A considerable section of the population in India accesses the services of individual private medical practitioners (PMPs) for primary level care. In rural areas, these providers include MBBS doctors, practitioners of alternative systems of medicine, herbalists, indigenous and folk practitioners, compounders and others. This paper describes the profile, knowledge and some practices of the rural doctor in India and then discusses the reasons for lack of equity in health care access in rural areas and possible solutions to the problem.

`Europe' and national identity are not necessarily in conflict, as the examples of Spain, Greece, Germany and Italy in their different ways suggest. The same may be true of some of the constituent nations of the British Isles - the Scots, the Irish (North and South), and the Welsh. Europe however poses a particular problem for the English, for longstanding political and cultural reasons. This article explores the different relations of the different parts of the United Kingdom to an increasingly (...) unified Europe. It suggests that, just as there have been many `Europes', so there have been many different ways of relating to it, depending on particular historical and political circumstances. Of all the people of the United Kingdom it is the English who have the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with a future in Europe. (shrink)

In the wake of the Iraq war of 2003, and in response to the European reaction to the war, a number of prominent European intellectuals launched a new debate on Europe's identity, and in particular the extent to which it differed from American identity. The debate was sparked by a newspaper article by Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, which was circulated to several other intellectuals for comment. The Europe-wide debate which ensued — in which several Americans joined — provides a (...) revealing snap-shot of European opinion on the question of Europe's identity. It illustrates in particular the dangers as well as the seductions of seeing that identity mainly in terms of a contrast with America, putatively to the advantage of the Europeans. This article argues that such a contrast fuels an anti-Americanism that is disabling to Europe and conceals many significant — and less selfflattering — aspects of the European inheritance. (shrink)

A reflective evaluation and policy implications of teaching an STS course via the Internet are presented. The course explored the science, technology, and society interactions from personal, social, cultural, historical, political, and value perspectives. The World Wide Web was used to present lecture materials and related STS links. Most of the class discussions took place via an e-mail chat room. The chat room discourses were found insufficient to meaningfully discuss and debate in-depth STS issues. Follow-up telephone conferences were often needed. (...) The interdisciplinary nature of STS, complexity of STS interactions, and dynamics of STS issues require more involved dialogue, analysis, and problem solving than typical online correspondence can provide requiring immersive-level technology applications. More research and development efforts and supportive policies are needed to make the delivery of interdisciplinary courses via distance learning a success. (shrink)

The “Protect, Respect, Remedy” Framework along with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is the current global standard regarding corporate conduct. This article analyses the UN Framework from the vantage point of labour rights in India by looking at the garment supply chain. It argues that it can do little to induce states and businesses to bring substantive improvements to working conditions in a largely informal economy like India. Without the state performing its duty to protect human (...) rights, the secondary responsibility of corporations can do very little in realising the rights of workers. Nonetheless, its tallest contribution is that it has given a platform for civil society to push for better conduct from all businesses and marks the beginning of a unified international business and human rights agenda. (shrink)

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion–attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or high-load task with a string of letters presented against a happy, sad or neutral face (in a circular form) as the background. Participants were asked to identify the face that appeared in the (...) critical trial. Results indicate an interaction between emotion and load. First, identification of faces with happy expression was better than chance and unaffected by load. Second, performance was worse than chance for faces with sad expression in the high-load condition, indicating inhibition of unattended sad distractor faces in the critical trial. This indicates that inhibitory processes during a difficult attentional task under divided attention influence subsequent perception of distractor stimuli especially sad faces. The results have implications for the theories of selective attention as well as the role of emotions in conscious perception. (shrink)

The integrity of research findings and the safety of participants who voluntarily consent to participate in research studies must be assured through ethical approaches. Additionally, ethical guidelines and the ethics committee protect participants from unfair practices by the research team. Therefore, this study aims to assess the knowledge and attitudes toward the ethics committee and research ethical practices among the researchers of a diabetes institute in Kuwait. An anonymous survey was conducted through an online questionnaire using Microsoft Forms. The study (...) had a response rate of 86%. Among the 55 participants in this study, 43 (78%) had ethics training. Researchers involved in more than four research projects were shown to have a much higher awareness of the ethics committee and its role than researchers involved in no projects. Approximately 90% of researchers had training in research ethics and were knowledgeable about informed consent forms and assent, as well as additional protections for vulnerable populations. Ninety-eight percent of respondents were of the view that an ethics committee was necessary. Our study concluded that most of the researchers at the institute were aware of the role of the ethics committee, and ethical principles. However, we recommend that continuous and customized training on research ethics should be provided. (shrink)

