Search Results (94)

Despite a century of learning research, why human beings desire to learn remains theoretically unresolved. Behaviorist, cognitivist, and constructivist paradigms explain the mechanisms of learning but presuppose rather than account for its motivational genesis—a gap this paper terms motivational minimalism. Drawing on René Girard’s mimetic anthropology, this paper develops Mimetic Learning Theory (MLT), grounded in philosophical anthropology (Plessner, Gehlen), hermeneutics (Rosa, Gadamer), and normative theory (Biesta, Honneth, Arendt). MLT reconceives learning as the reflective transformation of mediated desire. Humans do not merely copy actions but appropriate the desires of models who render knowledge, identity, and recognition worth striving for. Eight dominant learning paradigms are reread as partial articulations of this mimetic dynamic. Two novel constructs are introduced: mimetic load (the affective–cognitive tension from competing models of desire, complementing cognitive load theory) and zones of desire (a reformulation of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development). MLT does not displace existing frameworks but re-grounds them in a shared anthropological logic—that learning begins not in the mind, but in the field of mediated desire. Full article

This study examines the dynamic impact of geopolitical risk (GPR) and renewable energy consumption (RENE) on energy security in Egypt from 2000 to 2023. Given the increasing regional instability and Egypt’s strategic pivot toward a green economy, this research employs the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach, which is robust for small sample sizes and mixed integration levels. The empirical results provide preliminary evidence of a long-run negative relationship between geopolitical risk and energy security (coefficient: −11.92), suggesting that external political shocks may act as a deterrent to energy stability. Conversely, renewable energy is found to exert an indicative positive influence (coefficient: +1.17) on the energy security index. Notably, these long-run coefficients are significant at the 10% level, implying that while these variables represent emerging structural trends, they remain sensitive to high regional volatility and the evolving nature of the Egyptian energy sector. Diagnostic tests, including Jarque–Bera (0.92) and Breusch–Pagan–Godfrey (0.94) tests, support the model’s reliability, while CUSUM and CUSUMSQ tests indicate general parameter stability. The study suggests that while renewable energy integration shows potential for enhancing resilience, its current scale may not yet be sufficient to fully counterbalance the potential pressures of geopolitical shocks. Policy implications point toward the strategic value of “geopolitical hedging” through continued green investment, the expansion of strategic reserves, and the adoption of de-risking financial instruments like Green Sukuk to support long-term energy sovereignty as a precautionary measure. Full article

This study presents the dynamic characterization of a gas turbine blade manufactured from two different nickel-based superalloys: on the first hand, a superalloy called René 80 and, on the second hand, a directionally solidified (DS) nickel-based anisotropic superalloy, investigated during the validation phase of the development process. Starting from the original CAD geometry, precise and very detailed finite-element models were developed, progressively refined and modified, and consequently validated to ensure mesh-independent modal predictions. The study examines multiple possible sources of discrepancy between experimentally measured and numerically predicted natural frequencies, including geometric deviations, grouping of different interesting points, broach-block test configuration, material anisotropy, and the influence of internal rib turbulators. Statistical analyses of dimensional variations revealed no significant correlation with the observed frequency scatter, redirecting the investigation toward material behavior and modeling fidelity. The inclusion of turbulators in the finite-element model proved essential, reducing prediction errors for the first two modes by approximately 2–3%. For the DS superalloy, the effect of grain orientation was evaluated over permissible angular deviations (extremes were considered); however, no systematic and clear improvement in frequency prediction was observed. Finally, several tuning strategies were assessed, leading to an optimization procedure that simultaneously adjusted the elastic moduli $E_x$ and $E_z$, reducing modal frequency deviations to below 1% for the first two modes. The proposed methodology provides a robust and solid framework for the validation of turbine blade dynamic behavior across different materials and manufacturing conditions. Full article

