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Recent studies report that few journals are adopting unethical citation practices to inflate Impact Factor (IF) artificially. "Clarivate Analytics" has started to blacklist such journals since 2006. As reported in the literature, evaluation of journals individually, to detect anomalies from vast and dynamically changing citation network is not efficient. The primary purpose of this work is to define a diverse feature set that can identify such cases of extreme outliers and reason them. The sample size is narrowed down using an unsupervised clustering algorithm in the absence of a labeled training dataset. Next, time‐series IF data is analyzed to detect point outliers. Furthermore, microscopic features are identified to reason them. Results reflected from the F‐value after ANOVA analysis reveals that geometrical patterns (self‐loop, pairwise and group mutual‐citation) among journals, an abrupt increase in the paper count of donor and corresponding IF inflation of recipient are some of the essential features. Microscopic features include social factor (calculation of revised IF after removing directed self or mutual‐citation), impact of the field of study, impact of publication house and author factor that includes author self and mutual‐citation. The significance of this work is to ensure that the quality of a journal is withheld without compromising research integrity by controlling or auditing individual features periodically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do you persist as the same person over time because you keep the same mind or because you keep the same body? Philosophers have long investigated this question of personal identity with thought experiments. Cognitive scientists have joined this tradition by assessing lay intuitions about those cases. Much of this work has focused on judgments of identity continuity. But identity also has practical significance: obligations are tagged to one's identity over time. Understanding how someone persists as the same person over time could provide insight into how and why moral and legal obligations persist. In this paper, we investigate judgments of obligations in hypothetical cases where a person's mind and body diverge (e.g., brain transplant cases). We find a striking pattern of results: In assigning obligations in these identity test cases, people are divided among three groups: "body‐followers," "mind‐followers," and "splitters"—people who say that the obligation is split between the mind and the body. Across studies, responses are predicted by a variety of factors, including mind/body dualism, essentialism, education, and professional training. When we give this task to professional lawyers, accountants, and bankers, we find they are more inclined to rely on bodily continuity in tracking obligations. These findings reveal not only the heterogeneity of intuitions about identity but how these intuitions relate to the legal standing of an individual's obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vast advances in biometrics over the past several decades have brought with them a host of pressing concerns. Philosophical scrutiny has already been devoted to many of the relevant ethical and political issues, especially ones arising from matters of privacy, bias, and security in data collection. But philosophers have devoted surprisingly little attention to the relevant metaphysical issues, in particular, ones concerning matters of personal identity. This paper aims to take some initial steps to correct this oversight. After discussing the philosophical problem of personal identity, the ways in which the notion of biometric identity connects with, or fails to connect with, the philosophical notion of personal identity is explored. Though there may be some good reasons to use biometric identity to track personal identity, it is contended that biometric identity is not the same thing as personal identity and thus that biometrics researchers should stop talking as if it were. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue against the conventional view that Buddhist philosophy of personal identity regards the self as an illusion. Critically engaging the work of Miri Albahari, I defend the view that it is instead centered around the properly diagnostic claim that the overwhelming majority of human beings suffer from a delusion concerning the nature of the self. In the central section of the paper, I draw from contemporary work in philosophy of psychiatry to gain clarity on what delusions are and how they are distinct from illusions. On the narrative theory of delusions I thence develop, delusions are best understood as faulty and harm‐inducing self‐referential narrative constructions. Buddhist views on human beings' confusion concerning the self, I then submit, consist of the diagnosis of a delusion in precisely this sense. At the end of the article, I argue that in addition to its intrinsic merits this interpretation has the added advantage of bringing into sharper focus the irreducibly therapeutic character of Buddhist philosophy of personal identity, and I discuss the implications of this for future cross‐cultural research on the problem of selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typical data available to engineering educators about the state of degrees awarded is disseminated via various groups. The most salient limitations to each of these sources are a lack of disaggregating data by multiple personal identities and an annualized reporting schedule hindering interpretations over time. This analysis ascertains how female degrees earned in engineering changed for bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree levels from 2005 to 2021. We sought to understand trends by disaggregating ASEE records by gender, race, and engineering discipline. Data gathered from EDMS were cleaned, analyzed, and visualized, following principles for data sense making and human factors. Results highlight women gravitating towards Biological, Environmental, and Computational engineering disciplines. The total number of all degrees awarded is increasing for all genders in all disciplines, but these trends are not evenly distributed across disciplines. While it is true that the overall proportion of women in engineering wavered near 20%, this statistic does not tell the whole story of what has been occurring in engineering. By disaggregating infographics, we tracked percentage growth in certain fields as well as overall increases in number of degrees awarded at all levels of higher education. Future research is needed to determine causes for women's choices in engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical analyses of the effects of neural interventions commonly focus on changes to personality and behavior, interpreting these changes in terms of authenticity and identity. These phenomena have led to debate among ethicists about the meaning of these terms for ethical analysis of such interventions. While these theoretical approaches have different criteria for ethical significance, they agree that patients' reports are concerning because a sense of self is valuable. In this paper, I question this assumption. I propose that the Buddhist theory of no‐self offers a novel approach to making ethical sense of patients' claims following deep brain stimulation. This alternative approach is based on the value of insight into patterns of cause and effect among mental states and actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It is an old philosophical idea that if the future self is literally different from the current self, one should be less concerned with the death of the future self (Parfit, ). This paper examines the relation between attitudes about death and the self among Hindus, Westerners, and three Buddhist populations (Lay Tibetan, Lay Bhutanese, and monastic Tibetans). Compared with other groups, monastic Tibetans gave particularly strong denials of the continuity of self, across several measures. We predicted that the denial of self would be associated with a lower fear of death and greater generosity toward others. To our surprise, we found the opposite. Monastic Tibetan Buddhists showed significantly greater fear of death than any other group. The monastics were also less generous than any other group about the prospect of giving up a slightly longer life in order to extend the life of another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a novel approach for modelling self serving bias by way of reference dependence. Bias is modelled as a systematic individual level deviation of the endogenous reference point from the expected price of a good in a two person k‐double auction. We find that bias decreases the efficiency of the model, and that efficiency is decreasing in both the level of bias and reference dependence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescence is marked by increased peer influence on risk taking; however, recent literature suggests enormous individual variation in peer influence susceptibility to risk‐taking behaviors. The current study uses representation similarity analysis to test whether neural similarity between decision‐making for self and peers (i.e., best friends) in a risky context is associated with individual differences in self‐reported peer influence susceptibility and risky behaviors in adolescents. Adolescent participants (N = 166, Mage = 12.89) completed a neuroimaging task in which they made risky decisions to receive rewards for themselves, their best friend, and their parents. Adolescent participants self‐reported peer influence susceptibility and engagement in risk‐taking behaviors. We found that adolescents with greater similarity in nucleus accumbens (NACC) response patterns between the self and their best friend reported greater susceptibility to peer influence and increased risk‐taking behaviors. However, neural similarity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was not significantly associated with adolescents' peer influence susceptibility and risk‐taking behaviors. Further, when examining neural similarity between adolescents' self and their parent in the NACC and vmPFC, we did not find links to peer influence susceptibility and risk‐taking behaviors. Together, our results suggest that greater similarity for self and friend in the NACC is associated with individual differences in adolescents' peer influence susceptibility and risk‐taking behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shelf exam/board scores/grades Standardized test scores may influence students' interview opportunities and ability to match in residency.11 It is prudent to discuss low scores or failures. Creating a high-quality personal statement for residency application: A guide for medical students and mentors In 2022, a total of 50,830 applicants applied to residency programs in the United States.1 The majority of the application are data driven, including Step 1 and 2 scores, preclinical and clinical grades, and the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE or "Dean's Letter"). [Extracted from the article]

Objective: We aimed to broaden understanding of the perspectives of persons with arthritis on their use of wearables to self‐monitor physical activity, through a synthesis of evidence from qualitative studies. Methods: We conducted a systematic search of 5 databases (including Medline, CINAHL, and Embase) from inception to 2018. Eligible studies qualitatively examined the use of wearables from the perspectives of persons with arthritis. All relevant data were extracted and coded inductively in a thematic synthesis. Results: Of 4,358 records retrieved, 7 articles were included. Participants used a wearable during research participation in 3 studies and as part of usual self‐management in 2 studies. In remaining studies, participants were shown a prototype they did not use. Themes identified were: 1) the potential to change dynamics in patient–health professional communication: articles reported a common opinion that sharing wearable data could possibly enable patients to improve communication with health professionals; 2) wearable‐enabled self‐awareness, whether a benefit or downside: there was agreement that wearables could increase self‐awareness of physical activity levels, but perspectives were mixed on whether this increased self‐awareness motivated more physical activity; 3) designing a wearable for everyday life: participants generally felt that the technology was not obtrusive in their everyday lives, but certain prototypes may possibly embarrass or stigmatize persons with arthritis. Conclusion: Themes hint toward an ethical dimension, as participants perceive that their use of wearables may positively or negatively influence their capacity to shape their everyday self‐management. We suggest ethical questions pertinent to the use of wearables in arthritis self‐management for further exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud detection is one of important tasks in automatic ground‐based cloud observation systems with ground‐based cloud images. Most supervised methods need substantial annotated samples for model training, while the pixel‐level annotation costs a lot. In this letter, a self‐training mechanism is proposed to significantly reduce the requirement of annotated samples. With a number of original images, only a few images need to be annotated (even incompletely), and