The role of philosophy in the academic study of religion in Indian

Joseph T. O’Connell drew attention to the relative scarcity of academic work on religion in South Asia, and o ered as a plausible explanation for this state of a airs the tension between secular and religio‐political communal interests. This paper explores the potential role of phi‐ losophy as an established academic discipline within this situation, in the context of India. It argues that objective study, including evaluation, of the truth claims of various religious traditions is an important aspect of academic as opposed to confessional engagement with religion, and that philosophy in India is especially well suited to undertake such re ection and to provide corresponding education. Unlike Western countries, philosophy and religion were never clearly separated in India and did not evolve in tension with one another. The history of Indian philosophy therefore includes and is included within the history of its ‘religions’, in a way that makes philosophical examination of the truth claims of Indian religions internal to those religions themselves. By tracing this history, the discipline of philosophy can help to unsettle the idea of religion as a matter of xed dogma. It can also continue the procedure of interpreting and evaluating metaphysical and epistemological theses that has been an intrinsic component of Indian religious thought for most of its history

Corporate Governance: What about the workers?

To stimulate debates about the creation of corporate governance mechanisms and processes which would help to secure an equitable distribution of income and wealth for workers. Methodology/Approach: The paper builds on a political economy of income and wealth inequalities. It argues that corporate governance mechanisms and processes are rooted in particular politics and histories. The state is a key actor. It provides a brief history of the UK corporate governance debates relating to income distribution, industrial democracy and disclosures. It provides social data about the extent of income inequalities. Findings: The paper shows that the UK lacks institutional structures and processes and mechanisms to enable workers to secure a higher share of the firm?s income. Research limitations/implications (if applicable): The study primarily focuses on some aspects of the corporate governance structures, practices and income/wealth inequalities in the UK. Its implications could also be relevant to market-oriented liberal states with ?consensus? or ?majoritarian? electoral systems. Practical implications (if applicable): To encourage debates, the paper puts forward a number of suggestions for changing electoral and corporate governance practices together with disclosures that could give visibility to income and wealth inequalities. Originality/value of paper: The paper links corporate governance debates to broader political choices. Article Type: A research article that uses a variety of government and institutional data sources to highlight shortcomings of corporate governance practices

All Offshore - The Sprat, The Mackerel, Accounting Firms and the State in Globalization

Globalization has created opportunities for major businesses to roam the world and shop for regulation conductive to their interests. Major auditing firms are no exception and have used offshore financial centres to dilute their liability. This chapter provides a case study to show that major firms used their political and financial resources to craft Limited Liability Partnership law in Jersey. This was done at a time when the UK government was reluctant to grant further liability concessions to auditors. The firms subsequently used the Jersey scenario to exert pressure upon the UK government and secure liability concessions

Discriminatively Trained Latent Ordinal Model for Video Classification

We study the problem of video classification for facial analysis and human action recognition. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for "smile", running and jumping for "highjump"). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF -- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations and on three challenging human action datasets. We also validate the method with qualitative results and show that they largely support the intuitions behind the method.Comment: Paper accepted in IEEE TPAMI. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1604.0150

The Tax Avoidance Industry: Accountancy Firms on the Make

The focus of the paper is upon the financial sector and, more specifically the involvement of global accountancy firms in devising and selling tax avoidance schemes euphemistically marketed as `tax planning?. Commenting upon some of the ?entrepreneurial? activities of these firms, Perrow (2010) observes that ?they knew what they were doing was fraudulent? (ibid: 314) as he notes that Greenwood and Suddaby?s (2006) widely referenced study excludes consideration of how partners in these firms were complicit in embracing the `alternative logics pressed upon them by their large corporate clients? (ibid: 314). An example is so-called ?alternative logics? is the construction and promotion of elaborate tax avoidance schemes by big accounting firms (Sikka and Hampton, 2005) which, we show, has become so deeply normalized within the Big Firms as to cast doubt upon their `alternative? status

Targeting crosstalk between Nrf-2, NF-κB and androgen receptor signaling in prostate cancer

Oxidative stress, inflammation and androgen receptor (AR) signaling play a pivotal role in the initiation, development and progression of prostate cancer (PCa). Numerous papers in the literature have documented the interconnection between oxidative stress and inflammation; and how antioxidants can combat the inflammation. It has been shown in the literature that both oxidative stress and inflammation regulate AR, the key receptor involved in the transition of PCa to castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC). In this review, we discuss about the importance of targeting Nrf-2-antioxidant signaling, NF-κB inflammatory response and AR signaling in PCa. Finally, we discuss about the crosstalk between these three critical pathways as well as how the anti-inflammatory antioxidant phytochemicals like sulforaphane (SFN) and curcumin (CUR), which can also target AR, can be ideal candidates in the chemoprevention of PCa

LOMo: Latent Ordinal Model for Facial Analysis in Videos

We study the problem of facial analysis in videos. We propose a novel weakly supervised learning method that models the video event (expression, pain etc.) as a sequence of automatically mined, discriminative sub-events (eg. onset and offset phase for smile, brow lower and cheek raise for pain). The proposed model is inspired by the recent works on Multiple Instance Learning and latent SVM/HCRF- it extends such frameworks to model the ordinal or temporal aspect in the videos, approximately. We obtain consistent improvements over relevant competitive baselines on four challenging and publicly available video based facial analysis datasets for prediction of expression, clinical pain and intent in dyadic conversations. In combination with complimentary features, we report state-of-the-art results on these datasets.Comment: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR