Early Childhood and Neuroscience is a practical guide to understanding the complex and challenging subject of neuroscience and its use (and misapplication) in early childhood policy and practice. The author begins by introducing the definition and history of neuroscience. The reader is then led through structured chapters discussing questions such as: Why should practitioners know about neuroscience? How can neuroscience help practitioners better provide for babies and children? and Is it relevant? Topics covered include the nature vs. nurture debate through (...) the lens of neuroscience, epigenetics, the first 1001 days and a discussion on just how critical the first three years of life are to healthy brain development. The book provides a balanced overview of the debates by weaving discussion on the opportunities of using neuroscience in early childhood practice with examination of the limitations and ethical implications throughout the chapters. This enables students to inform their own opinions about the discipline and its use in their future practice. Clear explanations of the main terms and theories are complemented with illustrative case studies of cutting-edge research from around the world, a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading. Reflective discussion questions give students the chance to apply their theoretical knowledge to real-world contexts. These features encourage and support independent critical thinking, helping students to reflect on, evaluate and analyse a range of ideas, research findings and applications for their own future early childhood practice. Early Childhood and Neuroscience is essential reading for lecturers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in the field as well as for the new practitioner. (shrink)

At the heart of Mizrahi’s project lies a sociological narrative concerning the recent history of philosophers’ negative attitudes towards scientism. Critics (e.g. de Ridder (2019), Wilson (2019) and Bryant (2020)), have detected various empirical inadequacies in Mizrahi’s methodology for discussing these attitudes. Bryant (2020) points out one of the main pertinent methodological deficiencies here, namely that the mere appearance of the word ‘scientism’ in a text does not suffice in determining whether the author feels threatened by it. Not all philosophers (...) use the term in ‘inherently negative’ (29) or pejorative ways. In this paper, I not only corroborate Bryant’s critical claim, but argue that Mizrahi’s response to this part of Bryant’s objection is inadequate. (shrink)

Background: The opinions of students regarding the attributes of a good nurse can make a major contribution to the planning and the conducting of professional education. There are few studies which aim at identifying the qualifications of a good nurse from the perspectives of nursing students. Objectives: To determine the opinions of first- and fourth-year nursing students concerning the ‘attributes of a good nurse’, and whether and how their views change depending on their year of study. Research design: Descriptive research. (...) Participants and research context: This study was conducted in the nursing department of a vocational school of health in the 2010/2011 academic year. The study participants consisted of first-year and intern students. A survey form was used to identify characteristics of participants, and students were asked the following open-ended question about their opinions related to the attributes of a good nurse. Ethical considerations: The permission was taken from the school administration. Informed consent was obtained, and anonymity was ensured for participating students. Findings: A total of 120 students participated in this study. Most frequently expressed attributes were ‘professional competence’ in first-year and ‘responsibility’ in fourth-year students. While first-year students placed a greater emphasis on the attributes of ‘geniality’, ‘patience’, ‘calmness’, ‘love of nursing’, ‘loyalty to nursing’ and ‘not attaching importance to material values’, fourth-year students emphasized the attributes of ‘empathy’, ‘honesty’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘scientific curiosity’ significantly more. Discussion and conclusion: Fourth-year students placed a greater emphasis on the attributes which the students are expected to acquire through a nursing program and clinical experience. However, they mentioned the attributes related to a good nurse–patient relationship and communication significantly less. Appropriate ethical training methods and good role models can help students acquire attributes that are important for the nursing profession and combine them with the attributes they already have. (shrink)

The necessity, method and content of childhood religious education are discussed from various perspectives in our country and around the world. The ‘Gift to the Child’ education method, which is applied in England where different religions live together, is a secular religious education approach with psychological, pedagogical and theological foundations. According to this method, which was developed with different methods from adult religious education and considering educational-scientific inferences, children can learn many information and skills based on religions and can transform (...) this into positive gains in their lives. The ‘Gift to the Child’ method processes concepts such as Allah, prophet, revelation and prayer with values such as responsibility, empathy, tolerance and love. It is distinguished from other religious education practices by aiming to highlight the child’s sense of holiness.This study examines the effect of the ‘Call to Prayer’ section, which is included in the ‘Gift to the Child’ method, one of the childhood religious education approaches, on children’s religious development in the Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge course. The applicability of the ‘Gift to the Child’ method, which aims to obtain educational-scientific inferences by comparing children with religious content, is discussed in terms of the educational process, teacher-student-material dimension and religious education.In examining the applicability of this approach, which evaluates religious development theory and development theories together and can be evaluated in terms of its achievements; After conducting a literature review from relevant sources, the data of the study were collected with the semi-structured interview technique, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The data of the study were collected through teacher interviews conducted with the cross-sectional research method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 teachers working in secondary schools of official educational institutions affiliated to the Ministry of National Education. During the course, the teachers allowed the students to express their opinions on the subject and did not intervene in their questions and answers. As a result of the findings obtained from the data, it was observed that the use of achievements and materials prepared according to the ‘Gift to the Child’ method in religious education positively affected the religious development of the students. (shrink)

Collaborative filtering recommender system (CFRS) plays a vital role in today’s e-commerce industry. CFRSs collect ratings from the users and predict recommendations for the targeted product. Conventionally, CFRS uses the user-product ratings to make recommendations. Often these user-product ratings are biased. The higher ratings are called push ratings (PRs) and the lower ratings are called nuke ratings (NRs). PRs and NRs are injected by factitious users with an intention either to aggravate or degrade the recommendations of a product. Hence, it (...) is necessary to investigate PRs or NRs and discard them. In this work, opinion mining approach is applied on textual reviews that are given by users for a product to detect the PRs and NRs. The work also examines the effect of PRs and NRs on the performance of CFRS by evaluating various measures such as precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy. (shrink)

Consultations are key to gather evidence that informs rulemaking. When analysing the feedback received, it is essential for the regulator to appropriately cluster stakeholders’ opinions, as misclustering may alter the representativeness of the positions, making some of them appear majoritarian when they might not be. The European Commission (EC)’s approach to clustering opinions in consultations lacks a standardized methodology, leading to reduced procedural transparency, while making use of computational tools only sporadically. This paper explores how natural language processing (NLP) technologies (...) may enhance the way opinion clustering is currently conducted by the EC. We examine 830 responses to three legislative proposals (the Artificial Intelligence Act, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act) using both a lexical and semantic approach. We find that some groups (like small and medium companies) have low similarity across all datasets and methodologies despite being clustered in one opinion group by the EC. The same happens for citizens and consumer associations for the consultation run over the DSA. These results suggest that computational tools actually help reduce misclustering of stakeholders’ opinions and consequently allow greater representativeness of the different positions expressed in consultations. They further suggest that the EC could identify a convergent methodology for all its consultations, where such tools are employed in a consistent and replicable rather than occasionally. Ideally, it should also explain when one methodology is preferred to another. This effort should find its way into the Better Regulation toolbox (EC 2023). Our analysis also paves the way for further research to reach a transparent and consistent methodology for group clustering. (shrink)

Extremism has been a problematic term to define and suggests different and opposing meanings. This study explores how Twitter users conceptualize extremism in Arabic and express their opinions/arguments to construct the term. A corpus of tweets was collected from Twitter API using the word ‘تطرف أو متطرف’ in Arabic for extremist/extremism. A topic modeling algorithm was then applied to the dataset to uncover latent associated concepts underlying extremism, followed by a critical discourse analysis using Van Dijk’s Sociocognitive approach. The discursive (...) and linguistic strategies used by Twitter users to support and justify their views of extremism were examined. The findings demonstrate an ideological influence that controls the concept of extremism, keeping it open to manipulation to serve shared interests and goals. Arab users of Twitter use extremism to promote their groups’ positive schema against others-negative schema. (shrink)

Religious leaders are being viewed as agents with influence over environmental opinion and attitude building. In public environmental project impact debate the Christian religious leaders may play an increasingly complex role due to their anthropocentric position. Roşia Montană Gold Corporation is such a project where The Romanian Orthodox Church has taken a position right from the beginning. Our study explores the local impact area religious leaders' attitudes as to the mining project in particular and the overall view of (...) environmental concerns in religious sermon in general. Orthodox, Catholic, Reformed and Baptist representatives have been interviewed. The main conclusion we drew is that environmental concerns can create leadership style dissonances between different hierarchical levels of the same religious hierarchies, but with benefits at the communitarian-religious levels. The practical implications that arise from this and the possible directions for future research are outlined in the final chapter of our study. (shrink)

Public’s concern about poor animal welfare provided by intensive farming systems has increased over the last decades. This study reviewed the interest of the scientific research on the pain issue in pig production to assess if the societal instances may be a driving force for the research activity. A literature search protocol was set up to identify the peer-reviewed papers published between 1970 and 2017 that covered the topic of ‘pain in pigs’ using Scopus®, database of Elsevier©. One hundred and (...) thirty papers were selected and they were mainly focused on the practice of castration followed by tail docking. The scientific community first focused on these painful practices as a way to improve production efficiency and quality issues while more recently, due to the increased pressure by the public opinion, turned its interest towards the search of alternative solutions. A text mining analysis on the abstract of the selected papers clearly indicated the effort of the research to explore solutions to alleviate pain. Evocative words of this target were the selected terms ‘pharmacological analgesic’ and ‘anaesthetic treatments’. The text mining highlighted vocalizations as the main pain indicators in pigs as this term was frequently associated to ‘acute stress’. Ethical issues were a minor research topic in the scientific literature on pig breeding but in the short run, they are supposed to become a major subject to justify the acceptance of the modern production systems at the eyes of the consumers. (shrink)

