As development of the speech recognition system entirely depends upon the spoken language used for its development, and the very fact that speech technology is highly language dependent and reverse engineering is not possible, there is an utmost need to develop such systems for Indian languages. In this paper we present the implementation of a time delay neural network system (TDNN) in a modular fashion by exploiting the hidden structure of previously phonetic subcategory network for recognition of Hindi consonants. For (...) the present study we have selected all the Hindi phonemes for srecognition. A vocabulary of 207 Hindi words was designed for the task-specific environment and used as a database. For the recognition of phoneme, a three-layered network was constructed and the network was trained using the back propagation learning algorithm. Experiments were conducted to categorize the Hindi voiced, unvoiced stops, semi vowels, vowels, nasals and fricatives. A close observation of confusion matrix of Hindi stops revealed maximum confusion of retroflex stops with their non-retroflex counterparts. (shrink)

Study of Aṇabhai-vāṇī by Sukharāmadāsa, 1716-1816, on Jaina doctrines and philosophy.

INTRODUCTION ' Three passions have governed my life: The longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. ...

Religion and diversified religious experiences are always held suspect and not spared from apprehensions regarding its value, its ethics, its revelatory claims and its approaches. Time immemorial religion and religious experiences have played a pivotal role in building up society for betterment and also for deterioration. Man’s intellectual activity throughout the history was on the line of religion. The sacred in religion has always empowered man in many paths of his life, say, to bring social reformation, be it environmental concern (...) or women empowerment. The sacred in religion have brought wonders in human life. (shrink)

Study on Sāṃkhyasāra of Vijñānabhikṣu, active 16th century, classical work on Sankhya school of Indic philosophy.

Analytical study of Advaita and Dvaita philosophy with reference to Śaṅkarācārya and Sankhya school.

In the 1990s, social movements against large dams in India were celebrated for crafting a powerful challenge to dominant policies of development. These grounded struggles were acclaimed for their critique of capitalist industrialization and their advocacy for an alternative model of socially just and ecologically sustainable development. Twenty years later, as large dams continue to be built, their critics have shifted the battle off the streets to new arenas – to courts and government committees, in particular – and switched to (...) a techno-managerial discourse of maintaining river health. What accounts for this change? This article traces the trajectory of cultural politics around Indian rivers within the larger imagination of the nation, the rise of economic liberalization and Hindu nationalism, and the emergence of environmental bureaucracies. It argues that, alongside being shaped by this context, current anti-dam campaigns also contend with the legacy of earlier social movements, their gains as well as losses. This political field has narrowed the potential for radical critique, large-scale collective mobilization and, ultimately, keeping rivers alive. (shrink)

"This book... is the English translation of the Hindi book Tattvārthasūtra with Upādhyāya (now Ailācārya) Srutasāgarji, as the principal commentator and edited by Dr Sudeep Jain in Hindi"--P. 3.

The aim of this article is to return to the concept of bricolage as theorized in 1962 by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and examine its presence and utility in the art and architectural history of the twentieth century. While Lévi-Strauss was the first theorist to present bricolage as an analogy for the creation of mythical thought among indigenous cultures, the concept has seen a wide range of conceptual, methodological and practical applications across different fields, including design, visual arts, urban (...) planning and the built environment. This article will examine the applicability of bricolage as a technical metaphor for the creative process and its relevance to artistic creation by tracing its trajectory over the course of the twentieth century. It will evaluate the significance of objects and events of ‘everyday life’ in the creative practices of contemporary artists, and draw attention to the emerging role of the architect as bricoleur or improviser, to conclude that it was the art of the ‘ordinary’ that gave creative inspiration to twentieth-century artists and architects to engage with the materiality and past experiences of the world. (shrink)

Numerous high-profile ethics scandals, rising inequality, and the detrimental effects of climate change dramatically underscore the need for business schools to instill a commitment to social purpose in their students. At the same time, the rising financial burden of education, increasing competition in the education space, and overreliance on graduates’ financial success as the accepted metric of quality have reinforced an instrumentalist climate. These conflicting aims between social and financial purpose have created an existential crisis for business education. To resolve (...) this impasse, we draw on the concept of moral self-awareness to offer a system-theoretical strategy for crowding-in a culture of ethics within business schools. We argue that to do so, business schools will need to (1) reframe the purpose of business, (2) reframe the meaning of professional success, and (3) reframe the ethos of business education itself. (shrink)

Exhaustive work on Hindu mythology, cosmology and evolution.

