This article evaluates the moral status of hominins, and obligations we may have towards them. In exploring these ethical considerations, I consider one of the most recent hominin finds: the ‘graveyard’ of Homo naledi in the Dinaledi caves at the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa. I argue that findings about H. naledi establish a pro tanto duty not to excavate their remains.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day, with a Register of Sites by Curtis N. Runnels and Mark H. MunnDonald C. HaggisMichael H. Jameson, Curtis N. Runnels and Tjeed H. Van Andel. A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day, with a Register of Sites by Curtis N. Runnels and Mark H. Munn. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. xx (...) + 658 pp. 224 figs. 36 tables. 8 back-pocket maps. Cloth, $125.The methodological divide between Greek history and archaeology is bridged in areas of epigraphy, topography, and political geography, or in instances where the data (sites, inscriptions, or destruction levels) manifestly complement or corroborate the text. This "handmaiden" role of archaeology has been challenged in the past two decades, and links between history and archaeology have been strengthened by changes in both disciplines, especially in the range of data utilized if not in method and approach. The archaeologist's reconstruction of long-term history is only enriched by textual documentation; and the historian has found in new approaches to ancient landscapes a wider scope of data, a realm of problems, and a multi-dimensional context for writing history.A new vision of documenting the Greek past is as yet nowhere more effectively illustrated than in A Greek Countrysidey. This book, which is the final publication of the Argolid Exploration Project (and Stanford University Archaeological and Environmental Survey), was conceived in an era of vastly changing approaches to the past and inspired by the first regional and diachronic survey in Greece, the Minnesota Messenia Expedition. The exploration of the southern Argolid also emerged in the context of two vastly different yet complementary excavations at the Paleolithic-Neolithic Franchthi Cave and Classical Halieis. The chronological, methodological, and environmental scope and problem orientation of these projects were important in setting the stage for the examination of human history in the broader region, emphasizing human-environment interaction as important to understanding culture change through time.A Greek Countryside presents the results of the survey (conducted in 1972 and 1979-1983) in the southern Argolid (225 km2) that recovered some 328 sites from an intensive sample of 44 km2. The first three chapters, "Topography," "History," and "Land and Sea in the Southern Argolid," provide an introduction to the study area. They present the synchronous dimensions of observable terrain, environment, and communication routes, and the diachronic perspectives of history (1000 B.C.-modern times), geomorphology, and environmental studies. Chapter 4, "The Archaeological Survey," describes the process and methods of fieldwork, the basis for the identification and functional designations of sites, and the classificatory nomenclature of the observable settlement patterns. Chapter [End Page 333] 5, "Using the Resources of the Land and Sea," is a discussion of agricultural, pastoral, and maritime activities derived from archaeological evidence from Franchthi Cave, Halieis, and wider afield, and from ethnography, studies of ancient and modern agriculture, and Medieval and Venetian records and travelers' accounts. This chapter injects the human element into the natural environment, setting the stage for the patterns of interaction between cultural and natural landscapes. The authors' synthesis and conclusions are presented in the final chapter 6, unambiguously titled, "Fifty Thousand Years of Coevolution of Landscape and Human Settlement."This concluding chapter is wonderfully detailed, referring back to the data presented in previous chapters and forward to the numerous appendices. The appendices are focused treatments of the sites recovered (A); population estimates (B); pseudo-Scylax's periplus (C); Pausanias' account of the south Argolid (D); the town of Hermion (E); the border dispute between Hermion and Epidauros in the first half of the second century B.C. (F); and an account of the Turkish traveler, Evliya Chelebi, in 1669 (G). Chapter 6 is somewhat of an achievement in itself, providing a lucid and fascinating chronological and historical narrative, un-encumbered by tendentious footnotes or cross-references, while making the reader constantly aware of both the data and the interpretive basis for conclusions. Although the diachronic survey maps, showing settlement patterns, are presented earlier in chapter 4, more detailed maps illustrate chapter 6 and are essential and effective complements to the text.The effects of... (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Objectives: To investigate the current situation of completing the informed consent for do-not-resuscitate (DNR) orders among the competent patients with terminal illness and the ethical dilemmas related to it. Participants: This study enrolled 152 competent patients with terminal cancer, who were involved in the initial consultations for hospice care. Analysis: Comparisons of means, analyses of variance, Student’s t test, χ2 test and multiple logistic regression models. Results: After the consultations, 117 (77.0%) of the 152 patients provided informed consent for hospice (...) care and DNR orders. These included 21 patients (17.9%) who signed the consent by themselves, and 96 (82.1%) whose consent sheet was signed only by family members. The reasons why patients were not involved in the discussions toward the consent (n = 82) included poor physical or psychological condition (44.9%), concerns of the consultant hospice team (37.2%), and the family’s refusal (28.2%). On a multivariate analysis, patients’ awareness of their poor prognosis (odds ratio = 4.07, 95% confidence interval = 2.05 to 8.07) and their understanding of hospice care (2.27, 1.33 to 3.89) were two independent factors (p<0.01) that influenced their participation in the discussions or their personal signature in the informed consent. Conclusion: The family-oriented culture in Asian countries may violate the principles of the Patient Self-Determination Act and the requirements of the Hospice Care Law in Taiwan, which inevitably poses an ethical dilemma. Earlier truth-telling and continuing education of the public by hospice care workers will be helpful in solving such ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