a local region classifier model can be initialized with the annotated samples. Then the model is retrained iteratively using unlabeled samples with high confidence pseudo labels given by a fusion decision. The finely trained model can classify the local regions into "cloud" or "sky". The experiments show that the proposed mechanism is effective for several classifiers. The proposed method can outperform unsupervised methods and achieve comparable results with fully supervised learning methods but using much fewer annotated samples. Plain Language Summary: Nowadays, most ground‐based sky observation tasks are completed by automatic systems with sky‐imaging devices instead of human observers. Cloud detection is one of the tasks and often appeals to image segmentation. Some unsupervised image segmentation methods are fast but the results of them are not good enough. So some researches divide the image local regions into "sky" and "cloud" through the two‐class classification models based on supervised learning and can achieve better results. However, the learning‐based models training needs substantial samples which are annotated finely by experts. While finely annotating the cloud images is a high cost and low efficiency work in practice. We propose a self‐training mechanism which can reduce the requirement of annotated samples for several learning‐based models. At first, we trained the two‐class classification models with only a few annotated samples for initiation. Then the models were trained iteratively with lots of unlabeled raw images based on our propose mechanism. Finally, the fine trained models can be directly applied to cloud detection and outperform unsupervised segmentation methods. What's more, compared with the supervised methods, the proposed method can obtain comparable results with much fewer annotated samples (even fewer than 10%). Key Points: We first apply the semi‐supervised learning and propose a novel self training mechanism for the learning‐based cloud detection methodThe proposed mechanism can significantly reduce the requirement of annotated samples in model training for different classifiersWith only a very few annotated (even incompletely) images of training set, our semi‐supervised method outperforms state‐of‐the‐art methods [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some philosophers and scientists have argued that we humans cannot be held morally responsible for anything. Invoking results of the neurosciences and the cognitive sciences, they argue that humans lack the kind of conscious control and awareness required for moral responsibility. For theological ethics and Christian theology as a whole, moral responsibility is indispensable. I will begin by outlining some empirical results that are invoked in support of moral responsibility skepticism. I will, then, examine the subsequent discussion and the question why conscious awareness is central to moral responsibility. Consciousness contributes to morally relevant control over action in multiple ways. I will briefly examine some accounts of conscious control that are resistant to the skeptical challenge. Although the empirical results might lead us to revise the degree and range of conscious control, there seems to be enough of it to ground many everyday practices of responsibility. I will conclude the article with some theological reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, pistil and pollen specificity determinants are encoded by distinct, but tightly linked and highly polymorphic, genes forming cognate haplotypes at the SI locus (S-locus). This loss will be neutral as long as the pollen remains within the local population, but migrating pollen grains carrying the degenerate S-haplotypes will now be unable to fertilise pistils carrying the original specificity maintained in other subpopulations. However, under collaborative nonself recognition, in addition to these parameters the degree of "completeness", that is the proportion of S-alleles at the pistil gene that can be detoxified by the cumulative action of the products of its pollen-expressed genes present, plays a central role and drastically alters the evolutionary trajectory of the diversification process. The same phenomenon would arise after evolution of a novel S-allele in one subpopulation because immigrant pollen grains would not be able to fertilise pistils carrying this S-allele. [Extracted from the article]

Floatation‐Reduced Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) is a procedure that reduces stimulation of the human nervous system by minimizing sensory signals from visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, thermal, tactile, vestibular, gravitational, and proprioceptive channels, in addition to minimizing musculoskeletal movement and speech. Initial research has found that Floatation‐REST can elicit short‐term reductions in anxiety, depression, and pain, yet little is known about the brain networks impacted by the intervention. This study represents the first functional neuroimaging investigation of Floatation‐REST, and we utilized a data‐driven exploratory analysis to determine whether the intervention leads to altered patterns of resting‐state functional connectivity (rsFC). Healthy participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after 90 min of Floatation‐REST or a control condition that entailed resting supine in a zero‐gravity chair for an equivalent amount of time. Multivariate Distance Matrix Regression (MDMR), a statistically‐stringent whole‐brain searchlight approach, guided subsequent seed‐based connectivity analyses of the resting‐state fMRI data. MDMR identified peak clusters of rsFC change between the pre‐ and post‐float fMRI, revealing significant decreases in rsFC both within and between posterior hubs of the default‐mode network (DMN) and a large swath of cortical tissue encompassing the primary and secondary somatomotor cortices extending into the posterior insula. The control condition, an active form of REST, showed a similar pattern of reduced rsFC. Thus, reduced stimulation of the nervous system appears to be reflected by reduced rsFC within the brain networks most responsible for creating and mapping our sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID‐19 crisis is affecting our sense of self and touches upon our existential fears. This extends to the self–other relationship, as there is both being infected and infecting the other. What does this pandemic crisis tell us about our self and relatedness, its cultural differences, and how these are rooted in the brain's relation to the world? First, we discuss the psychological and neuronal features of self and self–other relation and how they are rooted in a deeper layer