As Acharya Vidyanand writes in the Foreword of Samayasara, it is the ultimate conscious reality. The enlightened soul has infinite glory. It has the innate ability to demolish the power of karmas, both auspicious as well as inauspicious, which constitute the cycle of births and deaths, and are an obstacle in the path of liberation of the soul. Samayasara is an essential reading for anyone who wishes to lead a purposeful and contented life. It provides irrefutable and lasting solutions to (...) all our problems, concerning worldly ways as well as spiritual curiosities and misgivings. (shrink)

Human perception has long been a critical subject of design thinking. While various studies have stressed the link between thinking and acting, particularly in spatial experience, the term “design thinking” seems to disconnect conceptual thinking from physical expression or process. Spatial perception is multimodal and fundamentally bound to the body that is not a mere receptor of sensory stimuli but an active agent engaged with the perceivable environment. The body apprehends the experience in which one’s kinesthetic engagement and knowledge play (...) an essential role. Although design disciplines have integrated the abstract, metaphoric, and visual aspects of the body and its movement into conceptual thinking, studies have pointed out that design disciplines have emphasized visuality above the other sensory domains and heavily engaged with the perception of visual configurations, relying on the Gestalt principles. Gestalt psychology must be valued for its attention to a whole. However, the theories of design elements and principles over-empathizing such visuality posit the aesthetics of design mainly as visual value and understate other sensorial and perceptual aspects. Although the visual approach may provide a practical means to represent and communicate ideas, a design process heavily driven by visuality can exhibit weaknesses undermining certain aspects of spatial experience despite the complexity. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of multisensory perception, this article discusses the relationship between body awareness and spatial perception and its implication for design disciplines concerning built environments. Special attention is given to the concepts of kinesthetic and synesthetic phenomena known as multisensory and cross-sensory, respectively. This discussion integrates the corporeal and spatiotemporal realms of human experience into the discourse of kinesthetic and synesthetic perceptions. Based on the conceptual, theoretical, and precedent analyses, this article proposes three models for design thinking: Synesthetic Translation, Kinesthetic Resonance, and Kinesthetic Engagement. To discuss the concepts rooted in action-based perception and embodied cognition, this study borrows the neurological interpretation of haptic perception, interoception, and proprioception of space. This article suggests how consideration of the kinesthetic or synesthetic body can deepen and challenge the existing models of the perceptual aspects of environmental psychology adopted in design disciplines. (shrink)

Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people's intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of cross-cultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of (...) participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism. (shrink)

I would like to introduce the problematic to be addressed in this short article simply as follows. According to the majority of the modern interpreters of the Nyāya philosophy, the Naiyāyika-s are ontologically committed to an uncompromising direct realist theory of perception and to externalism both in epistemology and philosophy of mind. Computationalists, on the other hand, in their ontology, are frank or secret supporters of the view that what we cognize, even what we perceive, is representational. These two claims (...) appear to be opposed to each other. Naturally, the question arises: Is a computational account of intentional mental state, as proposed by Matilal, in his magnum opus Perception, admissible in the Navya-Nyāya framework? Though Matilal has not restricted the conundrum to Navya-Nyāya, the way he has analyzed the cognitive states are available only in the Navya-Nyāya literature. The main objective of this article is to strengthen Matilal’s position further with the help of some additional arguments from the Navya-Nyāya treatises. (shrink)