The study acknowledges that though mining has contributed to the development of many economies globally, it comes with unanticipated challenges especially on the people who are directly affected by the mining activities. The study aims to understand the implications of such challenges faced in mining resettled communities and the versatile practices followed to stay in the mist of such livelihood challenges in mining resettlement communities. The study also focuses on the copying strategies adapted to cope with (...) these challenges in mining resettlement communities. Qualitative approach was done to capture the rich essence of the subject matter. The study used focus groups and in-depth interviews as techniques and interviewed members from different households of the mining resettlements communities (Salman, Teleku-Bokazo and Nkroful) including land owners, opinion leaders, chiefs and from the institutional perspectives. As a result, it was found out that the livelihood challenges that clearly manifested itself was in the area of income, employment and morbidity issues. The evidence was shown that in all the challenges, copying measures are in place to enable the people live in their new settlements, but not adequate. (shrink)

This article seeks to address current debates comparing polls and opinion mining as empirically based figuration models of public opinion in the light of in-depth intellectual debates on the role and nature of public opinion that began after the French Revolution and the controversy over public opinion spurred by the invention of polls. Issues of historical quantification and re-conceptualisation of public opinion are addressed in four parts. The first summarises the history of the rise (...) and fall of the concept of public opinion. The second re-examines the key controversies in the debates on the theoretical, empirical and social implications and consequences of the invention of polling. The third part scrutinises the datafication of public opinion that started with polling industry and continues in the age of big data and data mining. The final section discusses the controversial potentials of opinion-mining technology and suggests ways in which social scientists could critically respond to the big data and opinion-mining challenges in order to reintegrate the ideas of publicness, the public and public sphere into public opinion research. (shrink)

Education public opinion information management is an important research focus in the field of Education Data Mining. In this paper, we classify the education data information based on the traditional Flat-OCC model. From the cognitive psychology perspective, we identify up to 12 kinds of emotions, including sadness and happiness. In addition, the EMO-CBOW model is also proposed in this paper to further identify emotion by using various emoticons in educational data sets. The empirical result shows that the proposed (...) Flat-OCC model can classify and identify the emotion of education public opinion data well; and for the recognition of educational emotion classification, the categorization accuracy of the Flat-OCC+EMO-CBOW model is significantly higher than that of a single Flat-OCC model, which reveals that the emotional-pack-based model we propose can enhance our benchmark model. (shrink)

The present study aims at proposing a time series-based network public opinion emergency management decision support algorithm for the problems of low decision accuracy and long decision time in traditional similar algorithms. In this proposed algorithm, after the time series data are preprocessed, the association rules of the original indicator data of network public opinion emergencies are mined, the original indicator data matrix of NPOEs will be constructed, and the improved local linear embedding approach will be employed to (...) obtain the original indicator data of NPOEs. After carrying out the preprocessing according to the preprocessing results, the objective weight of the emergency decision index is calculated through the interval value fuzzy information entropy measurement of the emergency decision index, the emergency management decision support model is constructed, and the emergency management decision support of the NPOE is realized. The simulation experiment results show that the proposed algorithm has a better effect on the decision-making effect of the management of NPOEs, and a higher decision-making efficiency is achieved. (shrink)

Sentiment analysis is also known as opinion mining. It has an important role in natural language processing and data mining. It involves extracting and analyzing subjective information from textual data to determine the sentiment. With the advancement of technology, it is increasingly important to understand users' opinions and sentiments regarding a particular product, service or issue. This research aims to optimize the marketing strategy of energy products in SOE subsidiaries through sentiment analysis using the VADER and LSTM (...) methods on social media.The researcher analyzed data from twitter to identify consumer sentiment towards energy products. The results of the analysis show that the combination of VADER and LSTM is effective in identifying the nuances of sentiment, with the accuracy of sentiment classification reaching 85%. Based on the analysis, the researchers developed recommendations for marketing strategies that are more focused and responsive to public perception. This study also highlights the importance of two-way interaction between companies and consumers as part of an effective marketing strategy. The findings of this study are expected to be used as a reference by state-owned companies in the energy sector to improve the effectiveness of their marketing strategies through a sentiment analysis approach on social media. (shrink)

With the development of sentiment analysis, studies have been gradually classified based on different researched candidates. Among them, aspect-based sentiment analysis plays an important role in subtle opinion mining for online reviews. It used to be treated as a group of pipeline tasks but has been proved to be analysed well in an end-to-end model recently. Due to less labelled resources, the need for cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis has started to get attention. However, challenges exist when seeking domain-invariant (...) features and keeping domain-dependent features to achieve domain adaptation within a fine-grained task. This paper utilizes the domain-dependent embeddings and designs the model CD-E2EABSA to achieve cross-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis in an end-to-end fashion. The proposed model utilizes the domain-dependent embeddings with a multitask learning strategy to capture both domain-invariant and domain-dependent knowledge. Various experiments are conducted and show the effectiveness of all components on two public datasets. Also, it is also proved that as a cross-domain model, CD-E2EABSA can perform better than most of the in-domain ABSA methods. (shrink)

In a reply to Mizrahi (2019), Bryant (2020) raises several methodological concerns regarding my attempt to test hypotheses about the observation that academic philosophers tend to find “scientism” threatening empirically using quantitative, corpus based methods. Chief among her methodological concerns is that numbers of philosophical publications that mention “scientism” are a “poor proxy for scholarly sentiment” (Bryant 2020, 31). In reply, I conduct a sentiment analysis that is designed to find out whether academic philosophers have negative, positive, or neutral sentiments (...) toward “scientism.” The results of this analysis suggest that, for the most part, articles on “scientism” written by academic philosophers tend to contain mostly negative rather than positive (or neutral) sentiments about “scientism.”. (shrink)

An Acquaintance of mine decided, in the late 1950s, to become an officer in the U.S. Navy, until he discovered a Navy regulation stating that ugly men would not be accepted as officer candidates. Surely there is something suspicious about such a policy. Yet, in a time when people are so conscious of the many forms of discrimination — race, colour, sex, age, religion — it is somewhat surprising that little serious attention is given to the practice of what I (...) shall call ‘aesthetic discrimination against persons’, discrimination on the basis of appearance or looks. It is true that, in recent years, some social scientists have conducted research leading them to the conclusion that human beings prefer and esteem good looking people over plain or ugly ones. A few of these researchers have even been willing to venture moral opinions on the subject. (shrink)

If a colleague of mine, whose opinion I respect, disagrees with me about some claim, this might give me pause regarding my position on the matter. The Equal Weight view proposes that in such cases of peer disagreement I ought to give my colleague’s opinion as much weight as my own, and decrease my certainty in the disputed claim. One prominent criticism of the Equal Weight view is that treating higher-order (indirect) evidence in this way invariably swamps first-order (...) (direct) evidence. While the opinions of our peers matter in our deliberations, the Equal Weight view counter-intuitively requires that evidence of mere disagreement is more important than standard kinds of evidence. I offer a proposal for how we should idealize epistemic agents that identifies the variable feature of disagreements that accounts for the shifting significance of direct and indirect evidence in different disagreement contexts. Specifically, by idealizing epistemic agents as deriving functions that characterize the non-subjective relationship between a body of evidence and the reasonableness of believing the various propositions supported by that evidence, we can accommodate the intuition to compromise that motivates the Equal Weight view, without accepting the counter-intuitive results. (shrink)

I have given this essay the title: “The Genealogy of Avenging Spirits” after Nietzsche's treatise: “The Genealogy of Morals” (Zur Genealogie der Moral). In this book Nietzsche clarifies the origins and essence of Christian morality which constitutes the basis of European civilization. In a similar fashion I shall endeavor to point out the origins and essence of the concept of avenging spirits which seems to me to form the basis of Japanese civilization.It may seem strange to talk about a concept (...) of avenging spirits. Nevertheless Norinaga Motoori considered mono-noawaré (the melancholy quality of things) the essence of Japanese culture; Daisetsu Suzuki, who was influenced by Zen, related its essence to a conception of Nothingness; and Ruth Benedict related it to the concept of shame as opposed to that of crime. I do not feel that these different opinions which have preceded mine are erroneous, for they undoubtedly capture certain aspects of our culture; however I would venture to say that it is more profoundly influenced by the concept of avenging spirits. (shrink)