of the brain's neural activity complementing its cognitive surface layer. Second, we demonstrate cultural differences of Eastern and Western concepts of the self (i.e., independency and interdependency) and how these reflect the manifestation of the brain's neuro‐social and neuro‐ecological alignment. Finally, we highlight the intersubjective and cultural nature of the self and its surface in the COVID‐19 crisis. Discussing various lines of empirical data showing the brain's intimate alignment to both social and ecological environmental contexts, our results support the assumption of the brain's deep layer features by laying bare a continuum of different degrees of neuro‐social and neuro‐ecological alignment. This entails a two‐stage model of self with neuro‐social‐ecological and psychological levels that extends the previously suggested basis model of self‐specificity. We conclude that the current pandemic shows the importance of the deeper intersubjective and cultural layers of both the self and brain; their neglect can be life‐threatening for the self and others and, paradoxically, might reduce, rather than enlarge, the self's sense of freedom and independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Values research generally confirms that personally held values influence an individual's decision processes and behavior. Yet this academic research often is limited to the individual or organizational level of analysis. This study utilizes social identity and personal values theories to search for the presence of superordinate identities emerging at the meso level from six different industries. The six selected industries—accounting, banking, construction, education, energy, and manufacturing—represent a mix of highly respected and disrespected industries, as well as industries that have an ethical professional association and those that do not. Results provide evidence of meso‐level superordinate identities, distinguishing managers' personal value orientations from a generalized population, and across the six selected industries. Implications emanating from this research for the human resource practitioners and academic scholars are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The self is a multifaceted phenomenon that integrates information and experience across multiple time scales. How temporal integration on the psychological level of the self is related to temporal integration on the neuronal level remains unclear. To investigate temporal integration on the psychological level, we modified a well‐established self‐matching paradigm by inserting temporal delays. On the neuronal level, we indexed temporal integration in resting‐state EEG by two related measures of scale‐free dynamics, the power law exponent and autocorrelation window. We hypothesized that the previously established self‐prioritization effect, measured as decreased response times or increased accuracy for self‐related stimuli, would change with the insertion of different temporal delays between the paired stimuli, and that these changes would be related to temporal integration on the neuronal level. We found a significant self‐prioritization effect on accuracy in all conditions with delays, indicating stronger temporal integration of self‐related stimuli. Further, we observed a relationship between temporal integration on psychological and neuronal levels: higher degrees of neuronal integration, that is, higher power‐law exponent and longer autocorrelation window, during resting‐state EEG were related to a stronger increase in the self‐prioritization effect across longer temporal delays. We conclude that temporal integration on the neuronal level serves as a template for temporal integration of the self on the psychological level. Temporal integration can thus be conceived as the "common currency" of neuronal and psychological levels of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employers, insurers, and other third parties are increasingly offering wellness programs and have recently begun incorporating quantification of self (QOS) features to encourage enrollment. While past studies have examined the impact of QOS on consumer behavior in self‐directed contexts, none have done so in the context of third‐party administration. The present research explores QOS's impact in wellness programs directed by employers, insurers and doctors. A 2 x 4 between‐subjects experiment manipulating QOS and program administration type was used to test our hypotheses. Our results found a significant interaction effect between QOS and administration type, where the motivational benefits of a QOS‐based wellness program that are found in self‐directed contexts are negated when the program is run by certain third parties. This effect is mediated by the participant's perceptions of disempowerment in the program, caused by the involvement of the third party. Consumer policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to know oneself, and what is the self that one hopes to know? This article outlines the implications of an embodied understanding of persons and some aspects of the 'self' that are generally ignored when thinking about our selves. The Cartesian model of body-soul (or body-mind) dualism reinforces the idea that there is within us a soul, or self, or mind that is our hidden, inner, and real self. Thus, the path to self-knowledge is introspection. The alternative view is that persons are embodied (entirely physical creatures), embedded (formed by our physical and social environment), and at times extended (cognitively soft-coupled to artifacts or other persons). This article emphasizes the bodily, active, contextual, relational, often simulated, and sometimes extended nature of the selves that we are, and that we hope to know. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are living in a time of unprecedented challenges: human activity is now the primary driver shaping the planet and we are perilously close to breaching a variety of critical planetary boundaries-a prelude to the possible extinction of our species. How should we be thinking and acting-as persons, communities, institutions and societies-so as to best understand and respond to these challenges? What contribution can the field of science and religion make to develop the knowledge needed to negotiate the civilizational transition we face? Such questions were addressed through a series of dialogues at the 62nd annual conference of the Institute on Religion in an Age of Science in June of 2016-'How Can We Know? Co-Creating Knowledge in Perilous Times.' This essay sets the background to these challenges and introduces the set of articles in this themed section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]