Techniques from artificial intelligence (AI) can be used in forensic evidence evaluation and are currently applied in biometric fields. However, it is generally not possible to fully understand how and why these algorithms reach their conclusions. Whether and how we should include such ‘black box’ algorithms in this crucial part of the criminal law system is an open question that has not only scientific but also ethical, legal, and philosophical angles. Ideally, the question should be debated by people with diverse (...) backgrounds. Here, we present a view on the question from the philosophy of science angle: computational reliabilism (CR). CR posits that we are justified in believing the output of an AI system, if we have grounds for believing its reliability. Under CR, these grounds are classified into ‘reliability indicators’ of three types: technical, scientific, and societal. This framework enables debates on the suitability of AI methods for forensic evidence evaluation that take a wider view than explainability and validation. We argue that we are justified in believing the AI’s output for forensic comparison of voices and forensic comparison of faces. Technical indicators include the validation of the AI algorithm in itself, validation of its application in the forensic setting, and case-based validation. Scientific indicators include the simple notion that we know faces and voices contain identifying information along with operationalizing well-established metrics and forensic practices. Societal indicators are the emerging scientific consensus on the use of these methods, as well as their application and interpretation by well-educated and certified practitioners. We expect expert witnesses to rely more on technical indicators to be justified in believing AIsystems, and triers-of-fact to rely more on societal indicators to believe the expert witness supported by the AIsystem. (shrink)

Substrate cycles are ubiquitous structures of the cellular metabolism (e.g. Krebs cycle, fatty acids -oxydation cycles, etc... ). Moiety-conserved cycles (e.g. adenine nucleotides and NADH/NAD, etc...) are also important.The role played by such cycles in the metabolism and its regulation is not clearly understood so far. However, it was shown that these cycles can generate multistationarity (bistability), irreversible transitions, enhancement of sensitivity, temporal oscillations and chaotic motions (Hervagault & Canu, 1987; Hervagault & Cimino, 1989; Reich & Sel'kov, 1981; Ricard & (...) Soulié, 1982). Fig. 1: Scheme of the open binary substrate cycle under study. The substrate S is converted into P with a net rate v2. Substrate P is converted in turn into S with a net rate v3. Step v2 is inhibited by excess of the substrate, S. In addition, the cycle operates under open conditions, that is zero-order input of S at rates \ga0(v1) and first order outputs of S and P at rates \gaS and \gaP(v4), respectively. (shrink)

The European Clinical Trials Directive (EU 2001; 2001/20/EC) was introduced to improve the efficiency of commercial and academic clinical trials. Concerns have been raised by interested organizations and institutions regarding the potential for negative impact of the Directive on non-commercial European clinical research. Interested researchers within the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) were surveyed to determine whether researcher experiences confirmed this view. Following a pilot study, an internet-based questionnaire was distributed to individuals in key research positions in (...) the European haemopoietic SCT community. Seventy-one usable questionnaires were returned from participants in different EU member states. The results indicate that the perceived impact of the European Clinical Trials Directive has been negative, at least in the research areas of interest to the EBMT. (shrink)

The interaction between cavity modes and optical transitions leads to new coupled light-matter states in which the energy is periodically exchanged between the matter states and the optical mode. Here we present experimental evidence of optical strong coupling between modes of individual sub-wavelength metamaterial nanocavities and engineered optical transitions in semiconductor heterostructures. We show that this behaviour is generic by extending the results from the mid-infrared to the near-infrared. Using mid-infrared structures, we demonstrate that the light-matter coupling occurs at the (...) single resonator level and with extremely small interaction volumes. We calculate a mode volume of 4.9 × 10 from which we infer that only ~2,400 electrons per resonator participate in this energy exchange process. (shrink)

