Crop genetic resources constitute a ‘new’ global commons, characterized by multiple layers of activities of farmers, genebanks, public and private research and development organizations, and regulatory agencies operating from local to global levels. This paper presents sui generis biocultural community protocols that were developed by four communities in Benin and Madagascar to improve their ability to contribute to, and benefit from, the crop commons. The communities were motivated in part by the fact that their national governments’ had recently ratified the (...) Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol, which make commitments to promoting the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities and farmers, without being prescriptive as to how Contracting Parties should implement those commitments. The communities identified the protocols as useful means to advance their interests and/or rights under both the Plant Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol to be recognized as managers of local socio-ecological systems, to access genetic resources from outside the communities, and to control others’ access to resources managed by the community. (shrink)

With the increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in wildlife conservation, issues around whether AI-based monitoring tools in wildlife conservation comply with standards regarding AI Ethics are on the rise. This review aims to summarise current debates and identify gaps as well as suggest future research by investigating (1) current AI Ethics and AI Ethics issues in wildlife conservation, (2) Initiatives Stakeholders in AI for wildlife conservation should consider integrating AI Ethics in wildlife conservation. We find that the existing literature (...) weakly focuses on AI Ethics and AI Ethics in wildlife conservation while at the same time ignores AI Ethics integration in AI systems for wildlife conservation. This paper formulates an ethically aligned AI system framework and discusses pre-eminent on-demand AI systems in wildlife conservation. The proposed framework uses agile software life cycle methodology to implement guidelines towards the ethical upgrade of any existing AI system or the development of any new ethically aligned AI system. The guidelines enforce, among others, the minimisation of intentional harm and bias, diversity in data collection, design compliance, auditing of all activities in the framework and ease of code inspection. This framework will inform AI developers, users, conservationists, and policymakers on what to consider when integrating AI Ethics into AI-based systems for wildlife conservation. (shrink)

Dans cet ouvrage, la philosophie de Rene Descartes nous apporte un discours nouveau sur le probleme relatif au rapport permanent entre la raison et la foi a partir de ses Meditations metaphysiques. Cette philosophie nous invite a nous questionner sur la necessite d un choix entre l engagement de croire et la liberte de savoir. Ce livre nous permet de mieux comprendre les enjeux d une telle problematique. Alla Marcellin Konin a partage l experience de plusieurs annees d enseignement (...) de la philosophie dans les Academies de Poitiers, de Nantes, de Caen et de Rouen en France. a l Universite de Poitiers et de Bordeaux 3, il a travaille sur la philosophie de la Nature et sur l Idealisme allemand. Mediateur dans les Organisations et Membre associe a MAPP (Metaphysique Allemande et Philosophie Pratique) de l Universite de Poitiers, il enseigne la philosophie a l Universite Felix Houphouet-Boigny de Cocody. Il poursuit actuellement ses recherches en philosophie de l histoire, en metaphysique, en philosophie morale et politique. Alla Marcellin Konin a partage l experience de plusieurs annees d enseignement de la philosophie dans les Academies de Poitiers, de Nantes, de Caen et de Rouen en France. a l Universite de Poitiers et de Bordeaux 3, il a travaille sur la philosophie de la Nature et sur l Idealisme allemand. Mediateur dans les Organisations et Membre associe a MAPP (Metaphysique Allemande et Philosophie Pratique) de l Universite de Poitiers, il enseigne la philosophie a l Universite Felix Houphouet-Boigny de Cocody. Il poursuit actuellement ses recherches en philosophie de l histoire, en metaphysique, en philosophie morale et politique.". (shrink)

If Spinoza is a thinker very present in the Faculties of Philosophy, on the other hand, he is presented as one of the great forgotten of the humanist programs of secondary education. Contrary to what happened with other philosophers, who had more chance of spreading in non-specialized contexts (we can cite Nietzsche, Pascal, Plato or Schopenhauer as obvious examples), Spinoza is generally considered a excessively systematic author, and complex, whose works would have been written for a small group of scholars. (...) Nothing could be further from the truth. Spinoza’s life was full of completely surprising events, from his estrangement from the Jewish community (which repudiated him in a strict and disagreeable way), through his dalliances with heterodox currents which gradually grew in power, until his meeting with Leibniz and his intrepid travels. from one part of his native Holland to another. In this article, we examine the concept of desire in Spinoza's philosophy and its connection to the philosopher's decision to find the greater good. Since the greatest good, in turn, is nothing but its own enjoyment, we conclude that ignoring its existence, seeking it, and living it are, respectively, the conditions of the vulgar, the philosopher, and the wise, as what happened in the Garden of Epicurus. (shrink)

