Amusement and Absolution: Transforming Narratives during Confession of Social Debts

During Okiek initiation in Kenya, the final ritual event before the climax of circumcision involves public "confession" by initiates of their "social debts." Confession is through an intermediary who questions initiates, then announces their wrongs to an assembled crowd. The questioner/announcer introduces formal transformations that recast the narrative and its interpretation. That recasting absolves initiates of their wrongs, amuses the listeners, and completes a ceremonial process that helps initiates succeed in the trial of circumcision and gradually distances them from their childhood lives.     

THE NON-IDENTITY PROBLEM AND GENETIC HARMS – THE CASE OF WRONGFUL HANDICAPS

The Human Genome Project will produce information permitting increasing opportunities to prevent genetically transmitted harms, most of which will be compatible with a life worth living, through avoiding conception or terminating a pregnancy. Failure to prevent these harms when it is possible for parents to do so without substantial burdens or costs to themselves or others are what J call "wrongful handicaps". Derek Parfit has developed a systematic difficulty for any such cases being wrongs — when the harm could be prevented only by preventing the existence of the individual who would have a worthwhile life even with the handicap, then bringing him into existence with the handicap does not make him worse off and so does not wrong him. I argue that a non "person-affecting" principle requiring the avoidance of suffering and limited opportunity correctly accounts for cases of wrongful handicaps without requiring that the individuals with the handicap have been made worse off and therefore wronged. It is an advantage, not a difficulty, of this account that it does not imply that the person with the handicap has been wronged or is a victim with a special moral complaint.     

The non-identity problem and genetic harms -- the case of wrongful handicaps

The Human Genome Project will produce information permitting increasing opportunities to prevent genetically transmitted harms, most of which will be compatible with a life worth living, through avoiding conception or terminating a pregnancy. Failure to prevent these harms when it is possible for parents to do so without substantial burdens or costs to themselves or others are what I call "wrongful handicaps". Derek Parfit has developed a systematic difficulty for any such cases being wrongs -- when the harm could be prevented only by preventing the existence of the individual who would have a worthwhile life even with the handicap, then bringing him into existence with the handicap does not make him worse off and so does not wrong him. I argue that a non "person-affecting" principle requiring the avoidance of suffering and limited opportunity correctly accounts for cases of wrongful handicaps without requiring that the individuals with the handicap have been made worse off and therefore wronged. It is an advantage, not a difficulty, of this account that it does not imply that the person with the handicap has been wronged or is a victim with a special moral complaint.     

Aging and Sensory Substitution in a Virtual Navigation Task

Virtual environments are becoming ubiquitous, and used in a variety of contexts–from entertainment to training and rehabilitation. Recently, technology for making them more accessible to blind or visually impaired users has been developed, by using sound to represent visual information. The ability of older individuals to interpret these cues has not yet been studied. In this experiment, we studied the effects of age and sensory modality (visual or auditory) on navigation through a virtual maze. We added a layer of complexity by conducting the experiment in a rotating room, in order to test the effect of the spatial bias induced by the rotation on performance. Results from 29 participants showed that with the auditory cues, it took participants a longer time to complete the mazes, they took a longer path length through the maze, they paused more, and had more collisions with the walls, compared to navigation with the visual cues. The older group took a longer time to complete the mazes, they paused more, and had more collisions with the walls, compared to the younger group. There was no effect of room rotation on the performance, nor were there any significant interactions among age, feedback modality and room rotation. We conclude that there is a decline in performance with age, and that while navigation with auditory cues is possible even at an old age, it presents more challenges than visual navigation.     

Parallel and interrelated neural systems underlying adaptive navigation

The ability to process in parallel multiple forms of sensoryinformation, and link sensory-sensory associations to behavior,presumably allows for the opportunistic use of the most reliableand predictive sensory modalities in diverse behavioral contexts.Evolutionary considerations indicate that such processing mayrepresent a fundamental operating principle underlying complexsensory associations and sensory-motor integration. Here, wesuggest that animal navigation is a particularly useful modelof such opportunistic use of sensory and motor information becauseit is possible to study directly the effects of memory on neuralsystem functions. First, comparative evidence for parallel processingacross multiple brain structures during navigation is providedfrom the literatures on fish and rodent navigation. Then, basedon neurophysiological evidence of coordinated, multiregionalprocessing, we provide a neurobiological explanation of learningand memory effects on neural circuitry mediating navigation.     

VULNERABILITY IN RESEARCH AND HEALTH CARE; DESCRIBING THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM?

