Machine Learning-Assisted Man Overboard Detection Using Radars

One of the most crucial emergencies that require instant action to be taken during traveling across water is the so-called man overboard (MOB). Thus, constant monitoring equipment needs to be installed for the fast notice and detection of the victim to be rescued, if an incident happens. Despite the fact that different installations such as radar sensors, thermal cameras etc., can be handy, a combination of these could be beneficial yet it would increase the complexity. Nevertheless, the full potential may be not reached yet. The key component to what needs to be done in order to achieve the utmost accuracy is artificial intelligence (AI). That is, with the aid of AI, one can deploy an automated surveillance system capable of making its own humanlike decisions regarding such incidents like MOB. To achieve this, fully organized real-time cooperation among the concerned system components is essential. The latter holds since in such dynamically changing operational environments like these, information must be distributed fast, errorless and reliably to the decision center. This study aims to analyze and demonstrate the outcome of an integrated sensor-based system that utilizes AI, implemented for ship incidents. Different machine learning algorithms were used where each one of them made use of information that originated from a cluster of radar sensors located remotely. In particular, the deployed system’s objective is to detect human motion so it can be used to protect against potentially fateful events during ship voyages.

The Philosophy of the Game in the American Ludic Novels of Pre-Digital and Digital Era

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. by R. Coover and Remade by N. Stephenson offer differing views of the evolving concept of “game” in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The purpose of the study is to reveal the implications of the game theme in these novels as well as the transformation of the game concept in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Coover’s novel analysis in parallel to Kant’s concepts of a man’s ability for reasoning reveals how the imaginary world of the game can become selfsufficient and reduce the creator of the game to no more than one of its participants. Having got out of control the game imposes its own logic on all participants including its creator. It no longer obeys the creators will and the decision center moved to the analogue of Kant’s hypothetical super intelligence phenomenon. Stephenson’s novel offers an example of the gaming reality creation in globalization era. Stephenson’s game presents a dialectical contradiction: it replaces reality but simultaneously serves as a tool for escaping to this reality. Advanced digital technologies create the necessary gaming infrastructure and provide users with the material culture, socio-economic mechanisms for the distribution of online and offline resources, and spiritual culture. This makes the game world as a multidimensional form of reality. The survey has revealed several tendencies of digital technological development such as the set of technological tools available to the designer of the virtual world, the less this game world will differ from authentic reality. In the digital era, the online game becomes a way of active and intensive interaction with the external world rather than an escape from reality. Keywords: game, digital technologies, American literature

The extended mind hypothesis: an anti-metaphysical vaccine

Discussions about the extended mind have ‘extended’ in various directions in the last decades. While applied to other aspects of human cognition and even consciousness, the extended-mind hypothesis has also been criticized, as it questions fundamental ideas such as the image of a dual world, divided between an external and an internal domain by the border of ‘skin and skull’, the idea of a localized and constant decision center, and the role of internal representations. We suggest that the main virtue of the hypothesis is not as a theory per se, but as a vaccine against persistent metaphysical prejudices about the mind’s structure, functions and borders. Being an hypothesis about the most efficient ways to combine resources and problems, and not a theory about the mind’s a-priori constitution, the extended mind view moves the focus from ontology to pragmatics and helps purify philosophy of mind from metaphysical remainders.

Neuropeptide F regulates courtship in Drosophila through a male-specific neuronal circuit

Male courtship is provoked by perception of a potential mate. In addition, the likelihood and intensity of courtship are influenced by recent mating experience, which affects sexual drive. Using Drosophila melanogaster, we found that the homolog of mammalian neuropeptide Y, neuropeptide F (NPF), and a cluster of male-specific NPF (NPFM) neurons, regulate courtship through affecting courtship drive. Disrupting NPF signaling produces sexually hyperactive males, which are resistant to sexual satiation, and whose courtship is triggered by sub-optimal stimuli. We found that NPFM neurons make synaptic connections with P1 neurons, which comprise the courtship decision center. Activation of P1 neurons elevates NPFM neuronal activity, which then act through NPF receptor neurons to suppress male courtship, and maintain the proper level of male courtship drive.

Major Tom to Ground Control: How Lipoproteins Communicate Extracytoplasmic Stress to the Decision Center of the Cell

ABSTRACT The envelope of bacteria is a complex multilayered shield that ensures multiple essential functions, including protecting the cell from external assaults. Hence, bacterial cells have evolved intricate mechanisms called envelope stress response systems (ESRS) to monitor all kinds of perturbations affecting the integrity of their envelope and to mount an appropriate response to contain or repair the damage. In the model bacterium Escherichia coli, several ESRS are built around a two-component system, in which envelope stress triggers a phosphotransfer between a sensor protein in the inner membrane of the envelope and a response regulator in the cytoplasm. In this review, we focus on two major ESRS in E. coli, the Rcs and Cpx pathways, in which additional proteins not directly involved in the phosphotransfer modulate signal transduction. Both the Rcs and Cpx systems can be turned on by a lipoprotein anchored in the outer membrane, RcsF and NlpE, respectively, providing a molecular connection between the most exterior layer of the envelope and the ground control center in the cytoplasm. Here, we review how these two lipoproteins, which share a striking set of features while being distinct in several aspects, act as sentinels at the front line of the bacterium by sensing and transducing stress to the downstream components of the Rcs and Cpx systems.