The focus of this paper is a possible Siberian link with the Na-Dene Languages, based on cognitive lexical semantics. Dene-Yeniseian is a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of Central Siberia and the Na-Dene languages of North-Western North America. The paper connects semantic universals, Ket and Dene folklore, and also comparative historical linguistic research. In analyzing a group of cognates, the paper’s aim is to discuss the cultural, cognitive and pragmatic reasons that enabled these cognates to survive for (...) several thousand years. Our main point is that factors such as the relative importance of linguistic signs in a language community, lingual conservatism of semantic universals and the distinctiveness of its referents, probable frequency with which these words were used, and their cultural symbolism in relatively similar environments significantly contributed to their survival in ethnic groups belonging to the proposed language family. Our cross-disciplinary study helps us identify the essential place of eco-ethnic material in interpreting cross-continental similarities and emphasizes the integrative role of culture. It will be argued that the eco-ethnic lexicon reflected by the Dene-Yeniseian cognates reveals several thousand years of diachronic cognitive processes. (shrink)

Through an examination of the bacteria that produce the cellulose, an investigation of the growing process and properties, and a discussion of an artistic exploration, one can fully grasp bio cellulose’s potential in becoming a synergist for sustainable fashion. This new creative and radical approach re-imagines the future materials for fashion and other fields requiring textile applications that are grown and renewable. Questions how textile can be created to be sustainable, biodegradable and infinitely reusable and mainly what the paradigms for (...) the new aesthetics are. The aim of this article is to convey the need for new biomaterials inspired by nature. (shrink)

The paper is based on the original study of Galina Kolomiets named «The conception of music value as a substance and as the way of value interaction between the person and the world» which is presented in the monograph “The music value: philosophical aspect”. The phenomenon of music is considered as the indissoluble unity of its two hypostases – the essence of music (musical substance) and musical skill, which belongs to the person and the world. The basicidea of the (...) author is to show, how the extra-historical essence of music (world harmony, universal rhythm) is connected with the man and the world and what are “the cohesion mechanisms” of musical substance as a form of art. According to the study such mechanisms are: the music value and value in the music, inverted, from one side, to the highest sense, from another - to the senses of human life. (shrink)

The paper is based on the original study of Galina Kolomiets named «The conception of music value as a substance and as the way of value interaction between the person and the world» which is presented in the monograph “The music value: philosophical aspect”. The phenomenon of music is considered as the indissoluble unity of its two hypostases – the essence of music (musical substance) and musical skill, which belongs to the person and the world. The basicidea of the (...) author is to show, how the extra-historical essence of music (world harmony, universal rhythm) is connected with the man and the world and what are “the cohesion mechanisms” of musical substance as a form of art. According to the study such mechanisms are: the music value and value in the music, inverted, from one side, to the highest sense, from another - to the senses of human life. (shrink)

The paper analyses empirical research results comparing the impact of the medium (traditional, paper-based vs. screen-based) on the reading process and text comprehension. It focuses on two analytical approaches—the first looks at the construction of cognitive maps of texts and the other the material aspects of the medium – which enable readers to orientate themselves and to explore and interpret the text more comprehensively. The paper discusses differences in how readers approach textual meaning according to experience of using digital technologies, (...) the text, and reader experience and abilities. It concludes by arguing that strengthening these individual experiences and abilities is key to effective inference of textual meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I concentrate on the dynamic aspects of the special theory of relativity (in the non-Minkowski formalism), and not on the kinematic part of the story as is usually done. Following up the dynamic story leads to a new point of view as to Poincare's important role in the development of special relativity. Much of Poincare's dynamic work did not enter into Einstein's 1905 theory, since Einstein was mainly occupied with kinematics. However, the dynamic part is most fundamental (...) in the development of the special theory of relativity after 1905. In this paper I consider the main developments of relativistic dynamics in which I demonstrate that much response to Poincare's dynamic research can be found. I argue that Poincare's dynamic work assisted in departing from Einstein's electrodynamic theory towards relativistic dynamics (independent of electrodynamics). (shrink)