The role of holistic or parts-based processing in face identification has been explored mostly with neutral faces. In the current study, we investigated the nature of processing (holistic vs. parts) in recognition memory for faces with emotional expressions. There were two phases in this experiment: learning phase and test phase. In the learning phase participants learned face–name associations of happy, neutral, and sad faces. The test phase consisted of a two-choice recognition test (whole face, eyes, or mouth) given either immediately (...) or after a 24-hour delay. Results indicate that emotional faces were remembered better than neutral faces and performance was better with whole faces as compared to isolated parts. The performance in immediate and delayed recognition interacted with emotional information. Sad eyes and happy mouth were remembered better in the delayed recognition condition. These results suggest that in addition to holistic processing, specific parts–emotion combinations play a critical role in delayed recognition memory. (shrink)

This dialogic roundtable discussion elaborates the possibilities opened up by the use of social reproduction theory in intersection with world-literary, materialist feminist, queer Marxist and world-systems approaches to literature and culture. In particular, contributors consider how the analysis of social reproduction might illuminate the politics of everyday life, the representational challenges accompanying the banality or ubiquity of women's work, the potential gaps of social reproduction feminism, and the aesthetic challenges accompanying or following from an interest in social reproduction. Topics covered (...) include digital media as foundational operating mode of Hindu nationalism, the sexuality- and race-based exclusions of employment in higher education, Philippine literature as ‘reproductive fiction’, the Latin American novel vis-à-vis its registration of domestic service, the short story as bellwether for global issues surrounding women’s labour, and questions of complicity in the kinds of labour some women and sexual minorities enact for larger authoritarian, patriarchal projects. If women do much of the work of producing the everyday then we must also ask how women might re-make the everyday along more radical, and radically egalitarian lines. (shrink)

Imbalance in the pH of water reduces this precious resource as an extremely dangerous liquid for human health and plants’ growth. Change in the pH levels of the drinkable water has majorly raised concern towards diverse health issues like heart problems, infant mortality rates, pigmentation of skin, and cholera outbreaks. Therefore, it is necessary to keep a check on essential water quality components that include acidic/basic nature of water. As per the US Environmental Protection Agency, the drinkable water should have (...) a pH level ranging from 6.5 to 8.5. Two sample situates have been identified wherever highly reported pollutants levels were found and have been analyzed through artificial intelligence techniques. It can be observed that wavelet denoised signals fed into the least squares support vector regression and M5 prime regression tree predicted more accurately on the basis of the performance errors that are as follows: root mean squared error ; mean squared error ; mean absolute error. On the basis of these errors, the coefficient of determination/goodness of fit simulated for the prototypes is developed in this study. RMSE outcomes diminish on the whole on applying the training and forecasting data-division via WLSSVR and WM5pRT as compared with fitting the normalized data through LSSVR and M5pRT. These performance measures are essential to analyze the concentration levels of pH in the river streams at the identified sites of study. Thus, the observed pattern from this study may help for future estimation of the quality of water at their sources so that it prohibits the further increase in either acidic or basic salts which prove to be lethal for the environment. Thus, these predictors would be helpful towards formulation of strategies for protection of ecosystem and human health. (shrink)

Contributed articles; contains writing on science, fiction, philosophy, social science, etc.

The book motivates you never to give up. Though life may break you and shatter you to pieces, you always have the option to turn it around. The courage, the strength which you get by facing the challenges thrown by life at you makes you stronger and makes you “Unbreakable”. Your self-confidence, strength and extra-ordinary determination have the power to change your life. This book provides you powerful insights on how to handle difficulties in life and face life head-on. You (...) can take the help of the divine and become the best version of yourself. It is a book of powerful breakthroughs and life's learning which can be implemented directly in your personal and professional life when you just want to give up on yourself when things get tough. This book lets you know that you are tougher than your problems and no matter how many times life knocks you down you have the power to rise and shine brightly like the sun and show the world who you are. (shrink)

This article is based on a research project drawing upon in-depth qualitative interviews (N=61) and data from a survey (N=628) of young people and parents belonging to the five largest ethnic minority groups in Denmark. The theoretical framework combines conceptualisations about conflict and the family with theories about modernisation/individualisation and discrimination effects. The dominating tendencies in the inter-generational relationships between young people and their parents on the subject of the young people’s intimate partnership formation are analysed and discussed. The ethic (...) minority youth and parents’ reflections on the ethnic majority partnership formation patterns are delineated. The analyses indicate that r elationships between young people and parents on the issue of intimate partnership formation can be cooperative or in opposition. This is contrary to the widespread discourse about serious conflicts between generations. Thus the article criticises the reductionistic conception of partnership formation being a question of either-or processes, i.e. own choice or parental choice, and appeals for broad concepts which include both-and processes, i.e. own choice and parental accept. (shrink)

