Abstract: Background: Coronary artery disease remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality Worldwide. Previous reviews pointed that nursing interventions are beneficial for coronary artery patients. However, most interventions focused on education and counselling, but not consistent with the outcome set; still did not consider patient’s coronary artery disease risky characteristics. Related studies in China also difficult to find. Therefore this study was conducted to investigate kinds of nursing interventions delivered to coronary artery patients and match them with patient’s risk (...) factors of coronary artery disease. Results of this study were expected to add new knowledge that will alert nurses to consider coronary artery risk factors which in turn might enable the development of appropriate approaches to improve patient’s wellbeing hence reduce frequent coronary artery morbidity and mortality. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, retrospective design using clinical case notes was employed. Study was undertaken in coronary care wards at the teaching hospital in China from November 2017 to September 2018. Structured-literature supported self-designed questionnaire was utilized for data collection. Chi square (χ2) test and multivariate logistic regression for adjusted odds ratio with 95% confidence interval were used to compare the relationship among independent (patient’s risk coronary artery disease factors) and dependent (nursing interventions) categorical variables. Ethical permission was granted accordingly. Results: A total of 300 coronary artery patients’ case notes were audited with mean age 63±11.2 years. Of these 175 (58.3%) were males. 126(42%) were smoking and 224(74.7%) were hypertensive. More evidence based nursing interventions than education and counselling were found to be delivered to these patients. “Administer coronary artery disease medication and their instructions” was mostly delivered to many patients 291(97%) while “counsel to cope with stress” was the least one 60 (20.0%). Three of eight nursing interventions delivered significantly matched with three or all of these patient’s coronary artery risk variables (age, smoking, hypertension and diabetes) (p < 0.05 and/or < 0.01) with Adjusted odds ratio (95% CI) within their significant ranges. Conclusion: This study delivers valuable insight that, nurses in the studied teaching hospital delivered beneficial evidence based nursing interventions to patients with coronary artery disease which significantly matched with their risk factors of coronary artery illness. However, care for stress was low hence needs improvement. Furthermore, research is needed to get consistency of nursing interventions with patient’s end point clinical outcomes for further appraisal of nursing efforts in caring CAD patients . (shrink)

The current COVID-19 pandemic and the previous SARS/MERS outbreaks of 2003 and 2012 have resulted in a series of major global public health crises. We argue that in the interest of developing effective and safe vaccines and drugs and to better understand coronaviruses and associated disease mechenisms it is necessary to integrate the large and exponentially growing body of heterogeneous coronavirus data. Ontologies play an important role in standard-based knowledge and data representation, integration, sharing, and analysis. Accordingly, we initiated the (...) development of the community-based Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology in early 2020. -/- As an Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) library ontology, CIDO is open source and interoperable with other existing OBO ontologies. CIDO is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology and Viral Infectious Disease Ontology. CIDO has imported terms from over 30 OBO ontologies. For example, CIDO imports all SARS-CoV-2 protein terms from the Protein Ontology, COVID-19-related phenotype terms from the Human Phenotype Ontology, and over 100 COVID-19 terms for vaccines (both authorized and in clinical trial) from the Vaccine Ontology. CIDO systematically represents variants of SARS-CoV-2 viruses and over 300 amino acid substitutions therein, along with over 300 diagnostic kits and methods. CIDO also describes hundreds of host-coronavirus protein-protein interactions (PPIs) and the drugs that target proteins in these PPIs. CIDO has been used to model COVID-19 related phenomena in areas such as epidemiology. The scope of CIDO was evaluated by visual analysis supported by a summarization network method. CIDO has been used in various applications such as term standardization, inference, natural language processing (NLP) and clinical data integration. We have applied the amino acid variant knowledge present in CIDO to analyze differences between SARS-CoV-2 Delta and Omicron variants. CIDO's integrative host-coronavirus PPIs and drug-target knowledge has also been used to support drug repurposing for COVID-19 treatment. -/- CIDO represents entities and relations in the domain of coronavirus diseases with a special focus on COVID-19. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and has been used in a range of applications. (shrink)