The term "spirituality" now has several interpretations, and the part acquires an excellent, even opposite, meaning in both religious and philosophical doctrines. At the same time, each under the indicated phenomenon understands something of its own. Some authors have in mind historical consciousness, others - the integrity of mental activity, others relate spirituality, first of all with the world of emotions. Undoubtedly, every interpretation of spirituality covers a certain part of the truth. It is worth noting that speaking about spiritual, (...) spirituality and its significance in human being can only be achieved by overcoming the existing bias in the scientific circles and ideological distrust of the very concept of "spirit" and "spiritual." It is not a secret that the spirituality problem was underestimated in the domestic science for a long period, which negatively affected, in particular, the understanding of its content and essence, the treatment of this phenomenon only from the point of view of materialism. From this perspective, the study of S.Prolev, who states that the spiritual exists and manifests itself in various subject forms, whose range is wide - from processes and phenomena of the human psyche to social institutions that provide spiritual production, worthy of attention. Spiritual is understood as a special reality, the "spiritual sphere" of human life. (shrink)

This paper discusses some philosophical aspects related to the recent publication of the experimental results of the 2017 black hole experiment, namely the first image of the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy M87. In this paper I present a philosophical analysis of the 2017 Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) black hole experiment. I first present Hacking’s philosophy of experimentation. Hacking gives his taxonomy of elements of laboratory science and distinguishes a list of elements. I show that the EHT (...) experiment conforms to major elements from Hacking’s list. I then describe with the help of Galison’s Philosophy of the Shadow how the EHT Collaboration created the famous black hole image. Galison outlines three stages for the reconstruction of the black hole image: Socio-Epistemology, Mechanical Objectivity, after which there is an additional SocioEpistemology stage. I subsequently present my own interpretation of the reconstruction of the black hole image and I discuss model fitting to data. I suggest that the main method used by the EHT Collaboration to assure trust in the results of the EHT experiment is what philosophers call the Argument from Coincidence. I show that using this method for the above purpose is problematic. I present two versions of the Argument from Coincidence: Hacking’s Coincidence and Cartwright’s Reproducibility by which I analyse the EHT experiment. The same estimation of the mass of the black hole is reproduced in four different procedures. The EHT Collaboration concludes: the value we have converged upon is robust. I analyse the mass measurements of the black hole with the help of Cartwright’s notion of robustness. I show that the EHT Collaboration construe Coincidence/Reproducibility as Technological Agnosticism and I contrast this interpretation with van Fraassen’s scientific agnosticism. (shrink)

This article extends prior conversation analytic research on the preference organization of sequence-initiating actions. Across two languages, this article examines one such action: explicitly soliciting an account for human conduct. Prior work demonstrates that this action conveys a challenging stance towards the warrantability of the accountable event/conduct. When addressees are somehow responsible for the accountable event/conduct, explicit solicitations of accounts are frequently critical of, and thus embody disaffiliation with, addressees. This article demonstrates that, when explicit solicitations of accounts embody disaffiliation, (...) they are systematically ‘withheld’ and, thus, can be characterized as ‘dispreferred’ actions. This article also examines: a) deviant cases, where account solicitations are not withheld, which is a practice for embodying aggravated disaffiliation; and b) negative cases, where account solicitations actually embody affiliation, and as such are typically treated as preferred actions and not withheld. (shrink)