This book provides an overview of computer techniques and tools — especially from artificial intelligence (AI) — for handling legal evidence, police intelligence, crime analysis or detection, and forensic testing, with a sustained discussion of methods for the modelling of reasoning and forming an opinion about the evidence, methods for the modelling of argumentation, and computational approaches to dealing with legal, or any, narratives. By the 2000s, the modelling of reasoning on legal evidence has emerged as a significant area (...) within the well-established field of AI & Law. An overview such as this one has never been attempted before. It offers a panoramic view of topics, techniques and tools. It is more than a survey, as topic after topic, the reader can get a closer view of approaches and techniques. One aim is to introduce practitioners of AI to the modelling legal evidence. Another aim is to introduce legal professionals, as well as the more technically oriented among law enforcement professionals, or researchers in police science, to information technology resources from which their own respective field stands to benefit. Computer scientists must not blunder into design choices resulting in tools objectionable for legal professionals, so it is important to be aware of ongoing controversies. A survey is provided of argumentation tools or methods for reasoning about the evidence. Another class of tools considered here is intended to assist in organisational aspects of managing of the evidence. Moreover, tools appropriate for crime detection, intelligence, and investigation include tools based on link analysis and data mining. Concepts and techniques are introduced, along with case studies. So are areas in the forensic sciences. Special chapters are devoted to VIRTOPSY (a procedure for legal medicine) and FLINTS (a tool for the police). This is both an introductory book (possibly a textbook), and a reference for specialists from various quarters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Metaphysics of Causality and NoveltyStephen BickhamI find myself in agreement with most of the points of Crosby's position that there are new things and new events in the world. Like him, I hold that determinists are mistaken, and I believe that time flows one way only. I appreciate Crosby's amendment of Whitehead's category of the ultimate from creativity to creativity/destructiveness or, translating Spinoza's term, nature naturing. And finally (...) I applaud his clever, and I think successful, argument that the production of novelty, rather than being incompatible with causal action, is, indeed, a requirement for any such process. Most of the meat of philosophy, however, lies not in agreements but in their contraries. While I do have significant disagreements with Crosby, I want to state at the beginning that these deal with issues in Philosophy that I find among the most perplexing, and so I hope I can expound them with at least a modicum of clarity.The major, underlying concern I have with Crosby's argument centers not on the concept of novelty nor on whether such occurs, but on the concept of causality. It is in relation to causality that Crosby attempts to prove his case on the existence of novelty. He maintains that not only is novelty not opposed to causality, but novelty itself is a necessary condition for causality to exist at all. Very importantly, I believe he proves his point. However, if causality is a totally confused notion, then, in my opinion, proving that novelty is necessary for causality to exist proves much less than Crosby intends. If I am correct, Crosby's argument is vitiated to a good extent because of its connection with causality at all.To see how this plays out, we can look at the simplest statement of this principle, "Everything that exists must have a cause." But note that this tries to make causality clear by invoking the frustrating and paradoxical notion of "thing." What is a thing, which is supposed to require a cause for its existence? [End Page 64] I present a piece of sandstone. Is it a thing? Here is a grain of sand on the surface of the piece. Is it a thing? The sandstone was taken from a ledge. Is the ledge a thing? The ledge is part of a deposit. Is the deposit of sandstone a thing? What happens to the causality principle if we try to eliminate (not an easy thing) this suspect category of thing (or something)?Maybe it is every event that must have a cause. But this gets us no closer to freedom from metaphysical quicksand. The first definition in my dictionary of event is, "Something that happens"(emphasis mine). And if we consider the notion of event on its own ground, so to speak, we run up against the following questions, among others: How much time is necessary for an event? Is a hiccup an event? A hiccup in the middle of a concert? Was the Chicago Fire an event? The battle of Antietam? The Civil War? The settling of the West? The Industrial Revolution?I am not concerned here with what is usually regarded as the essential puzzling issue of causality, that is, the nature of the causal relation. I am only struggling, and vainly I fear, with the preliminary issue of what the things are that are said to require causes. And I'm pessimistic that we will get very far in the task of specifying with precision just what these things—or occurrences or processes or fundamental entities or whatever—are.Perhaps another approach, a different angle, might be utilized. Must it not be that there is a fundamental truth or insight, or at least a strong, legitimate motive for holding that every thing (or event, etc.) must have a cause? This is a position held by virtually everyone at the level of common sense, and by the great majority, even, of skeptically minded philosophers. Rather than trying either to stipulate what the entities involved in causality are or wrestle with the issue of what the causal relationship itself is, let's try to understand why... (shrink)

This article presents, an analysis of the opinions of assurance providers regarding the quality and the limitations of sustainability reports and their recommendations to improve them using the Global Reporting Initiative as a framework. The qualitative content analysis of 301 assurance statements for sustainability reports from mining and energy companies provides a comprehensive view of the main outcomes of the assurance process, including its limitations, the application of the GRI principles and suggestions for improving sustainability reports. Taking into account (...) the perceptions of practitioners a priori well informed on the quality of sustainability reports—namely assurance providers—this paper complements the current literature on sustainability reporting and its assurance, including critical approaches that question the reliability of sustainability reports, stakeholder engagement and the accountability of reporting practices. This study contributes to the debates surrounding the quality of sustainability reports, the added value of assurance statements and the ethical issues underlying the assurance process. It also contains important practical implications for auditors, standardization organizations and stakeholders. (shrink)

This thoughtful, learned, well-written, extensively illustrated, and heavily documented study deserves to be regarded as a landmark in art history. Traditional art history has dealt for the most part with the “fine arts” (chiefly painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture), whereas other human creations that take physical form (such as furniture, ceramics, textiles, and metal and glass items), whether utilitarian or decorative (or both at once), are considered “craft” or “applied art” and are studied by folklorists, anthropologists, and archaeologists and often (...) displayed in different museums. Cooke wishes to break down this “hierarchical taxonomy,” this “fragmented, hierarchical field,” that emerged from Western Europe's “misunderstanding of art,” which valued “the cerebral over the manual.” His goal, in other words, is to outline “a more inclusive human history of art”— “a connected art history.” This phrase from his subtitle refers not simply to connecting “fine art” with “applied art” but also to crossing temporal and regional boundaries. Still another act of connecting is to examine all parts of an object's life history, and thus the three main divisions of the book deal with the making of objects, their circulation from one person and place to another (and “their ability to transmit ideas” in the process), and their meaning for the persons who possessed or encountered them.Over the years I have repeatedly said that all objects made by human beings are worthy of preservation and study because they bring us into direct contact with the past and, as part of our surroundings, affect our thoughts in the present. Every object, I have argued, including copies of a single printed edition of a book (so-called duplicates), is an independent witness to the past. I am particularly pleased, therefore, to welcome a major book that explores in detail, with a wealth of examples from many centuries and cultures, the place of objects in human history. Cooke's pursuit is “object-driven,” beginning with the nature of the materials and finally coming to “the inherent power of the object itself to influence human thought and action.” (Compare the subtitle of Sherry Turkle's 2007 anthology Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.) Cooke's refusal to separate “materials” from “people,” or “technologies” from “values,” reminds me of John Szarkowski's approach to photographs. In Photography until Now (1989), Szarkowski points out that histories of photography generally treat technical matters separately from artistic ones—a split between the “empirical” and the “intuitive” that he finds indefensible, for “these two ways of knowing meet in the process of making things.” He adds, “The meeting can be cordially symbiotic or aggressively competitive, but its resolution defines the character and meaning of the thing that is made.” This statement has been a favorite of mine as an elegant characterization of the nature of art, and it is one that Cooke would clearly agree with.Cooke does not discuss photography, but he makes clear that he is not attempting a “comprehensive history that charts the complete ebb and flow of objects over time.” Rather, his book is meant to be a “suggestive guide” to the “principles of material literacy,” a “kit of tools for future complex constructions of history.” Even so, I find some of the omissions puzzling. Why, for example, are glass objects not taken up, when he so thoroughly deals with other common materials? More serious, in my opinion, is the exclusion of the fine arts. (Of the 215 illustrations, five are of oil paintings and one is of a Japanese print, but they are present only as the sources for information drawn from their pictorial content; one Hogarth engraving is shown because its image was often reproduced on punch bowls; and there is a very brief passage on the “uneasy relationship” between sculpture and material culture, but no sculptures are illustrated or used as examples for discussion.) Presumably Cooke felt it was unnecessary for his book to encompass the fine arts after demonstrating that functional objects are just as sophisticated artistically and culturally as products of the fine arts are. Yet those products also belong to the universe of “entangled objects” (How could they not?), and it would have been illuminating to see them adduced among the examples Cooke cites. One could argue that by excluding them—and by referring to the makers of the objects he does discuss as “artisans” and “craftspeople”—he comes close to reinforcing the division he wishes to eliminate.Less easy to explain is Cooke's omission of books, for they have been one of the largest and most widely circulated classes of utilitarian objects. Most people never think about books as objects, treating them only as disposable receptacles for transmitting verbal texts in tangible form (which is why so many books are destroyed when their texts supposedly become available in another form). Such people do not realize that texts have connections with their physical embodiments. (For example, books, whether manuscript or printed, often contain clues revealing how their texts were affected by the production process; and readers’ attitudes toward texts can be influenced by their presentation.) Cooke, however, with his deep understanding of the way objects function and his impressive knowledge of the scholarship, cannot be one of these uninformed people. He would obviously be aware of the vast literature devoted to leather and cloth bookbindings and their decoration, as well as to the myriad styles of letters and the varieties of paper and parchment; he would also know how letterforms and binding designs reflect a complex interplay of social, political, and artistic forces. Bibliographers have long studied books as Cooke advocates studying other objects: “working from the inside out,” beginning with the evidence in books themselves for reconstructing the routines that were followed in their creation. And book historians are recognizing the necessity for an international approach like Cooke's, since many of the books circulating in one country originated in other countries. Books would have been a prolific additional source for illustrating Cooke's analyses.My admiration for Cooke's book is not altered by these few disappointments. Even without discussions of paintings, sculptures, and books, it is still exhilarating in its scope and depth. One hopes that art and material-culture historians will pay attention to it. But it ought to have a wider audience, for the daily lives of all of us would be enriched by a greater appreciation of the objects that make up a significant part of our environment. (shrink)

Purpose This study aims to analyze how English-language versions of e-newspapers in the first two countries affected, China and Japan, which are non-English-speaking countries and have different socio-economic and political settings, have highlighted Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic news and informed the global community. Design/methodology/approach A text-mining approach was used to explore experts’ thoughts as published by the two leading English-language newspapers in China and Japan from January to March 2020. This study analyzes the Opinion section, which mainly comprises (...) editorial and the op-ed section. The current study groups all editorial discussions and highlights into ten major aspects, which cover health, economy, politics, culture and others. Findings Within the first three months, the media in both China and Japan shifted their focus from health and preparedness to the economy, politics and social welfare. Governance and social welfare were key concerns in China’s news media, while, in contrast, global politics received the highest level of attention from experts in Japan’s news media. Environment and technologies aspects did not receive much attention by the expert’s columns. Originality/value At the initial stage of a world crisis, how leading nations and initially affected nations deal with the problem, how media play their role and guide mass population with experts’ thoughts are highlighted here. The understanding developed in this study can provide guidance to news media in other countries in playing effective roles in the management of this health crisis and catastrophes. (shrink)

Everywhere in the world, and in every period of human history, it has been common for energy decisions to be made in an ethically haphazard manner. With growing population pressure and increasing demand for energy, this approach is no longer viable. We believe that decision makers must include ethical considerations in energy decisions more routinely and systematically. To this end, we propose an applied ethics framework that accommodates principles from three classical ethical theories—virtue ethics, deontology, consequentialism, and two Native American (...) ethics (Lakota and Navajo)—all considered from the perspectives of the impacted communities. We illustrate this framework by evaluating five recent energy decisions: the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Navajo Nation’s possible transition from coal to solar, hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania, uranium mining in Virginia, and the construction of the Xiaolangdi Dam in China. An applied ethics framework is preferable to existing ethical analyses because it can serve to sharpen arguments for (un)ethical decisions and action. Rather than treat ethical reasoning as a matter of opinion, we argue that applying ethical principles in a universal and standardized way adds rigor to energy sector decisions by presenting a position available for objective scrutiny. Because our framework identifies which aspects of a targeted action (if any) must adjust to improve ethical merit, it can serve as a practical tool for improving decision-making as we enter a new era of energy transitions. (shrink)

Le lecteur non averti n’aura peut-être retenu de "Où atterrir ?" que le fait que son auteur semble animé de bonnes intentions, pour ainsi dire (on fermera les yeux sur le complotisme et le populisme) : la défense de l’environnement, l’accueil des migrants, l’intégration européenne, etc. À cela je voudrais opposer quelques remarques. La première est que la conception de Latour correspond tout à fait à ce qu’Ernst Cassirer appelait la pensée mythique. La pensée mythique, d’après Cassirer, ne conçoit pas (...) le monde comme constitué de choses stables, qui peuvent se manifester sous différents points de vue et à différentes occasions, mais plutôt comme un flux mouvant d’évènements liés entre eux par des qualités émotionnelles (menaçantes ou réconfortantes) et des caractères physionomiques. Ce monde obéit à des catégories de causalité, d’espace et de temps très différentes des nôtres : chaque partie contient le tout auquel elle appartient et dispose par conséquent du pouvoir causal du tout ; les différents lieux, directions ou moments sont déterminés en fonction de leur nature sacrée ou profane, menaçante ou désirable, etc. De plus, il n’y pas de différence essentielle entre le nom d’un objet et l’objet lui-même, etc. On aura constaté, à l’issue de cette note, qu’à bien des égards la pensée animiste et théologique de Latour fonctionne de la même manière. Par conséquent il faut considérer les livres de Latour comme des œuvres mythologiques, voire artistiques, qui peuvent éventuellement avoir un intérêt émotionnel ou esthétique, mais pas comme des ouvrages de sciences humaines et sociales. Je laisse à chacun le soin de juger de la qualité de ces œuvres, et du (dé)plaisir qu’elles procurent. C’est, bien sûr, tout à fait le droit de Latour d’écrire de tels livres, tant que, ce faisant, il ne fait pas montre de prétentions proprement scientifiques. Or, le problème est précisément qu’il prétend faire de la science (sociale), expliquer des phénomènes complexes et graves, et nous dire quoi faire face à eux. De ce point de vue, il faut tempérer les bonnes intentions dont je parlais, et on peut déceler une forme d’imposture voire de malhonnêteté intellectuelle dans le « pseudo-profound bullshit » que produit Latour. Ce dernier en effet, ne se contente pas de livrer un propos globalement dénué de sens, mais l’agrémente de termes et de faits scientifiques reconnus (comme le changement climatique) pour donner (faussement) l’impression qu’il fait sens. Il y a pire : même si le message de l’ouvrage est pour l’essentiel incompréhensible, le lecteur distrait gardera l’impression d’un brouillage irrémédiable des frontières entre nature et société, entre science et politique. Or ce brouillage non seulement rend incompréhensible toute notion de crise environnementale au niveau théorique, mais nuit évidemment à toute action pour y faire face au niveau politique. Ceci vaut en particulier pour le changement climatique, et les sciences qui le prennent pour objet – dont Latour préconise la politisation accrue. Or, si les sciences du climat sont avant tout politiques, plus rien ne distingue leurs énoncés de ceux des climato-négationnistes : il ne s’agit que d’énoncés également politiques en concurrence. La réalité du changement climatique d’origine anthropique peut ainsi facilement être remise en question. Et contrairement à ce qu’affirme Latour depuis qu’il prétend défendre la science, insister sur le fait que les faits scientifiques sont culturellement déterminés, et que l’objectivité scientifique dépend de processus sociaux et de négociations politiques, ne contribue pas à renforcer l’autorité de la science, au contraire. Par exemple, le scandale du climategate a miné la crédibilité des sciences du climat dans l’opinion publique américaine. Espérons donc que les recommandations de Latour ne fassent pas trop d’émules dans le grand public ou parmi les décideurs politiques – ce qui est hélas tout à fait possible étant donnée la grande notoriété dont il jouit. (shrink)

This study focuses on the life, works, scholarly personality and place of Abu Bakr Ahmad, one of the pioneers of the science of Qiraat in the Ottoman Empire. Abū Bakr Aḥmad was the son of Ibn al-Jazari, one of the authoritative figures in the science of Qiraat, and the author is called Ibn al-Nāzim after his father. Abū Bakr Aḥmad is an important figure who came to the forefront in the field of Qiraat by being educated by the leading scholars (...) of the period, especially Ibn al-Jazari, and wrote qualified works. Abu Bakr Ahmad distinguished himself among Ibn al-Jazari's other children. Abū Bakr Aḥmad served as a muderris in various madrasas in Damascus, such as the Great Ādiliyya, Atabekiyya and Umayyad mosques, and taught many students throughout his life. Among his students were the children of Bayezid Yildirim. After Ibn al-Jazari came to Bursa, Abu Bakr Ahmad took many books with him and taught what he learned from him to many people, especially the sultan's children. The works written by Abū Bakr Aḥmad also reveal his knowledge of scientific subjects. As a matter of fact, Ibn al-Jazari said that he liked his son Abū Bakr Aḥmad's commentary on Tayyibah very much, “...Although he did not even have a copy of my previous commentary on the same work, he commented it very well. Before that, he had also commented on two poems of mine very well...”. Apart from this commentary, which was praised by Ibn al-Jazari, he also wrote other works. Considering the works of Abū Bakr Aḥmad, it can be said that he was a commentator. This is because most of his works have the quality of a commentary. It is reported that when Ibn al-Nāzim was a professor in the madrasas in Damascus, the chief qadi of the period and many scholars attended his lectures. Ibn al-Nāzim was also the first commentator of Tayyibat al-Nashr, which is used as the main source of Qiraat education both in our country and in other Islamic countries and on which dozens of commentaries have been written. All this reflects the author's knowledge in the field of qiraat.While Abu Bakr Ahmad's personal effort, perseverance and intelligence played an important role in his reaching such a position, the fact that he was the son of a father like Ibn al-Jazari, who left his mark on the history of Qiraat and is considered an authority in his field, was undoubtedly effective. As a matter of fact, Ibn al-Jazari is a valuable figure who came to the forefront among his contemporaries in the shar'i sciences in general and in the field of Qiraat in particular. Aside from the words of praise uttered about him by scholars, the great works he penned and the vibrant community of students he left behind demonstrate this in the best way possible. Abu Bakr Ahmad was one of the first among the students who grew up under the tutelage of such an important scholar. When the studies on the life of Abū Bakr Aḥmad were examined, it was seen that there was no extensive and satisfactory information about the author. In fact, when the sources and documents that directly or indirectly mention the life of the commentator since his time are examined, it is seen that the information in the aforementioned sources is a repetition of what is given in Ibn al-Jazari's Ghāyat al-nihāya and sometimes contains contradictions within itself. For example, many issues such as the date of Abu Bakr Ahmad's death, the number and identity of his siblings, his position as imam-hatip of the Ulucamii, the name of one of his students, Ashraf Musa, the catalog information of some of his works or their attribution to the author are either erroneous or controversial. Nevertheless, sources such as manuscript library catalogs, archival records, and works on the life of Abū Bakr Ahmad such as tabāqat, terājim, and qiraat, academic, modern, or encyclopedic works have been searched, and the information obtained has been compiled and presented in this study. At the same time, the information about his life, which is assumed to be erroneous, has been identified and corrected by going to the main sources, and finally, the correct or close to the truth has been tried to be revealed. The general opinion formed by us as a result of our research on the life of Abu Bakr Ahmad led us to such a study. The main theme of the article is the life of Abū Bakr Ahmad and it is aimed to make a humble contribution to the literature through this study. (shrink)

IT IS DIFFICULT for me to read Pride and Prejudice without empathizing either with Elizabeth Bennet, or sometimes with her father, Mr Bennet. Not only do my own responses to and opinions of the events and characters of the book at times resemble theirs, but even when they do not, I find myself seeing the event from Elizabeth’s or Mr Bennet’s point of view. For example, at the close of the book, Elizabeth’s former dislike of Mr Darcy has completely vanished, (...) in part because of learning of a number of good deeds that Mr Darcy has done very quietly for their family. When Mr Darcy proposes to Elizabeth (for the second time) she is delighted to accept him. However, everyone else in Elizabeth’s family despises Mr Darcy, and they also believe that Elizabeth still hates him. So it is easy to understand Mr Bennet’s surprise and distaste when Mr Darcy asks Mr Bennet for Elizabeth’s hand; after all, Mr Bennet still believes Mr Darcy to be prideful and haughty. While I am not myself surprised to hear Elizabeth’s response—the reader learns much more of Mr Darcy’s character than Mr Bennet does—I do have the experience of imagining being surprised. I am also capable of empathizing with Elizabeth, who is excited, flustered, and a bit ashamed at having so misjudged Mr Darcy early on, and I can imagine having these feelings for people I have misjudged. I can (to some degree) understand why she finds explaining all this to Mr Bennet so difficult. I go back and forth, as I read, between the perspectives of Mr Bennet and Elizabeth. These experiences of mine are experiences of the sort that I call ‘empathizing with fictions’, although we sometimes might describe such experiences by saying that we ‘identified’ with a particular character or characters in a story. (shrink)

