«Natural Law and Natural Rights» and the Negation of the Objective Priority of Speculative Truth

This essay explores the nature and implications of John Finnis’s express negation in his work Natural Law and Natural Rights of the objective primacy of speculative truth with respect to the derivation of practical reason and agency. The essay observes two senses of the speculative/practical distinction. One sense concerns whether the object known is a contingent matter ordered to an end or whether it concerns a universal, necessary, or eternal truth. The other sense concerns the mode of the knowledge itself: whether its end is simply knowledge, or whether the end is the good of an operation. Because prior to desire and intention all knowledge is speculative in its mode, and this knowledge is absolutely necessary for knowledge that is practical in its mode; and because knowledge that is practical in its mode is absolutely prior to knowledge that is practical merely in that it concerns a practical object – because without knowledge practical in its mode there will never be such knowledge that is practical in its object – it follows that practical reasoning is derivative of knowledge that is speculative in its mode. Implications of Finnis’s error – about teleology, common good, and God – are considered.

OIC-MCE: A Practical Land Cover Mapping Approach for Limited Samples Based on Multiple Classifier Ensemble and Iterative Classification

Land cover samples are usually the foundation for supervised classification. Unfortunately, for land cover mapping in large areas, only limited samples can be used due to the time-consuming and labor-intensive sample collection. A novel and practical Object-oriented Iterative Classification method based on Multiple Classifiers Ensemble (OIC-MCE) was proposed in this paper. It systematically integrated object-oriented segmentation, Multiple Classifier Ensemble (MCE), and Iterative Classification (IC). In this method, the initial training samples were updated self-adaptively during the iterative processes. Based on these updated training samples, the inconsistent regions (ICR) in the classification results of the MCE method were reclassified to reduce their uncertainty. Three typical case studies in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) indicate that the overall accuracy of the OIC-MCE method is significantly higher than that of the single classifier. After five iterations, the overall accuracy of the OIC-MCE approach increased by 5.58%–8.38% compared to the accuracy of the traditional MCE method. The spatial distribution of newly added training samples generated by the OIC-MCE approach was relatively uniform. It was confirmed by ten repeated experiments that the OIC-MCE approach has good stability. More importantly, even if the initial sample size reduced by 65%, the quality of the final classification result based on the proposed OIC-MCE approach would not be greatly affected. Therefore, the proposed OIC-MCE approach provides a new solution for land cover mapping with limited samples. Certainly, it is also well suited for land cover mapping with abundant samples.

Widening the wind power cluster framework with a regional energy cluster: a research note

The energy industry is identified as a growing business area and the target of development in a case study region. This practitioner’s report describes how the regional energy cluster was defined by using the wind power cluster framework as a basis. The identified energy industry players are positioned in the wind power cluster framework and the actors and operating environment are described and analyzed. According to this study the cluster framework can be a basis for cluster definitions of other industries, especially in the same case region. The practical object of the study is to give regional officials a clear picture of the energy industry operating environment and its cooperation network.

Lucretius and Naturalism [1961]

Gilles Deleuze’s “Lucretius and Naturalism” (1961; translated by Jared Bly) is the first version of an essay that would later appear in an altered form in the appendix to Deleuze’s 1969 Logique du Sens, “Lucrèce et le Naturalisme.” Here Deleuze shows how Lucretius, in the first truly noble deed of philosophical pluralism, articulates his atomism as a means to determine the speculative and practical object of philosophy as “naturalism.” To distinguish, in humanity, what belongs to myth and what belongs to nature; to distinguish, in nature, what is really infinite and what is not: such is the practical and speculative object of naturalism. One of the most profound constants of naturalism is to denounce everything that is the cause of sadness, everything that requires sadness in order to exercise its power. Atomism accomplishes this through the concepts of the clinamen and simulacra. From Lucretius to Nietzsche, the same goal is pursued and attained: to transform thought and sensibility into affirmations.

Condemned to Celebrity

This chapter talks about how Staël used the time of her exile to complete the book she had begun after her flight from Paris in September 1792—a study of the influence of passions on individual and collective happiness. Following what seems a recurrent pattern in her life, frustration over some immediate practical object led her to invest in some more durable intellectual project. Unlike the pamphlets she had published during the Revolution, Of the Influence of Passions was conceived as a philosophical work, rather than as an occasional intervention in the political debate—though in the end the content of the text was probably closer to contemporary political issues than the writer had originally intended.

Automated visual inspection of multipattern train components using gradient information and feature fusion under the illumination-variant condition

The condition of train components needs to be inspected periodically to ensure the quality and safe operation of trains. The brake beam bolt is an important locking part in the main structure of the support and connection components. Any fault in the break beam bolt can lead to serious accidents. With the development of computer vision techniques, automated visual inspection methods have started replacing routine manual checking. This paper presents an automated and hierarchical inspection method for the detection of the condition of the brake beam bolt. Gradient information and basic feature descriptors are fused into a synthesized feature expression for eliminating the influence of the illumination-variant condition. The fused feature is also employed in the identification of the object condition. The results of the experiment show that the feature fusion expression form can effectively solve the problem caused by the illumination-variant scene and condition. The correct rates of localization of joint part and target fault detection have shown high accuracy. It has been concluded that the overall performance of the visual inspection system can meet the practical object safety assurance application.