The introduction of novel diagnostic techniques in clinical domains such as genomics and radiology has led to a rich ethical debate on how to handle unsolicited findings that result from these innovations. Yet while unsolicited findings arise in both genomics and radiology, most of the relevant literature to date has tended to focus on only one of these domains. In this article, we synthesize and critically assess similarities and differences between “scanning the body” and “sequencing the genome” from an ethical (...) perspective. After briefly describing the novel diagnostic contexts leading to unsolicited findings, we synthesize and reflect on six core ethical issues that relate to both specialties: terminology; benefits and risks; autonomy; disclosure of unsolicited findings to children; uncertainty; and filters and routine screening. We identify ethical rationales that pertain to both fields and may contribute to more ethically sound policies. Considerations of preserving public trust and ensuring that people perceive healthcare policies as fair also support the need for a combined debate. (shrink)

Compulsory genetic tests which reveal a predisposition to brain damage could be of more use in preventing harm than brain scans which show that damage has already occurredAmid calls for a ban on boxing the Victorian government in Australia introduced compulsory brain scans for professional boxers in June 2001. Some people think the introduction of this new law is a “tough” measure. Others think the law is of limited value because the damage has already occurred by the time something shows (...) up on a brain scan. The Victorian government is also considering the introduction of compulsory genetic tests that indicate a predisposition to brain damage.Nathan Croucher, a 24 year old construction worker and champion amateur boxer has been banned from professional boxing after a compulsory brain scan showed an abnormality which makes him susceptible …. (shrink)

Will understanding our brains help us to know our minds? Or is there an unbridgeable distance between the work of neuroscience and the workings of human consciousness? In a remarkable exchange between neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, this book explores the vexed territory between these divergent approaches--and comes to a deeper, more complex perspective on human nature.Ranging across diverse traditions, from phrenology to PET scans and from Spinoza to Charles Taylor, What Makes Us Think? revolves around a central (...) issue: the relation between the facts of science and the prescriptions of ethics. Changeux and Ricoeur ask: Will neuroscientific knowledge influence our moral conduct? Is a naturally based ethics possible? Pursuing these questions, they attack key topics at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience: What are the relations between brain states and psychological experience? Between language and truth? Memory and culture? Behavior and action? What is a mental representation? How does a sign relate to what it signifies? How might subjective experience be constructed rather than discovered? And can biological or cultural evolution be considered progressive? Throughout, Changeux and Ricoeur provide unprecedented insight into what neuroscience can--and cannot--tell us about the nature of human experience.Changeux and Ricoeur bring an unusual depth of engagement and breadth of knowledge to each other's subject. In doing so, they make two often hostile disciplines speak to one another in surprising and instructive ways--and speak with all the subtlety and passion of conversation at its very best. (shrink)

The question of how to handle incidental findings has sparked a heated debate among neuroimaging researchers and medical ethicists, a debate whose urgency stems largely from the recent explosion in the number of imaging studies being conducted and in the sheer volume of scans being acquired. Perhaps the point of greatest controversy within this debate is whether the magnetic resonance imaging scans of all research participants should be reviewed in an active search for pathology and, moreover, whether this search should (...) be performed by a radiologist. Resistance to routine readings performed by radiologists, as opposed to selective review of those scans on which investigators have spotted a possible IF, has been fueled in part by the obvious and enormous cost — financial and logistical — of engaging radiologists to read massive numbers of scans. This cost would be especially burdensome, even prohibitive, to investigators who are not affiliated with a medical center, because of their limited access to radiologists and other medical expertise. (shrink)

We weigh the presumed benefts of routinely searching all research scans for incidental fndings against its substantial risks, including false-positive and false-negative fndings, and the possibility of triggering unnecessary, costly evaluations and perhaps harmful treatments. We argue that routinely searching for IFs may not maximize benefts and minimize risks to participants.