The main aim of this chapter is to trace the naturalistic traits present in classical Indian philosophical systems, which are well known for their “spiritual” orientation. Having set aside initial doubts regarding the possibility of discovering naturalism in the Indian philosophical scenario, it draws attention to different kinds of naturalism, viz., ontological, methodological, semantic, linguistic, moral, and aesthetic. With reference to ontological naturalism, it discusses in detail the full‐fledged naturalism of the Cārvāka materialists, the mitigated naturalism of the Naiyāyika‐s, the (...) Buddhists, and the Jainas, and the protonaturalism of the Sāmkhya philosophers. It then discusses methodological naturalism mainly with reference to the Nyāya epistemology and moral naturalism, keeping in mind those philosophical systems which uphold that moral values can be understood in terms of moral facts and therefore question the validity of the fact/value distinction. (shrink)

It is platitudinous to say that whenever we try to read some ancient text or interpret some theory distant in space and/or time, we employ contemporary tools of analysis, contemporary techniques of modeling. Even while building theories, theoreticians (philosophers and scientists alike) are found to take help from the technology of the time. Aristotle, for example, had a wax-tablet view of memory. Leibniz used the model of a clock to explain the harmonious universe. Freud used a hydraulic model of the (...) flow of libido, and the telephone switchboard model guided psychologists while they were theorizing on intelligence. Nearer to our time, we have seen physicists explaining the structure of an atom by the model of the .. (shrink)

Perceived supervisor support is widely studied in terms of its positive outcomes. This paper, in contrast, investigates employees’ unethical pro-supervisor behavior as a negative consequence of perceived supervisor support. Drawing upon the multifoci approach of social exchange theory and the reciprocity principle, we hypothesized that perceived supervisor support can engender unethical pro-supervisor behavior via employees’ feelings of reciprocity towards the supervisor. Building on the instrumental reasons that underlie social exchanges, we further hypothesized that this mediation relationship is stronger for employees (...) high in Machiavellianism. We collected data for three experimental studies from full-time MBA students of a European business school and from U.S. working professionals, and the results provided consistent support for our proposed model. Taken together, the current study highlights the “dark side” of perceived supervisor support, in that it can lead to unethical behavior and that this effect can be accentuated by employees’ Machiavellianism. (shrink)

"Consciousness has remained an enigma even after close scientific scrutiny. The last two decades of the twentieth century, therefore, witnessed an explosion of interest in consciousness. Lack of consensus about the nature, definition and taxonomy of consci".

IntroductionScientific pluralism is generally understood in the backdrop of scientific monism. So is mathematical pluralism. Though there are many culture-dependent mathematical practices, mathematical concepts and theories are generally taken to be culture invariant. We would like to explore in this paper whether mathematical pluralism is admissible or not.Materials and methodsMathematical pluralism may be approached at least from five different perspectives. 1. Foundational: The view would claim that different issues within mathematics need support of different foundations, apparently incompatible with one another. (...) 2. Ontological: The world itself is dappled—the mathematical counterpart of which can be traced to the admission of non-Euclidean spaces and also in simultaneous acceptance of set-theoretic and category theoretic entities in the ontology of mathematics. 3. The third route is epistemological. It follows from the view that the nature of reality is so complex that different aspects of it require alternative modes of representation and explanation sometimes severally, sometimes simultaneously, e.g., classical, constructivist, computer-aided and different finitist mathematics can be used depending on the knowledge situation. 4. The fourth route is semantic. Fuzzy mathematics, we know, gives up bivalence in theory of truth, and ascribes truth to mathematical propositions in degrees. 5. The last one is Programmatic: for some, mathematical pluralism is a stance, a programme. It provides a framework which strikes at the root of cultural hegemony and nourishes a climate of intellectual humility and tolerance. It is not my intention to hold the brief of any of these versions. I just want to present to the readers a more or less complete picture of the scenario, though not an exhaustive one. ConclusionUnlike monism, mathematical pluralism does not rule out any possibility—even the possibility of having a unitary over-arching framework of interpretation remains as an open option. This paper highlights the fact that motivations for upholding pluralism in mathematics have been many and one can be a pluralist just by subscribing to any of the views listed above. (shrink)