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. To promote logically consistent representation and classification of statistical entities, we have developed the Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS). OBCS extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO Foundry ontology supported by some 20 communities. Currently, OBCS contains 686 terms, including 381 classes imported from OBI and 147 classes specific to OBCS. The goal of this paper is to present OBCS for community critique and to describe a (...) number of use cases designed to illustrate its potential applications. The OBCS project and source code are available at http://obcs.googlecode.com. (shrink)

Statistics play a critical role in biological and clinical research. However, most reports of scientific results in the published literature make it difficult for the reader to reproduce the statistical analyses performed in achieving those results because they provide inadequate documentation of the statistical tests and algorithms applied. The Ontology of Biological and Clinical Statistics (OBCS) is put forward here as a step towards solving this problem. Terms in OBCS, including ‘data collection’, ‘data transformation in statistics’, ‘data visualization’, ‘statistical data (...) analysis’, and ‘drawing a conclusion based on data’, cover the major types of statistical processes used in basic biological research and clinical outcome studies. OBCS is aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and extends the Ontology of Biomedical Investigations (OBI), an OBO (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry ontology supported by over 20 research communities. We discuss two examples illustrating how the ontology is being applied. In the first (biological) use case, we describe how OBCS was applied to represent the high throughput microarray data analysis of immunological transcriptional profiles in human subjects vaccinated with an influenza vaccine. In the second (clinical outcomes) use case, we applied OBCS to represent the processing of electronic health care data to determine the associations between hospital staffing levels and patient mortality. Our case studies were designed to show how OBCS can be used for the consistent representation of statistical analysis pipelines under two different research paradigms. By representing statistics-related terms and their relations in a rigorous fashion, OBCS facilitates standard data analysis and integration, and supports reproducible biological and clinical research. (shrink)

La notion de conflit révèle divers aspects. Parmi les litiges, les violences, les disputes, les mésententes, les guerres, l'importance de définir les éléments de conflictualité et le caractère institutionnel des enquêtes en matière de gestion et de résolution des conflits de nos jours. Néanmoins, nous sommes parvenus à percevoir que la clé du succès des résolutions des conflits pour une paix durable réside dans l'expérience humaine de la culpabilité et du pardon. Ce n'est certes pas des éléments nouveaux pour les (...) spécialistes et les diplomates en matière de gestion des conflits. Cependant, Ces deux notions sont reléguées à un second plan au profit de compromis et de mesures coercitives à l'encontre des factions en conflits. Notre vision de la résolution des conflits est que sans l'incompréhension de l'expérience de la culpabilité et du pardon,haine durable ). Est-il possible d'institutionnaliser le pardon et de mener des actions conduisant à une véritable responsabilité collective et individuelle préalable à toute réconciliation durable des peuples? La nature et la fréquence de nos conflits obligent à revenir sur les méthodes d'approche qui viennent d'être utilisées. En effet, c'est ce que tentent de faire certaines commissions pour la réconciliation appelées pour la plupart « Dialogue – Vérité – Réconciliation ; Dialogue – Justice – Réconciliation ; justice et paix, etc. ». où les belligérants, les bourreaux et les victimes sont invités à l'aveu, à la vérité et au pardon pour un revivreensemble. Mais dans l'espace d'un processus de réconciliation engagé à travers desdites commissions, les ballets de confessions aussi bien que les sentiments de victimisation se succèdent avant à l'arrière fond l'amnistie pour les bourreaux et l'octroi du pardon de la partie des victimes. Cela, parait peu convainquant pour la raison que ces commissions sont en partie majeure installées par les vainqueurs du moment. Dans une certaine Afrique surtout, ces derniers (les vainqueurs) sont aidés par des alliés ayant atteint de hauts niveaux. Il s'agit alors de processus où la paix est provisoire et se poursuit au bout de la force ; et où les bourreaux sont toujours les autres. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate, revise, and extend the Informed Consent Ontology (ICO) for expressing clinical permissions, including reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data. This study followed a formative evaluation design and used a bottom-up modeling approach. Data were collected from the literature on US federal regulations and a study of clinical consent forms. Eleven federal regulations and fifteen permission-sentences from clinical consent forms were iteratively modeled to identify entities and their relationships, followed by community (...) reflection and negotiation based on a series of predetermined evaluation questions. ICO included fifty-two classes and twelve object properties necessary when modeling, demonstrating appropriateness of extending ICO for the clinical domain. Twenty-six additional classes were imported into ICO from other ontologies, and twelve new classes were recommended for development. This work addresses a critical gap in formally representing permissions clinical permissions, including reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data. It makes missing content available to the OBO Foundry, enabling use alongside other widely-adopted biomedical ontologies. ICO serves as a machine-interpretable and interoperable tool for responsible reuse of residual clinical biospecimens and health data at scale. (shrink)

The extinct human relatives known as Neanderthals have long been described as brutish and dumb. This conception is often traced to paleontologist Marcellin Boule, who published a detailed analysis on a Neanderthal skeleton in the early twentieth century. The conventional historical narrative claims that Boule made an error in his analysis, causing the Neanderthals to be considered brutish. This essay challenges the narrative of “Boule’s error,” arguing instead that the brutish Neanderthal concept originated much earlier in the history of (...) Neanderthal research and was, in fact, an invention of the earliest analyses of the first specimen recognized as a Neanderthal in the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that temporally relocating this conception of Neanderthals allows for a better understanding of the interconnected nature of the study of fossil humans and the science of living human races during the nineteenth century. This new view of the brutish Neanderthal sheds light on the earliest phases of the science that became paleoanthropology, while examining the racial, cultural, and political attitudes about race and extinction that accompanied the science at that time. By inspecting the ways in which the Neanderthals’ image was a product of a particular time and place, we gain a perspective that provides a new basis for thinking about the conceptions of hominin fossil species. (shrink)

The following is an essay review of Paul Needham's translation of Pierre Duhem's Lemixte et la combinaison chimique and a numberof other essays. In this review we describe theintent and general features of Le mixte and try to place it in the larger context of Duhem'sprogram for energetics. The long essay (Essay3) opposing Marcellin Berthelot'sthermochemistry is singled out for detailedcommentary, since it gives Duhem's reasons forendorsing Josiah Willard Gibbs's chemicalstatics. We argue that a chemical mechanics ofa Gibbsian sort, defended (...) in Le mixte and otheressays in this volume, was the inspiration for,and basis of, Duhem's energetics. Needham'swelcome translations help an English-languageaudience to better understand the basiccontours of Duhem's important, if ultimatelymisguided, project. We conclude with somecomments on the difficulties in translatingDuhem and on the quality of the translationsNeedham has provided. (shrink)

During the first decades of the 20th century, many anthropologists who had previously adhered to a linear view of human evolution, from an ape via Pithecanthropus erectus and Neanderthal to modern humans, began to change their outlook. A shift towards a branching model of human evolution began to take hold. Among the scientific factors motivating this trend was the insight that mammalian evolution in general was best represented by a branching tree, rather than by a straight line, and that several (...) new fossil hominids were discovered that differed significantly in their morphology but seemed to date from about the same period. The ideological and practical implications of imperialism and WWI have also been identified as formative of the new evolutionary scenarios in which racial conflict played a crucial role. The paper will illustrate this general shift in anthropological theory for one particular scientist, William Sollas. Sollas achieved a synthesis of human morphological and cultural evolution in what I will refer to as an imperialist model. In this theoretical framework, migration, conflict, and replacement became the main mechanisms for progress spurred by 'nature's tyrant,' natural selection. (shrink)

Parent pauvre de la formation polytechnicienne à l’époque de Poincaré, la chimie resta en dehors des centres d’intérêt du savant malgré l’importance sociale qu’elle acquit à la fin du xixe siècle. Le mathématicien, physicien et philosophie y fut confronté assez fortuitement en 1907 comme président de la Commission scientifique d’étude des poudres de guerre créée après l’explosion du cuirassé Iéna car Marcellin Berthelot, qui avait été pressenti comme éminent spécialiste des poudres et explosifs mourut dans l’intervalle. Dans un contexte (...) international tendu entre la France et l’Allemagne depuis l’annexion de l’Alsace-Moselle en 1871 et alors que la crise marocaine relança l’esprit de revanche, cet accident catastrophique porta un rude coup à la confiance du pays dans ses moyens de défense. Le gouvernement jugea alors que seul Poincaré avait l’autorité scientifique nécessaire pour rassurer l’opinion publique sur la sécurité des poudres sans fumée issues de l’industrie chimique inventées par son camarade de promotion Paul Vieille et maintenir l’ennemi à distance. Les archives de la Commission et la correspondance administrative de Poincaré témoignent de son investissement. Sa correspondance personnelle avec Henry Le Chatelier, autre ingénieur X-Mines spécialiste des poudres et explosifs, permet de mieux cerner son appréhension des problèmes complexes posés par les nouvelles poudres et de dévoiler sa stratégie pour contourner les blocages institutionnels dus à la rivalité entre le service producteur des Poudres et salpêtres et les services consommateurs de l’Artillerie et la Marine et aux attaques contre le monopole des poudres de la part des industriels et de leurs partisans au Parlement. (shrink)

