To better understand the multiple individual factors that contribute to college cheating, we undertook a multivariate analysis of a national sample of 2,503 college students. Our findings indicated that demographic characteristics, character qualities, college experience, and student perceptions and attitudes are all significantly associated with academic cheating.

Sustainable behaviour promotes pro-ecological behaviour and is a practice of consuming and utilizing resources responsibly. The ongoing COVID-19-induced pandemic has already put economic, social and psychological distress across the globe. Meanwhile, it has become vital to think of issues related to the sustainable management of resources. Behavioural norms play a prominent role while promoting sustainable living. This research examines how the sustainable dimension in one’s behaviour influences the decision-making in their daily life. Previous studies have shown the importance of sub-factors (...) like happiness, diversity constraint and frugal actions as factors affecting sustainable behaviour. These indicators mainly define the action one will choose to react to while buying and consuming different resources. The study identifies happiness as the mediating variable which influences the relationship between the predictor variables—mindfulness and diversity acceptance and the criterion variable—frugality-linked sustainable behaviour. With a sample of 324 participants, Baron and Kenny’s mediation model was outlined to test the mediation. Results showed a positive relationship between frugality, diversity, mindfulness and happiness. Happiness was found to be mediating between mindfulness, diversity acceptance and frugality-linked sustainable behaviour indicating that mindfulness and diversity acceptance alone have limited potential to impact the frugality-linked sustainable approach that individuals take. Happiness, as explained through a positive frame of mind, plays a very important role in enhancing sustainability behaviour. (shrink)

Oversight of human gene transfer research presents an important model with potential application to oversight of nanobiology research on human participants. Gene therapy oversight adds centralized federal review at the National Institutes of Health's Office of Biotechnology Activities and its Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee to standard oversight of human subjects research at the researcher's institution and at the federal level by the Office for Human Research Protections. The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research oversees human gene (...) transfer research in parallel, including approval of protocols and regulation of products. This article traces the evolution of this dual oversight system; describes how the system is already addressing nanobiotechnology in gene transfer: evaluates gene therapy oversight based on public opinion, the literature, and preliminary expert elicitation; and offers lessons of the gene therapy oversight experience for oversight of nanobiotechnology. (shrink)

The Schrödinger’s cat paradox has troubled physicists for many years and many ways to solve it has been provided so far. In this paper I will try to provide a different method of solving the Paradox with the help of logical machine and it will look like a hybrid of Wigner’s no-go theorem and the machine of Gödel in his Incompleteness Theorems. And due to the machine the paradox will not require any human intervention to measure the state of the (...) cat, whether it is alive or dead, while the measurement will be made by humans with regard to the statement given out by the machine. (shrink)

Abstract:Across public and intellectual audiences, postcolonial feminism is often understood to only apply to the “post-colony”. This assumption fails to capture the significant intellectual contributions of postcolonial feminist theory, whilst relegating postcolonial feminist scholars' insights to the margins of the academy and social theory. This move reproduces temporal and geographic logics that presume imperialism “happened” only in the past (and is complete/over) and only in territories counted as the properties of (former) empires (i.e. in the global South and not the (...) global North). In this essay, we write against this conceptualization by highlighting some vital interventions of postcolonial feminist theory and demonstrating how the books under review build new theoretical pathways. We argue for the contemporary relevance of postcolonial feminism as a diverse body of theory offering analytical insights that extend beyond ‘the postcolony’ or a singular application to ‘women's lives’. In particular, we chart the significance of postcolonial feminisms as a lens through which we might ‘unsettle the global south’. Engaging recent calls for critical attention to the global South as a site of theory (rather than merely data extraction), we insist upon dislocating ‘the south’ from an imposed geographic fixity, which too often simply reproduces place-based and racialized hierarchies of ‘civility’ or modernity inherited from colonial science. Postcolonial feminist theory suggests we might instead view ‘south’ as a flexible and mobile marker that draws our gaze to the operation of imperial power, manifest in complex inequalities articulated at local and global scales. In this sense, we argue that ‘theorizing from the south’ requires both a divestment from the usual business of intellectual extraction that positions the global South as source of unprocessed data or ethnographic case study, and a kind of counter-mapping that centralizes the insights and theories that emerge from positions of struggle and marginality. Three themes organize our analysis of the monographs reviewed here and construct our argument about the role of postcolonial feminism in ‘unsettling’ imperial geographic imaginaries that haunt invocations of ‘the global south’. These theories include: (1) the central role of gender and sexuality in racialized imperialist projects; (2) liberal modernity and colonial definitions of ‘the human’; and (3) alternative approaches to capitalism that highlight hegemonic white property regimes. (shrink)

