Religious education,communal identity and national politics in the Muslim world

This article discusses models for religious education in school in (parts of) the Muslim world and the implied relation between self and other, confessional and national identity. The question of how current models and discussions respond to globalized issues in education is also discussed. The last part of the article identifies triggering factors behind some recent attempts at establishing more inclusive ways of teaching about religion and ethics in school.     

Knowledge sharing in a multi-cultural setting: a case study

Organizational culture has been shown to influence the success of knowledge management practices. Hofstede's theory specifies that organizational culture is not independent of national culture. A case study of an international subsidiary was conducted to explore the extent to which knowledge sharing is dependent on national culture. Results indicate that language differences can create knowledge blocks, and cross-cultural differences can explain the direction of knowledge flows.     

元极学发展了传统的天人合一观

论述了元极学的人天整体观是对传统的天人合一观的发展和元极图是人天运化的全息模型。     

Ethics and Artificial life: From Modeling to Moral Agents

Artificial Life (ALife) has two goals. One attempts to describe fundamental qualities of living systems through agent based computer models. And the second studies whether or not we can artificially create living things in computational mediums that can be realized either, virtually in software, or through biotechnology. The study of ALife has recently branched into two further subdivisions, one is “dry” ALife, which is the study of living systems “in silico” through the use of computer simulations, and the other is “wet” ALife that uses biological material to realize what has only been simulated on computers, effectively wet ALife uses biological material as a kind of computer. This is challenging to the field of computer ethics as it points towards a future in which computer and bioethics might have shared concerns. The emerging studies into wet ALife are likely to provide strong empirical evidence for ALife’s most challenging hypothesis: that life is a certain set of computable functions that can be duplicated in any medium. I believe this will propel ALife into the midst of the mother of all cultural battles that has been gathering around the emergence of biotechnology. Philosophers need to pay close attention to this debate and can serve a vital role in clarifying and resolving the dispute. But even if ALife is merely a computer modeling technique that sheds light on living systems, it still has a number of significant ethical implications such as its use in the modeling of moral and ethical systems, as well as in the creation of artificial moral agents.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Dis</Emphasis>closive Ethics and Information Technology: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Disclosing Facial Recognition Systems</Emphasis>

This paper is an attempt to present disclosive ethics as a framework for computer and information ethics – in line with the suggestions by Brey, but also in quite a different manner. The potential of such an approach is demonstrated through a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. The paper argues that the politics of information technology is a particularly powerful politics since information technology is an opaque technology – i.e. relatively closed to scrutiny. It presents the design of technology as a process of closure in which design and use decisions become black-boxed and progressively enclosed in increasingly complex socio-technical networks. It further argues for a disclosive ethics that aims to disclose the nondisclosure of politics by claiming a place for ethics in every actual operation of power – as manifested in actual design and use decisions and practices. It also proposes that disclosive ethics would aim to trace and disclose the intentional and emerging enclosure of politics from the very minute technical detail through to social practices and complex social-technical networks. The paper then proceeds to do a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. This analysis discloses that seemingly trivial biases in recognition rates of FRSs can emerge as very significant political acts when these systems become used in practice. Paper prepared for the Technology and Ethics Workshop at Twente     

Estimation of 2-D ARMA model parameters by using equivalent AR approach

In this paper, the problem of estimating the parameters of a two-dimensional autoregressive moving-average (2-D ARMA) model driven by an unobservable input noise is addressed. In order to solve this problem, the relation between the parameters of a 2-D ARMA model and their 2-D equivalent autoregressive (EAR) model parameters is investigated. Based on this relation, a new algorithm is proposed for determining the 2-D ARMA model parameters from the coefficients of the 2-D EAR model. This algorithm is a three-step approach. In the first step, the parameters of the 2-D EAR model that is approximately equivalent to the 2-D ARMA model are estimated by applying 2-D modified Yule-Walker (MYW) equation to the process under consideration. Then, the moving-average parameters of the 2-D ARMA model are obtained solving the linear equation set constituted by using the EAR coefficients acquired in the first step. Finally, the autoregressive parameters of the 2-D ARMA model are found by exploiting the values obtained in first and second steps. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with other 2-D ARMA parameter and spectral estimation algorithms available in the technical literature by means of three different criteria. As a result of this comparison, it is shown that the parameters and the corresponding power spectrums estimated by using the proposed algorithm are converged to the original parameters and the original power spectrums, respectively.     

浅析元极图与老子“一,二,三”

老子的“一,二,三”和元极图都描绘地宇宙万物生成模式,但两者既有同也有异,前者是后者的基础,后者是前者的升华,从两者的比较中可以看到元极图的创新。