Sustainable territorial development seeks to balance economic growth, social well-being, and environmental preservation across spatial contexts. In fragile and resource-constrained regions, achieving this balance remains particularly challenging. With the growing diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI), digital tools are increasingly presented as potential enablers of sustainability-driven territorial strategies. This study explores the role of AI in supporting sustainable territorial development across rural and urban areas of North Lebanon, a region characterized by infrastructural deficits, governance constraints, and socio-economic vulnerability. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with five key stakeholders from the public sector, civil society, business, and sustainability expertise, complemented by an illustrative case study of the proposed AI-enabled redevelopment of Klayaat (René Mouawad) Airport. The findings reveal that while stakeholders recognize AI’s potential to enhance resource optimization, smart agriculture, urban mobility, and disaster preparedness, its effective adoption remains constrained by limited digital infrastructure, insufficient policy frameworks, funding shortages, and gaps in digital literacy. Interpreted through the lenses of the Triple Bottom Line and Diffusion of Innovation theories, the results show that AI-driven sustainability outcomes in fragile territorial contexts are highly conditional on institutional readiness, governance capacity, and contextual alignment. The study contributes to the literature by providing context-specific insights into AI-enabled sustainable development in a developing and crisis-affected region, highlighting the need to complement technological innovation with policy reform, capacity building, and inclusive territorial governance. Full article

This study analyzed how both environmental sustainability and energy efficiency influence economic growth in Romania. The analysis in the research is based on sustainable development goals such as SDG8, SDG11 and SDG13, and several key indicators in the area of sustainability are analyzed for the period 2000–2022, such as: municipal waste recycling rate (RRMW), energy productivity (EP), greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and renewable energy share (RENE). In this regard, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model was used to capture both short-term and long-term effects. The results obtained show that energy productivity has a positive and significant impact on economic growth. This confirms the important role of energy efficiency in strengthening a sustainable economy. It has also been observed that greenhouse gas emissions are positively correlated with GDP in the short term, and the waste recycling rate has a negative effect. Regarding renewable energy, the long-term influence is not statistically significant, indicating the need for more effective policies to accelerate the energy transition. The analysis highlights the significance of a comprehensive strategy in the field of environmental and energy policies to promote stable and sustainable economic development, while providing valuable guidance for Romania’s strategic alignment with the European Union’s sustainable development goals. Full article

Forgiveness and reconciliation pose significant challenges in post-conflict societies, especially for those directly affected by violence. While legal frameworks of transitional justice are often discussed, the personal and religious dimensions of forgiveness receive less attention. This article seeks to address this gap using René Girard’s mimetic theory to analyze the relationship between religious motivation and the processes of forgiveness and reconciliation. The study’s empirical findings stem from qualitative interviews with 22 individuals who were victims during the Homeland War (1991–1995) in Croatia. Girard’s theory posits that humans imitate not just behavior, but the desires of others, leading to mimetic rivalry that can escalate into violence—a concept known as “negative mimesis.” However, concept of “positive mimesis” is also achievable when individuals emulate Jesus Christ’s model of self-giving love, facilitating a pathway towards reconciliation. The primary research question guiding this inquiry asks how individuals affected by violence navigate forgiveness and reconciliation, especially the role of religion in this process. In this context, forgiveness is conceptualized as a deeply personal and spiritual journey, whereas reconciliation is defined as the restoration of interpersonal relationships within a societal framework that requires forgiveness. Consequently, this research prioritizes exploring individual narratives and personal accounts from participants rather than addressing broader societal implications. Insights from interviews reveal participants’ understanding of both negative and positive mimesis, indicating that mimetic mechanisms can foster tendencies towards violence as well as forgiveness. In this framework, Jesus Christ serves as a vital external mediator, providing a transformative route away from cycles of violence. Most participants indicated that their faith, prayer practices, and the example set by Christ significantly influenced their forgiveness decisions. This paper contributes original insights into the theological and anthropological aspects of forgiveness, demonstrating that Girard’s mimetic theory effectively illuminates the complexities of reconciliation in post-conflict settings. Full article