Previous research has established that the success of strikes, and social movements more broadly, depends on their ability to garner support from the public. However, there is scant published research investigating the response of the public to strike action by healthcare workers. In this study, we address this gap through a study of public responses to UK nursing strikes in 2022–2023, using a data set drawn from Twitter of more than 2300 publicly available tweets. We focus on negative tweets, investigating (...) which societal discourses social media users draw on to oppose strike action by nurses. Using a combination of corpus‐based approaches and discourse analysis, we identified five categories of opposition: (i) discourse discrediting nurses; (ii) discourse discrediting strikes by nurses; (iii) discourse on the National Health System; (iv) discourse about the fairness of strikers' demands and (v) discourse about potential harmful impact. Our findings show how social media users operationalise wider societal discourses about the nursing profession (e.g., associations with care, gender, vocation and sacrifice) as well as recent crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic to justify their opposition. The results also provide valuable insights into misconceptions about nursing, strike action and patient harm, which can inform strategies for public communication. (shrink)

This paper will annoy modern logicians who follow Bertrand Russell in taking pleasure in denigrating Aristotle for [allegedly] being ignorant of relational propositions. To be sure this paper does not clear Aristotle of the charge. On the contrary, it shows that such ignorance, which seems unforgivable in the current century, still dominated the thinking of one of the greatest modern logicians as late as 1831. Today it is difficult to accept the proposition that Aristotle was blind to the fact that, (...) for example, incommensurability is a relation and not a property: that the proposition “In every square, the diagonals are incommensurable with the sides” is relational and not categorical. This paper asks the reader to do something more difficult: to accept the proposition that as late as 1831 De Morgan was blind to the same fact. This paper shows conclusively that in 1831, De Morgan was still in the grips of the allegedly Aristotelian paradigm. (shrink)

This self-contained lecture examines uses and misuses of the adverb conversely with special attention to logic and logic-related fields. Sometimes adding conversely after a conjunction such as and signals redundantly that a converse of what preceded will follow. -/- (1) Tarski read Church and, conversely, Church read Tarski. -/- In such cases, conversely serves as an extrapropositional constituent of the sentence in which it occurs: deleting conversely doesn’t change the proposition expressed. Nevertheless it does introduce new implicatures: a speaker would (...) implicate belief that the second sentence expresses a converse of what the first expresses. Perhaps because such usage is familiar, the word conversely can be used as “sentential pronoun”—or prosentence—representing a sentence expressing a converse of what the preceding sentence expresses. -/- (2) Tarski read Church and conversely. -/- This would be understood as expressing the proposition expressed by (1). Prosentential usage introduces ambiguity when the initial proposition has more than one converse. Confusion can occur if the initial proposition has non-equivalent converses. -/- Every proposition that is the negation of a false proposition is true and conversely. -/- One sense implies that every proposition that is the negation of a true proposition is false, which is true of course. But another sense, probably more likely, implies that every proposition that is true is the negation of a false proposition, which is false: the proposition that one precedes two is not a negation and thus is not the negation of a false proposition. The above also applies to synonyms of conversely such as vice versa. Although prosentence has no synonym, extrapropositional constituents are sometimes called redundant rhetoric, filler, or expletive. Authors discussed include Aristotle, Boole, De Morgan, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Tarski, and Church. END OF PUBLISHED ABSTRACT -/- See also: Corcoran, John. 2015. Converses, inner and outer. 2015. Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, third edition, Robert Audi (editor). Cambridge: Cambridge UP. https://www.academia.edu/10396347/Corcoran_s_27_entries_in_the_1999_second_edition_Audi_s_Cambridge_ Dictionary_of_Philosophy . (shrink)