We have previously found that attention to internal somatic sensations during a heart beat perception task increases the misperception of external touch on a somatic signal detection task , during which healthy participants erroneously report feeling near-threshold vibrations presented to their fingertip in the absence of a stimulus. However, it has been suggested that mindful interoceptive attention should result in more accurate somatic perception, due to its non-evaluative and controlled nature. To investigate this possibility, 62 participants completed the SSDT before (...) and after a period of brief body-scan mindfulness meditation training, or a control intervention . The meditation intervention reduced tactile misperception and increased sensitivity during the SSDT. This finding suggests that the perceptual effects of interoceptive attention depend on its particular nature, and raises the possibility that body-scan meditation could reduce the misperception of physical symptoms in individuals with medically unexplained symptoms. (shrink)

A core symptom of anxiety disorders is the tendency to interpret ambiguous information as threatening. Using EEG and BOLD-MRI, several studies have begun to elucidate brain processes involved in fear-related perceptual biases, but thus far mainly found evidence for general hypervigilance in high fearful individuals. Recently, multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) has become popular for decoding cognitive states from distributed patterns of neural activation. Here, we used this technique to assess whether biased fear generalization, characteristic of clinical fear, is already present (...) during the initial perception and categorization of a stimulus, or emerges during the subsequent interpretation of a stimulus. Individuals with low spider fear (LSF, n = 20) and high spider fear (HSF, n = 18) underwent functional MRI scanning while viewing series of schematic flowers morphing to spiders. In line with previous studies, individuals with high fear of spiders were behaviorally more likely to classify ambiguous morphs as spiders than individuals with low fear of spiders. Univariate analyses of BOLD-MRI data revealed stronger activation towards spider pictures in high fearful individuals compared to low fearful individuals in numerous areas. Yet, neither average activation, nor support vector machine classification (i.e. a form of MVPA) matched the behavioral results - i.e., a biased response towards ambiguous stimuli - in any of the regions of interest. This may point to limitations of the current design, and to challenges associated with classifying emotional and neutral stimuli in groups that differ in their judgment of emotionality. Improvements for future research are suggested. (shrink)

The invention in 1986 of scanning force microscopy (SFM) provided a new and powerful tool for the investigation of biological structures. SFM yields a three‐dimensional view at nanometer resolution of the surface topography associated with biological objects. The potential for imaging either macromolecules or biomolecules and cells under native (physiological) conditions is currently being exploited to obtain functional information at the molecular level. In addition, the forces involved in individual bimolecular interactions are being assessed under static and dynamic conditions. In (...) this report we focus on the imaging capability of the SFM. The rather broad spectrum of applications represented is intended to orient the prospective user of biological SFM. (shrink)

One method for investigating the neurobiology of consciousness is to experimentally manipulate consciousness as a variable and then visualize the resultant functional brain changes with advanced imaging techniques. To begin investigation into this area, healthy volunteers underwent positron emission tomography scanning while listening to randomized word lists in both conscious and unconscious conditions. Following anaesthesia, subjects had no explicit memories. Nonetheless, subjects demonstrated implicit memory on a forced-choice test . These subsequent memory scores were correlated with regional brain metabolism measured (...) during encoding. Conscious recall and unconscious recognition memory demonstrated considerable anatomic overlap in correlating significantly with relative glucose metabolism in auditory verbal memory areas. However, only conscious recall correlated with mediodorsal thalamic nucleus activity; unconscious recognition memory did not. These findings suggest that conscious versus unconscious memory distinctions may depend on the presence or absence of correlated thalamic activity, and directly implicate the thalamus in the neurobiology of consciousness. (shrink)

Overruling of law said to establish the “right not to be born”The French government has given in to public pressure and overturned a controversial legal ruling which recognised the right of a disabled chld to seek damaages. Most notably, the ruling, widely described as establishing a child's right “not to be born”, had provoked “outrage” amongst groups defending the rights of the disabled and led to a ban on prenatal scans by French gynaecologists. Once again, only parents will be able (...) to seek damages but some people think the ruling has been misinterpreted.The Perruche judgment, a controversial ruling which has been said to establish the “right not to be born”, has now been overruled by a majority of the National Assembly of the French Parliament.1, 2 A bill has been put forward which states “no one can sue for damages for the sole fact of their birth”. It was considered by the senate until January 22, 2002.2In 1982, Josette Perruche discovered red spots covering her four year old daughter. The child was diagnosed with German measles. Mrs Perruche told her …. (shrink)

