Data apparently against such a hypothesis can be accounted for in terms of the retrieval process. (shrink)

Cooperation is vital to our survival and progress. Evolutionary game theory offers a lens to understand the structures and incentives that enable cooperation to be a successful strategy. As artificial intelligence agents become integral to human systems, the dynamics of cooperation take on unprecedented significance. Decentralized frameworks like Web3, grounded in transparency, accountability, and trust, offer a foundation for fostering cooperation by establishing enforceable rules and incentives for humans and AI agents. Guided by our Incentivized Symbiosis model, a paradigm aligning (...) human and AI agent goals through bidirectional incentives and mutual adaptation, we investigate mechanisms for embedding cooperation into human-agent coevolution. We conceptualize Incentivized Symbiosis as part of a contemporary moral framework inspired by Web3 principles, encoded in blockchain technology to define and enforce rules, incentives, and consequences for both humans and AI agents. By integrating these principles into the very architecture of human-agent interactions, Web3 ecosystems catalyze an environment ripe for collaborative innovation. Our study traverses several transformative applications of Incentivized Symbiosis, from decentralized finance to governance and cultural adaptation, illustrating how AI agents can coevolve with humans to forge a trajectory of shared, sustainable progress. (shrink)

Initial responses to questionnaires used to assess participants' understanding of informed consent for malaria vaccine trials conducted in the United States and Mali were tallied. Total scores were analyzed by age, sex, literacy (if known), and location. Ninety-two percent (92%) of answers by United States participants and 85% of answers by Malian participants were correct. Questions more likely to be answered incorrectly in Mali related to risk, and to the type of vaccine. For adult participants, independent predictors of higher scores (...) were younger age and female sex in the United States, and male sex in Mali. Scores in the United States were higher than in Mali (P = 0.005). Despite this difference participants at both sites were well informed overall. Although interpretation must be qualified because questionnaires were not intended as research tools and were not standardized among sites, these results do not support concerns about systematic low understanding among research participants in developing versus developed countries. (shrink)

Bios Philosophos. Philosophy in Ancient Greek Biography (Brepols, 2016), organized by Mauro Bonazzi and Stefan Schorn, delivers deep and wide tours through the philosophical aspects of Greek biographical production. On the one hand, it does not concentrate only on the later periods of Greek philosophy, when biographical production abounded; instead, it goes all the way back to the fourth century BCE, when biographical texts were fragmentary and mingled with other styles. On the other, it tries to unveil the philosophical motives (...) in authors' works who tend to be disregarded as historians, biographers, hagiographers, or even as mere fans of the most prominent figures of their own schools. -/- In our review, we will attempt to give a brief account of the ten articles that make up this volume, which, in turn, will hopefully provide an overview of the different connections between the biographies and biographers and their philosophical motives. (shrink)

Trong thế giới cạnh tranh thời đại số (“digital”), phương tiện kỹ thuật cung cấp nhiều thuận lợi cho việc sản xuất nội dung. Tuy thế, sự phong phú nội dung và đầu tư cho xúc tiến, tiếp thị gia tăng cũng lại khiến cho quá trình cạnh tranh tìm một chỗ đứng cho sản phẩm trở nên hết sức gian nan.Sản phẩm gần đây của nhóm nghiên cứu, chuyên khảo [1] của AISDL, ra đời sau những bài học gian (...) khó thu lượm được từ trước. Như thế, ý thức của mọi người về mức độ thách thức trong việc “chạm tới” người tiêu dùng. (shrink)

This is the first chapter to our edited collection of essays on the nature and ethics of blame. In this chapter we introduce the reader to contemporary discussions about blame and its relationship to other issues (e.g. free will and moral responsibility), and we situate the essays in this volume with respect to those discussions.

Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate a (...) new scale—the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale—to dissociate individual differences in the ‘negative’ (permissive attitude toward instrumental harm) and ‘positive’ (impartial concern for the greater good) dimensions of utilitarian thinking as manifested in the general population. We show that these are two independent dimensions of proto-utilitarian tendencies in the lay population, each exhibiting a distinct psychological profile. Empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and although instrumental harm was associated with subclinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity. Importantly, although these two dimensions were independent in the lay population, they were closely associated in a sample of moral philosophers. Acknowledging this dissociation between the instrumental harm and impartial beneficence components of utilitarian thinking in ordinary people can clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology and its relation to moral philosophy as well as generate fruitful avenues for further research. (shrink)

Shortages of new therapeutics to treat coronavirus disease (COVID-19) have forced clinicians, public health officials, and health systems to grapple with difficult questions about how to fairly allocate potentially life-saving treatments when there are not enough for all patients in need (1). Shortages have occurred with remdesivir, tocilizumab, monoclonal antibodies, and the oral antiviral Paxlovid (2) -/- Ensuring equitable allocation is especially important in light of the disproportionate burden experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic by disadvantaged groups, including Black, Hispanic/Latino and (...) Indigenous communities, individuals with certain disabilities, and low-income persons. However, many health systems have resorted to first-come, first-served approaches to allocation, which tend to disadvantage individuals with barriers in access to care (3). There is mounting evidence of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in access to medications for COVID-19 (4, 5). -/- One potential method to promote equitable allocation is to use a weighted lottery, which is an allocation strategy that gives all eligible patients a chance to receive the scarce treatment while also allowing the assignment of higher or lower chances according to other ethical considerations (6). We sought to assess the feasibility of implementing a weighted lottery to allocate scarce COVID-19 medications in a large U.S. health system and to determine whether the weighted lottery promotes equitable allocation. (shrink)

“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived. But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even inspire (...) jealousy-fueled homicide. How might these perilous devotions be diminished? The ancients thought that treatments such as phlebotomy, exercise, or bloodletting could “cure” an individual of love. But modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses—and misuses—of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise. (shrink)

Transoral laser microsurgery applies to the piecemeal removal of malignant tumours of the upper aerodigestive tract using the CO2 laser under the operating microscope. This method of surgery is being increasingly popularised as a single modality treatment of choice in early laryngeal cancers (T1 and T2) and occasionally in the more advanced forms of the disease (T3 and T4), predomi- nantly within the supraglottis. Thomas Kuhn, the American physicist turned philosopher and historian of science, coined the phrase ‘paradigm shift’ in (...) his groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that the arrival of the new and often incompatible idea forms the core of a new paradigm, the birth of an entirely new way of thinking. This article discusses whether Steiner and col- leagues truly brought about a paradigm shift in oncological surgery. By rejecting the principle of en block resection and by replacing it with the belief that not only is it oncologically safe to cut through the substance of the tumour but in doing so one can actually achieve better results, Steiner was able to truly revolutionise the man- agement of laryngeal cancer. Even though within this article the repercussions of his insight are limited to the upper aerodigestive tract oncological surgery, his willingness to question other peoples’ dogma makes his contribution truly a genuine paradigm shift. (shrink)

Global challenges such as climate change, food security, or public health have become dominant concerns in research and innovation policy. This article examines how responses to these challenges are addressed by governance actors. We argue that appeals to global challenges can give rise to a ‘solution strategy' that presents responses of dominant actors as solutions and a ‘negotiation strategy' that highlights the availability of heterogeneous and often conflicting responses. On the basis of interviews and document analyses, the study identifies both (...) strategies across local, national, and European levels. While our results demonstrate the co-existence of both strategies, we find that global challenges are most commonly highlighted together with the solutions offered by dominant actors. Global challenges are ‘wicked problems' that often become misframed as ‘tame problems’ in governance practice and thereby legitimise dominant responses. (shrink)

Psychopaths routinely disregard social norms by engaging in selfish, antisocial, often violent behavior. Commonly characterized as mentally disordered, recent evidence suggests that psychopaths are executing a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy that historically increased reproductive success at the expense of others. Natural selection ought to have favored strategies that spared close kin from harm, however, because actions affecting the fitness of genetic relatives contribute to an individual’s inclusive fitness. Conversely, there is evidence that mental disorders can disrupt psychological mechanisms designed to (...) protect relatives. Thus, mental disorder and adaptation accounts of psychopathy generate opposing hypotheses: psychopathy should be associated with an increase in the victimization of kin in the former account but not in the latter. Contrary to the mental disorder hypothesis, we show here in a sample of 289 violent offenders that variation in psychopathy predicts a decrease in the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders; that is, psychopathy predicts an increased likelihood of harming non-relatives. Because nepotistic inhibition in violence may be caused by dispersal or kin discrimination, we examined the effects of psychopathy on (1) the dispersal of offenders and their kin and (2) sexual assault frequency (as a window on kin discrimination). Although psychopathy was negatively associated with coresidence with kin and positively associated with the commission of sexual assault, it remained negatively associated with the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders after removing cases of offenders who had coresided with kin and cases of sexual assault from the analyses. These results stand in contrast to models positing psychopathy as a pathology, and provide support for the hypothesis that psychopathy reflects an evolutionary strategy largely favoring the exploitation of non-relatives. (shrink)