This study attempts to reconstruct Nietzsche’s reading of Aristotle in the 1860s and 1870s—the years before he left his career as a philologist. Against the popular view that Nietzsche read only one book by Aristotle, namely the Rhetoric, the present study hopes to show that he had direct knowledge of several of Aristotle’s main works, while much of his interest in Aristotle centred on the latter’s account of art. The particular aim of this study is to explore how Nietzsche’s reading (...) of Aristotle contributed to the formation of The Birth of Tragedy. It will show that, although Nietzsche mentions Aristotle in his first book only en passant, his theory of tragedy should be understood against the background of Aristotelian poetics, especially as interpreted by such contemporaries as Jacob Bernays, Joseph Hubert Reinkens, and Gustav Teichmüller. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly expected to disrupt the ordinary functioning of society. From how we fight wars or govern society, to how we work and play, and from how we create to how we teach and learn, there is almost no field of human activity which is believed to be entirely immune from the impact of this emerging technology. This poses a multifaceted problem when it comes to designing and understanding regulatory responses to AI. This article aims to: (i) (...) defend the need for a novel conceptual model for understanding the systemic legal disruption caused by new technologies such as AI; (ii) to situate this model in relation to preceding debates about the interaction of regulation with new technologies (particularly the ‘cyberlaw’ and ‘robolaw’ debates); and (iii) to set out a detailed model for understanding the legal disruption precipitated by AI, examining both pathways stemming from new affordances that can give rise to a regulatory ‘disruptive moment’, as well as the Legal Development, Displacement or Destruction that can ensue. The article proposes that this model of legal disruption can be broadly generalisable to understanding the legal effects and challenges of other emerging technologies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a Buddhist treatise from around the fourth century CE there is a very remarkable story which serves as a thought experiment calling us to question the nature of self and the identity of persons. Lost in Sanskrit, the passage is fortunately preserved in a Chinese translation, the Dà zhìdù lùn. We here present the first reliable translation directly from the Classical Chinese, and discuss the philosophical significance of the story in its historical and literary context. We emphasise the (...) philosophical importance of embedding the story in two framing narratives, and demonstrate that the story taps a range of intuitions, and indeed fears, about the survival of the self which have also played a large role in the history of the topic in the West, and which continue to be of great contemporary concern. (shrink)

This paper examines Aristotle’s vocabulary of pain, that is the differences and relations of the concepts of pain expressed by synonyms in the same semantic field. It investigates what is particularly Aristotelian in the selection of the pain-words in comparison with earlier authors and specifies the special semantic scope of each word-cluster. The result not only aims to pin down the exact way these terms converge with and diverge from each other, but also serves as a basis for further understanding (...) Aristotle’s philosophical conception of pain. (shrink)

I propose a dynamic causal approach to characterizing the notion of a mechanism. Levy and Bechtel, among others, have pointed out several critical limitations of the new mechanical philosophy, and pointed in a new direction to extend this philosophy. Nevertheless, they have not fully fleshed out what that extended philosophy would look like. Based on a closer look at neuroscientific practice, I propose that a mechanism is a dynamic causal system that involves various components interacting, typically nonlinearly, with one another (...) to produce a phenomenon of interest. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO) is designed as a formal and principled Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry ontology for proteins. The components of PRO extend from a classification of proteins on the basis of evolutionary relationships at the homeomorphic level to the representation of the multiple protein forms of a gene, including those resulting from alternative splicing, cleavage and/or posttranslational modifications. Focusing specifically on the TGF-beta signaling proteins, we describe the building, curation, usage and dissemination of PRO. PRO provides a framework (...) for the formal representation of protein classes and protein forms in the OBO Foundry. It is designed to enable data retrieval and integration and machine reasoning at the molecular level of proteins, thereby facilitating cross-species comparisons, pathway analysis, disease modeling and the generation of new hypotheses. (shrink)