We hypothesize that life began not with the first self‐reproducing molecule or metabolic network, but as a prebiotic ecology of co‐evolving populations of macromolecular aggregates (composomes). Each composome species had a particular molecular composition resulting from molecular complementarity among environmentally available prebiotic compounds. Natural selection acted on composomal species that varied in properties and functions such as stability, catalysis, fission, fusion and selective accumulation of molecules from solution. Fission permitted molecular replication based on composition rather than linear structure, while fusion (...) created composomal variability. Catalytic functions provided additional chemical novelty resulting eventually in autocatalytic and mutually catalytic networks within composomal species. Composomal autocatalysis and interdependence allowed the Darwinian co‐evolution of content and control (metabolism). The existence of chemical interfaces within complex composomes created linear templates upon which self‐reproducing molecules (such as RNA) could be synthesized, permitting the evolution of informational replication by molecular templating. Mathematical and experimental tests are proposed. BioEssays 28: 399–412, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In three studies, we explored the retention and transfer of tool-making knowledge, learnt from an adult demonstration, to other temporal and task contexts. All studies used a variation of a task in which children had to make a hook tool to retrieve a bucket from a tall transparent tube. Children who failed to innovate the hook tool independently saw a demonstration. In Study 1, we tested children aged 4 to 6 years (N = 53) who had seen the original demonstration (...) 3 months earlier. Performance was excellent at the second time, indicating that children’s knowledge was retained over the 3 month period. In Studies 2 and 3 we explored transfer of the new knowledge to other tasks. In Study 2, children were given two variants of the apparatus that differed in surface characteristics (e.g. shape and colour). Participants generalised their knowledge to these new apparatuses even though the new pipecleaner also differed in size and colour. Five- to 6-year-olds (n = 22) almost always transferred their knowledge to problems where the same tool had to be made. Younger, 3- to 5-year-olds’ (n = 46), performance was more variable. In Study 3, 4- to 7-year-olds (N = 146) saw a demonstration of hook making with a pipecleaner, but then had to make a tool by combining pieces of wooden dowel (or vice versa: original training on dowel, transfer to pipecleaner). Children did not transfer their tool-making knowledge to the new material. Children retained tool-making knowledge over time and transferred their knowledge to new situations in which they needed to make a similar tool from similar materials, but not different materials. We concluded that children’s ability to use tool-making knowledge in novel situations is likely to depend on memory and analogical reasoning, with the latter continuing to develop during middle childhood. (shrink)

This study extended the scope of previous findings in human–computer interaction research within the computers are social actors paradigm by showing that online users attribute perceptions of moral qualities to Websites and, further, that differential perceptions of morality affected the extent of persuasion. In an experiment (N = 138) that manipulated four morality conditions (universalist, relativist, egotistic, control) across worldview, a measured independent variable, users were asked to evaluate a Web site designed to aid them in making ethical decisions. Web (...) sites offered four different types of ethical advice as participants contemplated cases involving ethical quandaries. Perceptions of the Web sites’ moral qualities varied depending on the type of advice given. Further, the Web sites’ perceived morality and participants’ worldview predicted credibility, persuasiveness, and attitudes toward the Web sites. (shrink)

This paper focuses on flows to emerging capital markets (ECMs) and examines the importance of corporate transparency and public governance in attracting portfolio flows to ECMs. This paper's empirical investigation centers on the hypothesis that ceteris paribus, ECMs with better quality accounting standards and good governance attract higher levels of portfolio equity and bond flows. To assess the incremental impact of each of these factors, a pooled time series, cross‐sectional model was econometrically tested for 17 ECMS over the 1998–2002 time (...) period. Our empirical analysis demonstrates a positive association between public governance, corporate transparency, and portfolio flows after controlling for other macroeconomic factors. The results suggest that good public governance and high accounting quality are important determinants of portfolio flows to ECMs. Finally, the paper establishes that while portfolio equity flows are significantly attracted to ECMs with strong democratic institutions, there is no significant association between portfolio bond flows and the presence of democratic institutions. (shrink)