In the article the basic procedures for finding of connective elements and resolving conflicts of references is analyzed. On the basis of this, a generalized algorithm is proposed that combines advantages of existing procedures for search for connective elements between phrases. The advantages of the selected procedures and their sequence are described, the formal description of input data and the results of the algorithm are presented. To optimize the procedure for scanning the text, the algorithm is performed as an iterative (...) reduction of the candidates for communication elements. This is achieved through the confirmation of non-conflict links and the gradual resolution of conflicts. (shrink)

Previous research indicates that individuals with depressive disorders have aberrant resting state functional connectivity and may experience memory dysfunction. While resting state functional connectivity may be affected by experiences preceding the resting state scan, little is known about this relationship in individuals with DD. Our study examined this question in the context of object memory. 52 individuals with DD and 45 healthy controls completed clinical interviews, and a memory encoding task followed by a forced-choice recognition test. A 5-min resting (...) state fMRI scan was administered immediately after the forced-choice task. Resting state networks were identified using group Independent Component Analysis across all participants. A network modeling analysis conducted on 22 networks using FSLNets examined the interaction effect of diagnostic status and memory accuracy on the between-network connectivity. We found that this interaction significantly affected the relationship between the network comprised of the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and hippocampal formation and the network comprised of the inferior temporal, parietal, and prefrontal cortices. A stronger positive correlation between these two networks was observed in individuals with DD who showed higher memory accuracy, while a stronger negative correlation was observed in individuals with DD who showed lower memory accuracy prior to resting state. No such effect was observed for HC. The former network cross-correlated with the default mode network, and the latter cross-correlated with the dorsal attention network. Considering that the DMN and DAN typically anticorrelate, we hypothesize that our findings indicate aberrant reactivation and consolidation processes that occur after the task is completed. Such aberrant processes may lead to continuous “replay” of previously learned, but currently irrelevant, information and underlie rumination in depression. (shrink)

The theme running through these cooperative studies is the relation between automated fields of communication and control, and the various strata of human behavior. The question of the stratification of behavior is beginning to receive serious attention from the standpoints of ecology and cybernetics. One can only welcome the explorations of this imaginative group of authors in areas as promising as those of form, information, and life ; communication, information, and poetic language ; the role of information in the human (...) sciences ; physics and information ; and knowledge and information. Once again E. Paci is the one who scans the largest territory.—A. M. (shrink)

Based on detailed descriptions of human–machine ensembles, this article explores how humans and machines work together to see specific things and unsee others, and how they come to co-configure one another. For seeing is not an automated function; whether one is a human or a machine, vision is gradually enskilled and mutually co-constituted. The analysis intersects three different ways of human–machine seeing to shed further light on the workings of each one: an airport, where facial recognition algorithms collaborate with border (...) guards to grant passage to particular travellers and not to others; a luggage-scanning system, where potential security threats are assessed by a complex of X-rays and human intro-spection; and a hospital operating room, where human–machinic surgical robots find their way and operate on the insides of human bodies, touching only by seeing. In these examples, human and machine ways of seeing merge together, seeing in particular apparatuses of material, political, organisational, economic and fleshy components. The article analyses the practical work of human–machinic collaboration and explores how the different material and social constituents, not necessarily always working from the same agenda, come to configure what can be seen and sensed and what cannot. (shrink)

For the last few years, the Escuela de Estudios Árabes has been carrying out a project for the computerisation of Arabic manuscripts. In this paper, we explain the benefits of consulting a manuscript using computer support, as apposed to traditional methods. We outline the steps followed in the process of building a digital archive: scanning of the manuscript as the first step, retrieval and use of the images storaged in the computer as the last one.