Most theories of slurs fall into one of two families: those which understand slurring terms to involve special descriptive/informational content (however conveyed), and those which understand them to encode special emotive/expressive content. Our view is that both offer essential insights, but that part of what sets slurs apart is use-theoretic content. In particular, we urge that slurring words belong at the intersection of a number of categories in a sociolinguistic register taxonomy, one that usually includes [+slang] and [+vulgar] and always (...) includes [-polite] and [+derogatory]. Thus, e.g., what distinguishes ‘Chinese’ from ‘chink’ is neither a peculiar sort of descriptive nor emotional content, but rather the fact that ‘chink’ is lexically marked as belonging to different registers than ‘Chinese’. It is, moreover, partly such facts which makes slurring ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

The debate over the value of pleasure among Eudoxus, Speusippus, and Aristotle is dramatically documented by the Nicomachean Ethics, particularly in the dialectical pros-and-cons concerning the so-called argument from contraries. Two similar versions of this argument are preserved at EN VII. 13, 1153b1–4, and X. 2, 1172b18–20. Many scholars believe that the argument at EN VII is either a report or an appropriation of the Eudoxean argument in EN X. This essay aims to revise this received view. It will explain (...) why these two arguments differ in premises, contents and purposes, and why these distinctions matter for a proper assessment of Aristotle’s understanding of pleasure and pain in general and his dialectical art in particular. (shrink)

The issue of the use of the Nachlass material has been much debated in Nietzsche scholarship in recent decades. Some insist on the absolute interpretative priority of his published writings over those unpublished and suggest that an extensive engagement with the Nachlass is harmful because it is something Nietzsche rejected. To verify this claim, they appeal to the story of Nietzsche asking his landlord in Sils-Maria to burn some of his notes. Since the notes that were ultimately retrieved are purportedly (...) incorporated into the compilation The Will to Power, the story also leads some to conclude that Nietzsche rejected his project on the will to power. However, the reliability of this story has been questioned. In this manuscript I first present the decisive piece of evidence that will settle the controversy over the story’s authenticity. After showing that it is true that in 1888 Nietzsche wanted some of his notes burned, I address the question of what we can conclude from this story. I argue that it neither suggests the abandonment of the will to power project, nor warrants a devaluation of the Nachlass. Finally, I will discuss the methodological problem of the use of Nietzsche’s Nachlass in general. (shrink)

