One of the most important facts in the contemporary intellectual life of mankind is its increasing liberation from the shackles of religion and the church. This is admitted even by bourgeois ideologists. Gabriel Marcel speaks of "desacralization" and the loss of the sense of the "holy" . Martin Heidegger speaks of "atheization" , and at the Second Session of the 21st Ecumenical Council the Council fathers noted with alarm the "de-Christianization" of society.

Nineteenth-century Russia reverberated with ideas of women's liberation as a condition of genuine equality in society. These ideas came to form the basis of an entire tradition linking the "woman's" question and the "social" question together and defining the democratic character of the women's movement in Russia.

Speaker recognition under mismatched conditions is a challenging task. Speech signal is nonlinear and nonstationary, and therefore, difficult to analyze under realistic conditions. Also, in real conditions, the nature of the noise present in speech data is not known a priori. In such cases, the performance of speaker identification or speaker verification degrades considerably under realistic conditions. Any SR system uses a voice activity detector as the front-end subsystem of the whole system. The performance of most VADs deteriorates at the (...) front end of the SR task or system under degraded conditions or in realistic conditions where noise plays a major role. Recently, speech data analysis and processing using Norden E. Huang’s empirical mode decomposition combined with Hilbert transform, commonly referred to as Hilbert–Huang transform, has become an emerging trend. EMD is an a posteriori, adaptive, data analysis tool used in time domain that is widely accepted by the research community. Recently, speech data analysis and speech data processing for speech recognition and SR tasks using EMD have been increasing. EMD-based VAD has become an important adaptive subsystem of the SR system that mostly mitigates the effect of mismatch between the training and the testing phase. Recently, we have developed a VAD algorithm using a zero-frequency filter-assisted peaking resonator and EMD. In this article, the efficacy of an EMD-based VAD algorithm is studied at the front end of a text-independent language-independent SI task for the speaker’s data collected in three languages at five different places, such as home, street, laboratory, college campus, and restaurant, under realistic conditions using EDIROL-R09 HR, a 24-bit wav/mp3 recorder. The performance of this proposed SI task is compared against the traditional energy-based VAD in terms of percentage identification rate. In both cases, widely accepted Mel frequency cepstral coefficients are computed by employing frame processing from the extracted voiced speech regions using the respective VAD techniques from the realistic speech utterances, and are used as a feature vector for speaker modeling using popular Gaussian mixture models. The experimental results showed that the proposed SI task with the VAD algorithm using ZFFPR and EMD at its front end performs better than the SI task with short-term energy-based VAD when used at its front end, and is somewhat encouraging. (shrink)

This book challenges the widespread assumption of the incompatibility of evolution and the biological design argument. Kojonen analyzes the traditional arguments for incompatibility, and argues for salvaging the idea of design in a way that is fully compatible with evolutionary biology. Relating current views to their intellectual history, Kojonen steers a course that avoids common pitfalls such as the problems of the God of the gaps, the problem of natural evil, and the traditional Humean and Darwinian critiques. The resulting deconstruction (...) of the opposition between evolution and design has the potential to transform this important debate. (shrink)

The author of the article deals with the main issues of Chinese neologisms formation. Language is a complex and dynamically developing system. Vocabulary is one of the most unstable and changeable layers of a language; it is highly sensitive to any changes in the society. In the study, a number of neologisms found in Chinese dictionaries of neologisms published in 2012-2015 is analyzed. The research is based on the concept of linguistic motivation, which distinguishes three levels of motivation of lexical (...) units: phonetic, morphological and semantic. Phonetically motivated lexical units under the examination are phonetic borrowings and homonymous lexical units. On the morphological level, such productive ways of word formation were analyzed as compounding, derivation, and such phenomena as acronyms and lettered words. Special attention is paid to the study of Chinese semantic word-formation where metaphorization plays an important role. The specific feature of Chinese metaphors is that abstract concepts are expressed with the help of concrete words, which is explained by national and cultural peculiarities of the Chinese language. Chinese native speakers perceive the world through concrete images that is conditioned by the Chinese language typology and the hieroglyphics. (shrink)

Intensive developing of computing technologies and the necessity of using them in the educational process ask a modern teacher to possess both skills on a discipline and knowledge of information technologies. The paper analyzes the reasons of using webquests in the process of teaching foreign languages, and focuses on the following formats of webquests like HotList, Treasure Hunt, WebQuest, etc. Pros and cons of using them in the educational process are analyzed as well. The most popular up-to-date webquests are classified (...) starting with the simplest programs like Hotlist and up to the most sophisticated platforms, for example WebQuest. The paper offers a possible review of webquest platforms and programs and explores their educational potential also giving certain examples of efficient using of the web quests either at seminars or during students’ self-work in economic universities. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyzed the discussion on the principle of universalizability which took place in moral philosophy in 1970–1980s. In short, I see two main problems that attracted more attention than others. The first problem is an opposition of universalizability and generalization. M.G. Singer argued for generalization argument, and R.M. Hare defended universalizability thesis. Hare tried to refute Singer’s position, using methods of ordinary language philosophy, and claimed that in ethics generalization is useless and misleading. I have examined Singer’s (...) defense and concluded that he was right and Hare was mistaken. Consequently, generalization argument is better in clarification of the relationship between universality and morality than Hare’s doctrine of universalizability, and hence the universality of moral principles is not incompatible with the existence of exclusions. The second problem is the substantiation of the application of categorical imperative in the theory of relevant act descriptions and accurate understanding of the difference between maxims and non-maxims. In Generalization in Ethics, Singer drew attention to this theme and philosophers have proposed some suggestions to solve this problem. I describe ideas of H.J. Paton, H. Potter, O. O’Neill and M. Timmons. Paton coined the teleological-law theory. According to Potter, the best criterion for the relevant act descriptions is causal one. O’N eill suggested the inconsistency-of-intention theory. Timmons defended the causal-law theory. My claim is that the teleological-law theory and the causal-law theory fail to solve the relevant act descriptions problem and the causal criterion and the inconsistency-of-intention theory have their limits. From this, I conclude that these approaches cannot be the basis for clarifying the connection between universality and morality, in contrast to Singer’s approach, which, therefore, is better than others to clarify the nature of universality in morality. (shrink)