AI images are programmed. We should consider the value of original and truly unique work.
AI images are programmed. We should consider the value of original and truly unique work.
Today online research can supplement field and lab research in multiple sciences, but a study suggests that some potentially important findings are no longer available because they have not been preserved.
The work of archiving and preserving science journals is time consuming and there is no uniformly applied process to preserve free downloadable journal articles. If the publisher ceases to exist, the journals may vanish.
Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 20 years as publishers stopped maintaining them. The average duration of online access appears to have been about 10 years.
The authors of the study are Mikael Laakso (Hanken School of Economics), Lisa Matthias (Free University of Berlin), and Najko Jahn (University of Göttingen). To determine the list of the 176 vanished journals, they did some digital detective work because clues about them are fragmentary. After the journals go dark their names no longer appear in bibliometric databases.
The study found that only about one-third of the 14,068 journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals in 2019 ensure the long-term preservation of their content. Some commercial services offer it, and the Public Knowledge Project Preservation Network, does so for free.
I recommend reading this paper by Dr. David Bradshaw, Philosophy professor at the University of Kentucky. "Making Human Rights Orthodox," International Conference on Post-Humanism and Artificial Intelligence, Athens, Greece, November 2024.
Dr. Bradshaw often speaks at Eastern Orthodox conferences and is an expert in early Greek theology. His book Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom is fascinating and challenging (Cambridge U Press, 2004).
Bradshaw writes, "From an Orthodox standpoint, contemporary human rights discourse is problematic in two ways: many rights that are widely advocated are contrary to Orthodox moral teaching, and even those that are acceptable (such as, for example, the right to life) are often justified through faulty reasoning. Hence it is important to articulate a legitimately Orthodox framework for human rights.
Dr. Alice C. Linsley
Many social issues of the Western world hinge on decisive statements about humans. They touch on human dignity, human diversity, human rights, and human reproduction. We hear from "experts" in many fields, but rarely from anthropologists whose focus is humankind.
The British biologist Richard Dawkins has been outspoken on these issues. In a particularly flamboyant statement, he denigrated the dignity of the unborn human.
"With respect to those meanings of 'human' that are relevant to the morality of abortion, any fetus is less human than an adult pig." - Richard Dawkins' TweetIn 2011 researchers discovered jaw bones and teeth of four
individuals in the Afar region of Ethiopia which date to between 3.3m and 3.5m
years old. These archaic humans were alive at the same time as other groups of
early humans. Clearly, there were more archaic humans living in Africa 3 million
years ago than is generally recognized.