The paper presents two useful extensions of the incremental SVM in the context of online learning. An online support vector data description algorithm enables application of the online paradigm to unsupervised learning. Furthermore, online learning can be used in the large-scale classification problems to limit the memory requirements for storage of the kernel matrix. The proposed algorithms ar...

Consider the following three cases: A paediatrician is called to the delivery room as a woman is about to give birth to a premature baby at 24 weeks. The mother and father request that the baby not be resuscitated. The baby weighs 760 grams and has an Apgar score of 6 at 1 min. The paediatrician ignores the parents’ requests for comfort care and intubates the baby. A full-term baby with Trisomy...

On 2 July 2015, the killing of a lion nicknamed "Cecil" prompted the largest global reaction in the history of wildlife conservation. In response to this, it is propitious to consider the ways in which this moment can be developed into a financial movement to transform the conservation of species such as the lion that hold cultural significance and sentiment but whose numbers in the wild are dw...

From a liberationist, feminist, and Catholic point of view, this article attempts to understand the decision of abortion. People are constantly testing their principles and values against the question of abortion. Advances in technology, the rise of communitarianism and the rejection of individualism, and the commodification of children are factors in the way in which the abortion debate is bei...

We were aware that publications in the clinical ethics literature suggested that conscience and compassion were problematic concepts in health care for clinicians.1,2 While these address compassion and conscience, they are possibly interpreted as clinicians ought not to make ethical judgements, or enact human values beyond those strictly stipulated by the job. Personal conscience (at least with...

THE SUPEREGO first came to my attention when I did not know what to call it. The occasion was a relatively harmless instance: an Army officer and his wife, who were by virtue of their military status dispensed from Friday abstinence, told me how it had taken them almost a year to be able to eat meat on Friday without feeling somewhat guilty about this —in spite of their dispensation. But anothe...

OBJECTIVES To compare moral development and psychopathological interference with conscience functioning (PI) among adolescents exposed to different degrees of earthquake-related trauma and to investigate the relationship of moral development and PI to exposure to trauma, severity of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, postearthquake adversities, and extent of loss of nuclear family m...

Introduction With the first glance on an object, the human observer is able to say if its sight is pleasant for him or not. He makes then neither more nor less than one classification of the perception of this object according to the feeling gotten and felt in two categories: ”I like” or ”I don’t like”. Such an aptitude to classify the visual feelings is indisputably to put in relation with the...