Nearly thirty years ago, Robert Alexy in his book The Concept and Validity of Law as well as in other early articles raised non-positivistic arguments in the Continental European tradition against legal positivism in general, which was assumed to be held by, among others, John Austin, Hans Kelsen and H.L.A. Hart. The core thesis of legal positivism that was being discussed among contemporary German jurists, just as with their Anglo- American counterparts, is the claim that there is no necessary connection (...) between law and morality. Robert Alexy has argued, however, that the law, besides consisting conceptually of elements of authoritative issuance and social efficacy, necessarily lays a claim to substantial correctness, which is derived from analytical arguments. Furthermore, if this claim to substantial correctness necessarily requires the incorporation of moral elements into law, then the ‘necessary connection thesis’, as defended by non-positivism, can be justified. Some of the most significant objections to this sort of claim, stemming from the Anglo-American world, are those introduced by Joseph Raz. In his ‘Reply’ to Robert Alexy, Raz raises at least three interesting criticisms, including, first, the ambiguity of ‘legal theory in the positivistic tradition’, second, the indeterminate formulations of the ‘separation thesis’, and, third, the necessary claim of law to legitimate authority as a moral claim. As a point of departure, I will argue that Raz’s three criticisms are misleading. For they do not enhance our understanding of the genuine compatibility or incompatibility between legal positivism and non-positivism. Despite the frequently reformulated theses of legal positivism and the various kinds of opponents responding thereto, the essential divergence between legal positivism and non-positivism was and remains the answer to the question of the relation between law and morality. Furthermore, I will clarify that in the strictest sense there can be three and only three logically possible positions concerning the relation between law and morality: the connection between them is either necessary, or impossible (i. e. they are necessarily separate), or contingent (i. e. they are neither necessarily connected nor necessarily separate). The first position is non-positivistic, while the latter two positions are, indeed, both positivistic, but in different forms: one may be called ‘exclusive’ legal positivism, the other ‘inclusive’ legal positivism. I will continue by showing that these three positions stand to one another in the relation of contraries, not contradictories, and that, taken together, they exhaust the logically possible positions concerning the relation between law and morality, never mind the tradition or authority from which these positions are derived. Raz mentions, however, many changeable formulations of the separation thesis, which even leads him to acknowledge ‘necessary connections between law and morality’. One who is trying to understand legal positivism would no doubt be puzzled by this claim. Nevertheless, I will argue that this is an alternative strategy of legal positivism, and it points to naturalistically oriented view. Although this necessary separation between law and morality, understood naturalistically, strikes one as strengthening the separation, in the end it leads to a weakened notion of necessity. This weakened necessary separation thesis, however, cannot be justified through the so-called claim of the law to legitimate authority, defended by Raz, for it is difficult to answer the question of whether a normally justified but factual authority can gain legitimate authority. Finally, the necessary connection between law and morality in a strong sense can still be justified by the claim of law to correctness, as per Alexy’s argument. (shrink)

The concept of human dignity has been criticized as either too thick or too thin. However, according to the non-positivistic standpoint, the legal normativity of human dignity can be justified and thus strengthened by means of its moral correctness. From the individual perspective, Mencius’ understanding of human dignity as an intrinsic value and Kant’s formula of ‘man as an end in itself’ can be adequately understood based on the differentiation of, as well as the connection between, principium diiudicationis and principium (...) executionis, between will and choice, and between homo phaenomenon and homo noumenon (that is, ‘humanity in the personality’). From the social perspective, since the dual dimensions of the individual and the social person are both fictive constructions, even Radbruch, once as a supporter of social law, has not replaced the concept of ‘legal person’ and, in the post-War period, acknowledges individualistic human dignity as the criterion for applying the famous ‘disavowal formula’. On the one hand, human dignity shows at least a weak normative character, which requires, firstly, balancing between the exercise of state powers and the constitutional review under the guidance of the dual dimensions of man and, secondly, optimization of the principle of human dignity in individual cases. On the other hand, through the necessary connection between the concept of dignity and that of personality, human dignity can exhibit a strong normative character, which unavoidably requires a metaphysical justification. (shrink)

El concepto de dignidad humana ha sido considerado o demasiado denso o demasiado delgado. Sin embargo, desde el punto de vista del no-positivismo, la normatividad jurídica de la dignidad humana puede ser justificada y reforzada por medio de su corrección moral. Desde una perspectiva individual, la comprensión de Mencio sobre la dignidad humana como un valor intrínseco y el imperativo categórico de Kant (el ser humano como un fin en sí mismo) podrían ser adecuadamente comprendidos con base en la diferencia (...) (así como la conexión) entre el principium diiudicationis y el principium executionis, entre voluntad y “elección”; así como entre homo phaenomenon y homo noumenon (es decir, humanidad en la persona de los seres humanos). Desde una perspectiva social, las dimensiones del individuo y la persona social son construcciones ficticias; inclusive Radbruch -alguna vez defensor del derecho social- no remplazó el concepto de “persona jurídica” y, en el periodo de posguerra, reconoció la dignidad humana individual como el criterio para aplicar su famosa “fórmula de Radbruch". Por una parte, la dignidad humana muestra cuando menos un carácter normativo débil, el cual requiere, primero, ponderar entre el ejercicio de los poderes estatales y el control de constitucionalidad bajo la guía de la dimensión dual del ser humano y, segundo, la optimización del principio de la dignidad humana en casos particulares. Por otra, a través de la conexión necesaria entre el concepto de dignidad y personalidad, la dignidad humana puede exhibir un carácter normativo fuerte, el cual requiere inevitablemente una justificación metafísica. (shrink)