Despite broad agreement that the vulnerable have a claim to special protection, defining vulnerable persons or populations has proved more difficult than we would like. This is a theoretical as well as a practical problem, as it hinders both convincing justifications for this claim and the practical application of required protections. In this paper, I review consent-based, harm-based, and comprehensive definitions of vulnerability in healthcare and research with human subjects. Although current definitions are subject to critique, their underlying assumptions may be complementary. I propose that we should define vulnerability in research and healthcare as an identifiably increased likelihood of incurring additional or greater wrong. In order to identify the vulnerable, as well as the type of protection that they need, this definition requires that we start from the sorts of wrongs likely to occur and from identifiable increments in the likelihood, or to the likely degree, that these wrongs will occur. It is limited but appropriately so, as it only applies to special protection, not to any protection to which we have a valid claim. Using this definition would clarify that the normative force of claims for special protection does not rest with vulnerability itself, but with pre-existing claims when these are more likely to be denied. Such a clarification could help those who carry responsibility for the protection of vulnerable populations, such as Institutional Review Boards, to define the sort of protection required in a more targeted and effective manner.     

Animal navigation: the difficulty of moving in a straight line

In principle, there are two strategies for navigating a straight course. One is to use an external directional reference and continually reorienting with reference to it, while the other is to infer body rotations from internal sensory information only. We show here that, while the first strategy will enable an animal or mobile agent to move arbitrarily far away from its starting point, the second strategy will not do so, even after an infinite number of steps. Thus, an external directional reference—some form of compass—is indispensable for ensuring progress away from home. This limitation must place significant constraints on the evolution of biological navigation systems. Some specific examples are discussed. An important corollary arising from the analysis of compassless navigation is that the maximum expected displacement represents a robust measure of the straightness of a path.     

数字化导航技术在人工全膝关节置换中的初步应用研究

目的:探讨数字化导航技术在人工全膝关节置换术中应用的可行性及初步临床应用。方法:对我院2013年6月至2014年6月行单侧全膝关节置换术的80例患者,按照抽签法随机分为数字化导航组40例及传统手术组40例,导航组术前设计个性化定制导航模板,术中应用导航模板截骨,传统组应用厂家器械截骨。分别测量两组患者手术前后的髋-膝-踝角、冠状面股骨和胫骨截骨面与机械轴夹角、矢状面股骨和胫骨截骨面与外旋和后倾夹角,记录每一例患者手术时间及术中出血量并进行对比。结果:数字化导航组患者的手术时间及术中出血量均少于传统手术组,差异具有统计学意义(P0.05)。与传统手术组比较,数字化导航组术后冠状面FFC角及FTC角平均偏差角度较小,差异具有统计学意义(P0.05)。与传统手术组比较,数字化导航组术后矢状面LFC角及LTC角平均偏差角度较小,差异具有统计学意义(P0.05)。结论:数字化导航技术在人工膝关节置换术中具有快速、个性化及精确性高等优点,值得临床推广应用。     

A geometric model for initial orientation errors in pigeon navigation

All mobile animals respond to gradients in signals in their environment, such as light, sound, odours and magnetic and electric fields, but it remains controversial how they might use these signals to navigate over long distances. The Earth's surface is essentially two-dimensional, so two stimuli are needed to act as coordinates for navigation. However, no environmental fields are known to be simple enough to act as perpendicular coordinates on a two-dimensional grid. Here, we propose a model for navigation in which we assume that an animal has a simplified ‘cognitive map’ in which environmental stimuli act as perpendicular coordinates. We then investigate how systematic deviation of the contour lines of the environmental signals from a simple orthogonal arrangement can cause errors in position determination and lead to systematic patterns of directional errors in initial homing directions taken by pigeons. The model reproduces patterns of initial orientation errors seen in previously collected data from homing pigeons, predicts that errors should increase with distance from the loft, and provides a basis for efforts to identify further sources of orientation errors made by homing pigeons.     