Every quantum state can be represented as a probability distribution over the outcomes of an informationally complete measurement. But not all probability distributions correspond to quantum states. Quantum state space may thus be thought of as a restricted subset of all potentially available probabilities. A recent publication (Fuchs and Schack, arXiv:0906.2187v1, 2009) advocates such a representation using symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurements. Building upon this work we study how this subset—quantum-state space—might be characterized. Our leading characteristic is that the inner (...) products of the probabilities are bounded, a simple condition with nontrivial consequences. To get quantum-state space something more detailed about the extreme points is needed. No definitive characterization is reached, but we see several new interesting features over those in Fuchs and Schack (arXiv:0906.2187v1, 2009), and all in conformity with quantum theory. (shrink)

IPCC SPECIAL REPORT ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAND (SRCCL) -/- Chapter 3: Climate Change and Land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems.

About six weeks ago, our post referred to the long-winding path to a new theoretical innovation as the pursuit of “useless knowledge” in Flexner’s terms. That little creation is the freshly minted informational entropy-based definition of value, presented in a very short paper, initially regarded by its authors as a research note. (And it still is.) Well, only two and a half months since its birth, this new concept of value has had enough time to power up several of our (...) publications in different disciplinary fields. The first published paper using the new definition deals with climate change denialism. The second paper (forthcoming) discusses the problem of academic retractions amidst the growing influence of generative AI. And the third, just accepted, explains the underlying mechanism of submission mechanism employed by journal editors and peer-reviewers, and the information-value nexus associated with it. (shrink)

The main objective o f this descriptive paper is to present the general notion of translation between logical systems as studied by the GTAL research group, as well as its main results, questions, problems and indagations. Logical systems here are defined in the most general sense, as sets endowed with consequence relations; translations between logical systems are characterized as maps which preserve consequence relations (that is, as continuous functions between those sets). In this sense, logics together with translations form a (...) bicomplete category of which topological spaces with topological continuous functions constitute a full subcategory. We also describe other uses of translations in providing new semantics for non-classical logics and in investigating duality between them. An important subclass of translations, the conservative translations, which strongly preserve consequence relations, is introduced and studied. Some specific new examples of translations involving modal logics, many-valued logics, para- consistent logics, intuitionistic and classical logics are also described. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

Today marks the 7th anniversary of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research (ISR), at Phenikaa University. ISR has for seven years now the place where the co-founders of this portal have been working and producing publications. A special event occurs now as the Current Conservation magazine publishes a new writing piece by our member, Dr Minh-Hoang Nguyen.

A study was carried out from October, 2020 to September, 2021to investigate the diversity of fishes and the conservation status of Chittaura Jheel (Bahraich), Uttar Pradesh. During the study period, 38 fish species belonging to 28 genera, 14 families and 7 orders have been identified. The order Cypriniformes was found the dominated order with 15 species(39.47%) followed by Siluriformes 10 species (26.31%), Perciformes 4 species (10.52%), Ophiocephaliformes 4 species (10.52%), Synbranchiformes2 species (5.26%), Osteoglossiformes 2 species (5.26%) and Clupiformes 1 species (...) (2.63 %), The present investigation showed that the wetland, Chittaura Jheel possesses rich fish biodiversity but proper conservation measures are required to maintain sustainability and richness of the fish species diversity of that wetland of U.P. According to IUCN, 30 were enlisted as Least Concern (LC), 2 species as near endangered (NE), 3 species as near threatened (NT), 2 listed as Endangered (EN) and 1 species was listed as Vulnerable (VU). There is a need of conservation of fish diversity of this natural wetland. The pressure is increasing day by day due to increasing population, leading to loss of fish diversity hence identifying the problem and making a better management plan is the way for conservation of the fish diversity of the Chittaura Jheel, a wetland of Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh. (shrink)

In this paper we distinguish two issues that are often run together in discussions about physicalism. The first issue concerns levels. How do entities picked out by non-physical terminology, such as biological or psychological terminology, relate to physical entities? Are the former identical to, or metaphysically supervenient on, the latter? The second issue concerns physical parts and wholes. How do macroscopic physical entities relate to their microscopic parts? Are the former generally determined by the latter? We argue that views on (...) these two issues are independent of one another and should not be conflated. (shrink)

A newborn baby is an infant within the first 28 days of birth. Diagnosis and treatment of infant diseases require specialized medical resources and expert knowledge. However, there is a shortage of such professionals globally, particularly in low-income countries. To address this challenge, a knowledge-based system was designed to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of neonatal diseases. The system utilizes both machine learning and health expert knowledge, and a hybrid data mining process model was used to extract knowledge from (...) a clinical dataset. The PART algorithm achieved the highest performance result with 98.06% accuracy under 10-fold cross-validation, and the generated rules were used to develop the knowledge-based system. The system achieved 90.9% accuracy in system performance testing and 89.2% in user acceptance testing, and is intended to serve as an assistant tool for healthcare experts. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has motivated medical ethicists and several task forces to revisit or issue new guidelines on allocating scarce medical resources. Such guidelines are relevant for the allocation of scarce therapeutics and vaccines and for allocation of ICU beds, ventilators, and other life-sustaining treatments or potentially scarce interventions. Principles underlying these guidelines, like saving the most lives, mitigating disparities, reciprocity to those who assume additional risk (eg, essential workers and clinical trial participants), and equal access may (...) compete with one another. We propose the use of a “categorized priority system” (also known as a “reserve system”) as an improvement over existing allocation methods, particularly because it may be able to achieve disparity mitigation better than other methods. (shrink)

Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a ‘brain disease’ versus ‘moral weakness’ model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent’s identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person after (...) becoming addicted. Methods: We conducted a series of vignette-based experiments (total N = 3,620) to assess lay attitudes concerning addiction and identity persistence, systematically manipulating key characteristics of agents and their drug of addiction. Conclusions: In Study 1, we found that US participants judged an agent who became addicted to drugs as being closer to ‘a completely different person’ than ‘completely the same person’ as the agent who existed prior to the addiction. In Studies 2-6, we investigated the intuitive basis for this result, finding that lay judgments of altered identity as a consequence of drug use and addiction are driven primarily by perceived negative changes in the moral character of drug users, who are seen as having deviated from their good true selves. (shrink)

FDE, LP and K3 are closely related to each other and admit of an intuitive informational interpretation. However, all these logics are co-NP complete, and so idealized models of how an agent can think. We address this issue by shifting to signed formulae, where the signs express imprecise values associated with two bipartitions of the corresponding set of standard values. We present proof systems whose operational rules are all linear and have only two structural branching rules that express a generalized (...) Principle of Bivalence. Each of these systems leads to defining an infinite hierarchy of tractable approximations to the respective logic, in terms of the maximum number of allowed nested applications of the two branching rules. Further, each resulting hierarchy admits of an intuitive 5-valued non-deterministic semantics. (shrink)

Hôm nay là ngày Khoa học Công nghệ Việt Nam (KHCN). Có rất nhiều chuyện để bàn vì có biết bao thứ cần tới lao động KHCN. Nhưng có lẽ một chủ đề đang rất nóng chính là bảo vệ và phục hồi môi trường sinh thái trong bối cảnh đa dạng sinh học bị tác động tiêu cực nghiêm trọng và biến đổi khí hậu đang làm trầm trọng hóa thêm.

Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new way to (...) distinguish clinical placebos from standard medical treatments. (shrink)

This month, the AISDL Team was glad to see its continuing effort to raise the voice for conserving wildlife appearing in Pacific Conservation Biology (published by CSIRO/the Australian Academy of Science). The article stipulates the need for weaving humane values with scientific information, leveraging the sociocultural power to harmonize humans with nature. The article articulates the coauthors’ idea of building a funding source to contribute to the nature conservation cause by investing in some listed stocks. Technically, stocks we intend to (...) invest in must possess some key features of (i) having significant growth potential, (ii) containing little environmental risk of potential moral-practical gaps in their CSR missions, and (iii) showing a certain degree of “relevance” with AISDL’s fundamentals. (shrink)

“By natural order, birthing needs good timing and at a moderate pace. […] Looking for food in the fields and gardens farther from home is important. Also, try eating different kinds of nuts and worms. Mastering all of this would guarantee a prosperous life.” -/- —In “Food”; The Kingfisher Story Collection.