As thousands of healthy research participants are being included in small and large imaging studies, it is essential that dilemmas raised by the detection of incidental findings are adequately handled. Current ethical guidance indicates that pathways for dealing with incidental findings should be in place, but does not specify what such pathways should look like. Building on an interview study of researchers’ practices and perspectives, we identified key considerations for the set-up of pathways for the detection, management and communication of (...) incidental findings in imaging research. We conducted an interview study with a purposive sample of researchers at research facilities across the Netherlands. Based on a qualitative analysis of these interviews and on existing guidelines found in the literature, we developed a prototype ethical framework, which was critically assessed and fine-tuned during a two-day international expert meeting with bioethicists and representatives from large population-based imaging studies from the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Belgium. Practices and policies for the handling of incidental findings vary strongly across the Netherlands, ranging from no review of research scans and limited feedback to research participants, to routine review of scans and the arrangement of clinical follow-up. Respondents felt that researchers do not have a duty to actively look for incidental findings, but they do have a duty to act on findings, when detected. The principle of reciprocity featured prominently in our interviews and expert meeting. We present an ethical framework that may guide researchers and research ethics committees in the design and/or evaluation of appropriate pathways for the handling of incidental findings in imaging studies. The framework consists of seven steps: anticipation of findings, information provision and informed consent, scan acquisition, review of scans, consultation on detected abnormalities, communication of the finding, and further clinical management and follow-up of the research participant. Each of these steps represents a key decision to be made by researchers, which should be justified not only with reference to costs and/or logistical considerations, but also with reference to researchers’ moral obligations and the principle of reciprocity. (shrink)

Technology has outpaced the capacity of researchers performing research on human participants to interpret all data generated and handle those data responsibly. This poses a critical challenge to existing rules governing human subjects research. The technologies used in research to generate images, scans, and data can now produce so much information that there is significant potential for incidental findings, findings generated in the course of research but beyond the aims of the study. Neuroimaging scans may visualize the entire brain and (...) even the entire head; computed tomography colonography research may visualize the entire torso, from the base of the lungs to the pubis; genetics studies may reveal “extra” and sometimes unwanted information about the family, such as misattributed paternity and undisclosed adoption; and genomic microarray research increasingly involves whole-genome analysis revealing an individual’s complete genotype, with enormous potential for uncovering unexpected information about an individual’s genetics and risks of developing future conditions. (shrink)

During active vision, the eyes continually scan the visual environment using saccadic scanning movements. This target article presents an information processing model for the control of these movements, with some close parallels to established physiological processes in the oculomotor system. Two separate pathways are concerned with the spatial and the temporal programming of the movement. In the temporal pathway there is spatially distributed coding and the saccade target is selected from a Both pathways descend through a hierarchy of levels, (...) the lower ones operating automatically. Visual onsets have automatic access to the eye control system via the lower levels. Various centres in each pathway are interconnected via reciprocal inhibition. The model accounts for a number of well-established phenomena in target-elicited saccades: the gap effect, express saccades, the remote distractor effect, and the global effect. High-level control of the pathways in tasks such as visual search and reading is discussed; it operates through spatial selection and search selection, which generally combine in an automated way. The model is examined in relation to data from patients with unilateral neglect. (shrink)

"This report investigates the question of the universality of classical logic. The approach is to show that an almost arbitrary logical system can be translated reasonably intuitively and almost automatically into classical logic. The path leading to this result goes through the analysis of what is reasonable logic, how to find semantics for it, how to build a labelled deductive system (LDS) for it, how to translate a LDS into classical logic and how to automate the process using SCAN. (...) This report relies on other papers, published and/or to be published as explained in the acknowledgements. (shrink)

