Flávio Oliveira

The term sustainability has become one of the most significant in the current era. It seems to be ubiquitous amongst academics, politicians, business leaders, media personnel and even the general public. It is no exaggeration to state that it is considered all over the world to be the most pressing issue to be addressed for the long-term future of the planet and its inhabitants. The topic is of course complex, and the issue of sustainability is under much debate as to what it actually is and how it can be achieved, but it is completely certain that the resources of the planet are fixed in quantity and, once used, cannot be reused except through being reused in one form or another. At present, much of the discourse of sustainability has focused upon the environment and in particular upon climate change and the effects that this is having. Thus, the discourse has tended to be about mitigation. Sustainability of course requires all three pillars of the triple bottom line—economic, environmental and social—to be addressed. Indeed, it might be considered that the effects upon the social, and how we choose to live our lives, might well be the most profound effect of achieving sustainability. This book therefore focuses upon some of the many aspects of the social and how we can adapt our lives to accommodate the requirements of sustainability. it therefore takes a very different approach to addressing the issues of sustainability, while of course not ignoring the other pillars. This book therefore sets out to examine various aspects of the changes to personal, corporate and institutional behaviour which may have to come about in our search for sustainability. It is tended to address some of the issues and how they are being dealt with in various parts of the world. As always, our concept is to share best practice and thereby enrich both the discourse and our progress towards sustainability. Thus, we focus upon the current situation while also considering the extent to which the focus is changing so much that we need to think about new approaches to our understanding of behaviour and differing effects in practice. The international origins of the contributors to this book make this an original contribution taking some of the best ideas from around the world. This book therefore addresses these issues from a perspective not generally addressed by researchers, or even by politicians and the press. It therefore provides fresh perspectives upon the important issue of our common future. As always, this approach is based on the tradition of the Social Responsibility Research Network srrnet.org (a worldwide body of scholars with membership of several thousand), which in its 20-year history has sought to broaden the discourse and to treat all research as inter-related and relevant to business. This tradition has always been to explore the subject widely and to seek relevant solutions, while also sharing best practice. This book is based primarily upon some of the contributions from the network at our recent conference and shows both commonality and diversity in approaches and effects.

Robustness is a significant constraint in machine learning models. The performance of the algorithms must not deteriorate when training and testing with slightly different data. Deep neural network models achieve awe-inspiring results in a wide range of applications of computer vision. Still, in the presence of noise or region occlusion, some models exhibit inaccurate performance even with data handled in training. Besides, some experiments suggest deep learning models sometimes use incorrect parts of the input information to perform inference. Active image augmentation is an augmentation method that uses interpretability methods to augment the training data and improve its robustness to face the described problems. Although ADA presented interesting results, its original version only used the vanilla backpropagation interpretability to train the U-Net model. In this work, we propose an extensive experimental analysis of the interpretability method’s impact on ADA. We use five interpretability methods: vanilla backpropagation, guided backpropagation, gradient-weighted class activation mapping, guided GradCam and InputXGradient. The results show that all methods achieve similar performance at the ending of training, but when combining ADA with GradCam, the U-Net model presented an impressive fast convergence.

In this paper, I investigate the significance of the act of supplication - an important social and religious institution in Greek civilization - and I try to identify the very moment when, in the Homeric vocabulary, the verb gounoûmai acquires an abstract value.Neste artigo, investigo o significado do ato de suplicação - uma importante instituição social e religiosa na civilização grega - e busco identificar o momento preciso em que, no vocabulário homérico, o verbo gounoûmai adquire um valor abstrato.

O meu objetivo neste trabalho é qualificar o momento histórico de revitalização do pragmatismo americano na década de 1970. Richard Rorty é o nome de maior expressão quando se trata de pensarmos as bases sobre as quais essa renovação deveria acontecer, a saber, o holismo linguístico de Quine, Sellars e Davidson. O antifundacionalismo derivado da obra desses três filósofos abriu as portas para uma retomada vigorosa do pragmatismo, agora, no entanto, melhorado com o instrumental linguístico da filosofia pós-analítica. Sem qualquer concessão aos problemas epistemológicos inerentes ao conceito de “experiência”, o novo pragmatismo toma a “linguagem” em sua função estruturante. “Experiência” e “linguagem” são, portanto, os conceitos chave dessa história.

O objetivo deste artigo é analisar a loucura em seu aspecto mais vergonhoso da animalidade humana, particularmente da liberdade nociva e inútil. Assim, podemos encontrar na História da loucura alguns tópicos do que futuramente iremos designar no pensamento de Foucault como reflexões sobre biopolítica? A indagação não parece estranha se interpretarmos a loucura como grande experimento público em torno do controle da liberdade, do comedimento humano e a categoria da animalidade positiva, resultante da própria objetivação da loucura enquanto fenômeno que vincula o estado patológico e o estado animalesco.