The Irish poet W. B. Yeats once wrote, with great sapience and perception: Nor dread, nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all. That death has ever been a problem to man is attested as far back as we can trace our species in the archaeological record—indeed, it seems to have been a problem even for that immediate precursor of homo sapiens, the so-called Neanderthal Man; for he buried his dead.

“Free riding,” used as a descriptive term, refers to taking a jointly produced benefit without contributing towards its production. Used as a term of criticism, it refers to the wrongful failure to contribute towards the joint production of benefits that one receives. On either usage, the central interest of moral philosophy in free riding is the same: to specify the conditions under which not contributing towards the joint production of benefits that one receives is wrong, and to explain why.

What Is a Person: Untapped Insights from Africa, a new book by Nancy Jecker and Caesar Atuire, offers an appealing and fresh perspective into ongoing debates surrounding personhood.1 The bioethics literature has, largely, drawn from Western/global North thought or (as arguably with the case of principlism) amalgamations of those traditions.2 3 This leaves substantial room for enriching current debates through insights from and engagement with understudied traditions. Just such an approach is taken by Jecker and Atuire, who in particular bring (...) African philosophical theories of personhood into dialogue with Western ones. Their critical appraisal ably identifies flaws with a range of theories across different traditions, and their book attempts to put forward a new theory of personhood that aims to draw from the best and discard the worst of those theories: Emergent Personhood. The book’s early sections indeed are very useful in terms of critical comparative analysis, resulting in insights such as the finding that both traditional African and traditional Western (or more specifically, Greco-Roman) thought actually overlap in terms of how personhood is conceptualised: extrinsic, earned, scalar and changing. Modern Western thought, though, eschewed those concepts first through the introduction of Christian moral equality, then Enlightenment systematic secular theories like deontology and utilitarianism that claim non-theological basis for such moral personhood. By contrast, the contemporary African theories Jecker and Atuire cite largely align with the traditional, relational accounts. So does their theory of Emergent Personhood succeed where African and Western thought have fallen short? While the theory’s contours are promising, several aspects are in need of further development. In this brief commentary, I will highlight three somewhat inter-related issues: (1) The criteria by which theories of personhood are evaluated are never given firm normative justification; (2) The normative force of Emergent Personhood’s relational foundations are not explicated; …. (shrink)

Before talking about national science as a specific phenomenon we find out the essence of science as a phenomenon in general. We note that science is one of the most complex phenomena of social life. Complex understanding of it complicates the fact that science is structurally extremely complex, polyfunctional, historically variable, with many of its faces included in this or that sphere of social life. It therefore appears as an extremely diverse social phenomenon. This raises some difficulties in developing a (...) general definition of it. As G. Volkov correctly pointed out, "there is nothing simpler than giving a definition to any phenomenon, when the whole thing is only in the formulation, and there is nothing more complicated than when it comes to the concentration in the concentrated form of the very essence of the object under study". (shrink)

In the case of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) imaging, image processing is crucial. In the medical industry, MRI images are commonly used to analyze and diagnose tumor growth in the body. A number of successful brain tumor identification and classification procedures have been developed by various experts. Existing approaches face a number of obstacles, including detection time, accuracy, and tumor size. Early detection of brain tumors improves options for treatment and patient survival rates. Manually segmenting brain tumors from a significant (...) number of MRI data for brain tumor diagnosis is a tough and time-consuming task. Automatic image segmentation of brain tumors is required. The objective of this study is to evaluate the degree of accuracy and simplify the medical picture segmentation procedure used to identify the type of brain tumor from MRI results. Additionally, this work suggests a novel method for identifying brain malignancies utilizing the Bagging Ensemble with K-Nearest Neighbor (BKNN) in order to raise the KNN’s accuracy and quality rate. For image segmentation, a U-Net architecture is utilized first, followed by a bagging-based k-NN prediction algorithm for classification. The goal of employing U-Net is to improve the accuracy and uniformity of parameter distribution in the layers. Each decision tree is fitted on a little different training dataset during classification, and the bagged decision trees are effective since each tree has minor differences and generates slightly different skilled predictions. The overall classification accuracy was up to 97.7 percent, confirming the efficiency of the suggested strategy for distinguishing normal and pathological tissues from brain MR images; this is greater than the methods that are already in use. (shrink)