An increasing number of people seek medical attention for mild cognitive symptoms at older age, worried that they might develop Alzheimer’s disease. Some clinical practice guidelines suggest offering biomarker testing in such cases, using a brain scan or a lumbar puncture, to improve diagnostic certainty about Alzheimer’s disease and enable an earlier diagnosis. Critics, on the other hand, point out that there is no effective Alzheimer treatment available and argue that biomarker tests lack clinical validity. The debate on the (...) ethical desirability of biomarker testing is currently polarized; advocates and opponents tend to focus on their own line of arguments. In this paper, we show how the method of reflective equilibrium can be used to systematically weigh the relevant arguments on both sides of the debate to decide whether to offer Alzheimer biomarker testing. In the tradition of RE, we reflect upon these arguments in light of their coherence with other argumentative elements, including relevant facts, ethical principles, and theories on societal ideals or relevant concepts, such as autonomy. Our stance in the debate therefore rests upon previously set out in-depth arguments and reflects a wide societal perspective. (shrink)

This paper argues that Descartes conceives of theoretical reason in terms derived from practical reason, particularly in the role he gives to the passions. That the passions serve — under normal circumstances — to preserve the union of mind and body is a well-known feature of Descartes's defense of our native make-up. But they are equally important in our more purely theoretical endeavors. Some passions, most notably wonder, provide a crucial source of motivation in the search after truth, and also (...) serve to reinforce memory. Our cognitive successes and failure scan also be tracked by passions and trains of passions. (shrink)

Programming computers to construct "real types," generally descriptive of a class of societies, makes explicit all steps in the thought process of such constructions because unambiguous instructions to, the computer are needed. The historian uses his judgment to choose a data field and variables that may be relevant in forming a type. He then looks for matches; he divides the data field into groups according to one variable and sees if the other variables differ significantly according to these groups. In (...) this process, he may discover new variables of importance. The selection of interesting types from among the matches can be determined only by the pragmatic interest of the historian; analysis of this selection process involves some of the most difficult problems in the study of historical technique. The computer using a "real type" program may be useful as a quick means to scan data. (shrink)

Twentieth-century Greco-French philosopher, economist, psychoanalyst and activist Cornelius Castoriadis offers a creative new conception of imagination that is uniquely promising for social justice. Though it has been argued that this conception has one fatal flaw, the latter has recently been resolved through a creative dialogue with dance. The present article fleshes out this philosophical-dancing dialogue further, revealing a deeper layer of creative dialogue therein, namely between Castoriadis’ account of time and choreography. To wit, he reconceives time as the self-choreography of (...) the sociohistorical, in which performance the sociohistorical plays two dancing roles simultaneously, both choreographer and choreographed dancer. More precisely, as interpreted by Castoriadis in a late essay, the creation and emergence of forms in time consists of a poetic “scansion” or “scanning” of time. Thus, the sociohistorical is both choreographer and dancer, poet and reader, reinterpreting the poetic text of time as the music for its evolving dance. (shrink)

Background: Primary open-angle glaucoma patients exhibit widespread white matter degeneration throughout their visual pathways. Whether this degeneration starts at the pre- or post-geniculate pathways remains unclear. In this longitudinal study, we assess the progression of WM degeneration exhibited by the pre-geniculate optic tracts and the post-geniculate optic radiations of POAG patients over time, aiming to determine the source and pattern of spread of this degeneration.Methods: Diffusion-weighted MRI scans were acquired for 12 POAG patients and 14 controls at two time-points 5.4 (...) ± 2.1 years apart. Fiber density, an estimate of WM axonal density, was computed for the OTs and ORs of all participants in an unbiased longitudinal population template space. First, FD was compared between POAG patients and the controls at time-point 1 and time-point 2 independently. Secondly, repeated measures analysis was performed for FD change in POAG patients between the two time-points. Finally, we compared the rate of FD change over time between the two groups.Results: Compared to the controls, POAG patients exhibited significantly lower FD in the left OT at TP1 and in both OTs and the left OR at TP2. POAG patients showed a significant loss of FD between the time-points in the right OT and both ORs, while the left OR showed a significantly higher rate of FD loss in POAG patients compared to the controls.Conclusions: We find longitudinal progression of neurodegenerative WM changes in both the pre- and post-geniculate visual pathways of POAG patients. The pattern of changes suggests that glaucomatous WM degeneration starts at the pre-geniculate pathways and then spreads to the post-geniculate pathways. Furthermore, we find evidence that the trans-synaptic spread of glaucomatous degeneration to the post-geniculate pathways is a prolonged process which continues in the absence of detectable pre-geniculate degenerative progression. This suggests the presence of a time window for salvaging intact post-geniculate pathways, which could prove to be a viable therapeutic target in the future. (shrink)