Summary We offer a novel historical-philosophical framework for discussing experimental practice which we call ‘Generating Experimental Knowledge’. It combines three different perspectives: experimental systems, concept formation, and the pivotal role of error. We then present an historical account of the invention of the Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), or Raster-Tunnelmikroskop, and interpret it within the proposed framework. We show that at the outset of the STM project, Binnig and Rohrer—the inventors of the machine—filed two patent disclosures; the first is dated 22 (...) December 1978 (Switzerland), and the second, two years later, 12 September 1980 (US). By studying closely these patent disclosures, the attempts to realize them, and the subsequent development of the machine, we present, within the framework of generating experimental knowledge, a new account of the invention of the STM. While the realization of the STM was still a long way off, the patent disclosures served as blueprints, marking the changes that had to be introduced on the way from the initial idea to its realization. (shrink)

Roberto Frega argues for the advancement of workplace democracy theorisation by synergising the conceptual pathways of various disciplines. He places a particular emphasis on the practice of employee involvement, which, according to him, constitutes one of the three pillars of workplace democracy, the other two being voice and representation. The present commentary broadens the interdisciplinary horizons of this debate by reflecting on the central role of accountability in workplace democracy and the workings of the three pillars identified by Frega. The (...) commentary explores the potential of accountability and the insights drawn from critical accounting research to translate democratic ideals into meaningful and sustainable organisational practices and so strengthen workplace democracy. (shrink)

This article provides a conversation analytic description of a previously unstudied conversational action: ‘articulating the unsaid’ via and-prefaced formulations of other people’s talk. Contributing to the extant research on formulations and on interactional functions of discourse markers, the article shows that and-prefaced formulations accomplish a distinct conversational action that has the following features: these formulations are assertions about the addressee’s domain of knowledge that perform a repair operation in the form of a request for confirmation; they articulate a ‘missing’ element (...) of the addressee’s preceding talk ; what is being formulated is claimably inferable from the prior talk; moreover, such formulations extend the addressee’s course of action on his/her behalf. The article describes compositional and sequential features of and-prefaced formulations and how they shape interactional trajectories of in-progress courses of action. (shrink)

It has become apparent that difficulties to replicate telomeres concern not only the very ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. The challenges already start when the replication fork enters the telomeric repeats. The obstacles encountered consist mainly of noncanonical nucleic acid structures that interfere with replication if not resolved. Replication stress at telomeres promotes the formation of so‐called fragile telomeres displaying an abnormal appearance in metaphase chromosomes though their exact molecular nature remains to be elucidated. A substantial number of factors is required (...) to counteract fragility. In this review we promote the hypothesis that telomere fragility is not caused directly by an initial insult during replication but it results as a secondary consequence of DNA repair of damaged replication forks by the homologous DNA recombination machinery. Incomplete DNA synthesis at repair sites or partial chromatin condensation may become apparent as telomere fragility. Fragility and DNA repair during telomere replication emerges as a common phenomenon which exacerbates in multiple disease conditions. (shrink)

BACKGROUND: Ontologies play a major role in life sciences, enabling a number of applications, from new data integration to knowledge verification. SNOMED CT is a large medical ontology that is formally defined so that it ensures global consistency and support of complex reasoning tasks. Most biomedical ontologies and taxonomies on the other hand define concepts only textually, without the use of logic. Here, we investigate how to automatically generate formal concept definitions from textual ones. We develop a method that uses (...) machine learning in combination with several types of lexical and semantic features and outputs formal definitions that follow the structure of SNOMED CT concept definitions. RESULTS: We evaluate our method on three benchmarks and test both the underlying relation extraction component as well as the overall quality of output concept definitions. In addition, we provide an analysis on the following aspects: How do definitions mined from the Web and literature differ from the ones mined from manually created definitions, e.g., MeSH? How do different feature representations, e.g., the restrictions of relations' domain and range, impact on the generated definition quality?, How do different machine learning algorithms compare to each other for the task of formal definition generation?, and, What is the influence of the learning data size to the task? We discuss all of these settings in detail and show that the suggested approach can achieve success rates of over 90%. In addition, the results show that the choice of corpora, lexical features, learning algorithm and data size do not impact the performance as strongly as semantic types do. Semantic types limit the domain and range of a predicted relation, and as long as relations' domain and range pairs do not overlap, this information is most valuable in formalizing textual definitions. CONCLUSIONS: The analysis presented in this manuscript implies that automated methods can provide a valuable contribution to the formalization of biomedical knowledge, thus paving the way for future applications that go beyond retrieval and into complex reasoning. The method is implemented and accessible to the public from: https://github.com/alifahsyamsiyah/learningDL. (shrink)