Lives on the Fringes: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Incarceration Editors: Caterina Benelli, Giovanni Cogliandro, Giovanna Costanzo.

Malware is a sophisticated, malicious, and sometimes unidentifiable application on the network. The classifying network traffic method using machine learning shows to perform well in detecting malware. In the literature, it is reported that this good performance can depend on a reduced set of network features. This study presents an empirical evaluation of two statistical methods of reduction and selection of features in an Android network traffic dataset using six supervised algorithms: Naïve Bayes, support vector machine, multilayer perceptron neural network, (...) decision tree, random forest, and K-nearest neighbors. The principal component analysis and logistic regression methods with p value were applied to select the most representative features related to the time properties of flows and features of bidirectional packets. The selected features were used to train the algorithms using binary and multiclass classification. For performance evaluation and comparison metrics, precision, recall, F-measure, accuracy, and area under the curve were used. The empirical results show that random forest obtains an average accuracy of 96% and an AUC-ROC of 0.98 in binary classification. For the case of multiclass classification, again random forest achieves an average accuracy of 87% and an AUC-ROC over 95%, exhibiting better performance than the other machine learning algorithms. In both experiments, the 13 most representative features of a mixed set of flow time properties and bidirectional network packets selected by LR were used. In the case of the other five classifiers, their results in terms of precision, recall, and accuracy, are competitive with those obtained in related works, which used a greater number of input features. Therefore, it is empirically evidenced that the proposed method for the selection of features, based on statistical techniques of reduction and extraction of attributes, allows improving the identification performance of malware traffic, discriminating it from the benign traffic of Android applications. (shrink)

Das Handbuch führt erstmals die vielseitigen Traditionen der Emotionsforschung zusammen. Den Anfang macht eine historische Betrachtung der Emotions- und Affekttheorien von der Antike bis zur Moderne. Dem folgt eine umfassende Übersicht zentraler Emotionskonzepte der Gegenwart, wie sie in Psychologie und Philosophie diskutiert werden. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Konzepte und ihrer historischen Verortung entfaltet das Handbuch eine umfassende Typologie der Emotionen. Verschiedenste Komplexe – wie etwa Trauer, Melancholie und Depression oder Freude, Glück und Wohlbefinden – werden jeweils in den Sichtweisen unterschiedlicher (...) Disziplinen dargelegt, darunter Ethnologie, Philosophie, Literaturwissenschaft, Soziologie, Psychologie. Abschließend werden entlang zentraler Konzepte wie Sprache, Kultur, Politik und Medien vier wesentliche Fluchtlinien aktueller Emotionsforschung entfaltet, welche den Horizont einzelner Disziplinen überschreiten und entsprechend in interdisziplinärer Perspektive erschlossen werden. (shrink)

In orthodox quantum mechanics, it has virtually become the custom to identify properties of a physical system with operationally testable propositions about the system. The causes and consequences of this practice are explored mathematically in this paper. Among other things, it is found that such an identification imposes severe constraints on the admissible states of the physical system.