If a quiz‐master were to ask the question, “Is there anything common among the philosophies of the world?” the answer that should come from the participants with perfect aplomb is, “Yes, the concern for truth.” The presumed unanimity of this response, however, does not imply that philosophers possess a uniform understanding of the notion of truth. There are, indeed, many similarities in the way great minds think on this topic, yet divergences among them are also too significant to be ignored. (...) In this article, therefore, I propose to expound the various aspects of truth from a typically Indian perspective (although, of course, in the contemporary philosophical idiom) before making a comparative assessment of different philosophical theories of truth. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

We investigate dependence of recursively enumerable graphs on the equality relation given by a specific r.e. equivalence relation on ω. In particular we compare r.e. equivalence relations in terms of graphs they permit to represent. This defines partially ordered sets that depend on classes of graphs under consideration. We investigate some algebraic properties of these partially ordered sets. For instance, we show that some of these partial ordered sets possess atoms, minimal and maximal elements. We also fully describe the isomorphism (...) types of some of these partial orders. (shrink)

Nationwide, almost 11% of women abuse drugs during their pregnancy. In some communities, these numbers are as high as 25–30%. Drug abuse is not limited to the poor or to African Americans, but is seen among affluent and white Americans as well. It is widespread, irrespective of race or social class. Annually, nearly 375,000 infants are exposed to drugs in America. Because of the terrible suffering caused by these births, and the conflicts caregivers experience in the treatment of these infants, (...) Trollope's quote is very apropos. Although caregivers have good motives in trying to rescue these babies and helping place them in a nurturing environment, despair about this objective is always close to the surface. (shrink)

We appreciated the important commentary provided by Michelle Oberman on our paper, “Discontinuing Life Support in an Infant of a Drug-Addicted Mother: Whose Decision Is It?” . For the most part we agree with Oberman's analysis of the issues, but there are seven points of variance, either of conception, emphasis, or accuracy. We wish to clarify these and welcome the chance her commentary provided to offer aspects of the social situation surrounding the case we presented.

Abstract: Each affective state has distinct motor-expressions, sensory perceptions, autonomic, and cognitive patterns. Panksepp (1998) proposed seven neural affective systems of which the SEEKING system, a generalized approach-seeking system, motivates organisms to pursue resources needed for survival. When an organism is presented with a novel stimulus, the dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens septi (NAS) is released. The DA circuit outlines the generalized mesolimbic dopamine-centered SEEKING system and is especially responsive when there is an element of unpredictability in forthcoming rewards. (...) We propose that when the outcome of this interaction is unexpected or unanticipated then Panksepp’s “cognitive or expectancy reset” mechanism involving the cognitive dissonance would yield the subjective emotion of surprise. In order to appropriately react to the environment’s stimuli one needs fundamental processes that would enable one to distinguish between what is novel and what has been already experienced, as well as the different degrees of novelty. Novel events are those whose essential features of the representation (visceral and perceptual) are altered and being discrepant provoke more sustained attention. Novelty arises from salient and arousing events and the organism experiences surprise, as coming out of a habitual state. In this framework, we shall look at established theories of emotions and propose a different approach to their taxonomy. (shrink)

Academic dishonesty among students at colleges and universities has been a serious problem all over the world. Due to advances in information and communication technologies, particularly the Internet, the problem has become more severe in the past two decades. This is especially serious among undergraduate students. Very little research has been done in this field in Botswana and Zambia. This study was an attempt in this direction. This paper presents the findings of the study carried out with second year students (...) at the University of Botswana and the University of Zambia. The main objectives of the research were to investigate students' attitudes toward academic dishonesty, frequency of cheating, cheating methods used, and motives for cheating in a local university context. To pursue the study a questionnaire survey was used. The results revealed that students had a high knowledge of various forms of academic dishonesty; and were of the opinion that academic dishonesty devalues academic qualifications. Academic dishonesty was widely practiced; yet, it was not adequately dealt with. The paper recommends that various stakeholders should collaborate to continually educate and discourage students from indulging in academic dishonesty. (shrink)

In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.

This book provides a detailed analysis of classical and modern Indian views on consciousness along with their related meditative methods. It offers a critical analysis of three distinct trends of Indian thought.