水面和水下长航对艇员肠道菌群影响的比较及意义探讨

比较研究和水下两种长期航行条件对航艇和核潜艇艇员肠道菌群的影响并对其意义进行初步探讨。结果显示两种长航条件均对人体肠道菌群产生显著影响,可打破肠道微生态平衡,但两者所致的肠道菌群构成变化的特点不同。提示不同长航条件可造成不同的微生态失调,需区别对待。     

Why Procreative Preferences May be Moral – And Why it May not Matter if They Aren't

There has been much argument over whether procreative selection is obligatory or wrong. Rebecca Bennett has recently challenged the assumption that procreative choices are properly moral choices, arguing that these views express mere preferences. This article challenges Bennett's view on two fronts. First, I argue that the Non‐Identity Problem does not show that there cannot be harmless wrongs – though this would require us to abandon the intuitively attractive ‘person‐affecting principle’, that may be a lesser cost than abandoning some more firmly‐held intuition. But, even if we accept Bennett's claim that these choices are not moral, that does not show them to be mere personal preferences. I argue that there is a class of non‐moral ‘categorical preferences’ that have much the same implications as moral preferences. If a moral preference for able‐bodied children is problematic (as Bennett claims), then so is a non‐moral categorical preference. Thus, showing that these preferences are not moral does not show that they are not problematic, since they may still be categorical.     

A Cost of Leadership in Human Groups

Group living is the result of a dynamic trade‐off between associated costs and benefits. However, these costs and benefits are not necessarily distributed equally across different spatial positions of groups which may result in different fitness returns for individuals occupying different positions in groups. Here we consider whether leadership of a group during a navigation task in humans may have a specific cost associated with it. Pairs of students performed a counting task whilst walking through two obstacle courses, once as leader and once as follower. We found that leaders made significantly more errors in the counting task than followers suggesting that there is an attention cost associated with leadership/navigation behaviour.     

磁导航技术辅助麦芒仿生鼻肠营养管的设计和初步实验研究

目的:为解决现有液囊鼻肠营养管置管过程中漂浮时间长、成功率低的问题,设计了基于磁导航技术辅助的磁性麦芒仿生鼻肠营养管。方法:分析了麦芒在管腔内能够快速单向移动的力学原理,结合磁外科相关技术,提出了鼻肠管头端内嵌磁性麦芒仿生结构设计方案和磁导航技术辅助快速推进的操作方法,并在体内外模拟了其运动情况。结果:体外管路模拟实验提示麦芒仿生结构在外力作用下能够快速移动。家兔肠道实验显示,磁性麦芒仿生结构在导航磁体引导下,能够在肠道内快速单向移动。结论:磁性麦芒仿生结构在导航磁体的引导下能够实现消化道内快速单向移动,该设计进一步优化有望用于临床。     

Evidence for the honeybee's place knowledge in the vicinity of the hive

Upon leaving the nest for the first time, honeybees employ a tripartite orientation/exploration system to gain the requisite knowledge to return to their hive after foraging. Focal exploration comes first- the departing bee turns around to face the return target and oscillates in a lateral flight pattern of increasing amplitude and distance. Thereafter, for the peripheral exploration, the forward flying bee circles the return-goal area with expanding and alternating clockwise and counterclockwise arcs. After this two- part proximal exploration follows distal exploration, the bee flies straight towards her potential distal goal. For the return path, supported by the preceding exploratory learning, the return navigational performance is expected to reflect the three exploratory parts in reverse order. Previously only two performance parts have been experimentally identified: focal navigation and distal navigation. Here we discovered peripheral navigation as being distinct from focal and distal navigation. Like focal navigation, yet unlike distal navigation, peripheral navigation is invariably triggered by local place recognition. Whereas focal navigation (orientation) is close to unidirectional, peripheral navigation makes use of multiple goal-vector knowledge. We term the area in question the Peripheral Correction Area because within it peripheral navigation is triggered, which in turn is capable of correcting errors that accumulated during a preceding distal dead-reckoning based flight.     

Finding the way with a noisy brain

Successful navigation is fundamental to the survival of nearly every animal on earth, and achieved by nervous systems of vastly different sizes and characteristics. Yet surprisingly little is known of the detailed neural circuitry from any species which can accurately represent space for navigation. Path integration is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous navigation strategies in the animal kingdom. Despite a plethora of computational models, from equational to neural network form, there is currently no consensus, even in principle, of how this important phenomenon occurs neurally. Recently, all path integration models were examined according to a novel, unifying classification system. Here we combine this theoretical framework with recent insights from directed walk theory, and develop an intuitive yet mathematically rigorous proof that only one class of neural representation of space can tolerate noise during path integration. This result suggests many existing models of path integration are not biologically plausible due to their intolerance to noise. This surprising result imposes significant computational limitations on the neurobiological spatial representation of all successfully navigating animals, irrespective of species. Indeed, noise-tolerance may be an important functional constraint on the evolution of neuroarchitectural plans in the animal kingdom.     

