Objectivity in the sciences is a much-touted yet problematic concept. It sometimes held up as characterising scientific knowledge, operational definitions are diverse and call for such paradoxical genius ability to see without perspective, predict repeatability, elicit nature’s own self-revelation, or discern structure of reality with inerrancy. Here we propose positive general definition objec...

According to Helen Longino, objectivity is necessarily social as it depends on critical interactions in community. Justin Biddle argues that Longino’s account presupposes individuals that are completely open to any criticism; as such individuals are in principle able to criticise their beliefs on their own, Longino’s account is not really social. In the first part of my paper I argue that even ...

Fasting is a form of Islamic worship to approach God.  There is a direct relationship between fasting, abstaining from eating and drinking, and an individual’s health as well as his ill-health. Therefore, it is of utmost importance in the Islamic perspective to weigh the spiritual benefits achieved through fasting against its probable harmfulness to an individual’s health. Regarding fasting, th...

For assessing evacuation dynamics in disaster situations, current approaches of pedestrian simulations increasingly include additional human characteristics. One aim is to assess realistic effects of structural changes of an infrastructure on evacuation behavior displayed by users. Creating agents with supplementary physical and psychological human characteristics and assembling the agents in a...

The common goal of the two practices Pair Programming and Inspections is to produce high quality software. Even though they have a common goal, their approaches are different, and they are typically used in different situations. Pair programming is typically applied as a part of agile development methodologies, such as Extreme Programming, whereas Inspections are often applied in plandriven or ...