It is no easy task to answer Jerry Wakefield’s comments, for I feel at risk of merely pitting two major paradigms in the history and epistemology of psychiatry against each other: the one historical/anthropological, the other epistemological/naturalistic. Fortunately, Wakefield and I do share enough to find a middle ground. This commonality should allow me to reconcile his opinions and mine, by dissipating a few misunderstandings, and also to state more clearly why I am dubious about some of his proposals. First, (...) let me repeat that, in my argument, the lived experience of having an inner mental space is not primarily a psychological phenomenon—at least in the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rome and Baetica: Urbanization in Southern Spain, c. 50 B.C.–A.D. 150Leonard A. CurchinA. T. Fear. Rome and Baetica: Urbanization in Southern Spain, c. 50 B.C.–A.D. 150. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xii 1 292 pp. 3 maps. Cloth, $75. (Oxford Classical Monographs)The Roman province of Baetica has not received a comprehensive treatment since R. Thouvenot’s Essai sur la province romaine de Bétique (Paris 1940; 2d ed. 1973). Since then, (...) important epigraphic finds such as the Tabula Irnitana (AE 1986, 333) and archaeological excavations have greatly modified our understanding of the structure of Roman cities in this province. Fear endeavors to assess the urban phenomenon in Roman Baetica in light of this new evidence. Rather than “Urbanization,” his subtitle might better have read “Urban Change,” since Baetica had already been largely urbanized by the Carthaginians and Iberians, and the real issue is how the native cities were affected by the Roman presence. The author himself concedes that Baetica had a “native urban tradition,” whereas there is “little firm evidence that Rome pursued an active urbanizing policy” (27–29). He also shows that while Romanization may have been passive from a Roman perspective, the inhabitants were actively involved in “bottom-up” initiatives to improve the status and amenities of their cities.An introductory chapter surveys Baetican geography and examines an anthropological model of colonialism. Since Fear later questions “whether the premisses of such a model... are in fact of any use when looking at the life of a Roman province” (274), it is unclear why he includes it at all. The next chapter discusses the characteristics of an ancient city, and (with a range of examples from Britain to Palestine) how urbanism was diffused in new areas. Listing the features of a city mentioned—but incidentally, rather than as a definition—in the Digest, Fear examines to what extent these are reflected in the laws of Urso and Irni. This seems an artificial and otiose exercise, since the colony of Urso and the municipium of Irni were unquestionably cities, even if the Urso law, for instance, contains no reference to bath houses. Moreover, Fear’s tendency to use interchangeably the terms “town” and “city” obscures the issue of urban definition; the pre-Roman oppida of the Baetican highlands may have been towns, but were not cities.Chapter 3 investigates the state of urbanism (including colonies like Carteia and Corduba) in southern Spain around 50 b.c. Fear challenges conventional opinion by discounting the conventus as a major factor in urbanization and by questioning whether mining brought large numbers of Italians to the province. He also shows that while the legends on local coinage were Latinized, the designs (bull, Melqart, Iberian cavalryman) remained pre-Roman. The next chapter asks whether the Late Republican colonies were really miniature replicas of Rome, as Aulus Gellius (16.13) suggests. Fear argues that while the colonies did imitate Rome in such features as law and public architecture, they were “content to adapt native structures” (104) in other areas. This was because the Baetican colonies were not founded on “greenfield” sites (such as Emerita in [End Page 143] Lusitania) but were superimposed on indigenous settlements, thereby including a substantial proportion of Spanish incolae who inevitably had an “Iberianizing” influence on the colonists.The chapter on the Julio-Claudian period is primarily an analysis of the elder Pliny’s list of Baetican privileged towns. Fear finds very few cases in which we can state with certainty whether municipia were of Roman or Latin status. He also maintains that the distinctive cognomina assigned to the cities did not confer legal status (contra M. I. Henderson, JRS 32 [1942] 6, who saw them as “flowery colonial titles”) but simply helped distinguish between homonymous place names. Chapter 6 considers the impact of the Flavian Municipal Law, which Fear sees as a general blueprint, a lawyer’s vision of what life should be like in a municipium. As such the law makes unrealistic assumptions, for instance (in the section on enrollment of iudices) that all the residents will have tria nomina. As for the effect of the law on the inhabitants... (shrink)

This guide accompanies the following article(s): ‘Full Disclosure of the “Raw Data” of Research on Humans: Citizens’ Rights, Product Manufacturer’s Obligations and the Quality of the Scientific Database.’Philosophy Compass 6/2 (2011): 90–99. doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2010.00376.x Author’s Introduction Securing consent (and informed consent) from patients and research study participants is a key concern in patient care and research on humans. Yet, the legal doctrines of consent and informed consent differ in their applications. In patient care, the judicial doctrines of consent and informed (...) consent are disclosure doctrines based on the obligation of physicians to inform their patients of the following types of information: the nature of the procedure the physician is recommending in the patent’s care (P), the alternatives to the physician‐recommendation (A), and the risks of procedure and its alternatives (R). In addition, the physician must provide truthful answers to the patient’s questions (Q) to the best of the physician’s abilities. In research on humans, the onus of disclosure by study sponsors and principal investigators is much greater than in patient care precisely because the purpose of research is not patient care. The purpose of research is the identification and development of new generalizable knowledge. Thus, participation in a research study or trial may not benefit the study volunteer at all. In addition, the participant may carry a heavy risk burden in relationship to any testing of a newly designed drug or device as part of their experiences in the research study. Presently, despite the risks borne by the research study participant, the raw data collected from volunteers in research trials are treated by courts as if they were the private property of the study sponsor rather than generally owed to the public as would be expected by an effort like research participation aimed at contributing to the development of generalizable knowledge. This paper reviews the obligations that study sponsors owe to their study participants based on the very definition of research as a systematic activity whose purpose is to develop generalizable knowledge to help all humans. Author Recommends Court cases Canterbury v. Spence, United States Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate decision heard in the District of Columbia, USA) Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980). (Supreme Court of Canada) Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Canterbury v. Spence is the landmark Federal informed consent case in the United States heard in the District of Columbia. In this case, Judge Spottswood Robinson articulated the reasonable person standard of informed consent. This standard was subsequently adopted by the Supreme Court of Canada (Reibl v. Hughes, 2 S.C.R. 880 (1980)) and the High Court of Australia (Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L. R. 479 (1992)). The House of Lords rejected the reasonable person standard in England in Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985). Book Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. This book is a detailed guide for the review of scientific and ethical aspects of research on humans contained in the research study protocols and research informed consent forms which need to be submitted by study sponsors and principal investigators to institutional review boards (IRBs) for IRB review before a research study can receive approval to be conducted within a human study population in those institutions over which the IRB has authority. It also presents basic definitions in the area of research on humans and basic approaches to help conduct a deep review of the underlying scientific and ethical issues that are present within a research study protocol and its accompanying research informed consent form. Report National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). This U.S. National Commission in the Belmont Report argued for the necessity of a reasonable volunteer standard in research on humans in the United States. Arguing that the professional standard and the reasonable person standard of consent and informed consent were insufficient to base a disclosure standard in research on humans, this National Commission developed the reasonable volunteer standard where a study participant is to be approached in research informed consent with that information that a reasonable volunteer would want to know. Online Materials Belmont Report: Syllabus Topics for Lecture and Discussion Week I: Introduction and Overview Readings: Rogers v. Whitaker, 175 C.L.R. 479 (1992). (High Court of Australia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week II: The Different Standards of Consent and Informed Consent Readings: Canterbury v. Spence, 464 F.2d 772 (1972). (Federal appellate opinion heard in the District of Columbia) Sidaway v. Board of Governors of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital and Others. 1 A.C. 871 (1985) (House of Lords) Week III: Definition of Research Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 2 and 3) Week IV: How to Review a Research Study Protocol and Research Informed Consent Form Reading: Mazur, Dennis J. The Science and Ethics of Research on Humans. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (Especially Chapters 4–6, 10, and 12–14) Week V: Obligations in Research of Humans Versus Patient Care Reading: National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Belmont Report: Ethical Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research. Washington, DC: DHEW Publications, 1978 (78‐0012). Focus Questions • How do the judicial doctrines of consent in England and Australia compare to the judicial doctrines of informed consent in the United States and Canada? • How does a professional standard of disclosure differ from a reasonable person standard of disclosure? • What is the definition of research? • How is a research study (study proposal and research informed consent form) reviewed from scientific and ethical bases for considerations of approval by an IRB? • How do the obligations of a study sponsor, a principal investigator, and a research team conducting a research trial on human study participants differ from the obligations of a physician caring for a patient? • Should all raw data of research derived from humans be made available to the public for use in developing generalizable knowledge to help others, or should raw data be considered the private property of the study sponsors (for example, prescription drug manufacturers), who fund the research trials? Seminar/project Idea Draw a timeline of the development of the basic concepts of consent and informed consent in patient care and in patient research. On this timeline, first place the dates of the key court cases in England, the United States, Canada, and Australia on consent and informed consent. Then place the date of the development of the Belmont Report. Why do differences exist between these four countries in terms of the legal requirements of informedness of a patient (in medical care) and a study participant (in medical research)? What roles if any do the concepts of self‐determination and self‐decision have in consent and informed consent in patient care and in informed consent in research on humans among the four countries of interest? What are the realities of research on human participants that require a new standard of informed consent, the reasonable volunteer standard, to be developed beyond the two standards in patient care, the professional standard, and the reasonable person standard? Counterpoint Arguments The following are counterpoint arguments that need to be appreciated to more fully understand the concepts that impact the thesis that ‘raw data’ should be open to the public to allow the opportunity of checking of the results of its associated scientific paper and for further analysis. De‐Identified (Anonymized) Raw Data A current approach to identifying (anonymizinig) raw data is based on the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (P.L.104‐191). HIPAA was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996 to keep a person’s medical information private. In a research study, a person’s private medical information can become research data. HIPAA’s Privacy Rule allows a covered entity to de‐identify data by removing all 18 elements that could be used to identify the individual or the individual’s relatives, employers, or household members; these elements are enumerated in the Privacy Rule. The covered entity must also have no actual knowledge that the remaining information could be used alone or in combination with other information to identify the individual who is the subject of the information. Under this method, the identifiers that must be removed are the following: 1 Names. 2 All geographic subdivisions smaller than a state, including street address, city, county, precinct, ZIP Code, and their equivalent geographical codes, except for the initial three digits of a ZIP Code if, according to the current publicly available data from the Bureau of the Census: 2a. The geographic unit formed by combining all ZIP Codes with the same three initial digits contains more than 20,000 people. 2b. The initial three digits of a ZIP Code for all such geographic units containing 20,000 or fewer people are changed to 000. 3 All elements of dates (except year) for dates directly related to an individual, including birth date, admission date, discharge date, and date of death, and all ages over 89 and all elements of dates (including year) indicative of such age, except that such ages and elements may be aggregated into a single category of age 90 or older. 4 Telephone numbers. 5 Facsimile numbers. 6 Electronic mail addresses. 7 Social security numbers. 8 Medical record numbers. 9 Health plan beneficiary numbers. 10 Account numbers. 11 Certificate/license numbers. 12 Vehicle identifiers and serial numbers, including license plate numbers. 13 Device identifiers and serial numbers. 14 Web universal resource locators (URLs). 15 Internet protocol (IP) address numbers. 16 Biometric identifiers, including fingerprints and voiceprints. 17 Full‐face photographic images and any comparable images. 18 Any other unique identifying number, characteristic, or code, unless otherwise permitted by the Privacy Rule for re‐identification. Even though ‘raw data’ can be de‐identified (anonymized) so that there is no way to trace back the data to the study participant from which it was drawn, there are still questions whether the ‘de‐identified raw data’ can be given to other researchers or made public without the original study participant’s approval. It may be the case that this approval could be done at the start of any research study where the individual considering study participation would be counseled on what the process of de‐identification consists of and would be asked whether the participant would allow use of the data by other researchers or made available to the public in a de‐identified state. However, there may be questions of the study participants as to whether the data are truly de‐identified and untraceable back to the study participant since the participant would not be able to see the process actually being carried out in detail in all relevant circumstances. Using Raw Data in Context Simply being in possession of raw data is never enough to build on that data from a research perspective. Researchers need to understand the context of the scientific research study in which the data were collected. This research context includes (but is not limited to): (i) the scientific hypothesis of the research study, (ii) the inclusion and exclusion criteria selected by the research designers of the study to determine which study participants were included and which were excluded from the study, (iii) the methods used to collect the data and possibilities of errors in the data collection processes, and (iv) answers to questions regarding whether any data were excluded from the study data and why these data were excluded. Ownership Rights Over Data There are ownership rights over data. Ownership rights include court decision making related to the question which parties are to be considered as the owners of the data. Possible owners here include (but are not limited to) (i) the study sponsor whose only role was to fund that study, (ii) the principal investigator(s) who developed the scientific hypothesis, and (iii) individual study participants through special contracts made by individual participants who negotiate such contracts with study sponsors and principal investigators to share in the ownership of data. Examples of such data are participant sources of unique gene lines or unique cell lines to be used in future research. Objections to Data Sharing Finally, individual researchers may simply object to sharing data. A researcher’s arguments here may be simply stating that he or she has a right to fully analyze the data since the collection of the data was the researchers’ idea in the first place. These researchers may argue that they have the right to mine the data as fully as they can before deciding to make the data open to the public for others to analyze. Works Cited 1 Kaiser, J. ‘Making Clinical Data Widely Available.’Science 322.5899 (10 Oct. 2008): 217–8. 2 de Lusignan, S., J.F. Metsemakers, P. Houwink, V. Gunnarsdottir, and J. van der Lei. ‘Routinely Collected General Practice Data: Goldmines for Research? A Report of the European Federation for Medical Informatics Primary Care Informatics Working Group (EFMI PCIWG) from MIE2006, Maastricht, The Netherlands.’Informatics in Primary Care 14.3 (2006): 203–9. 3 Sim, I. ‘Human Studies Database Project’, CTSA Data Repositories Symposium (17 Oct. 2008). 23 Nov. 2010. 4 Sim, I., C.G. Chute, H. Lehmann, R. Nagarajan, M. Nahm, and R.H. Scheuermann. ‘Keeping Raw Data in Context.’Science 323.5915 (6 Feb. 2009): 713. 5 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, HIPAA Privacy Rule, Information for Researchers. 13 Nov. 2010. 6 Wilczynski, N.L., R.B. Haynes, and Hedges Team. ‘EMBASE Search Strategies for Identifying Methodologically Sound Diagnostic Studies for Use by Clinicians and Researchers.’BMC Medicine 29.3 (March 2005): 7. (shrink)