Several metabolites serve as substrates for histone modifications and communicate changes in the metabolic environment to the epigenome. Technologies such as metabolomics and proteomics have allowed us to reconstruct the interactions between metabolic pathways and histones. These technologies have shed light on how nutrient availability can have a dramatic effect on various histone modifications. This metabolism–epigenome cross talk plays a fundamental role in development, immune function, and diseases like cancer. Yet, major challenges remain in understanding the interactions between cellular metabolism (...) and the epigenome. How the levels and fluxes of various metabolites impact epigenetic marks is still unclear. Discussed herein are recent applications and the potential of systems biology methods such as flux tracing and metabolic modeling to address these challenges and to uncover new metabolic–epigenetic interactions. These systems approaches can ultimately help elucidate how nutrients shape the epigenome of microbes and mammalian cells. (shrink)

An increasing amount of data is now available from public and private sources. Furthermore, the types, formats, and number of sources of data are also increasing. Techniques for extracting, storing, processing, and analyzing such data have been developed in the last few years for managing this bewildering variety based on a structure called a knowledge graph. Industry has devoted a great deal of effort to the development of knowledge graphs, and knowledge graphs are now critical to the functions of intelligent (...) virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The goal of the Ontology Summit 2020 was to understand not only what knowledge graphs are but also where they originated, why they are so popular, the current issues, and their future prospects. The summit sessions examined many examples of knowledge graphs and surveyed the relevant standards that exist and are in development for knowledge graphs. The purpose of this Communiqué is to summarize our understanding from the Summit in order to foster research and development of knowledge graphs. (shrink)

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

In the superannuation/pension industry, ordinary investors entrust their retirement savings to the trustees of the superannuation plan. Investors rely on the trustees to ensure that ethical business and risk management practices are implemented to protect their retirement savings. Governance practices ensure the monitoring of ethical risk management (Drennan, L. T.: 2004, Journal of Business Ethics 52, 257-266). The Australian superannuation industry presents a unique scenario. Legislation requires employers to contribute a minimum of 9% of the employees wage to retirement savings. (...) However, there are no legislated governance standards, although there are standards of recommended governance practices. In this article, we examine the level of voluntary adoption of governance practices by the trustees of Australian public sector and industry superannuation funds. We also assess whether superannuation governance practices are associated with performance and volatility /riskiness of returns. Survey results show that the majority of superannuation plans adopt recommended governance practices supporting the concept of ethical management of the member's retirement savings. The examination of governance principles that impact returns and risk shows that board size and regular review of conflicts are positively associated with return. Superannuation plans with higher volatility in returns meet more frequently. (shrink)

Scientific routes to understanding the nature of reality have led to the development of science and technology, which in turn has led to improvement in material conditions of humanity. In contrast, the rishi route to real ity enhanced our understanding of human beings from the perspective of higher levels of consciousness. The rishi route has given us insights and ideas for improvement in the spiritual conditions of humanity. There is a need for an 'integral embrace' of the two (...) routes. This paper presents a discussion on these two routes to reality and suggests that their integration would lead us a step further in the direction of creating sacro-civic societies by preventing alienation of human beings from their real nature. (shrink)

The approach of looking at organizations from the perspective of Management Strategy, Structure, Systems and Style has been considered to be one of the useful ways for understanding and managing them well. In schools, the educational intent or educational philosophy or vision, which may be likened to the term strategy used in other contexts, is one of the determinants of the organizational structure, systems and style. The way these four elements interact with each other and manifest in the various processes (...) and functions of the school does influence the ambience and culture of school significantly. Management style appears to have the potential of actualizing the educational intent of the school by enabling the required scope for growth of teachers and students. The style also has a bearing on the extent to which the scope for growth brought about will be ‘utilized’ or realized by the teachers and students to actually learn and grow. The scope for growth and the growth experienced by students and teachers were studied and the correlation coefficient between the two tentatively determined. (shrink)

On Atri Rishi and fundamentals of Indic philosophy.