Die Disziplin, die als „Juristische Methodenlehre“ bezeichnet wird, ist gegenwärtig chinesischen Juristen nicht fremd, sie stammt aber ursprünglich aus dem deutschen Sprachraum. In der Literatur finden sich auch verwandte Ausdrücke wie „Juristische Methodologie“, „Juristische Methodik“ bzw.„Methodenlehre der Rechtswissenschaft“. Seit Anfang des 21. Jahrhunderts wurde ihre Rezeption in China durch zwei Übersetzungen gekennzeichnet, nämlich die „rechtswissenschaftliche Methodenlehre“ (faxue fangfalun) und die „rechtliche Methodenlehre“ (falü fangfalun). Neben der herkömmlichen Methodenlehre entwickelte sich auch eine jüngere Theorie der juristischen Argumentation, die die weltweite Aufmerksamkeit (...) sogar außerhalb Deutschlands auf sich lenken konnte und deren Bestand in China einen ganz selbständigen Abschnitt verdient. Als Hintergrund dafür soll von vornherein ein Blick auf die Entwicklungen der chinesischen Rechtstheorie und Rechtsphilosophie nach 1978 und demzufolge auf die Entstehung der Methodenfrage in der chinesischen Rechtswissenschaft geworfen werden. (shrink)

This paper reexamines Theophrastus’ Metaphysics 11a18–26, an obscure testimony about Speusippus, the second head of the Platonic Academy. As opposed to the traditional interpretation, which takes this passage as Theophrastus’ polemic against Speusippus’ doctrine of value, I argue that he here dialectically takes advantage of, rather than launches an attack on, the Platonist. Based on this new reading, I further propose a revision and a reassessment of the ‘gloomy metaphysics’ of Speusippus which will shed new light on his ethics.

Causalists and Evidentialists can agree about the right course of action in an (apparent) Newcomb problem, if the causal facts are not as initially they seem. If declining $1,000 causes the Predictor to have placed $1m in the opaque box, CDT agrees with EDT that one-boxing is rational. This creates a difficulty for Causalists. We explain the problem with reference to Dummett's work on backward causation and Lewis's on chance and crystal balls. We show that the possibility that the causal (...) facts might be properly judged to be non-standard in Newcomb problems leads to a dilemma for Causalism. One horn embraces a subjectivist understanding of causation, in a sense analogous to Lewis's own subjectivist conception of objective chance. In this case the analogy with chance reveals a terminological choice point, such that either (i) CDT is completely reconciled with EDT, or (ii) EDT takes precedence in the cases in which the two theories give different recommendations. The other horn of the dilemma rejects subjectivism, but now the analogy with chance suggests that it is simply mysterious why causation so construed should constrain rational action. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 242-242.

This Review paper is about the security of bio metric templates in cloud databases. Biometrics is proved to be the best authentication method. However, the main concern is the security of the biometric template, the process to extract and stored in the database within the same database along with many other. Many techniques and methods have already been proposed to secure templates, but everything comes with its pros and cons, this paper provides a critical overview of these issues and solutions.