Interpretation of experiments involving use of vacuum ultraviolet radiation to effect ionization of N 2 in terms of measurements of a molecular orbital is erroneous.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 489 right; and it will be of interest to students of modern aesthetics. But compared with Rudolf Makkreel's ground-breaking study, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, 1975), it is handicapped by an exasperating vagueness. This is mainly because Heinen does not go more deeply into Dilthey's profuse aesthetic writings from a historical perspective and on the basis of a commitment to an appropriate methodology. What we (...) get, instead, is a rather one-sided reflection on several important aspects of Dilthey's aesthetic writings. ROLF-DIETERHERRMANN University of Tennessee Young John Dewey: An Essay in American Intellectual History. By Nell Coughlan. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 187) The author's aim in this carefully researched volume is to examine the early development of Dewey's character, primarily as it is expressed in the changes in his philosophical development from the time he was a student at the University of Vermont until he left the University of Michigan to go to Chicago in 1894. The account is at its best in relating the common problems shared by Dewey, his teachers George Sylvester Morris and G. Stanley Hall and his younger colleague George Herbert Mead. All were conscientious men, concerned to develop an account of the world and of society that does not fall back on religion as a crutch, that could give some accounting of or even take advantage of new developments in empirical psychology yet still provide a role for the philosopher as a moral leader. Where in the America of the 1870s and 1880s could such a person turn? Aside from Harvard and Johns Hopkins, there was no place for the independent, secular philosopher in American colleges and universities. The safe clergyman was typically given employment; the free thinking agnostic was considered dangerous. Further, there was the problem of intellectual isolation. Coughlan brilliantly contrasts the tight knit intellectual community of Victorian England with the struggles of individual American thinkers, scattered around the United States, to find like-minded intellectual companionship. Morris tried to resolve these problems by embracing the idealism of T. H. Green and hoping for a full-time chair at Hopkins. Hall, who eventually got the chair, went into empirical psychology. His choice was safe and intellectually respectable but ignored moral matters. Mead and a young friend named Henry Castle went through a long struggle to develop a satisfactory world view. Castle never achieved success and died in a shipwreck at age 32. Mead's correspondence with Castle reveals that he endured a number of acute personal crises before becoming Dewey's colleague at Michigan and discovering the latter's newly developing "organic circuit" theory with all its implications for the development of social psychology. Dewey was the most successful of the lot. It would be easy to construe a scenario wherein the young Dewey became skeptical about Green's idealism and underwent an acute personal crisis at the prospect of a world no longer glued together by the universal mind. This apparently never happened. By his own account, Dewey's "drift" from idealism took fifteen years, 1and I suspect that this gradual disengagement served as an effective buffer against the shock of having to develop an experimental naturalism all of a sudden. At any rate, Coughlan gives the most thorough account available of the evolution of Dewey's thought during the Michigan years. Coughlan is on solid ground so long as he treats Dewey as a person who shared common intellectual problems with like-minded colleagues and teachers. But how can one reconstruct his personal life? The difficulties are real. Dewey's published writings of the period reveal little John Dewey, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," in John Dewey on Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 12. 490 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of his personality. Indeed, one is moved to ask whether his personality was almost entirely submerged in his work. Colleagues, friends and students are no longer available to tell their story. There is little in the way of revealing personal correspondence that is available. Dewey was not inclined to reminisce.2 About all we have from him... (shrink)

Le « lieu théologique » qu'est le magistère de l'Eglise s'impose de plus en plus à la réflexion du théologien, du canoniste et, plus largement, de tout catholique averti en raison de documents nombreux et divers émanant du pape et des instances romaines. Tirant ses origines du concept de tradition en référence directe à l'expérience de foi, le Magistère est aussi le produit d'une longue histoire. Dans cette histoire, l'organe transmetteur allait prendre le pas sur la tradition transmise, avec prise (...) en compte de la foi comme obéissance plutôt qu'adhésion et surgissement du concept de « foi ecclésiastique ». Au terme de cette histoire, une question se pose inévitablement : doit-on analyser ces évolutions en terme de dérives ? The « theological site » that is the Church's Magisterium is more and more a subject of reflection for the theologian, the canonist, and, more generally, fur every aware Catholic. This is especially due to the numerous and diverse documents coming from the Pope and other Roman sources. Deriving its origins from the concept of tradition in direct reference to the experience of faith, the Magisterium is also the Product of a long history. In this history the transmitting organ would take ascendancy over received tradition, with an account of the faith as obedience rather than adhesion, and the growth of the concept of « ecclesiastical faith. » At the term of this history a question is inevitably posed : should one analyze these evolutions in terms of going astray ? (shrink)

ABSTRACT On 19 July 2019, Agnes Heller died whilst swimming in Lake Balaton outside Budapest. With her passing, the culture of humanity lost one of its most remarkable representatives. So too, contemporary critique lost a philosophical sensibility that is, today, within the neoliberal university, increasingly rare. It is this philosophical sensibility with which this essay is concerned. Through a critical reconstruction of Heller’s reading of three key figures from the philosophical tradition (Marx, Pascal and Kierkegaard), this essay both charts the (...) changes and continuities in Heller’s philosophy of concrete subjectivity and makes a case for its continuing relevance to the cultural project of philosophy. (shrink)

The study of post-Aristotelian philosophy is constantly confused by the perplexing way in which the names of philosophers recur. Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, is sufficiently well known not be confused with either Zeno the Eleatic or the later Stoic, Zeno of Tarsus, a disciple of Chrysippus; but when we come to less distinguished names the opportunity of error is greater. If two philosophers of the same name are prominent members of different schools, there ought to be no obscurity, but (...) in an age of eclecticism one school will sometimes adopt doctrines from another, and so make classification difficult. (shrink)

“Multiculturalism”, “pluralism” and “tolerance” have become buzz words in applied ethics. While serious and well thought out work is going on in these areas, a misunderstanding of the importance of tolerance, and the difficulties raised by multicultural moral conflict seems common. In this paper I argue that intolerance of some cultural traditions is morally required, and suggest that the forging of a moral mono-culture is preferable to pluralism.

The object of this article is to discuss, defend, and supplement the only definite piece of evidence we possess which deals with the musical scalesreferred to by Plato in the Republic . In this first section I shall consider the list of scales given by Aristides Quintilianus and suggest the source from which it is derived; in the second part the employment of certain abnormal intervals will be established and elucidated; and finally the evidence of the preceding sections will be (...) reviewed from the standpoint of the Pythagorean musical theory. (shrink)

A number of Democritean fragments may loosely be called ‘political’, concerned as they are with questions to do with the πλις – with government, with the duties and dangers of public office, with justice, law and order. The majority of them have been preserved in chapters of Stobaeus’ anthology entitled ‘On the State’ , ‘On Laws and Customs’ , ‘On Government’.