A high percent of oxidative energy metabolism is needed to support brain growth during infancy. Unhealthy diets and limited nutrition, as well as other environmental insults, can compromise these essential developmental processes. In particular, iron deficiency anemia has been found to undermine both normal brain growth and neurobehavioral development. Even moderate ID may affect neural maturation because when iron is limited, it is prioritized first to red blood cells over the brain. A primate model was used to investigate the neural (...) effects of a transient ID and if deficits would persist after iron treatment. The large size and postnatal growth of the monkey brain makes the findings relevant to the metabolic and iron needs of human infants, and initiating treatment upon diagnosis of anemia reflects clinical practice. Specifically, this analysis determined whether brain maturation would still be compromised at 1 year of age if an anemic infant was treated promptly once diagnosed. The hematology and iron status of 41 infant rhesus monkeys was screened at 2-month intervals. Fifteen became ID; 12 met clinical criteria for anemia and were administered iron dextran and B vitamins for 1–2 months. MRI scans were acquired at 1 year. The volumetric and diffusion tensor imaging measures from the ID infants were compared with monkeys who remained continuously iron sufficient. A prior history of ID was associated with smaller total brain volumes, driven primarily by significantly less total gray matter and smaller GM volumes in several cortical regions. At the macrostructual level, the effect on white matter volumes was not as overt. However, DTI analyses of WM microstructure indicated two later-maturating anterior tracts were negatively affected. The findings reaffirm the importance of iron for normal brain development. Given that brain differences were still evident even after iron treatment and following recovery of iron-dependent hematological indices, the results highlight the importance of early detection and preemptive supplementation to limit the neural consequences of ID. (shrink)

Attentional scanning was studied in anxious and non-anxious participants, using a modified change detection paradigm. Participants detected changes in pairs of emotional scenes separated by two task irrelevant slides, which contained an emotionally valenced scene and a visual mask. In agreement with attentional control theory, change detection latencies were slower overall for anxious participants. Change detection in anxious, but not non-anxious, participants was influenced by the emotional valence and exposure duration of distractor scenes. When negative distractor scenes were presented at (...) subliminal exposure durations, anxious participants detected changes more rapidly than when supraliminal negative scenes or subliminal positive scenes were presented. We propose that for anxious participants, subliminal presentation of emotionally negative distractor scenes stimulated attention into a dynamic state in the absence of attentional engagement. Presentation of the same scenes at longer exposure times was accompanied by conscious awareness, attentional engagement, and slower change detection. (shrink)

Imagine a gadget, call it “brain-ovision,” for brain scanning that doesn’t create pictures of brains at all. That’s right, no orbs spattered with colorful “activations” that need to be interpreted by neuroanatomists. Instead, with brain-o-vision, what a brain sees is what you get—an image of what that brain is experiencing. If the person who owns the brain is envisioning lunch, up pops a cheeseburger on the screen. If the person is reading a book, the screen shows the words. For that (...) matter, if the brain owner is feeling pain, perhaps brain-o-vision could reach out and swat the viewer with a rolled-up newspaper. Brain-ovision could give us access to another person’s consciousness. Technologies for brain-o-vision are beginning to seem possible. We are learning how brain activations map onto emotions, memories, and mental processes, and it won’t be long before we might translate activations into Google searches for images of what the brain is thinking. There is a specific brain area linked with face perception, for instance, and even a neuron that fires when it sees Jennifer Aniston. So why, in principle, shouldn’t we be able to scan a brain and discover when it is looking at her—and eventually even learn what she’s wearing? Of course, it may be many years to the beta version. But imagine that everything works out and brain-o-vision goes on sale at Wal- Mart. Could the device solve the problem of whether consciousness causes behavior? With direct evidence of a person’s consciousness, we could do science on the question. We could observe regularities in the relation between consciousness and behavior. If the consciousness always preceded the behavior, we could arrive at the inductive inference of causation and, as scientists, be quite happy that we had established a causal connection. (shrink)