This paper aims to clarify Plato’s notions of the natural and the neutral state in relation to hedonic properties. Contra two extreme trends among scholars—people either conflate one state with the other, or keep them apart as to establish an unsurmount- able gap between both states, I argue that neither view accurately reflects Plato’s position because the natural state is real and can coincide with the neutral state in part, whereas the latter, as an umbrella term, can also be realized (...) in a non-natural condition. The clarification of the relation between the two states will shed light on the degree to which Plato admits and constrains the hedonic value for a good human life; further, this will call attention to some (not well explored) parallel thoughts in the medical tradition to which Plato is indebted. (shrink)

Plato’s nephew Speusippus has been widely accepted as the historical person behind the mask of the anti-hedonists in Phlb. 42b–44c. This hypothesis is supported by, inter alia, the link between Socrates’ char- acterization of them as δυσχερεῖς and the frequent references of δυσχέρεια as ἀπορία to Speusippus in Aristotle’s Metaphysics MN. This study argues against assigning any privileged status to Speusippus in the assimilation of δυσχέρεια with ἀπορία. Instead, based on a comprehensive survey of how δυσχερ- words were used in (...) classical antiquity, the semantic shift of δυσχέρεια can be explained in an alternative way. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 516-531.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 47 Heft: 1 Seiten: 364-366.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 235-235.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 494-497.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 498-499.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 490-493.

Since its emergence in the 1950s, analytic aesthetics has become the mainstream approach to aesthetics in the English-speaking world, and it has subsequently spread throughout most of the world, including mainland China. Although it was introduced into the Chinese academic world at an early time, around the late 1950s, and has been disseminated and researched in China over the past three decades, analytic aesthetics remains underdeveloped in China. Chinese academics tend to have little familiarity with, and exposure to, analytic approaches (...) to aesthetics. Unsurprisingly, given this situation, Chinese contributions to analytic aesthetics have had a marginal impact on the international academic discussion. This paper aims at providing a picture of the development of analytic aesthetics in China. In section 1, I clarify the scope of the paper. Section 2 briefly introduces aesthetics in China so as to outline the context for our discussion about analytic aesthetics. In section 3, I first offer a brief historical narrative of the dissemination and reception of analytic aesthetics in China, and then explore how analytic aesthetics has been researched and taught in China. -/- . (shrink)

In his classic book “the Foundations of Statistics” Savage developed a formal system of rational decision making. The system is based on (i) a set of possible states of the world, (ii) a set of consequences, (iii) a set of acts, which are functions from states to consequences, and (iv) a preference relation over the acts, which represents the preferences of an idealized rational agent. The goal and the culmination of the enterprise is a representation theorem: Any preference relation that (...) satisfies certain arguably acceptable postulates determines a (finitely additive) probability distribution over the states and a utility assignment to the consequences, such that the preferences among acts are determined by their expected utilities. Additional problematic assumptions are however required in Savage's proofs. First, there is a Boolean algebra of events (sets of states) which determines the richness of the set of acts. The probabilities are assigned to members of this algebra. Savage's proof requires that this be a σ-algebra (i.e., closed under infinite countable unions and intersections), which makes for an extremely rich preference relation. On Savage's view we should not require subjective probabilities to be σ-additive. He therefore finds the insistence on a σ-algebra peculiar and is unhappy with it. But he sees no way of avoiding it. Second, the assignment of utilities requires the constant act assumption: for every consequence there is a constant act, which produces that consequence in every state. This assumption is known to be highly counterintuitive. The present work contains two mathematical results. The first, and the more difficult one, shows that the σ-algebra assumption can be dropped. The second states that, as long as utilities are assigned to finite gambles only, the constant act assumption can be replaced by the more plausible and much weaker assumption that there are at least two non-equivalent constant acts. The second result also employs a novel way of deriving utilities in Savage-style systems -- without appealing to von Neumann-Morgenstern lotteries. The paper discusses the notion of “idealized agent" that underlies Savage's approach, and argues that the simplified system, which is adequate for all the actual purposes for which the system is designed, involves a more realistic notion of an idealized agent. (shrink)

