The usage of new and progressive technologies brings with it new types of security threats and security incidents. Their number is constantly growing.The current trend is to move from reactive to proactive activities. For this reason, the organization should be aware of the current security situation, including the forecasting of the future state. The main goal of organizations, especially their security operation centres, is to handle events, identify potential security incidents, and effectively forecast the network security situation awareness (NSSA). In (...) this paper, we focus on increasing the efficiency of utilization of this part of cybersecurity. The paper’s main aim is to compare selected statistical models and models based on neural networks to find out which models are more suitable for NSSA forecasting. Based on the analysis provided in this paper, neural network methods prove a more accurate alternative than classical statistical prediction models in NSSA forecasting. In addition, the paper analyses the selection criteria and suitability of time series, which do not only reflect information about the total number of security events but represent a category of security event (e.g. recon scanning), port or protocol. (shrink)

Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the mechanism for emotion induction, a (...) cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction. (shrink)

Democratic school systems are expected to equip students with the knowledge, abilities, and attitudes needed for life as citizens, particularly through social science education. Disciplinary knowledge, derived from the academic counterparts to school subjects, is essential in developing these skills. However, research has also emphasized the importance of life-world perspectives, where students’ experiences are included and taken seriously in teaching. This study suggests that the theory of (civic) narrative competence can function as a bridge between the disciplinary domain and the (...) life-world domain in its focus on how students’ civic reasoning can be developed through teaching. The article uses narrative theory to explore how the students’ civic narratives changed and became more nuanced after a teaching segment focusing on social and political trust. In the article, we demonstrate how the students’ personal experiences colored their interpretations and orientations before the teaching segment and how their civic narratives were developed through the implemented teaching, which provided them with concepts, a theoretical model, and empirical examples. We found that the students did not discard previous perceptions after the teaching segment, but integrated them into their new knowledge and orientations, thus integrating the life-world and disciplinary domains. (shrink)

In discourses on digitization and the data economy, it is often claimed that data subjects shall beownersof their data. In this paper, we provide a problem diagnosis for such calls fordata ownership: a large variety of demands are discussed under this heading. It thus becomes challenging to specify what—if anything—unites them. We identify four conceptual dimensions of calls for data ownership and argue that these help to systematize and to compare different positions. In view of this pluralism of data ownership (...) claims, we introduce, spell out and defend a constructive interpretative proposal: claims for data ownership are charitably understood as attempts to call for theredistributionof material resources and the socio-culturalrecognitionof data subjects. We argue that as one consequence of this reading, it misses the point to reject claims for data ownership on the grounds that property in data does not exist. Instead, data ownership brings to attention a claim to renegotiate such aspects of thestatus quo. (shrink)

This paper examines three proposals on the difference between the complex and the simple view about personal identity: Parfit’s original introduction of the distinction, Gasser and Stefan’s definition, and Noonan’s recent proposal. I argue that the first two classify the paradigm cases of simplicity as complex, while Noonan’s proposal makes simplicity and complexity turn on features whose relevance for the distinction is questionable. Given these difficulties, I examine why we should be interested in whether a position is complex or simple. (...) I describe two purposes of having a distinction, and show that extant accounts of the complex versus simple distinction fail to serve these. I argue that unless we find a satisfying account of the difference between complex and simple positions, we should not frame discourses on personal identity in these terms. (shrink)

A successor to the acclaimed 'Music and Emotion', The Handbook of Music and Emotion provides comprehensive coverage of the field, in all its breadth and depth. As well as summarizing what is currently known about music and emotion, it will also stimulate further research in promising directions that have been little studied.

Xenotransplantation is any transplantation, implantation, or infusion of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or human bodily fluids, cells, tissues, or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues, or organs into a human recipient. Most scientists agree that clinical xenotransplantation should not be performed in the absence of accompanying public health safeguards The science upon which that consensus is based has been extensively described in the literature. By and large (...) the most compelling reason for public health safeguards is the possible introduction of new infectious agents into the human life cycle as a result of xenotransplantation.The most frequent source of new infectious diseases in human populations is the transfer of agents, such as viruses, bacteria, or prions, from animals to man. Human diseases and infectious agents that are thought to have originated from animals include influenza, rabies, malaria, lassa fever, lyme disease, AIDS, yellow fever, tuberculosis, the human t-cell lymphotropic virus, the herpes B virus, the hantavirus, and even the bubonic and pneumonic plagues. (shrink)