These letters were sent to the following schools founded by Krishnamurti: INDIA: Rishi Valley School, Rishi Valley Chittoor District Andhra Pradesh Rajghat ...

This paper establishes that the contemporary figures of organizational leadership are at best excellent examples of 'dealership' characterized by high skills-competence and low values-commitment. The author points out that managerial and organizational psychology for leadership is yet to grapple with the most fundamental of all the themes: the complete model of man which places the spirit-core of SELF in the centre. The paper upholds the classical Indian concept of wisdom leadership and introduces the rajarshi model of the leader as the (...) very embodiment of satya and rita. The author then dwells on the nature of'rishi-consciousness' and elaborates on the 'rishi' process which leads to the unfoldment of unitive SELF-awareness or ekatmanubhuti. Speaking on behalf of one of the most enduring civilizations of the world, the author asserts that wisdom leadership comes from the ability to perceive the indivisible whole and this ability is not a function of the thinking, reasoning mind but of the intuitive, spiritual mind. (shrink)

One day, when Krishna wanted to board an aeroplane, he was not allowed to! All because he did not have an identity card. Then his friends Garuda and Sesha took him to meet Lata-kumari in Guwahati, who told him the story of Anasuya and the Ashwini twins, and why Rishi Chavan made a rule that all gods should carry a dhvaja—a flag with each god’s very own symbol. Did Krishna get his identity card so he could ride the aeroplane (...) finally? o Why are identity cards important, even for gods? o How can you tell a Deva from a Manava? o How would you find a particular god in a crowd of gods? (shrink)

On the life of Nund-Rishi, Nund-Rishi, Muslim saint from Jammu and Kashmir and Kashmiri poet.

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This special issue provokes a conversation between decolonial and postcolonial feminisms by asking what they are, how they speak about each other, and how they can speak to each other. Read together, the articles engage and sometimes trouble the temporal and spatial distinctions drawn between decolonial and postcolonial approaches. Kiran Asher explores overlaps between decolonial and postcolonial thought by comparing the ideas of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Silvia (...) Rivera Cusicanqui on representation. Aimee Carrillo Rowe also stages a dialogue between these approaches when interrogating her family ’s Chican@ settler history. Tiara R. Na’puti and Judy Rohrer offer an account of how recent scholarship from Hawai‘i and Guåhan (Guam) has elaborated Indigenous epistemologies in settler contexts. Two articles excavate colonialism’s relationship to science: Jennifer Hamilton, Banu Subramaniam, and Angela Willey explore how two instances of population genetic research illustrate the racialized knowledge systems that undergirded colonialism, while Sandra Harding points out how the colonization of Latin America contributed to the edifice of Western science. In a related vein, Breny Mendoza centers the material role of Abya Yala (the preferred term for Latin America) in not just Spanish colonialism but British colonial expansionism and eventually the eclipsing of China. Patricia A. Schechter reflects on her trajectory as a scholar and teacher of US women’s history and the insights she has gained through 504Preface engaging decolonial scholarship. Amy Piedalue and Susmita Rishi argue for a more expansive understanding of postcolonial feminism’s reach as they review recently published titles in the field. Although Anna Tsing and Paulla Ebron’s review of feminist scholarship about the Anthropocene does not directly mention postcolonial or decolonial approaches, it nonetheless engages relevant scholarship on the environmental impact of settler modernization and capitalism. An art essay by Hyunji Kwon introduces the largely unrecognized paintings of former comfort woman Duk-kyung Kang (1929–1997) and focuses on the potential of Kang’s work to challenge Japanese colonial hierarchies. Our featured poets in this issue are Emily Zhang, Megan Kaminski, and Raina J. León. Both postcolonial and decolonial scholars have been committed to critiquing the material and epistemic legacies of colonialism. The distinctions that are frequently drawn between the two approaches, however, have been a source of disquiet to the editors of Feminist Studies, and they prompted our journal’s call for papers in 2016. A common temporal marking that concerned us was the eclipsing of postcolonialism, which was increasingly becoming viewed as passé, and a setting up of decolonial feminism as always already better in time. Decolonial approaches sometimes depicted postcolonial feminism as being only about the past, despite postcolonial feminism’s stated commitment to studying the continuing impact of colonial processes and its complex use of the prefix “post.” Our concern was, as well, with misrepresentations of postcolonial feminist priorities. The depiction of postcolonial feminism as deconstructive, abstract, elite theory confined to the ambit of modern colonial knowledge systems overlooked the important quandaries that postcolonial feminism raised about how to represent marginalized people ethically and, indeed, how to understand the very desire to represent the marginalized—whether or not we claim belonging to them. Postcolonial feminists warned against an easy embrace of alterity, noting that the desire for positioning oneself outside colonialism could naively ignore the power of colonial discourses to frame colonialism’s Other. Another set of hopes for this special issue was to dwell on the spatial markings of decolonial and postcolonial feminisms: decolonial feminism is often associated with Indigenous scholars and those from the Americas, and postcolonial feminism with scholars from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. These regional emphases, although not always as tidy as sometimes depicted, have produced distinct intellectual Preface 505 priorities. We must heed decolonial feminism’s insistence on engaging with the genocidal history of settler colonialism, the current manifestations of the violent dispossession of land, and its constitution of gendered racial capitalism the world over. (FeministStudies will soon publish a special issue on Indigenous Feminisms). Yet, if postcolonial feminism is circumscribed geographically to only South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, we risk ignoring its powerful transcontinental mapping of imperial gender formations and its scrupulous attention to the ethics of representing... (shrink)