This essay explores the metaphysical and philosophical implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) through the intersecting insights of René Guénon (ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥiā), Martin Heidegger, and Ibn al-ʿArabī. It argues that modern AI systems, particularly in their statistical and data-centric forms, are not merely instrumental tools but expressions of a deeper metaphysical worldview-one rooted in quantification, abstraction, and utility. Guénon’s critique of the “reign of quantity” and Heidegger’s notion of Enframing (Gestell) converge in diagnosing the loss of qualitative and sacred dimensions in modern life. While Heidegger’s phenomenology provides a powerful immanent critique of technological reductionism from within the Western philosophical tradition, Guénon’s metaphysical traditionalism articulates a diagnosis of modernity that resonates with Islamic metaphysics, especially as articulated by Ibn al-ʿArabī. The essay includes Heidegger in the argument as a representative of a critique of modern technology issuing from the Western tradition itself, and by emphasizing his shared concerns with Guénon, whose metaphysics resonates with Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysics. Through a comparative metaphysical framework, this paper proposes an Islamic response to AI that avoids both technophilia and technophobia, insisting instead on a spiritually grounded ethic of technology that preserves human’s dignity and mission. Methodologically, the essay restores a prior order often inverted in contemporary AI ethics: ontology (what AI is) grounds epistemology (what it can know), and only then can ethical evaluation be coherent. Full article

This article reinterprets modern realist drama as a site of secular spirituality, where aesthetic form sustains the sacred under conditions of modern secularity. Employing a phenomenological–theological framework, it integrates Charles Taylor’s account of the secular age, Mircea Eliade’s sacred–profane dialectic and hierophany, and René Girard’s anthropology of sacrifice. Through textual and performance-historical analysis of key works—Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and An Enemy of the People (1882)—together with Chinese modern drama shaped by Ibsenization, including Hu Shi’s translations, Lu Xun’s critiques, and Cao Yu’s Thunderstorm (1934), the article argues that realist theatre fulfils religious functions in secular culture: revelation as truth-telling, confession as critical self-disclosure, and renewal as ethical transformation. In early twentieth-century China, the encounter between Ibsen’s moral realism and indigenous moral traditions generated a distinctive spiritual humanism, in which theatre assumed ritual and didactic functions traditionally associated with religious practices. Full article

Nickel-based superalloys require protective low-activity aluminide coatings to withstand high-temperature oxidation and corrosion in turbine applications. As opposed to conventional gas processes, this study investigates the mechanisms of formation of alternative low-activity nickel aluminide coatings on the René N5 superalloy through electroless nickel pre-deposition followed by slurry aluminizing. Different thicknesses of electroless nickel layers (5, 10, 25 μm) were deposited and subsequently aluminized with varying slurry amounts (5–16 mg/cm²) under controlled heat treatments at 700–1080 °C with heating rates of 5 and 20 °C/min. Without electroless pre-deposition, high-activity coatings with refractory element precipitates formed. With electroless nickel, a precipitate-free low-activity coating developed, with thickness increasing linearly from 15 to 40 μm proportional to the initial electroless layer. An increasing slurry amount raised the overall coating thickness from 27 to 67 μm. Kirkendall porosity formed exclusively during the δ-Ni₂Al₃ to β-NiAl phase transformation at elevated temperature. Reducing the heating rate from 20 to 5 °C/min significantly decreased void formation by promoting more balanced Ni-Al interdiffusion. This work demonstrates that combining electroless nickel with slurry aluminizing provides an efficient route for producing low-activity coatings with controlled microstructure and minimal porosity. Full article

The work Xingli zhenquan tigang (Sing lii jen ciyan bithei hešen) was written in Chinese and Manchu by the French Jesuit Alexandre de la Charme (1695–1767) and published in Beijing in 1753. The first two sections of this paper provide an introduction to de la Charme’s work biography and to further textual and historical contexts, explore the peculiarities of the subsequent early German reception of the work almost 90 years later, and introduce the content from an overview perspective. The third section explores the most essential contents of Book 1 (of 3) of the Manchu version. The investigation is based on Hans Conon von der Gabelentz’s (1807–1874) German translation from 1840. Camouflaged as a Confucian educational dialogue, and by blurring his true identity in his publication, de la Charme criticizes Neo-Confucian positions from an implicitly Cartesian and hidden Christian perspective, tacitly blending Cartesian views with traditional Chinese concepts. In addition, he alludes to Manchu shamanic views in the same regard. De la Charme’s assimilating rhetoric “triangulation” of three different cultural and linguistic horizons of thought and spirituality proves that later Jesuit scholarship reached out into the inherent ethnic and spiritual diversity of the Qing intellectual and political elites. Hidden allusions to Descartes’s dualistic concepts of res cogitans and res extensa implicitly anticipate the beginnings of China’s intellectual modernization period one and a half centuries later. This work also provides an example of how the exchange of intellectual and religious elements persisted despite the Rites Controversy and demonstrates how the fading Jesuit mission influenced early German sinology. I believe that this previously underexplored work is significant in both systematic and historical respects. It is particularly relevant in the context of current comparative research fields, as well as transcultural and interreligious intellectual dialogue in East Asia and around the world. Full article

The Latin (De Homine, 1662, 1664) and French (L’Homme, 1664) editions of René Descartes’ Treatise on Man present different iconographic traditions, but the iconography of the Latin editions is little known. Dutch physician and botanist Florentius Schuyl edited De Homine and illustrated it himself with a mix of woodcut and copperplate illustrations. This paper examines Schuyl’s innovative depictions of purported dynamic aspects of the pineal gland as claimed by Descartes: (1) repeatedly illustrating the pineal gland as the corporeal–spiritual linkage of the brain and soul; and (2) using a movable flap anatomy to illustrate the pineal gland as a motile structure that both responds to and directs animal spirits. None of the canonical illustrations in the later French edition attempted to depict the corporeal–spiritual linkage of the brain and soul, and the modest attempts in the French edition to depict the motility of the pineal gland relied simply on superimposition of two purported positions of the gland, a technique also employed by Schuyl. This paper also reviews how Schuyl’s illustration of a corporeal–spiritual linkage of the brain and soul in a goat sharply contrasts with his written defense of Descartes’ bête-machine doctrine in the extended preface to De Homine. Full article

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic performance of various MRI sequences in detecting nodal metastasis (N+) and extranodal extension (ENE+) in patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on 42 patients with HNSCC who underwent preoperative MRI and subsequent surgical lymph node dissection between June 2021 and December 2023. Lymph node MRI features were evaluated on five different MRI sequences. For each rN+ case, the presence of radiological extranodal extension (rENE+) was assessed independently in every MRI sequence by analyzing three characteristics. ENE was deemed positive if at least one of three criteria considered was present. Results: All of the MRI sequences demonstrated slightly high accuracy (~76%) for detecting N+, with T1WI, STIR, and CE THRIVE showing comparable sensitivities (60–65%). The STIR sequence exhibited the highest sensitivity (75%) and nearly the highest accuracy (91%) for detecting ENE+. Capsular irregularity and necrosis showed high specificity across sequences, while the loss of fatty hilum and nodal size had lower performance. Conclusions: Tailoring MRI protocols to leverage the strengths of specific sequences can significantly improve the diagnostic accuracy, aiding in better patient management and treatment outcomes. Full article