Xenotransplantation is any transplantation, implantation, or infusion of either live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or human bodily fluids, cells, tissues, or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues, or organs into a human recipient. Most scientists agree that clinical xenotransplantation should not be performed in the absence of accompanying public health safeguards The science upon which that consensus is based has been extensively described in the literature. By and large (...) the most compelling reason for public health safeguards is the possible introduction of new infectious agents into the human life cycle as a result of xenotransplantation.The most frequent source of new infectious diseases in human populations is the transfer of agents, such as viruses, bacteria, or prions, from animals to man. Human diseases and infectious agents that are thought to have originated from animals include influenza, rabies, malaria, lassa fever, lyme disease, AIDS, yellow fever, tuberculosis, the human t-cell lymphotropic virus, the herpes B virus, the hantavirus, and even the bubonic and pneumonic plagues. (shrink)

Culinary products have culinary value. That is, they have value qua culinary products. However, what is the nature of culinary value and what elements determine it? In the light of the central and universal role that culinary products play in our lives, offering a philosophical analysis of culinary value is a matter of interest. This paper attempts to do just this. It develops three different possible models of culinary value, two rather restricted ones and a third more encompassing one, rejects (...) the first two, and defends the third one. (shrink)

Attention serves to represent selectively relevant information at the expense of competing and irrelevant information, but the mechanisms and effects of attention are not unitary. The great variety of methods and techniques used to study automaticity and attention for facial expressions suggests that the time should now be ready for a better breaking down of the concepts of automaticity and attention into elementary constituents that are more tractable to investigations in cognitive neuroscience. This article reviews both the behavioral and neuroimaging (...) literature on the automatic perception of facial expressions of emotion in healthy volunteers and patients with brain damage. It focuses on aspects of automaticity in face perception that relate to task goals, attentional control, and conscious awareness. Behavioral and neuroimaging findings converge to support some degree of automaticity in processing facial expressions and is likely to reflect distinct components that should be better disentangled at both the behavioral and neural level. (shrink)

Interreligious dialogue and conversion are two contentious foci for understanding how religion operates. An interpretation of George Lindbeck serves as a starting point for discussion in this paper. The dominant reading is that Lindbeck claims that traditions absorb the world. Religious traditions are isolated, and the one with a greater capacity to assimilate others’ concerns emerges the strongest – implying what is called exclusivism. My proposal is that a different reading of Lindbeck is possible; I am not so much questioning (...) Lindbeck as highlighting another aspect of his oeuvre. If grammar, framework and structure – and not propositional first-order ontological contents – are given first place, dialogue and conversion appear differently. Questions must be raised, however; isn't it true that there is always some content and substance – even if hidden or disguised? (shrink)

Kalisch et al. discuss the causal process underlying stress in terms of a multidimensional goal-appraisal process, but there are several mechanisms at various levels of the brain that use different types of information to guide behavior. Depending on the mechanism, the characteristics of the process are different. Hence, both research and prevention must deal with appraisal in mechanism-specific ways.

It is commonly assumed that there are differences in physicians’ and caregivers’ ethical attitudes towards clinical situations. The assumption is that the difference is driven by different values, views and judgements in specific situations. At Aalborg University Hospital, Denmark, we aimed to investigate these assumptions by conducting a large quantitative study. The study design, based on the Factorial Survey Method, was a carefully constructed survey with 50 questions designed to test which factors influenced the respondents’ ethical reasoning. The factors were (...) clustered into three categories of ethical reasoning and values. The categories were formulated in terms of easily recognizable ethical positions: consequential ethics, deontological ethics and relational ethics. Based on 2129 respondents, we found significant support for the assumption of differences between physicians and caregivers. The group of caregivers favoured the relational ethics view in clinical ethical situations, and the group of ph... (shrink)

I argue that Paul Ricœur displaces and decentres established theodicies; the issue of evil is perceived as a practical rather than a speculative matter. It is the view of evil as a productive aporia, which suggests that evil provokes action and obliges human beings to take a stand ethically and politically. Hence, the topic of evil is not necessarily about putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The central problem of evil has less to do with logic than with resignation, inertia, despair (...) and meaninglessness. (shrink)