The current study is conducted to examine the following research questions: 1) What information sources on social media are associated with the general intention to try space tourism? 2) Does the automatically recommended information moderate the associations between multiple sources of information and the intention to try space tourism?

“Crow recalls the story about his ancestor, Crow Forefather and Peacock, drawing feathers together. Crow Forefather had drawn a beautiful outfit for Peacock, but when it was the turn for Peacock to draw, Crow Forefather was in such a hurry to eat that he told Peacock to just pour the black ink bucket onto him. Since then, the Crows have lived with pit black, ugly-looking feathers.” -/- —In “Contentment”; The Kingfisher Story Collection [1].

On November 3 and 4, 2023, Dr. Nguyen Minh Hoang (Phenikaa University), co-author of the BMF Analytics [1], gave a lecture on computational approaches using bayesvl and BMF application for social science research.

“Are humans in a toxic, abusive relationship with nature? Love is strange.” -/- —In “Glands of Love”; Meandering Sobriety.

In the first month of 2024, there was a significant increase in the number of downloads for the Bayesian stats / MCMC computing program, bayesvl, developed by AISDL running on R and Stan. The following RDocumentation (CRAN) graph illustrates the noticeable leap in data for January 2024.

A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N (...) = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests. (shrink)

Disclosure in clinical practice is aimed at promoting patient autonomy, usually culminating in patient choice (e.g., to consent to an operation or not, or between different medications). In medical ethics, there is an implicit background assumption that knowing more about (X) automatically translates to greater, or more genuine, autonomy with respect to one's choices involving (X). I challenge this assumption by arguing that in rare cases, withholding information can promote a patient's autonomy (understood as the capacity for rational choice in (...) alignment with one's values and goals). (shrink)

“Only those who have lived among the birds could truly appreciate the magic of their singing. At daybreak, the bushes and the alley corners would all be drenched in a vibrant chorus of birdsongs. The whole scene is exhilarating, exuding the mysterious vibes of a major orchestra.” -/- —In “Conductor”; The Kingfisher Story Collection [1].

“[…] To alleviate the boredom, after catching a fish, Kingfisher would press all three buttons before swallowing the fish. Pressing the buttons has gradually become somewhat of a new technological ritual.” -/- —In “Innovation”; The Kingfisher Story Collection.

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://proconsortium.org) formally defines protein entities and explicitly represents their major forms and interrelations. Protein entities represented in PRO corresponding to single amino acid chains are categorized by level of specificity into family, gene, sequence and modification metaclasses, and there is a separate metaclass for protein complexes. All metaclasses also have organism-specific derivatives. PRO complements established sequence databases such as UniProtKB, and interoperates with other biomedical and biological ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). PRO relates to (...) UniProtKB in that PRO’s organism-specific classes of proteins encoded by a specific gene correspond to entities documented in UniProtKB entries. PRO relates to the GO in that PRO’s representations of organism-specific protein complexes are subclasses of the organism-agnostic protein complex terms in the GO Cellular Component Ontology. The past few years have seen growth and changes to the PRO, as well as new points of access to the data and new applications of PRO in immunology and proteomics. Here we describe some of these developments. (shrink)

“As time passes, news about the now hotter Earth buzzes through the bird village. […] As Kingfisher casts his gaze upon the events that have unfolded, he can’t help but feel a sense of unease creeping up within him. He decides to collect all the scientific information concerning climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.” -/- —In “GHG Emissions”; The Kingfisher Story Collection.