Parent pauvre de la formation polytechnicienne à l’époque de Poincaré, la chimie resta en dehors des centres d’intérêt du savant malgré l’importance sociale qu’elle acquit à la fin du xixe siècle. Le mathématicien, physicien et philosophie y fut confronté assez fortuitement en 1907 comme président de la Commission scientifique d’étude des poudres de guerre créée après l’explosion du cuirassé Iéna car Marcellin Berthelot, qui avait été pressenti comme éminent spécialiste des poudres et explosifs mourut dans l’intervalle. Dans un contexte international (...) tendu entre la France et l’Allemagne depuis l’annexion de l’Alsace-Moselle en 1871 et alors que la crise marocaine relança l’esprit de revanche, cet accident catastrophique porta un rude coup à la confiance du pays dans ses moyens de défense. Le gouvernement jugea alors que seul Poincaré avait l’autorité scientifique nécessaire pour rassurer l’opinion publique sur la sécurité des poudres sans fumée issues de l’industrie chimique inventées par son camarade de promotion Paul Vieille et maintenir l’ennemi à distance. Les archives de la Commission et la correspondance administrative de Poincaré témoignent de son investissement. Sa correspondance personnelle avec Henry Le Chatelier, autre ingénieur X-Mines spécialiste des poudres et explosifs, permet de mieux cerner son appréhension des problèmes complexes posés par les nouvelles poudres et de dévoiler sa stratégie pour contourner les blocages institutionnels dus à la rivalité entre le service producteur des Poudres et salpêtres et les services consommateurs de l’Artillerie et la Marine et aux attaques contre le monopole des poudres de la part des industriels et de leurs partisans au Parlement. (shrink)

At first blush values such as diversity appear to be worth striving for. The question is whether or not such values—which have become increasingly prevalent the institutional credos of academia—are values as such, that being that they are things of moral worth (Value, n.d.), or if they are something else altogether. My unpopular suspicion leans toward the latter. Personal opinions, of course, can hardly be said to be good justification for a withering critique, however, these opinions of mine mirror similar (...) concerns held by moderate and conservative opinions of the matter (Pew Research Center, 2017). As such it is beneficial to examine these issues rigorously separated from the pathological rhetoric that typically insulates them from outside reproach. Anecdotally speaking, since "diversity" seems to be the chief concern among these groups both in the academic setting and the world at large, the crux of this article will be anchored by a Marx-influenced assessment of the actuality of diversity as a social work in the academic environment, and the effect such projects might have if my suspicions prove to be correct. (shrink)

Amongst other methods, political campaigns employ microtargeting, a specific technique used to address the individual voter. In the US, microtargeting relies on a broad set of collected data about the individual. However, due to the unavailability of comparable data in Germany, the practice of microtargeting is far more challenging. Citizens in Germany widely treat social media platforms as a means for political debate. The digital traces they leave through their interactions provide a rich information pool, which can create the necessary (...) conditions for political microtargeting following appropriate algorithmic processing. More specifically, data mining techniques enable information gathering about a people's general opinion, party preferences and other non-political characteristics. Through the application of data-intensive algorithms, it is possible to cluster users in respect of common attributes, and through profiling identify whom and how to influence. Applying machine learning algorithms, this paper explores the possibility to identify micro groups of users, which can potentially be targeted with special campaign messages, and how this approach can be expanded to large parts of the electorate. Lastly, based on these technical capabilities, we discuss the ethical and political implications for the German political system. (shrink)