A somewhat prominent view in the literature is that language provides opportunity to program the brain with ‘cognitive gadgets’, or ‘virtual machines’. Here, I explore the possibility that thinking itself – internal symbolic responses to stimuli that are either intrinsic or extrinsic, and computational procedures that operate on these internal symbolic representations – is such a software product rather than just an emergent phenomenon of the brain’s hardware being ‘complex enough’, or the brain processing information in a manner that is (...) ‘integrated enough’. I also present a testable hypothesis that would indicate the presence of such a thought-gadget, and briefly overview some evolutionary pre-requisites for its existence. Further, I explore some consequences the existence of such a gadget would entail for our understanding of consciousness. The nature of the gadget is left unspecified as the article is not a blueprint for the thinking gadget, but an argument in favor of its existence. (shrink)

This paper examines three proposals on the difference between the complex and the simple view about personal identity: Parfit’s original introduction of the distinction, Gasser and Stefan’s definition, and Noonan’s recent proposal. I argue that the first two classify the paradigm cases of simplicity as complex, while Noonan’s proposal makes simplicity and complexity turn on features whose relevance for the distinction is questionable. Given these difficulties, I examine why we should be interested in whether a position is complex or simple. (...) I describe two purposes of having a distinction, and show that extant accounts of the complex versus simple distinction fail to serve these. I argue that unless we find a satisfying account of the difference between complex and simple positions, we should not frame discourses on personal identity in these terms. (shrink)

This review provides an overview of the ethics of extinctions with a focus on the Western analytical environmental ethics literature. It thereby gives special attention to the possible philosophical grounds for Michael Soulé’s assertion that the untimely ‘extinction of populations and species is bad’. Illustrating such debates in environmental ethics, the guiding question for this review concerns why – or when – anthropogenic extinctions are bad or wrong, which also includes the question of when that might not be the case (...) (i.e. which extinctions are even desirable). After providing an explanation of the disciplinary perspective taken (section “Introduction”), the concept of extinction and its history within that literature are introduced (section “Understanding extinction”). Then, in section “Why (or when) might anthropogenic extinctions be morally problematic?”, different reasons for why anthropogenic extinctions might be morally problematic are presented based on the loss of species’ value, harm to nonhuman individuals, the loss of valuable biological variety and duties to future generations. This section concludes by also considering cases where anthropogenic extinctions might be justified. Section “How to respond to extinctions?” then addresses a selection of topics concerning risks and de-extinction technologies. Finally, the section on “Extinction studies” introduces other viewpoints on the ethics of extinction from the extinction studies literature, followed by the “Conclusion”. (shrink)

Interreligious dialogue and conversion are two contentious foci for understanding how religion operates. An interpretation of George Lindbeck serves as a starting point for discussion in this paper. The dominant reading is that Lindbeck claims that traditions absorb the world. Religious traditions are isolated, and the one with a greater capacity to assimilate others’ concerns emerges the strongest – implying what is called exclusivism. My proposal is that a different reading of Lindbeck is possible; I am not so much questioning (...) Lindbeck as highlighting another aspect of his oeuvre. If grammar, framework and structure – and not propositional first‐order ontological contents – are given first place, dialogue and conversion appear differently. Questions must be raised, however; isn't it true that there is always some content and substance – even if hidden or disguised? (shrink)

Kathleen Stock has recently argued that Gregory Currie’s account of fiction is beset by two patchwork puzzles. According to the first, Currie’s account entails that works of fiction end up being implausible heterogenous complexes of utterances that furnish a fictional world and utterances that aim at representing the actual world. According to the second, competent engagement with a fiction can implausibly result in switching from one mental attitude to another – namely, belief and make-belief. In this paper, I argue for (...) two main claims. First, that a few alterations to Currie’s account make it immune to Stock’s puzzles. And, second, that such a modified account presents clear advantages over the alternative one offered by Stock. (shrink)

This study explored a dimensional approach to vocal expression of emotion. Actors vocally portrayed emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) with weak and strong emotion intensity. Listeners (30 university students and 6 speech experts) rated each portrayal on four emotion dimensions (activation, valence, potency, emotion intensity). The portrayals were also acoustically analysed with respect to 20 vocal cues (e.g., speech rate, voice intensity, fundamental frequency, spectral energy distribution). The results showed that: (a) there were distinct patterns of ratings of activation, (...) valence, and potency for the different emotions; (b) all four emotion dimensions were correlated with several vocal cues; (c) listeners' ratings could be successfully predicted from the vocal cues for all dimensions except valence; and (d) the intensity dimension was positively correlated with the activation dimension in the listeners' ratings. (shrink)

