The idea of passive euthanasia has recently been attacked in a particularly clear and explicit way by an ‘‘Ethics Task Force’’ established by the European Association of Palliative Care (EAPC) in February 2001. It claims that the expression ‘‘passive euthanasia’’ is a contradiction in terms and hence that there can be no such thing. This paper critically assesses the main arguments for the Task...

The stochastic response surface method (SRSM) and the response surface method (RSM) are often used for structural reliability analysis, especially for reliability problems with implicit performance functions. This paper aims to compare these two methods in terms of fitting the performance function, accuracy and efficiency in estimating probability of failure as well as statistical moments of sy...

The ImageCLEF image retrieval track has been part of CLEF (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) since 2003. Organizing ImageCLEF and its large participation of research groups involves a considerable amount of work and data to manage. Goal of the management system described in this paper was to create a system for the organization of ImageCLEF to reduce manual work and professionalize the structure...

Dynamically stable biped robots mimicking human locomotion have received significant attention over the last few decades. Formerly, the existence of stable periodic gaits for straight walking of passive biped walkers was well known and investigated as the notion of passive dynamic walking. This study is aimed to elaborate this notion in the case of three dimensional (3D) walking and extend it f...

Wojciulik, Ewa, Nancy Kanwisher, and Jon Driver. Covert vito biologically significant stimuli such as faces has never sual attention modulates face-specific activity in the human fusibeen tested. form gyrus: an fMRI study. J. Neurophysiol. 79: 1574–1578, The present study tested whether face-specific activity in 1998. Several lines of evidence demonstrate that faces undergo the human fusiform g...

BACKGROUND While humans (like other primates) communicate with facial expressions, the evolution of speech added a new function to the facial muscles (facial expression muscles). The evolution of speech required the development of a coordinated action between visual (movement of the lips) and auditory signals in a rhythmic fashion to produce "visemes" (visual movements of the lips that correspo...