Aging treatment plays a significant role in altering the mechanical properties of superalloys; however, the influences of aging on the mechanical performance of Rene 41 alloy and its strengthening mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, the effects of aging on the microstructure and mechanical properties of forged Rene 41 alloy were systematically investigated through experimental and theoretical analyses. It was found that aging conditions have significant influences on the grain structure, γ′ characteristics, and tensile properties of the alloy. The size of secondary γ′ increased from 20 nm to 69 nm with elevated aging temperature and prolonged aging time, while their volume fraction initially increased and then decreased. Notably, the γ′ maintained a coherent interface with the matrix even after high-temperature aging at 860 °C. An optimal strength–ductility balance was achieved by aging at 760 °C for 16 h. An experimentally verified strengthening model was used for understanding the strengthening mechanisms of the alloy aging at varying conditions. Precipitation strengthening was identified as the dominant strengthening mechanism, substantially contributing to the overall yield strength. The precipitation strengthening mainly belongs to the strong pair-coupling cutting mechanism rather than the Orowan bypass mechanism. This study concludes that a rational aging treatment regime can significantly optimize the comprehensive properties of Rene 41 alloy, providing theoretical support for its application in aerospace component manufacturing. Full article

Restoring components in the hot gas path of turbine engines after service-induced degradation is crucial for economic efficiency. This study investigates the printability of Rene 65 powder on a degraded first-stage turbine blade using two additive manufacturing techniques: Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) and Laser Powder Directed Energy Deposition (L-DED). Deposited material was evaluated using optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) to characterize its crystallographic texture, while microhardness testing provided insight into its mechanical properties. Our results show that L-PBF excels at replicating intricate features, such as small cooling holes, and produces a highly texturized microstructure oriented parallel to <001> under optimal parameters (80 W, 400 mm/s, unidirectional scanning), although at a slower pace. In contrast, L-DED offers a versatile, rapid, and cost-effective method for repairing medium to large parts, yielding an equiaxed microstructure and higher as-printed hardness—approaching GTD 111 values due to an aging effect from high heat input. Both processes effectively restored the dimensional integrity of degraded blade tips, paving the way for more sustainable and economical maintenance strategies in the aerospace industry. Full article

This study aims to provide a comprehensive knowledge mapping and extensive analysis of NeuroIS research, elucidating global trends and directions within this field from January 2007 to January 2024. A visual analysis of 256 research articles sourced from the Scopus database is conducted. The knowledge mapping, utilizing CiteSpace (CiteSpace 3.6 R1) and VOSviewer (VOSviewer 1.6.19), illustrates the current research landscape, encompassing collaboration networks, co-citation networks, references exhibiting citation bursts, and keyword analysis. The findings highlight the United States and Germany as leading nations in the exploration of NeuroIS, with the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie in Germany identified as a prominent institution in this domain. René Riedl, Pierre-Majorique Léger, Marc T. P. Adam, and Christof Weinhardt emerge as the most prolific authors in the field. Noteworthy themes that have garnered attention in recent years include customer experience, information systems, and information processing. Document analysis reveals that the study by Dimoka et al. in 2012 is the most cited work, providing a comprehensive overview of global NeuroIS research. Analysis of the document co-citation network identifies electroencephalography (EEG) in the context of technostress, the social impact of information in security alerts, and user experience in human–computer interaction as key areas of focus. René Riedl is recognized as the most cited researcher, while MIS Quarterly is distinguished as the leading journal in this field. Twelve NeuroIS papers exhibit high citation counts, with significant activity noted in 2021 and 2022. The timeline delineates the evolution of topics such as neuroscience, fMRI, cognitive neuroscience, social media, trust, eye tracking, and human–computer interaction. This study pioneers the examination of the current research status of NeuroIS through bibliometric analysis and the latest available data. It advocates for enhanced collaborations among scholars and institutions to improve information systems management and foster the development of NeuroIS. The study underscores the importance of ongoing research and cooperation in NeuroIS to deepen our understanding of how neuroscience can inform information systems design and management, thereby enhancing human–technology interaction. By identifying key trends, influential authors, and prominent themes, this analysis lays the groundwork for further exploration and innovation in this interdisciplinary domain. As technology continues to advance and our reliance on information systems intensifies, the insights derived from NeuroIS research can provide valuable perspectives on enhancing user experiences, optimizing information processing, and applying neuroscientific principles to develop more effective IT artifacts. Through sustained collaboration and knowledge sharing, the NeuroIS community can drive progress and shape the future of information systems management in an increasingly dynamic digital landscape. Full article