It can be said that literary texts do not have any obligation to reality, and that literature destabilises our relation to normal use of words and to established perspectives. Literature is in relation with something that cannot be explained or conceptualised. In this respect literature is close to religion. Literature invites us to believe in something that is unreal and beyond ordinary life. In literature we are confronted with something different and hence ordinary meaning of words, normal understandings and every (...) clear defintion of concepts are shaken and brought to the field of uncertainties. In this particular respect, literture is very close to religion. At least that is so in Elisabeth Løvlie’s reading of Jacques Derrida and literature. This could be seen as in radical contrast to philosophy aiming at clarity and a rigorous use of concepts. I argue that many of the characteristics of literature that Løvlie underlines, also apply to philosophical writing. Concurrently, I argue that also literature indeed is connected to reality and indeed wants to say something about our world. I contend that philosophy can benefit from a deeper understanding of the parallels and similarities between philosophical writing and literature. (shrink)

Can culinary items bear heritage value? That is, can culinary items bear the kind of universal value shared by, say, a paleolithic site and the Hiroshima Peace.

Artificial intelligence is currently changing many areas of society. Especially in health, where critical decisions are made, questions of control must be renegotiated: who is in control when an automated system makes clinically relevant decisions? Increasingly, the concept of meaningful human control (MHC) is being invoked for this purpose. However, it is unclear exactly how this concept is to be understood in health. Through a systematic review, we present the current state of the concept of MHC in health. The results (...) show that there is not yet a robust MHC concept for health. We propose a broader understanding of MHC along three strands of action: enabling, exercising and evaluating control. Taking into account these strands of action and the established rules and processes in the different health sectors, the MHC concept needs to be further developed to avoid falling into two gaps, which we have described as theoretical and labelling gaps. (shrink)

I support the music and social bonding framework, but submit that the authors' predictions lack discriminative power, and that they do not engage sufficiently with the emotion mechanisms that mediate between musical features and social bonding. I elaborate on how various mechanisms may contribute, in unique ways, to social bonding at various levels to help account for the socio-emotional effects of music.

To facilitate recruitment of conscript cyber soldiers in Sweden, the Cyber Test for Future Soldiers was developed as a complement to the existing generic enrolment test. Consisting of several parts, CTFS measures different aspects of computer-related knowledge and cognitive abilities that we believe are of particular relevance to cyber security. This article describes the evaluation regarding CTFS’s validity and reliability based on data from 62 conscripts that took the test and the 27 selected conscripts finishing the training 1 year later. (...) Reliability was predicted through internal consistency and test–retest measures. Cronbach’s alpha for CTFS ranges from 0.79 to 0.86 whereas the test–retest reliability is 0.60. Evidence regarding validity was collected based on test content and internal structure. Convergent, discriminant, and predictive evidence are also presented. Perhaps most importantly, CTFS could predict the cyber soldiers’ performance during their training and added incremental validity to I-prov 2000. When adjusted for range restriction, I-prov 2000 predicted 20% of the variation in course score, while 34% of the variance was explained when CTFS was used in conjunction with I-prov 2000. The results show that CTFS already in its first version is adding value for the Swedish Armed Forces. (shrink)

In fluid-dynamics, several motivating factors can spur new lines of inquiry. Beginning with considerations on the exchange of momentum that takes place at small scales inside a fluid, and after introducing a generalized categorization of different types of fluid media, Understanding the Nature of Science presents a critical analysis of contemporary issues which are being debated in the scientific community. Next, the authors present an evolutionary ecological approach in which human knowledge is studied as the ecology of interacting data-information-knowledge systems (...) developing in time as a consequence of incessant learning from interactions with the environment on various levels of organization. The concluding section suggests the use of problem-based learning to promote conceptual changes from the "Nature of Science" naive views, usually found in students, to more informed views. (shrink)

Background Big data and AI applications now play a major role in many health contexts. Much research has already been conducted on ethical and social challenges associated with these technologies. Likewise, there are already some studies that investigate empirically which values and attitudes play a role in connection with their design and implementation. What is still in its infancy, however, is the comparative investigation of the perspectives of different stakeholders. Methods To explore this issue in a multi-faceted manner, we conducted (...) semi-structured interviews as well as focus group discussions with patients and clinicians. These empirical methods were used to gather interviewee’s views on the opportunities and challenges of medical AI and other data-intensive applications. Results Different clinician and patient groups are exposed to medical AI to differing degrees. Interviewees expect and demand that the purposes of data processing accord with patient preferences, and that data are put to effective use to generate social value. One central result is the shared tendency of clinicians and patients to maintain individualistic ascriptions of responsibility for clinical outcomes. Conclusions Medical AI and the proliferation of data with import for health-related inferences shape and partially reconfigure stakeholder expectations of how these technologies relate to the decision-making of human agents. Intuitions about individual responsibility for clinical outcomes could eventually be disrupted by the increasing sophistication of data-intensive and AI-driven clinical tools. Besides individual responsibility, systemic governance will be key to promote alignment with stakeholder expectations in AI-driven and data-intensive health settings. (shrink)

