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Ce mémoire porte sur l’éthique des modifications génétiques à visées mélioratives. Les modifications génétiques à visées mélioratives sont l’une des technologies les plus étudiées dans le mouvement transhumaniste. Nous présenterons la défense transhumaniste de cette technologie à travers l’ouvrage « From Chance to Choice », qui propose une défense de nature politique, faisant remarquer que cette technologie peut venir offrir un outil précieux aux théories de la justice égalitariste. Cette défense est cependant dépourvue d’un volet éthique, puisque les éthiques classiques sont impuissantes à se saisir de ce phénomène nouveau de manière intelligible. Afin de fournir un cadre de régulation éthique de ces modifications génétiques, nous nous tournerons vers l’éthique de la discussion de Jürgen Habermas et l’éthique de la responsabilité de Hans Jonas. Nous montrerons dans un premier temps que l’éthique de la discussion, selon laquelle une norme morale est valide si elle peut espérer recevoir le consentement des sujets moraux impliqués à la suite d’un débat argumenté, permet de légitimer sur un plan éthique les modifications génétiques car il est possible d’espérer le consentement à venir du sujet de la modification génétique. Cependant, ce consentement ne peut être postulé que si la réflexion sur la modification à effectuer est effectuée sous le signe de l’éthique de la responsabilité, présentée par la suite, selon laquelle un tel choix doit être effectué dans un processus nommé « heuristique de la peur », soit avec en ayant en tête les effets lointains de notre action. / This memoir studies the ethical implications of human genetic modification. Human genetic enhancement is one of the most studied technologies by the transhumanist movement. We will present the transhumanist defence of genetic modification in the book “From Chance to Choice”, which defends this technology on political grounds, due to its efficiency in helping carry out egalitarian theories of justice. This defense is deprived of a substantial ethical aspect. More generally, classical ethical theories seem to be inadequate to grasp the issues of human genetic modification. In order to offer an ethical framework of regulation of this technology, we will study Jürgen Habermas’s discussion ethics and Hans Jonas’s responsibility ethics. We will first show that discussions’ ethics, according to which a moral norm is valid if and only if every moral subject affected by it can agree to it through an argumentative debate, ethically legitimates genetical improvements because we can hoe for the future consent of the modified person. This being said, this consent can only be postulated if the ethical reasoning is aided by responsibilities ethics, which is then presented, according to which a choice such as a genetic modification has to be made under the guidance of the heuristic of fear, in other words, while bearing in mind the long-term effects of our actions.

The QuikSCAT scatterometer provides global daily coverage of oceanic near-surface vector winds. Recently, algorithms have been developed to enhance the spatial resolution of QuikSCAT winds from 25~km to 2.5~km posting. These ultra-high resolution winds are used, in comparison with standard L2B data product winds, to observe and track tropical cyclones. Resolution enhanced winds are found to provide additional storm structure such as inner core size and structure and the presence of multiple eyewalls compared with standard resolution winds. The 2.5~km winds are also able to observe storms nearer to the shore than 25~km winds. An analysis of circulation center locatability with each resolution wind field is performed. Center fixes with enhanced resolution winds are nearer the National Hurricane Center best-track positions than are standard resolution center fixes. A data and image set of every tropical cyclone worldwide observed by Seawinds on QuikSCAT or SeaWinds on ADEOS II from 1999 through 2005 is generated and made available to the scientific community at http://scp.byu.edu.

This dissertation develops design methods and architectures which allow analog circuits to operate at VT + 2Vds,sat, the minimum supply for CMOS circuits with all transistors in the active region where Vds,sat is the drain to source saturation voltage of a MOS transistor. Techniques which meet this criteria for rail-to-rail input stages, gain enhancement stages, and output stages are discussed and developed. These techniques are used to design four fully-differential rail-to-rail amplifiers. The highest gain is shown to be attained using a drain voltage equalization (DVE) or active-bootstrapping technique which produces more than 100dB of gain in a two stage amplifier with a bulk-driven input pair while showing no bandwidth degradation when compared to amplifier architectures with similar biasing. The low voltage design techniques are extended to switching and sampling circuits. A 10-bit digital to analog converter (DAC) and a 10-bit analog to digital converter (ADC) are designed and fabricated in a 0.35um dual-well CMOS process to prove the developed design methods, architectures, and techniques. The 10-bit DAC operates at 1MSPS with near rail-to-rail differential output operation with a 700mV supply voltage. This supply voltage, which is 150mV lower than the VT+2Vds,sat limit, is attained by using a bulk driven threshold voltage lowering technique. The ADC design is a fully-differential pipelined 10-bit converter that operates at 500kSPS with a full scale input range equal to the supply voltage and can operate at supply voltages as low as 650mV, 200mV below the VT + 2Vds,sat limit. The design methods and architectures can be used in advanced processes to maintain gain and minimize supply voltage. These designs show a minimum supply improvement over previously published designs and prove the efficacy of the design architectures and techniques presented in this dissertation.

Video from aerial surveillance can provide a rich source of data for analysts. From the time-critical perspective of wilderness search and rescue operations, information extracted from aerial videos can mean the difference between a successful search and an unsuccessful search. When using low-cost, payload-limited mini-UAVs, as opposed to more expensive platforms, several challenges arise, including jittery video, narrow fields of view, low resolution, and limited time on screen for key features. These challenges make it difficult for analysts to extract key information in a timely manner. Traditional approaches may address some of these issues, but no existing system effectively addresses all of them in a unified and efficient manner. Building upon a hierarchical dense image correspondence technique, we create a unifying framework for reducing jitter, enhancing resolution, and expanding the field of view while lengthening the time that features remain on screen. It also provides for easy extraction of moving objects in the scene. Our method incorporates locally adaptive warps which allows for robust image alignment even in the presence of parallax and without the aid of internal or external camera parameters. We accelerate the image registration process using commodity Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accomplish all of these tasks in near real-time with no external telemetry data.