Ramelli undertakes for the first time a systematic investigation of the possible knowledge of Christianity in a group of novels, all dated between the first and third century CE, and belonging to geographical areas in which Christianity was present at that time. She endeavors to point out the meaning that possible allusions had for the public addressed by those novels. . . . The results of her research are, in my opinion, of the highest interest. . . . Her (...) work seems to me to be most helpful and rich in outstanding results. --Marta Sordi, in Aevum 76 (2002) -/- The authors of the classical novels shared their world with Christians--some may have been Christians themselves--and one might expect to find references to Christianity in their works. In this learned and pioneering study, Ilaria Ramelli, an expert in both classical literature and early Christianity, brings to bear her profound knowledge of ancient history and a subtle feel for literary values, and identifies a wide range of possible allusions. Her book is a contribution not only to the study of the ancient novel but also to our understanding of the cross influences between religious cultures in the ancient world. --David Konstan Professor of Classics New York University -/- The book has important qualities. First of all, the author offers a very full synthesis of the results of earlier partial studies, including those by herself. A lot of work must have been invested in its preparation, which entailed studying a variety of areas, literary, historical, and theological . . . Secondly, she always takes a careful stand, and never allows herself to declare certain what is no more than plausible or even most probable; Lucian is the only author about whose direct knowledge of Christianity she is absolutely sure. And finally, the work includes a wealth of bibliographical references, both in the footnotes and in the sixty-eight pages of the bibliography. The book is a mine of information . . . Nowadays, both the literature of the novels and the early Church as an element of society are in the spotlight of scholarly interest. Those wishing to work on the points of contact between the two are well advised to use Ramelli as a guide. They will find the facts, well-balanced discussions, and an exhaustive bibliography. --Anton Hilhorst, in Ancient Narrative 3 (2003) -/- Ramelli demonstrates enormous meticulousness, learning, and a critical approach to the sources and bibliography . . . The documentation with which the author of this monograph corroborates all of her statements concerning possible parallels (between the ancient novels and Christianity) with respect to the contents or form . . . is absolutely exhaustive. We must also highlight the huge carefulness, erudition, and critical use of literature. --Antonio Artes Hernandez, in Myrtia 19 (2004). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross's Contribution to Contemporary Western Tibetan BuddhismJudith Simmer-BrownI first met Rita Gross on 2 January 1978, on the day of my arrival to take a professor's post at Naropa University. She opened the front door of Reggie Ray's house, where she was a houseguest. Little did I know how long and active our friendship would be, and I'm delighted to contribute to this very special panel on her (...) work. During the decades since, she has been the only person in my life who has intersected academia, dharmic realms, feminism, and interreligious dialogue, the four most important areas of my life; still, I think it is in the area of her scholarly and personal contributions to Tibetan Buddhism that I can speak most directly.When I met Rita, she was new to Tibetan Buddhism and had faced many challenges in her religious and spiritual journey. When she was excommunicated from the German Lutheran Church at age twenty-one, it was because she asked too many questions and expressed too many opinions. She has never stopped. She briefly explored Judaism, and then became enamored in her feminist studies with the goddess traditions of India, also an interest of mine. She has been able to bring her critical mind, her devotional heart, her connection to practice, and her appreciation of community directly into her life as a Tibetan Buddhist, and I have had the privilege of being by her side during most of it.After Rita began her meditation practice in the mid-1970s, she became a student of the great Kagyu-Nyingma master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who is also my teacher. She and I have done meditation and study retreats from a few days to three months in length, sharing ritual practice, teachings and discussions, and challenging lives together as members of a vibrant spiritual community around a charismatic teacher. Together we served as the senior members of the Task Force on Women and the Feminine Principle in the large, international Shambhala community. Eventually, she took on another teacher, the female tulku Ven. Khandro Rinpoche, whom I also dearly love, and she has become one of her senior dharma teachers, or lopons. All of this has occurred while I became a senior dharma teacher, an ācārya, of Shambhala, where we both began.In her time in these two lively Western Tibetan Buddhist communities, she has [End Page 69] Buddhist-Christian Studies 31 (2011) 69-74. © by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved. served as an accomplished dharma teacher and at alternating times a scholar, activist, and critic, while committing to thousands of hours of service to the development of a genuinely Western dharma. While doing this, she has made many contributions equivalent to those of many dedicated dharma students. My comments address the unique contributions she has made as a feminist scholar, historian of religion, and theologian to this western dharmic world.Ironically, our areas of specialty have also intertwined. Early in the 1980s we began a book project with SUNY that was to be a feminist critique of Buddhism (hers) and a Buddhist critique of feminism (mine). After several years of conversation and discussion, Rita and I decided that our agendas were sufficiently different and our styles sufficiently independent to warrant separate books. As our books emerged (mine two babies later than hers), our friendship has continued its evolution.The Prophetic VoiceThe first of Rita's unique contributions to Tibetan Buddhism in the West revolve around what she has called her "prophetic voice," a notion that first appeared in her landmark book, Buddhism after Patriarchy, in 1993. Rita has consistently asserted that the prophetic voice is "the missing element" in Buddhism, leading Buddhists to a kind of double standard in which teachings concerning compassion coexist with Buddhism's traditional disregard for social and political inequities in society. She claims that "Buddhists have generally not been willing to engage in social action to see the realization of that ethic" in these social and political realms, and speculates that for the Buddhist, individual liberation has taken precedence over societal transformation. Instead, Buddhists have a long-standing history of acceptance of the... (shrink)

What Aphorism Does Nietzsche Explicate in Genealogy of Morals, Essay III ? JOHN T. WILCOX A picture held us captive. Wittgenstein ~ AS EVERYONE KNOWS, the dominant opinion is not always correct. Current scholarship, in all likelihood, makes assumptions which have not yet been questioned; and probably some of them will be seen to be false, once they have been examined. I will argue here that there is a dominant but erroneous assumption concerning the Third Essay in Nietzsche's On (...) the Genealogy of Morals. It will be obvious that correcting this error has some serious implica- tions for almost all current interpretations of the essay. After acknowledging, at the end of his Preface to the Genealogy, that some might find his new book "incomprehensible," Nietzsche warns that "the fault.., is not necessarily mine." He assumes, he says, that readers have already worked hard at his earlier writings, themselves "not easy to pene- trate," and have been "wounded" and "delighted" by his Zarathustra. Then he begins one of several passages we must examine carefully: In other cases, people have difficulty with the aphoristic form: this arises from the fact that today this form is not taken seriously enough. An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather, one has then to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art of exegesis. I have offered in the third essay of the present book an example of what I.. (shrink)

Plato’s overarching and seemingly unabashedly explicit purpose of his entire Socrates-featured — not to say -dominated — dialogue-form corpus is to put forth Socrates’ side of any argument in a singularly positive light. While, granted, this asymmetry is at times disrupted by the rather strong appearances of such then-leading erudite and social lights as Parmenides, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon, Plato inclines toward portraying Socrates’ interlocutors as virtually reflexively assenting to what the latter maintains, or proposing toothless, undeveloped, in a word, pro (...) forma differing opinions. Conversely, Socrates is (literally) unfailingly rendered as more composed and amiable than, and as intellectually superior to, everyone else; it is he who normally determines the direction of, leads, and wins nearly every debate; and he either adroitly converts his counterparts to his side or even reduces them to silence. Not surprisingly, therefore, after perusing any of Plato’s dialogues wherein the participants arrive at no clear understanding of the subject under discussion, the reader is left with the distinct sense that this is, fundamentally, Socrates’ personal, but nevertheless sublime, failure. As Plato quotes Socrates intimating about as much in the concluding paragraphs of the Charmides: “I have been utterly defeated, and have failed to discover what that is to which the lawgiver gave this name of temperance or wisdom” (175b) (italics mine). (shrink)

Social network services such as Twitter are important venues that can be used as rich data sources to mine public opinions about various topics. In this study, we used Twitter to collect data on one of the most growing theories in education, namely Self-Regulated Learning and carry out further analysis to investigate What Twitter says about SRL? This work uses three main analysis methods, descriptive, topic modeling, and geocoding analysis. The searched and collected dataset consists of a large volume of (...) relevant SRL tweets equal to 54,070 tweets between 2011 and 2021. The descriptive analysis uncovers a growing discussion on SRL on Twitter from 2011 till 2018 and then markedly decreased till the collection day. For topic modeling, the text mining technique of Latent Dirichlet allocation was applied and revealed insights on computationally processed topics. Finally, the geocoding analysis uncovers a diverse community from all over the world, yet a higher density representation of users from the Global North was identified. Further implications are discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The use of voluntary assisted dying as an end‐of‐life option has stimulated concerns and debates over the past decades. Although public attitudes towards voluntary assisted dying (including euthanasia and physician‐assisted suicide) are well researched, there has been relatively little study of the different reasons, normative reasoning and rhetorical strategies that people invoke in supporting or contesting voluntary assisted dying in everyday life. Using a mix of computational textual mining techniques, keyword study and qualitative thematic coding to analyse public submissions (...) to a parliamentary inquiry into voluntary assisted dying in Australia, this study critically examines the different reasons, normative reasoning and rhetorical strategies that people invoke in supporting or contesting voluntary assisted dying in everyday life. The analysis identified complex and potentially contradictory ethical principles being invoked on both sides of the debate. These findings deepen our understanding of the moral basis of public reasoning about end‐of‐life matters and will help to inform future discussions on policy and law reform. The findings underscore the importance of sound normative reasoning and the use of caution when interpreting opinion polls to inform policy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Second GuessingAnonymous OneThis is difficult for me to write because I have tremendous respect for every doctor that has been involved in my son’s care. I firmly believe that they chose and administered the highest level of care that they assessed as appropriate; that they cared for him both personally and professionally as if he were their own child; and that he was in the care of acknowledged giants (...) in their fields. I write this knowing that I will share this narrative with these doctors, in order that they can better understand the decisions I was faced with and the guilt I must live with feeling that I may not have made the best possible informed choice for my son, because of this trust and relationship.Let me describe my oncologist. I say “my” instead of my son’s whose doctor he really is, because he is mine too in every sense of the word. He cares passionately about his work and about my son specifically; he engenders my trust because he is compassionate, brilliant, and available to me for concerns both great and small. His accomplishments have saved lives and will continue to impact his field. He became the narrow bridge I walk, that is the only thing between me and dangerous water and rocks waiting below; the balancing bar on the tightrope that is the only thing that stands to keep me from falling into the abyss and breaking my neck. And this made it difficult for me to disagree with him and seek a second opinion. Because his unspoken words were, “Don’t you trust me that I will do the best for your child?” and I could not answer then what I would answer now, “Nobody is infallible and sometimes we may miss something that someone else can see despite how much we know or care.”It is ironic, I think, that sometimes a layperson, because of her limited knowledge, can see more clearly where a professional may not.My son was diagnosed at age six with Grade II ependymoma in 2006. He was treated with surgery, a complete resection, and then 33 rounds of conformal radiation. He recurred in 2012, and was diagnosed with anaplastic ependymoma Grade III. He had another surgery, with the same surgeons, who pronounced it another successful total resection. This is where my story begins.The MRI taken the next day showed a sliver of something there. My oncologist, much sought after for his diagnostic abilities in reading MRI’s showed slight concern that it may be residual tumor, but both the surgeons and the MRI report came back negative, identifying the sliver as inflammation. Six [End Page 9] weeks later, 3 days before we were scheduled to leave out of town to receive proton beam radiation, I insisted on another MRI. The sliver was enlarged from the post–op MRI. My oncologist said it was tumor; one surgeon said it was inflammation and the other surgeon abstained from speculation. The MRI report stated it appeared to be recurrent tumor.Now here was my dilemma as a parent. The prognosis today of radiation on residual tumor for ependymomas is very bad, especially with a residual tumor of his size. On the other hand, my oncologist felt that going in for surgery with no guarantee of a total resection anyway, was incurring a risk of damage to my child that may impact severely on his quality of life.My oncologist felt that for many medical reasons, inherent risks of surgery, uncertainty about status of the scan reading, quality versus quantity of life, and—I think—an understandably pessimistic view of the possibility of cure for recurrent anaplastic grade III ependymoma, he was against another surgery, and opted to continue with radiation with the tumor as is.I am part of two support groups on line, one for parents of children with any type of brain tumor and the other specific for ependymoma parents. The clinical and anecdotal knowledge of these groups as a whole is phenomenal because, unfortunately, we have parents who have experienced and researched almost everything about this illness, in all its stages. When I was faced... (shrink)