Primary headaches are highly prevalent and represent a major cause of disability in young adults. Neurofeedback is increasingly used in the treatment of chronic pain; however, there are few studies investigating its efficacy in patients with headaches. We report the results of a cross-over sham-controlled study on the efficacy of neurofeedback in the prophylactic treatment of tension-type headache. Participants received ten sessions of infra-low frequency electroencephalographic neurofeedback and ten sessions of sham-neurofeedback, with the order of treatments being randomized. The study (...) also included a basic psychotherapeutic intervention — a psychoeducational session performed before the main study phases and emotional support provided throughout the study period. The headache probability was modeled as a function of the neurofeedback and sham-neurofeedback sessions performed to date. As a result, we revealed a strong beneficial effect of neurofeedback and no influence of the sham sessions. The study supports the prophylactic use of infra-low frequency neurofeedback in patients with TTH. From a methodological point of view, we advocate for the explicit inclusion of psychotherapeutic components in neurofeedback study protocols. (shrink)

This article examines the role of medical interpreters in structuring interaction between physicians and their patients. Through a detailed analysis of interpreters' involvement in the history-taking part of medical consultations, it is demonstrated that their participation in this activity is organized by their understanding of its goals rather than by the task of translation alone. Specifically, the different ways in which interpreters participate in history taking display their orientation to obtaining from the patient and conveying to the doctor medically relevant (...) information about the patient's symptoms - and doing so as effectively as possible. Medical interpreters are found to share the physicians' normative orientation to obtaining objectively formulated information about relevant biomedical aspects of patients' conditions. Thus, far from being passive participants in the interaction, interpreters will often pursue issues they believe to be diagnostically relevant, just as they may choose to reject patients' information offerings if they contain subjective accounts of their socio-psychological concerns. (shrink)

Questions of value are central to understanding alternative practices of food exchange. This study introduces a practice-based approach to value that challenges the dominant views, which capture value as either an input for or an outcome of practices of exchange. Building on a longitudinal ethnographic study on food collectives, I show how value, rather than residing in something that people share, or in something that objects have, is an ideal target that continuously unfolds and evolves in action. I found that (...) people organized their food collectives around pursuing three kinds of value-ideals, namely good food, good price and good community. These value-ideals became reproduced in food collectives through what I identified as valuing modes, by which people evaluated the goodness of food, prices and community. My analysis revealed that, while participating in food collectives in order to pursue their value-ideals, people were likely to have differing reasons for pursuing them and tended to attach different meanings to the same value-ideal. I argue that understanding how value as an ideal target is reproduced through assessing and assigning value is essential in further explorations of the formation of value and in better understanding the dynamics of organizing alternative practices of food exchange. (shrink)

The controversial status of goluboi as a basic color term is discussed. Fuzzy logic alone cannot reliably attribute basic status to goluboi. Recent linguistic studies support a single basic blue category. Psychophysical data on color-space distances and color naming are currently ambiguous in this regard. Correspondence:p1 Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie an der Universität Dortmund, 44139 Dortmund, Germany [email protected] www.ifado.de/projekt-06/.