2006. George Boole. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2nd edition. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA. -/- George Boole (1815-1864), whose name lives among modern computer-related sciences in Boolean Algebra, Boolean Logic, Boolean Operations, and the like, is one of the most celebrated logicians of all time. Ironically, his actual writings often go unread and his actual contributions to logic are virtually unknown—despite the fact that he was one of the clearest writers in the field. Working with various students including Susan Wood and (...) class='Hi'>Sriram Nambiar, I have written several publications trying to set the record straight—but so far to little avail. This encyclopedia entry is one more attempt to set the record straight in a way that can be appreciated by non-experts.Also see https://www.academia.edu/10161999/Booles_criteria_of_validity_and_invalidity . (shrink)

A woman and a man desire to come together stirred by the primal fire of Kama and the man deposits his egg in the womb of the woman. This egg develops into a human undergoing nine or ten months of evolution. This process is the microscopic replication of the method evolved by God to create the universe. Rigveda (10.121) mentions Hiranyagarbha, the Golden Egg as the source of the creation of the universe. It is said that God, wishing to create (...) the world, produced an egg as big as the cosmos. God meditated for a thousand years sitting inside the egg and when the egg burst, the Lord himself was born out of the egg as the Progenitor of the universe (“He made Himself by Himself.”, Taitiriya Upanishad: 2.7.1). The Rishis called the Egg Brahmanda (the Cosmic Egg), and the Progenitor Manu. Scientists have discovered that the universe has an oval shape. Like the nine months of the evolution of the human egg, the Cosmic Egg also undergoes nine stages of evolution before it gets dissolved during what we call ‘Maha Pralaya’. The Puranas mention that Brahmanda has 14 biospheres, seven nether and seven upper inhabited by different types of souls. If we count from the human world, there are ten dimensions of consciousness. Rishis called these astral biospheres Mandalas/Lokas with different wavelengths and colours. Sri Karunakara Guru referred to them as Avasthas, or spiritual stages. The Buddhists and Hindu esoteric sects such as the Theosophical Society explain these levels of the Absolute in terms of Physical plane, Astral plane, Mental plane, Buddhic plane, Atmic plane, Anupadaka plane, Adi plane and Shiv and Shakti. These Avasthas are related to the expanding consciousness reaching up to the core of the Cosmic Egg, the Paramatma. Like a spider which creates a web around it sitting in the centre, and withdraws it in the end, Paramatma creates and withdraws webbed multi-dimensional universes. Nobody can say when it started and when it will end as it is a beginningless and endless process. (shrink)