This study aims to reveal the Turkish religious music practices of Jawharism, a sect based on Qadiri and Rifai, founded in Bagcilar, Istanbul. The historical process of the establishment of Jawharism was firstly mentioned, and then the musical activities of the "Association for the Promotion and Sustenance of Sufi Music and Culture", which enabled it to spread in a cultural sense, were discussed. As a result of archives, interviews and observations, the relationship of Jawharism with music was determined, the types (...) of music performed in the dhikr and the compositions belonging to the lodge were identified. In addition, through the sound recordings and note archives obtained as a result of the research, the works specific to the lodge were arranged and notated, and it was aimed to introduce the Turkish religious music repertoire to new works. Genres such as salawat, imamet, tasbihât, istighfar, taravih composition, odes and hymns are performed in the lodge, and especially the compositions of salawats and tasbihâts in the maqam of uşşak, rast, hicaz and segah are sung specifically for the lodge. Meşk evenings are also organized and many hymns, suğl, tevşih, nefes, mersiye, etc. are practiced. Composed genres are performed. The problem of this study is, is the relationship between dhikr and music of Jawharism compatible? How is the statues of Jawharism in Turkish religious music?, Qualitative research methods such as source scanning, data collection, sampling, comparison and citing sources were used in our study determined as a method. We can express the importance of this study as the importance of Jawharism's relationship with music, as it used music effectively and trained many musicians and composers. (shrink)

Every person has his/her own unique signature that is used mainly for the purposes of personal identification and verification of important documents or legal transactions. There are two kinds of signature verification: static and dynamic. Static(off-line) verification is the process of verifying an electronic or document signature after it has been made, while dynamic(on-line) verification takes place as a person creates his/her signature on a digital tablet or a similar device. Offline signature verification is not efficient and slow for a (...) large number of documents. To overcome the drawbacks of offline signature verification, we have seen a growth in online biometric personal verification such as fingerprints, eye scan etc. In this paper we created CNN model using python for offline signature and after training and validating, the accuracy of testing was 99.70%. (shrink)

Lawyers write, blog and are otherwise producers of words; they structure public life through legal discourse and integrate all issues that reinforce legal reasoning. Even if one is inclined not to justify the power of their words in the context of a democratic theory, one is hardly able to challenge its public acceptance. But semiotic analyses harden the question whether these emperors wear nothing but robes. That attitude intensifies where medicine becomes increasingly relevant for legal discourse, as becomes clear where (...) for instance US political viewpoints bring bioethical issues to the Courts. One major theme in today’s medicine pertains to identity in its psychological, philosophical and social dimensions. Identity thus becomes a groundbreaking semiotic issue in law and medicine; both discourses are particular important to the otherness of the other. A US criminal law case interests here (Harrington v. State of Iowa, 2003; cited as: 659N.W.2d 509). The case is decided with “information about what the person has stored in his brain”. A chain of signs is involved: from “brain-function” to “brain-storage” via “brain-scan” to “brain-fingerprint”, for which the case became famous. A long series of signs and meanings belong here to intertwined discourses. Central is a particular sign in each discourse: “brain” means brain scan, and “fingerprint” means law! The two display trading mechanisms, which determine the otherness of the other and the self! The chain of signs in the Harrington case shows inter-disciplinarity in law and inter-discursivity among law and medicine. The trading itself underlines the semiotic dimensions in cyberspace, in particular the semiotics of the virtual (Hayles, Kurzweil) and their effects on legal discourse. (shrink)