Visualization of SNOMED CT’s non-lattice subgraphs can help make sense of what has been asserted in the hierarchical (is-a) relation. More importantly, it can demonstrate what has not been asserted, or “is-not-a,” using Closed-World Assumption for such subgraphs.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMsLarge Language Model (LLM)) and Generative AI have opened up transformative opportunities across many disciplines in science and engineering. For biomedical ontologies, there are multiple potential roles that LLMs can play to aid ontological engineering and ontological analysis; all of which are positioned to enhance the existing workflows and processes. This chapter presents initial LLM use cases in ontological analysis to demonstrate their potential values.

One of the desirable properties of the resulting graph structure is that the subsumption relationship (is-a hierarchy) should form a lattice [47]. There are in general two types of lattice-based approaches to ontology quality assurance. One involves the direct application of Formal Concept Analysis (FCAFormal Concept Analysis (FCA) [48]), mostly for auditing semantic completeness or missing concepts [42].

Ontologies are special types of data that are often referred to as standard metadata. They serve as metadata standards that can be used for the definition, annotation (labeling), indexing, linkage (mapping), extraction, integration, retrieval, enrichment, harmonization, and interaction of data. Ontologies, sometimes defined as shared conceptualization of a domain represented in a formal language, represent not only the concepts used across scientific work, but just as importantly, the relationships between the concepts.

This chapter presents a variety of approaches that leverage non-lattice substructures (i.e. non-lattice fragments or non-lattice subgraphs) for ontological analysis.

Many modern biomedical terminologies including SNOMED CTSNOMED CT and NCItNCI Thesaurus (NCIt) have been formally represented using description logics (DLDescription Logic (DL)), a family of formal knowledge representation languages. A key reasoning service provided by DL is ontology classification, achieved by DL reasoners (e.g., ELK [121], Snorocket [122]), which can check the consistency of definitions across the whole ontology and automatically infer a hierarchy of concepts (i.e., infer IS-A hierarchical relations among concepts) based on the stated facts. In this chapter, (...) we discuss approaches that leverage these logical definitions to identify missing IS-A relations and missing concepts in biomedical ontologies. (shrink)

Biomedical terminologies have been increasingly used in modern biomedical research and applications to facilitate data management and ensure semantic interoperability. As part of the evolution process, new concepts are regularly added to biomedical terminologies in response to the evolving domain knowledge and emerging applications. Most existing concept enrichment methods suggest new concepts via directly importing knowledge from external sources.

The eight main content chapters of the book provided approaches for analyzing ontological structure and content with the goal of detecting potential quality issues (errors, inconsistencies, or gaps in concept entities as well as their relations) and enhancing quality of the knowledge represented. Central to our approach has been the theory of Formal Concept Analysis (Section 1.2.3) as a general mathematical underpinning for lattice-conformation of the is-a relation as an ontological principle (Sect. 1.2.2).

The construction sector in India, driven significantly by migrant construction workers (MCWs), plays a pivotal role in the nation’s economic development. Despite their substantial contribution, there is a dearth of literature on the happiness of MCWs, who often face challenges such as irregular employment, financial instability, and poor living conditions. This chapter aims to address this gap by exploring various aspects of happiness among MCWs in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. The objectives include, (i) determining the mean happiness scores of MCWs in the (...) construction industry in Bhubaneswar, (ii) investigating the factors contributing to their happiness, and (iii) analyzing how happiness varies among workers engaged in different types of construction activities. This chapter highlights the need for holistic interventions that address both workplace conditions and broader socio-economic factors to enhance the overall happiness of MCWs. (shrink)

In this chapter, we provide a quantitative evaluation on how the quality of the SNOMED CT subtype hierarchy directly affects the effectiveness of patient cohort queries. Using a de-identified COVID-19 Electronic Health RecordElectronic Health Records (EHRs) dataset [162], licensed by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, we assess the impact of inaccurate and missing is-a relationships in SNOMED CT on the precision and recall of patient cohort queries, respectively.

In this chapter, we introduce lexical approaches to systematically detect potential subtype (or is-a relation) inconsistencies that can be generally applied to biomedical terminologies. These approaches utilize lexical information in concept names to uncover and suggest fixes to ontology defects.