Extending neural systems for navigation to hunting behavior

For decades, a central question in neuroscience has been: How does the brain support navigation? Recent research on navigation has explored how brain regions support the capacity to adapt to changes in the environment and track the distance and direction to goal locations. Here, we provide a brief review of this literature and speculate how these neural systems may be involved in another, parallel behavior—hunting. Hunting shares many of the same challenges as navigation. Like navigation, hunting requires the hunter to orient towards a goal while minimizing their distance from it while traveling. Likewise, hunting may require the accommodation of detours to locate prey or the exploitation of shortcuts for a quicker capture. Recent research suggests that neurons in the periaqueductal gray, hypothalamus, and dorsal anterior cingulate play key roles in such hunting behavior. In this review, we speculate on how these regions may operate functionally with other key brain regions involved in navigation, such as the hippocampus, to support hunting. Additionally, we posit that hunting in a group presents an additional set of challenges, where success relies on multicentric tracking and prediction of prey position as well as the position of co-hunters.     

Respect for outsiders? respect for the law? the moral evaluation of high scale issues by US immigration officers

High-scale morality is the study of moral ideas and sentiments deployed in relations that encompass multiple, geographically or socially distant populaces. The envisioning of distant people, their attributed moral personhood, the evaluation of their perceived behaviour, and the rectification of wrongs through the use of powerful organizations are key topics in high-scale morality. High-scale morality differs from existing anthropological approaches that emphasize local ethnography or contrastive moral ideas; it addresses the moralization of issues like world hunger, the drug trade, or international migration. The officers of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service understand and evaluate legal and illegal immigrants, as well as directly enacting moral rectification for the US polity. As they resolve moral dilemmas on their job, they utilize pervasive models for moral thought and action in capitalist, individualist, stratified, and bureaucratized societies. The article finishes by considering directions in which anthropology can contribute to understanding the moral dimension of global issues.     

Compliance and Postagreement Bargaining in the Barents Sea Fisheries

States’ failure to comply with their international obligations has been viewed by institutional theory as problems to be solved, rather than as wrongs to be punished. This article reviews how Norway has employed different postagreement bargaining strategies in the Joint Norwegian-Russian Fisheries Commission in order to enhance Russian compliance with the bilateral fisheries agreements in the Barents Sea and with the precautionary approach more widely.     

实时影像融合的超声虚拟导航技术联合射频消融术治疗原发性肝癌合并门静脉癌栓患者的疗效及对血清Bax、Cyfra21-1的影响

摘要 目的：探讨实时影像融合的超声虚拟导航技术联合射频消融术治疗原发性肝癌合并门静脉癌栓患者的疗效及对血清BCL-2同源的水溶性相关蛋白（Bax）、细胞角蛋白19片段（Cyfra21-1）的影响。方法：选择本院2017年1月到2021年4月收治的原发性肝癌合并门静脉癌栓患者82例作为研究对象,根据1：1随机数字表法将患者分为虚拟导航组与对照组各41例,虚拟导航组给予实时影像融合的超声虚拟导航技术联合射频消融术治疗,对照组给予单纯超声引导联合射频消融术治疗。结果：虚拟导航组的进针次数、融合时间、布针时间少于对照组（P<0.05）;虚拟导航组治疗后3个月的胆汁瘤、肝脓肿、膈肌损伤、肺部感染等并发症发生率为4.9 %,低于对照组的29.3 %（P<0.05）。虚拟导航组治疗后3个月的总有效率为82.9 %,高于对照组的51.2 %（P<0.05）。两组治疗后3个月的血清谷丙转氨酶（ALT）、谷草转氨酶（AST）水平低于治疗前,虚拟导航组低于对照组（P<0.05）。两组治疗后的血清Bax、Cyfra21-1含量低于治疗前,虚拟导航组低于对照组（P<0.05）。结论：实时影像融合的超声虚拟导航技术联合射频消融术治疗原发性肝癌合并门静脉癌栓能降低血清Bax、Cyfra21-1含量,改善患者的肝功能,提高消融效率,还可减少并发症的发生,最终提高患者的总体治疗效果。     

Conditions for landmark-based navigation in the house mouse, Mus musculus

I investigated whether mice, after learning to home by relying on visual extra-arena landmarks, still required instantaneous access to such cues for successful navigation. Two groups of lactating mice were trained to retrieve their pups from the centre of a circular arena back to their peripheral nest. On test trials, mice from one group were allowed to view distal visual cues while moving from the nest towards the centre, and mice from the other group were allowed to view distal visual cues when homing from the centre towards the nest. The results indicate that viewing the visual cues when homing is necessary for landmark-based navigation.