We investigate the association between controlling shareholders' ownership (CS_Own) and firms' leverage decisions in the Singaporean context. We examine whether the impact of ownership concentration on leverage differs across excess and lower control. We report that shareholders with excess control prefer leverage financing for an optimal capital structure and focus on value maximisation rather using leverage as a tool of minority shareholders' expropriation. Our analysis shows that firms capital structure significantly influences by the coalition of shareholders particularly decisions about leverage (...) financing in addition to the firms' specific characteristics and institutional arrangements. Our empirical evidence shows that controlling shareholders with a lower fraction of equity are more concerned about limited holding thus prefer leverage over equity financing to inflate their equity stake to protect them from the potential takeovers and mergers. We report that capital structure decisions in Singapore are linked with the trade-off between the controlling shareholders' target of mitigating firm risk and their non-dilution entrenchment needs. Further, we found an inverted U-shaped association between control ownership and leverage financing. In terms of moderating effect of family-controlled ownership, our findings exhibit that leverage financing is less pronounced for family firms in Singapore due to the under-diversified investment portfolio. (shrink)

The structure of communication networks can be more or less “democratic”: networks are less democratic if (a) communication is more limited in terms of characteristic degree and (b) is more tightly channeled to a few specifc nodes. Together those measures give us a two-dimensional landscape of more and less democratic networks. We track opinion volatility across that landscape: the extent to which random changes in a small percentage of binary opinions at network nodes result in wide changes across the network (...) as a whole. If wide and frequent swings of popular opinion are taken as a mark of instability, democratic communication networks prove far more stable than anti-democratic ones. In a fnal section, we consider the democratic or anti-democratic character of networks that respond to volatility by rewiring at random, in a search for community, or in a search for a leader. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has imperatively shaken the behavior of the global financial markets. This study estimated the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of the financial markets of Europe and the US. The results revealed that the returns of the S&P 500 index have been greatly affected by a lockdown in the US owing to COVID-19. However, the health crisis generated due to the novel coronavirus significantly decreased the stock returns of the Nasdaq Composite index. The results also showed (...) that the economic crisis generated from the pandemic in Spain has had more impact on the IBEX 35 as compared to the health crisis itself. On the other hand, in the long-run, Italy’s stock markets are more affected by the health crisis as contrasted with the economic crisis, while, in the short-run, both lockdown conditions and economic instability lower the stock returns of FTSE MIB. The UK stock markets witnessed that in the short-run, deficiency of health management systems imperatively damaged the stock returns of the London Stock Exchange. The investigation revealed that deficiency of health systems and lockdown conditions have imperatively damaged the structure of financial markets, inferring that sustainable development of these nations is at risk due to COVID-19. The study suggested that governments should allocate more of their budget to the health sector to overcome a health crisis in the future. (shrink)

Savage's framework of subjective preference among acts provides a paradigmatic derivation of rational subjective probabilities within a more general theory of rational decisions. The system is based on a set of possible states of the world, and on acts, which are functions that assign to each state a consequence€. The representation theorem states that the given preference between acts is determined by their expected utilities, based on uniquely determined probabilities (assigned to sets of states), and numeric utilities assigned to consequences. (...) Savage's derivation, however, is based on a highly problematic well-known assumption not included among his postulates: for any consequence of an act in some state, there is a "constant act" which has that consequence in all states. This ability to transfer consequences from state to state is, in many cases, miraculous -- including simple scenarios suggested by Savage as natural cases for applying his theory. We propose a simplification of the system, which yields the representation theorem without the constant act assumption. We need only postulates P1-P6. This is done at the cost of reducing the set of acts included in the setup. The reduction excludes certain theoretical infinitary scenarios, but includes the scenarios that should be handled by a system that models human decisions. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

This collection brings together fourteen contributions by authors from around the globe. Each of the contributions engages with questions about how local and global bioethical issues are made to be comparable, in the hope of redressing basic needs and demands for justice. These works demonstrate the significant conceptual contributions that can be made through feminists' attention to debates in a range of interrelated fields, especially as they formulate appropriate responses to developments in medical technology, global economics, population shifts, and poverty.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 43 Heft: 1 Seiten: 241-249.