Academic institutions migrated to modular teaching-learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the quality of the pedagogical innovations employed, the study determined the students’ evaluation of the faculty prepared instructional modules for the courses they enrolled in during the first and second semesters of Academic Year 2020-2021. Employing a descriptive-correlational research design, the study was participated by 644 students from three colleges who were then available during the data gathering. Data gathered through online surveys were then analyzed using descriptive statistics (...) and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient utilizing jamovi software. Results revealed that the faculty-prepared instructional modules were acceptable and satisfactory to the students. Besides, the students' evaluation of the instructional modules was positively related to their level of satisfaction. Still, the students recommended that a review of the modules be done before sending the modules; a more extended time allotment is considered, and sufficient concrete examples are given in the modules. With this, the faculty concerned are encouraged to review the phases involved in the design, development, and distribution of the instructional modules to make them highly acceptable and very satisfactory to the students while maintaining the quality of both the content and aesthetics of the learning materials. Considering the study’s limitations, further endeavors may be carried out to validate this pedagogical innovation. (shrink)

“[…] To alleviate the boredom, after catching a fish, Kingfisher would press all three buttons before swallowing the fish. Pressing the buttons has gradually become somewhat of a new technological ritual.” -/- —In “Innovation”; The Kingfisher Story Collection [1].

The current study has two objectives: - Examine whether the residents’ perceived impact of climate change on water supply affects their direct and indirect potable water reuse willingness in Albuquerque, New Mexico. - Examine whether being a member of the Republican party moderates the relationship between the perceived impact of climate change on water supply and potable water reuse willingness. Findings from this study are expected to contribute to promoting the eco-surplus culture for achieving the environmental semiconducting principle.

This page provides a quick glance at official publications that use either the bayesvl package in R or the BMF analytics (or both). The data will tell a bit about the research community’s efforts made over time and the growth of the bayesvl/BMF analytics community.

The current study has two objectives: - Examine whether the residents’ perceived impact of climate change on water supply affects their water conservation behaviors. - Examine whether being a member of the Republican party moderates the relationship between the perceived impact of climate change on water supply and water conservation behaviors. Findings from this study are expected to contribute to promoting the eco-surplus culture for achieving the environmental semiconducting principle.

Strategic Reliabilism is a framework that yields relative epistemic evaluations of belief-producing cognitive processes. It is a theory of cognitive excellence, or more colloquially, a theory of reasoning excellence (where 'reasoning' is understood very broadly as any sort of cognitive process for coming to judgments or beliefs). First introduced in our book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (henceforth EPHJ), the basic idea behind SR is that epistemically excellent reasoning is efficient reasoning that leads in a robustly reliable fashion (...) to significant, true beliefs. It differs from most contemporary epistemological theories in two ways. First, it is not a theory of justification or knowledge – a theory of epistemically worthy belief. Strategic Reliabilism is a theory of epistemically worthy ways of forming beliefs. And second, Strategic Reliabilism does not attempt to account for an epistemological property that is assumed to be faithfully reflected in the epistemic judgments and intuitions of philosophers. If SR makes recommendations that accord with our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions, great. If not, then so much the worse for our reflective epistemic judgments and intuitions. (shrink)

It is not always obvious for even well-trained researchers to appreciate their peer’s scientific pursuits. In many cases, research results obtained from strenuous work processes could even be regarded as “useless knowledge”. -/- Only in very few places on this planet had the notion of useless knowledge been respected and sought after. That’s the famous IAS of Princeton University powered by the conception of the usefulness of useless knowledge of Abraham Flexner. That’s why brilliant scientists such as Albert Einstein, Kurt (...) Godel, and John von Neumann were among its first recruited members. -/- Our team has for many years now gone through various research problems. Still, it is difficult for even experienced and highly accomplished researchers to identify the type of IAS “useless knowledge” problems. But we never stopped trying. -/- Our latest try has led to the informational entropy-based definition of value. At first, it sounded weird for one to ponder the long-existing notion of value, which is used on a daily basis by everybody on Earth. In short, kind of... useless. But gradually, we have come to an understanding that the very familiarity of the word “value” has long obscured our question of its nature. -/- So, a bit about this newly minted definition is here for your perusal. (shrink)

The fable book The Kingfisher Story Collection shows that Mr. Kingfisher is an avid traveler. However, due to unfavorable conditions, his dream of a long-distance journey became a challenging ordeal. Since 2016, Mr. Kingfisher had been yearning for this trip, but it wasn’t until recently that he was able to board the CSIRO/AOS ship to Australia for a long-haul trip. The purpose of the trip was to contribute words of encouragement to the conservation efforts of the Tasmanian Azure Kingfishers in (...) Australia. (shrink)