Contraception and the Contralife Will

Father Connor received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Lateran University in Rome. He points out that “Intending the good is a subjective operation deriving from an intellectual objective perception of being. The being that I perceive is the esse of my personal self which is thrusting to fulfillment through acts. The person and his/her acts are the grounding of what I mean by “good” or “bad”. The evil of contraception, then is not an intention against the life of a future child, but the nonconformity of the will with the double structure (love-making/life giving) of the coital act which is a manifestation of the intercoursing process. “The evident weakness of the contralife will shows in the inability to apply it uniformly throughout sexual morality. For example, in in vitro fertilization, the will is pro-life, yet the “manufacturing” of the child is evil. They then have recourse to other principles ad hoc.” </jats:p

Internet authentication based on personal history - a feasibility test

On the Internet, there is an uneasy tension between the security and usability of authentication mechanisms. An easy three-part classification is: 'something you know' (e.g. password); 'something you hold' (e.g. device holding digital certificate), and 'who you are' (e.g. biometric assessment) [9]. Each of these has well-known problems; passwords are written down, guessable, or forgotten; devices are lost or stolen, and biometric assays alienate users. We have investigated a novel strategy of querying the user based on their personal history (a 'Rip van Winkle' approach.) The sum of this information is large and well-known only to the individual. The volume is too large for impostors to learn; our observation is that, in the emerging environment, it is possible to collate and automatically query such information as an authentication test. We report a proof of concept study based on the automatic generation of questions from electronic 'calendar' information. While users were, surprisingly, unable to answer randomly generated questions any better than impostors, if questions are categorized according to appropriate psychological parameters then significant results can be obtained. We thus demonstrate the potential viability of this concept

Magnetic compressibility and ion-temperature-gradient-driven microinstabilities in magnetically confined plasmas

The electromagnetic theory of the strongly driven ion-temperature-gradient (ITG) instability in magnetically confined toroidal plasmas is developed. Stabilizing and destabilizing effects are identified, and a critical $\beta_{e}$ (the ratio of the electron to magnetic pressure) for stabilization of the toroidal branch of the mode is calculated for magnetic equilibria independent of the coordinate along the magnetic field. Its scaling is $\beta_{e}\sim L_{Te}/R,$ where $L_{Te}$ is the characteristic electron temperature gradient length, and $R$ the major radius of the torus. We conjecture that a fast particle population can cause a similar stabilization due to its contribution to the equilibrium pressure gradient. For sheared equilibria, the boundary of marginal stability of the electromagnetic correction to the electrostatic mode is also given. For a general magnetic equilibrium, we find a critical length (for electromagnetic stabilization) of the extent of the unfavourable curvature along the magnetic field. This is a decreasing function of the local magnetic shear

Minimizing the average distance to a closest leaf in a phylogenetic tree

When performing an analysis on a collection of molecular sequences, it can be convenient to reduce the number of sequences under consideration while maintaining some characteristic of a larger collection of sequences. For example, one may wish to select a subset of high-quality sequences that represent the diversity of a larger collection of sequences. One may also wish to specialize a large database of characterized "reference sequences" to a smaller subset that is as close as possible on average to a collection of "query sequences" of interest. Such a representative subset can be useful whenever one wishes to find a set of reference sequences that is appropriate to use for comparative analysis of environmentally-derived sequences, such as for selecting "reference tree" sequences for phylogenetic placement of metagenomic reads. In this paper we formalize these problems in terms of the minimization of the Average Distance to the Closest Leaf (ADCL) and investigate algorithms to perform the relevant minimization. We show that the greedy algorithm is not effective, show that a variant of the Partitioning Among Medoids (PAM) heuristic gets stuck in local minima, and develop an exact dynamic programming approach. Using this exact program we note that the performance of PAM appears to be good for simulated trees, and is faster than the exact algorithm for small trees. On the other hand, the exact program gives solutions for all numbers of leaves less than or equal to the given desired number of leaves, while PAM only gives a solution for the pre-specified number of leaves. Via application to real data, we show that the ADCL criterion chooses chimeric sequences less often than random subsets, while the maximization of phylogenetic diversity chooses them more often than random. These algorithms have been implemented in publicly available software.Comment: Please contact us with any comments or questions

Wind-tunnel acoustic results of two rotor models with several tip designs

A three-phase research program has been undertaken to study the acoustic signals due to the aerodynamic interaction of rotorcraft main rotors and tail rotors. During the first phase, two different rotor models with several interchangeable tips were tested in the Langley 4- by 7-Meter Tunnel on the U.S. Army rotor model system. An extensive acoustic data base was acquired, with special emphasis on blade-vortex interaction (BVI) noise. The details of the experimental procedure, acoustic data acquisition, and reduction are documented. The overall sound pressure level (OASPL) of the high-twist rotor systems is relatively insensitive to flight speed but generally increases with rotor tip-path-plane angle. The OASPL of the high-twist rotors is dominated by acoustic energy in the low-frequency harmonics. The OASPL of the low-twist rotor systems shows more dependence on flight speed than the high-twist rotors, in addition to being quite sensitive to tip-path-plane angle. An integrated band-limited sound pressure level, limited by 500 to 3000 Hz, is a useful metric to quantify the occurrence of BVI noise. The OASPL of the low-twist rotors is strongly influenced by the band-limited sound levels, indicating that the blade-vortex impulsive noise is a dominant noise source for this rotor design. The midfrequency acoustic levels for both rotors show a very strong dependence on rotor tip-path-plane angle. The tip-path-plane angle at which the maximum midfrequency sound level occurs consistently decreases with increasing flight speed. The maximum midfrequency sound level measured at a given location is constant regardless of the flight speed

Comparative evaluation of twenty pilot workload assessment measure using a psychomotor task in a moving base aircraft simulator

A comparison of the sensitivity and intrusion of twenty pilot workload assessment techniques was conducted using a psychomotor loading task in a three degree of freedom moving base aircraft simulator. The twenty techniques included opinion measures, spare mental capacity measures, physiological measures, eye behavior measures, and primary task performance measures. The primary task was an instrument landing system (ILS) approach and landing. All measures were recorded between the outer marker and the middle marker on the approach. Three levels (low, medium, and high) of psychomotor load were obtained by the combined manipulation of windgust disturbance level and simulated aircraft pitch stability. Six instrument rated pilots participated in four seasons lasting approximately three hours each