This book examines the role of ethics and philosophy in biodiversity conservation. The objective of this book is two-fold: on the one hand it offers a detailed and systematic account of central normative concepts often used, but rarely explicated nor justified, within conservation biology. Such concepts include 'values', 'rights', and 'duties'. The second objective is to emphasize to environmental philosophers and applied ethicists the many interesting decision-making challenges of biodiversity conservation. The book argues that a nuanced account of instrumental values (...) provides a powerful tool for reasoning about the values of biodiversity. It also scrutinizes relational values, the concept of rights of nature, and risk, and show how moral philosophy proves indispensable for these concepts. Consequently, it engages with recent suggestions on normative aspects of biodiversity conservation, and show the need for moral philosophy in biodiversity conservation. The overriding aim of this book is to provide conservation biologists and policy-makers with a systematic overview of concepts and assessments of the reasons for reaching prescriptive conclusions about biodiversity conservation. This will prove instrumental in clarifying the role of applied ethics and a refined understanding of the tools it can provide. This title will be of interest to students and scholars of conservation biology, conservation policy, environmental ethics and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

In both academic literature and the media, financial conflicts of interest in human subjects research have come center-stage. The cover of a recent edition of Time magazine features a research subject in a cage with the caption human guinea pigs, signifying perhaps that human research subjects are no more protected from research abuses than are laboratory animals. That magazine issue highlights three well-publicized cases of human subjects research violations that occurred at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Pennsylvania, and (...) Johns Hopkins University.At St. John Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a study that was co-sponsored by the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center investigated an experimental vaccine for malignant melanoma. In that case, the chair of the university's institutional review board — the committee within each medical institution charged with ethics review of human research projects undertaken at that institution — and the dean of the University's College of Medicine allegedly concealed from both the IRB and the United States Food and Drug Administration a report by an outside consulting firm that had found severe deficiencies with the melanoma vaccine study being conducted at the medical center. (shrink)

Do recipes and their instances, i.e. dishes, have any representational power? This is vexed question in the philosophy of food. In this paper, I take a fresh look on the issue by means of a theory of recipes. I argue that once a certain conception of recipes is in place, complemented by a certain conception of traditions, it becomes plausible that certain recipes, traditional ones, and their instances, traditional dishes, can be said to represent past living conditions. Hence, at some (...) some food items experiences could be said to genuinely possess a representational dimension. (shrink)

Making good decisions in extremely complex and difficult processes and situations has always been both a key task as well as a challenge in the clinic and has led to a large amount of clinical, legal and ethical routines, protocols and reflections in order to guarantee fair, participatory and up-to-date pathways for clinical decision-making. Nevertheless, the complexity of processes and physical phenomena, time as well as economic constraints and not least further endeavours as well as achievements in medicine and healthcare (...) continuously raise the need to evaluate and to improve clinical decision-making. This article scrutinises if and how clinical decision-making processes are challenged by the rise of so-called artificial intelligence-driven decision support systems (AI-DSS). In a first step, this article analyses how the rise of AI-DSS will affect and transform the modes of interaction between different agents in the clinic. In a second step, we point out how these changing modes of interaction also imply shifts in the conditions of trustworthiness, epistemic challenges regarding transparency, the underlying normative concepts of agency and its embedding into concrete contexts of deployment and, finally, the consequences for (possible) ascriptions of responsibility. Third, we draw first conclusions for further steps regarding a ‘meaningful human control’ of clinical AI-DSS. (shrink)

Instrumental values are often considered to be inferior to intrinsic values. One reason for this is that instrumental values are extrinsic and rely on two factors: (a) a means–end relationship that is (b) conducive to something of final or intrinsic value. In this paper, I will investigate the conditions under which bearers of instrumental value are given different value or owed different levels of respect. Such conditions include the number of means that are conducive to something of final or intrinsic (...) value as well as the form of causality that is implied. It will be suggested that different numbers and causal relations will imply different degrees of reverence or respect to the bearers of instrumental value. I will also critically investigate recent proposals such as relational values that allegedly go beyond the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic value. Drawing from this critical analysis, a nuanced picture of instrumental value will be provided. (shrink)