There has been a tendency, even among authors who have regarded Valerius Maximus as worthy of independent study, to use theFacta et Dictaas a neutral conduit of information about other wider areas. Valerius has thus sometimes become a sourcebook mined for nuggets of information but effectively invisible to those who work it. The past thirty years have seen valuable contributions that raise awareness of the importance of the genre of theFacta et Dictaand the personal input of Valerius, but traces of (...) the ‘conduit’ approach are still preserved in some authors’ attempts to justify their study of the work. For instance, Valerius provides an insight into the historical image of Marius, and is valuable precisely because he has no opinion or personal ideas to offer, because he preserves the language of school rhetoric, because his collection gives us strictly conventional material about religion, because he presents an unadulterated mirror-image of imperial policy and propaganda and because he is ‘middle-brow’ and thus depicts common attitudes. The text has also sometimes been studied for what it reveals about Early Imperial Latin, non-Republican culture and the organisation of Roman knowledge. Most recently, Tara Welch has argued that Valerius deliberately stripsexemplaof all authorial input, including his own, in an attempt to make himself a conduit fortraditio.Alternatively, study of the text is justified by interest in the time period in which it was written. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Benjamin I. Schwartz' "China and Contemporary Millenarianism—Something New under the Sun"Lin Yu-shengIn the spring of 1998, my colleague Mike Clover, a historian of the ancient West and an admirer of Benjamin I. Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient China, invited Professor Schwartz to participate, with Heiko Oberman, J. C. Heesterman, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, among others, in a conference he had been organizing on "Eurasia and Africa (...) during the Last Thousand Years." The essay that follows—the last piece of scholarly writing by Ben Schwartz, finished thirty-seven days before his passing—was read by me on his behalf at the conference, held on October 11 and 12, 1999, in Madison.From my telephone conversations with Ben in the summer of 1999, I learned that while he intended to work on a paper for the conference to be titled "The Idea of Unilinear Evolution and the Destinies of China," his attention was very much drawn to the fact of the onset in America of unbridled consumerism and materialism, whose characteristic of feeding on themselves with ever increasing intensity and widespread impact seemed to indicate to him the rise of a profoundly disturbing new phenomenon in this world. When I visited with Ben and Bunny (Mrs. Schwartz) in Cambridge on October 2 and 3, Ben was in the midst of writing an essay on what he would call the "new technological-economic millenarianism" or "materialistic apocalypticism." He said that he preferred to have me read this essay, which he would finish before the conference, rather than the one he originally intended to write. Since the conference was meant to take note of the significance of the passage of time from a world-historical perspective, the reflections by a thinker as deeply serious and searching as Ben Schwartz at the juncture of the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third on the implications of an entirely new worldwide phenomenon as he perceived it—though having little direct bearing on China's past—would of course be most welcome at the conference.Ben's health deteriorated almost immediately after he had completed the essay on Friday, October 8, and he died on November 14, 1999. We now know from hindsight that Ben had probably felt that he might soon leave us, but he summoned enough energy not to let this happen before his completion of the essay, partly due to his sense of responsibility to deliver what he had promised and partly, and more importantly, because of the imperative he felt to issue, in the spirit of the old prophets, as his parting words, a grave warning to his fellow human beings.The essay is discursive, with many important points implied through nuance rather than formally argued. We can hardly expect more, given the physical condition of its author at the time of its writing. Although this does not, in my opinion, diminish its importance, it does demand close reading from its readers. The following is my brief attempt at this task, for whatever it may be worth. [End Page 189]To begin with, that Ben chooses to use religious language (which is related to "ultimate concerns")—words like "millenarianism" or "apocalypticism," which are ordinarily reserved for depicting the rare and drastic deliverance of humankind from "the vast burden of human suffering and despair"—as a means to explore metaphorically the nature and implications of the new consumerism and materialism is indicative of how serious he has perceived the onset of the phenomenon under consideration to be.To the extent that consumerism and materialism promise to their true believers "a totally new way of neutralizing the age-old causes of human suffering" (italics mine) through their "total attention on every aspect of human life from the techno-economic side," it is legitimate to speak of them as "materialistic apocalypticism," in that they transcend all tensions and agonies in life and elevate the true believers to a state of salvation. However, in its exclusive concern with "unalloyed, unreflective contentment" and pleasure in the self without any regard for the ethical consequences of techno-economic progress, it is a new materialism very different from... (shrink)

In this paper I explore privacy as a concept that becomes relevant and sometimes necessary under specific circumstances, but unnecessary in others. Privacy, I suggest, can be thought of as the right to be left alone and is integral to related concepts such as freedom, liberty, and independence. In light of the ongoing expansion of data-mining technologies, business models, and emerging modes of governance, I suggest that privacy is simultaneously more necessary and more at risk than ever. Privacy, in (...) other words, is fragile and must be appreciated, understood, and defended. At the same time, privacy is increasingly an obstacle for businesses, governments, and financial interests, all of whom are eager to extract our data, manage our expectations, and shape and control our desires. To achieve their objectives, I describe how these organizations have long used propaganda and persuasive techniques to shape and manage the opinions, values, and expectations of the public. These days, I argue, the meaning of privacy is being made to evolve in order to bolster these organizations’ interconnected efforts to expand their power and control and to pave the way for the imposition of digital IDs. I also reflect on the way propaganda is being used today, the ways it has been described in the past, and the ways it will evolve in the future—either in defense of freedom, liberty, and independence, or in service of organizations intent on expanding their power and control over managed populations. (shrink)

This article is a response to A. Patkul’s review of my translation of D. Jacquette’s book “Alexius Meinong, the Shepherd of Non-Being.” I disagree with reviewer’s opinion on a number of issues. One of the objections is that A. Patkul proceeds from the implicit (and sometimes explicit) opposition of analytical and continental philosophy when considering the contents of a book written by an analytical philosopher, and moreover translated by an analytical philosopher. This attitude is manifested by him in two (...) trends. Firstly, it is an emphasis on the already well-known sides of the Meinong’s theory of objects, which is rather of historical and philosophical interest, tending more to repeat the “Brentanian” roots and phenomenological aspects of Mining. Actually, the application of Meinong’s ideas to modern philosophical problems, which is the subject of Jacquette’s book, is practically ignored. Secondly, reviewer’s claims to the terminological decisions of the translator turn out, in addition to trivial typos, to be the result of all his desire to keep Meinong in the bosom of often scholastic terminology, with the recommendation to make do with Latin tracing paper. From my point of view, despite the well-known quirkiness of the terminology of Meinong himself, when translating, one should strive to convey the meaning in terms understandable to the reader. (shrink)

Lys. You have seen the exhibition of the man fighting in armour, Nicias and Laches, but we did not tell you at the time the reason why my friend Melesias and I asked you to go with us and see him. I think that we may as well confess what this was, for we certainly ought not to have any reserve with you. The reason was, that we were intending to ask your advice. Some laugh at the very notion of (...) advising others, and when they are asked will not say what they think. They guess at the wishes of the person who asks them, and answer according to his, and not according to their own, opinion. But as we know that you are good judges, and will say exactly what you think, we have taken you into our counsels. The matter about which I am making all this preface is as follows: Melesias and I have two sons; that is his son, and he is named Thucydides, after his grandfather; and this is mine, who is also called after his grandfather, Aristides. Now, we are resolved to take the greatest care of the youths, and not to let them run about as they like, which is too often the way with the young. (shrink)

Before the year 1857, when Mommsen published his celebrated treatise Die Rechtsfrage zwischen Caesar und dem Senat, most scholars believed that Caesar's provincial command legally expired at the end of 49 B.C.; but Mommsen demonstrated the falsity of this opinion, and for nearly half a century it was an article of faith that the date fixed was the 1st of March. I may remark parenthetically that, although this date is usually quoted, it would be more correct to say the (...) 28th of February. In 1904, however, Otto Hirschfeld gave reasons for believing that Caesar's command was not expressly secured beyond March 1, 50; and although Ludwig Holzapfel vigorously defended the orthodox view, Hirschfeld remained for several years in possession of the field. In 1913 Walther Judeich, while admitting that Hirschfeld had worsted Mommsen, argued, ‘convincingly’ as Mr. F. E. Adcock thinks, that the date was December 29, 50. The writers of the article on Latin Literature in The Year's Work in Classical Studies , noticing the reissue of the third volume of The Correspondence of Cicero, remark that ‘the authors [Tyrrell and Purser] still hold the pious faith that Caesar's command in Gaul was to run out on the 1st of March in 49; it is a pity,’ they add, ‘in view of Hirschfeld and the rest, that they have not shown the English reader their grounds for that belief.’ I propose in this article to give mine for sharing it. (shrink)