Implementing the key functions, any company is faced with issues related to the formation and analysis of the range of goods, products, services. Regardless of the field of activity, enterprises need to analyze each product line separately in order to make timely adjustments to the product range policy, which directly affects the economic efficiency of the enterprise as a whole. The purpose of the study is to reveal the content of matrix methods of assortment analysis. The article deals with the (...) concepts of "assortment", "product assortment", their meaning and impact on the company's activities; matrix methods: BKG matrix; Dibb-Simkin matrix; Markon matrix. The scientific novelty lies in the author's interpretation of the comparative characteristics of these methods, summarized in a tabular form, allowing enterprises to choose the optimal method when analyzing assortment positions in real business conditions. (shrink)

The red tape and delays around research ethics and governance approvals frequently frustrate researchers yet, as the lesser of two evils, are largely accepted as unavoidable. Here we quantify aspects of the research ethics and governance approvals for one interview- and questionnaire-based study conducted in England which used the National Health Service procedures and the electronic Integrated Research Application System. We demonstrate the enormous impact of existing approvals processes on costs of studies, including opportunity costs to focus on the substantive (...) research, and suggest directions for radical system change. We have recorded 491 exchanges with 89 individuals involved in research ethics and governance approvals, generating 193 pages of email text excluding attachments. These are conservative estimates. The exchanges were conducted outside IRAS, expected to be the platform where all necessary documents are provided and questions addressed. Importantly, the figures exclude the actual work of preparing the ethics documentation. We propose six areas of work to enable system change: 1. Support the development of a broad range of customised research ethics and governance templates to complement generic, typically clinical trials orientated, ones; 2. Develop more sophisticated and flexible frameworks for study classification; 3. Link with associated processes for assessment, feedback, monitoring and reporting, such as ones involving funders and patient and public involvement groups; 4. Invest in a new generation IT infrastructure; 5. Enhance system capacity through increasing online reviewer participation and training; and 6. Encourage researchers to quantify the approvals processes for their studies. Ethics and governance approvals are burdensome for historical reasons and not because of the nature of the task. There are many opportunities to improve their efficiency and analytic depth in an age of innovation, increased connectivity and distributed working. If we continue to work under current systems, we are perpetuating, paradoxically, an unethical system of research approvals by virtue of its wastefulness and impoverished ethical debate. (shrink)

This book focuses on Albert Einstein and his interactions with, and responses to, various scientists, both famous and lesser-known. It takes as its starting point that the discussions between Einstein and other scientists all represented a contribution to the edifice of general relativity and relativistic cosmology. These scientists with whom Einstein implicitly or explicitly interacted form a complicated web of collaboration, which this study explores, focusing on their implicit and explicit responses to Einstein s work. This analysis uncovers latent undercurrents, (...) indiscernible to other approaches to tracking the intellectual pathway of Einstein to his general theory of relativity. The interconnections and interactions presented here reveal the central figures who influenced Einstein during this intellectual period. Despite current approaches to history presupposing that the efforts of scientists such as Max Abraham and Gunnar Nordström, which differed from Einstein s own views, be relegated to the background, this book shows that they all had an impact on the development of Einstein s theories, stressing the limits of approaches focusing solely on Einstein. As such, General Relativity Conflict and Rivalries proves that the general theory of relativity was not developed as a single, coherent construction by an isolated, brooding individual, but, rather, that it came to fruition through Einstein's conflicts and interactions with other scientists, and was consolidated by his creative processes during these exchanges. (shrink)

The paper aims to highlight some of the characteristics of political trolling and to follow how the phenomenon functions in the Bulgarian context. The analysis focuses on the specifics of troll language and the so-called troll dilemma, as well as on the interaction between the troll and his audience. The features of the transfer of trolling from an online to an offline environment and the characteristics of trolling in a political context are examined. It is suggested that trolling should not (...) be interpreted as antisocial, anarchic behaviour, but as communication that parasitises ideas of objectivity and truth. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to present those realistic tendencies in Bulgarian painting from the 1920s and 1930s, that echoe contemporary West European ones, like the New Objectivity in Germany. Among others, it will be shown how Bulgarian artist’s paintings are inspired by the folklore primitive from the past and reflect the assiduity of cultural administration to renew the idea of a modern artistic school of art with a defined national character.