Survival of the Fittest Protection of Indigenous Knowledge

This chapter reflects on numerous protections that are available for indigenous knowledge from those who misappropriate it for personal aggrandizement without regard of the holders of the knowledge. The chapter is underpinned on the Afrocentricity and Sankofa theories. A socio-legal methodology was adopted to ground the work to enable students studying indigenous knowledge systems to have a foundation and be able to follow the interdisciplinarity in the writing. As such, a doctrinal approach and qualitative design were engaged to buttress the philosophical reasoning and capture the rich and unrecorded knowledge of inorganic intellectuals. The chapter's standpoint is that the protection of indigenous knowledge requires African-tailored legislation that resonates with indigenous communities' beliefs and are pragmatic yet innovative to bring benefit sharing. In pursuing this, a normative legal framework that could be utilised in the protection of indigenous knowledge is explored.

Intellectual Property Rights: The Other Side of the Coin

The modern world operates on the survival of the fittest rule. Hence, there is cutthroat competition among the states, and every state is striving for greater economic development. Development is based on the minimal use of resources which in turn is dependent upon technological innovations. These innovations incur huge research and development costs and can easily be copied to serve as the basis for further developments by the rivals. Thus, the idea of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) was introduced. While there are many advantages that these rights have to offer, they also prove to be deleterious in some ways as they also play a role in restricting innovation by the global North, which further widens the gap between both worlds. This paper traces the history of the IPR and develops an argument that proposes that IPR has been a cause of inequalities and has restricted innovation.

Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.

‘Survival of the fittest’? Perceptions of wellbeing at The Bar of Northern Ireland

This article, based on a qualitative study conducted in June–July 2019, assesses how barristers at the Bar of Northern Ireland perceive wellbeing and mental ill-health within their profession. It will argue that the Bar can be a competitive and potentially hostile workplace environment, leading to detrimental impacts on wellbeing. It will also contend that being a barrister in Northern Ireland provides its own unique challenges for practitioners due to the self-employed independent nature of the role, where practitioners do not work in chambers or stables like their counterparts in England & Wales and Scotland. At the same time, barristers spoke positively about the flexibility of their roles and beneficial forms of collegiality, as well as an evolving culture which places greater emphasis on wellbeing. This article will argue, using the ‘job demands and resources’ model, that efforts should be made to decrease job demands and increase the job resources of barristers of the Bar of Northern Ireland to improve levels of wellbeing. This model could also be applied to the Bar in other jurisdictions to assess the impact of both shared and unique challenges and opportunities.

Learning Data Correction for Myoelectric Hand Based on “Survival of the Fittest”

In recent years, myoelectric hands have become multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) devices, which are controlled via machine learning methods. However, currently, learning data for myoelectric hands are gathered manually and thus tend to be of low quality. Moreover, in the case of infants, gathering accurate learning data is nearly impossible because of the difficulty of communicating with them. Therefore, a method that automatically corrects errors in the learning data is necessary. Myoelectric hands are wearable robots and thus have volumetric and weight constraints that make it infeasible to store large amounts of data or apply complex processing methods. Compared with general machine learning methods such as image processing, those for myoelectric hands have limitations on the data storage, although the amount of data to be processed is quite large. If we can use this huge amount of processing data to correct the learning data without storing the processing data, the machine learning performance is expected to improve. We then propose a method for correcting the learning data through utilisation of the signals acquired during the use of the myoelectric hand. The proposed method is inspired by “survival of the fittest.” The effectiveness of the method was verified through offline analysis. The method reduced the amount of learning data and learning time by approximately a factor of 10 while maintaining classification rates. The classification rates improved for one participant but slightly deteriorated on average among all participants. To solve this problem, verifying the method via interactive learning will be necessary in the future.

COVID-19 pandemic and “survival of the fittest”

Occurrence and recurrence of COVID-19 cases have been observed globally. The complex relationship of host-pathogen and the environment plays a vital role in understanding the widespread recurrence of the SARS-CoV-2 among humans. Though the pathobiology of the disease is not completely understood, it is well established that COVID-19 poses a greater threat to individuals with co-morbidities and a weakened immune system. The article deals with the notion of innate immunity, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest during the COVID-19 outbreak. The article also attempts to introduce the concept of “lifestyle and cultural immunity” that needs to be addressed and incorporated at an early stage of childhood to boost up the human immune system. The communication further discusses the role of vaccination and micro-organisms pre-existing in the environment which are required to enhance the immunity of an individual.

Optimization of a Range-Separated UW12 Hybrid Functional

In a previous paper we presented a new hybrid functional B-LYP-osUW12-D3(BJ) containing the Unsöld-w12 (UW12) hybrid correlation model. In this paper we present a new 15-parameter range-separated hybrid density functional using a power series expansion together with UW12 correlation. This functional is optimised using the survival of the fittest strategy developed for the ωB97X-V functional, fitted to data from the Main Group Chemistry Database (MGCDB84). In addition we optimize a standard hybrid and double hybrid using the same method. We show that our fully self-consistent UW12 hybrid functional WM21-D3(BJ) outperforms both of these functionals and other range-separated hybrid functionals.