El centenario del fallecimiento del geólogo Eduard Suess el 26 de abril 1914 es la ocasión para indagar en el conocimiento que Teilhard tenía de las ideas innovadoras en Ciencias de la Tierra y la aceptación por su parte de aquellos paradigmas que contribuyeron a su trabajo como geólogo en China durante veinte años. En el año 1921, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin publica en Études, la revista de los jesuitas franceses, un artículo al que titula como «La faz de la (...) Tierra». El autor pretende informar a los lectores de las ideas más sobresalientes de uno de los grandes geólogos de finales del siglo xix y de inicio del siglo xx: Eduard Suess. Esta indagación ofrece la posibilidad de reflexionar filosóficamente sobre la epistemología oculta en Teilhard de Chardin y que contribuye de modo decisivo en la construcción de su gran síntesis. Por otra parte, hace cien años, entre 1912 y 1914, el joven Pierre Teilhard de Chardin dedica su tiempo al estudio de la prehistoria en París bajo la dirección de Marcellin Boule en el Instituto de Paleontología humana, incorporado al Museo de Historia Natural. Teilhard descubre que el conocimiento de las raíces humanas podría ser posible gracias a la emergencia de una disciplina nueva: la prehistoria. Entusiasmado con este descubrimiento, publica en 1913 un artículo en la revista de los jesuitas franceses, Études, en el que justifica el carácter científico de la prehistoria y su potencialidad para llegar a conocer nuestros orígenes humanos. (shrink)

Au début du XXe siècle, si la Chine demeure encore largement une terre vierge pour les explorateurs occidentaux, elle fascine également les chercheurs. Qu'ils soient géographes, géologues, paléontologues ou préhistoriens, tous savent que de formidables découvertes restent à y faire. Suédois et Américains font rapidement le voyage vers l'Empire du Milieu, mais ce sont des Français qui, sur le terrain, vont écrire les plus belles pages de la découverte du Paléolithique de Chine, des premières industries lithiques à l'étude du gisement (...) de l'Homme de Pékin. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin est l'un d'entre eux, qui durant près de vingt ans va parcourir des milliers de kilomètres dans les campagnes et les déserts de Chine et de Mongolie, à la recherche des premiers hommes. Entre 1923 et 1940, il maintient une relation épistolaire avec son port d'attache à Paris, le Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, en la personne de son professeur de paléontologie, Marcellin Boule. Au fil de quatre-vingt-neuf lettres, interrompues par seulement une dizaine de retours vers l'Occident et par sa participation à la fameuse Croisière Jaune Citroën, il décrit, sur fond de rumeurs révolutionnaires évoquées ici et là, ses explorations et ses découvertes à son " Maître et ami ", de vingt ans son aîné, et à qui il voue une dévotion reconnaissante et quasi filiale - " [...] celui à qui je dois tout dans ma carrière scientifique [...] ". Au-delà de sa valeur scientifique, chacune de ces lettres - qu'elle soit écrite du désert de Gobi, des rives du Fleuve Jaune ou à bord d'un véhicule de la Croisière Jaune - est le reflet d'une formidable épopée. Véritable " Journal de bord " d'un savant, cette correspondance se révèle, tout autant que l'écho d'une extraordinaire aventure humaine, la découverte d'un pays prodigieux. (shrink)

The following is an essay review of Paul Needham's translation of Pierre Duhem's Lemixte et la combinaison chimique and a numberof other essays. In this review we describe theintent and general features of Le mixte and try to place it in the larger context of Duhem'sprogram for energetics. The long essay (Essay3) opposing Marcellin Berthelot'sthermochemistry is singled out for detailedcommentary, since it gives Duhem's reasons forendorsing Josiah Willard Gibbs's chemicalstatics. We argue that a chemical mechanics ofa Gibbsian sort, defended (...) in Le mixte and otheressays in this volume, was the inspiration for,and basis of, Duhem's energetics. Needham'swelcome translations help an English-languageaudience to better understand the basiccontours of Duhem's important, if ultimatelymisguided, project. We conclude with somecomments on the difficulties in translatingDuhem and on the quality of the translationsNeedham has provided. (shrink)