Cognitive control enables people to adjust their thoughts and actions according to the current task demands. Response inhibition and response adjustment are two key aspects of cognitive control. Here, we examined how the implicit processing of emotional information influences these two functions with the help of the double-step saccade task. Each trial had either a single target or two sequential targets. Upon a single target onset, participants were required to make a quick saccade, but upon two target onsets, participants were (...) instructed to inhibit their initial saccades and redirect their gaze to the second target. In three experiments, we manipulated the emotional information of the first and second targets. We found that irrelevant emotional information of the first target impaired response inhibition compared to non-emotional information (geometric shapes) of the first target. When non-emotional information (geometric shape) came as the first target, irrelevant angry emotional faces as the second target interfered with both response inhibition and response adjustment compared to irrelevant happy and neutral faces. We explain these results with previous findings that processing faces with irrelevant angry facial expressions take up many attentional resources, leaving fewer resources available for ongoing activities such as response inhibition and response adjustment. (shrink)

In 2021, the Government of India amended the “Medical termination of pregnancy (MTP) act, 1971”, increasing the legal limit of gestational age (GA) from 20 to 24 weeks. We present data of 51 women who underwent MTP beyond the GA of 24 weeks. This study includes a retrospective analysis of 51 consecutive women who underwent MTP beyond the GA of 24 weeks from July 2023 to April 2024 after getting the necessary permission from the permanent medical board for abortion (beyond (...) GA of 24 weeks) of our institute. The reason for the delayed presentation was ascertained by detailed interviews and the review of medical records. The MTP was conducted as per standard protocol. The study was approved by the institutional ethics committee (INT/IEC/2025/SPL-1175, dated 17 October 2025). The mean age was 27.4 ± 4.4 years. The mean (± SD) GA at MTP was 28.2 (± 2) weeks. 38 (74.5%) women were multigravida and 5 (9.8%) women had two living children. All women underwent MTP for fetal malformation with neural anomalies being the most common (43.1%). Aneuploidy screen and amniocentesis was done in 15 (29.4%) and 12 (23.5%) women respectively. The mean GA at the time of level 2 ultrasonography was 23 ± 1.5 weeks. The delayed referral was due to patient related factors in 12 (23.5%), and due to late referral or late ultrasonography in 34 (66.7%) women. None of the woman was aware of the MTP Act. Despite allowing MTP up to 24 weeks of GA in India, some women do seek MTP beyond 24 weeks due both to personal and other reasons. (shrink)

This book explores the application of formal methods, rooted in mathematics and logic, to the analysis and enhancement of biomedical ontologies. The authors take a pragmatic approach focused on generating actionable insights to achieve high-quality codified biomedical knowledge in the most active and impactful areas where ontologies have a direct real-world impact. The book first introduces simple, yet formalized strategies for discovering undesired and incoherent patterns in ontologies before exploring the application of formal concept analysis for semantic completeness. The authors (...) then discuss formal concept analysis as an ontological engineering principle. The book goes on to highlight the power and utility of uncovering non-lattice structure for debugging ontologies. This Second Edition includes a new chapter that covers recent research on leveraging logical definitions for identifying ontological defects. The authors have also added a new chapter on the perspective of using large language models in the ontological analysis work. (shrink)

Humans are moral creatures. Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? -/- In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution. They explore the moral traits that (...) humans share with chimpanzees; how a more complex moral mind enabled Homo sapiens to arise and out-compete other human species; and the place of morality alongside historic revolutions in technology and social organization. Throughout the book, Kumar and Campbell argue that morality co-evolved with intelligence and complex sociality. Morality prevents societal collapse and enables complex knowledge. -/- After unearthing the ancient origins of human morality, Kumar and Campbell use evolutionary theory to deliver profound insights about how to advance moral progress and resist moral regress, such as reducing animal suffering on industrial farms; capitalizing on the recent revolution in gay rights to foster a nascent revolution in transgender rights; opposing intersectional inequality that impacts women and people of color in lower socioeconomic classes; and addressing major problems of global inequality, especially impending crises of injustice caused by anthropogenic climate change. Understanding how we evolved--and how we continue to evolve--can help us become a better ape. (shrink)

Prof. G.C. Pande in his work ‘ Studies in the Origins of Buddhism ’ speaks of the theory of relation ( paccaya) while discussing the principle of dependent origination ( paṭiccasamuppāda ). Theory of relation ( paccaya) is a law explaining the existence of the dhammas , being related by some relations. It is further extension of the law of dependent origination ( paṭiccasamuppāda ). Things come to existence in our day-to-day life. The law of dependent origination explains that they (...) come into existence; depending upon some other factors. The theory of relation explains that such dependence on the other dhammas is possible due to some relations. In other words, Paṭiccasamuppāda explains the process of existence of conditioned things. The relation ( paccaya ) explains the relation existing between different phases coming into existence. Such relations are also explained in conditioned things only. (shrink)