Neo-Assyrian Metaphors through the Telescope: Linguistic Patterns involving Body Part Constructions in the State Archives Letter Corpus

The article is the first to publish deciphered and translated letters from the German and French languages of the Grand Duchess Wilhelmina of Hesse and the Rhine (1788-1836), addressed to her daughter Princess Maria of Hesse and the Rhine, later the Russian Empress Maria Alexandrovna (1824-1880). The analysis of this epistolary corpus from the collection of the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) is given, first of all, in the context of clarifying the children's pages of the biography of Empress Maria Alexandrovna. The "Childhood World" of Princess Marie of Hesse remains the least explored element of her biography. The main difficulty faced by the biographers of the Empress was the lack of valid archival documents. In this regard, the letters of Grand Duchess Wilhelmina are of scientific value, as they contain rich source material about the childhood of the future Empress Maria Alexandrovna, enabling researchers to gain a deeper understanding of the initial prerequisites and factors of her personality formation. The corpus of letters covers the chronological framework of 1831-1835, including the years of systematic education of Princess Mary, which began in 1829, almost up to the death of Grand Duchess Wilhelmina. The letters demonstrate the established educational tandem of Princess Mary's mother and her governess, Baroness Maria (Marianne) von Senarklen de Grancy, and also give an idea of the mode and content of communication between the Grand Duchess and her daughter, including cultural accents in the educational program. The archival materials contain colorful examples of the existence of the Darmstadt court in the 1830s. They give the reader an authentic idea of the intra-family ties and the nature of relations in the Grand Ducal family, in particular, noticeably correcting the prevailing ideas about the "separation" of the younger children of Grand Duke Ludwig II of Hesse and the Rhine (1777-1848) and Grand Duchess Wilhelmina from the older children and members of the Grand Ducal family. families. The letters mention the social circle of both the Grand Duchess and her daughter, the study of which deserves a separate study. The epistolaries under consideration allow us to form a more realistic picture of the relationship between Princess Mary and her mother, clarifying the idealized ideas of a number of biographers of the Empress, in particular, who speak of the "inseparability" of Wilhelmina and her daughter. The corpus of letters demonstrates the practice of epistolary communication inherent in Grand Duchess Wilhelmina and inherited by her daughter. The corpus of letters is equally relevant for clarifying the biographical picture of the final stage of the life of the Grand Duchess Wilhelmina herself.

Reviewed by: Letters to Francesco Datini by Margherita Datini trans. by Carolyn James and Antonio Pagliaro Andrea Rizzi James, Carolyn and Antonio Pagliaro, trans., Letters to Francesco Datini by Margherita Datini (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, 16), Toronto, Iter/Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012; paperback; pp. 431; 1 colour illustration; R.R.P. US$37.00; ISBN 9780772721167. Carolyn James and Antonio Pagliaro have brought to life the first English translation of the 251 letters Margherita Datini (1360–1423) wrote to her husband – the merchant of Prato, whose life was famously described by Iris Origo – between January 1384 and January 1410. It is a fascinating corpus of letters, made even more special by the fact that it is by far the largest collection of letters by a single premodern, western laywoman. In the enlightening Preface to the edition, James explains why this collection has remained largely ignored: it belongs to a large mercantile archive frequented solely by economic historians looking for Francesco Datini’s business records, not the epistolary voice of a woman. But perhaps two further reasons account for this neglect. Prato is no Florence or Venice, and its State Archive has only recently attracted sustained attention from Renaissance scholars. This is a familiar story for Italian Renaissance scholars working outside Florence, Venice, and Rome. Another reason is language. Margherita and Francesco Datini’s letters have been available through modern Italian editions for some time now – Margherita’s since 1977 and Francesco’s since 1990. These editions were printed by Prato-based publishers and in relatively small print runs. The accessibility has been further limited by the fact that the original documents are in a polymorphic Tuscan vernacular, and contain cryptic and at times confusing domestic and private information that only the Datini and their entourage could have understood. An example is a postscript at the end of letter 13 in which Margherita asks her husband to relate to a ‘Benvenuto the bread man’ that ‘not everyone who managed to make you laugh should be a jester’. This English edition is a remarkable contribution to the study of women’s writing. Not only does it make this unique corpus of letters accessible to general and academic readerships, the translation is carefully produced to account for the complex swings of registers, styles, and content. I have crosschecked the 1977 Italian edition of these letters against this English version, and found the latter flawless, inspired, and utterly convincing. Margherita was no ordinary woman: from a disgraced knightly Florentine family, she emerges from her letters as a spouse required by her irascible and workaholic husband both to conform to and stray from the conventional obedience expected of wives as described by the prescriptive texts of the period. In her letters, Margherita communicates unrelenting love, fractious complaints, stern reproaches, and intelligent observations on everyday life. She embraced the domestic and mercantile business in a dignified and canny [End Page 177] manner, fending off her husband’s demands, suspicions, and inattentiveness. Such endurance of Francesco’s often inconsistent, tactless, and demanding behaviour towards her was somewhat rewarded towards the end of her husband’s life: in January 1410, Margherita produced a flurry of letters showing utmost confidence, authority, and empowerment. On 4 January of the same year she was occupied with preparations for Cardinal du Puy’s visit, while at the same time she was busy attending to signing documents and keeping debtors at bay until the cardinals departed Prato. Margherita’s strong-willed and wise views extend over domestic turmoil, her husband’s business, and the complex social fabric of employees, friends, and family in Florence and Prato are couched within an impressively complex syncretism of epistolary conventions, improvisation, self-representation, and pragmatic communication. Margherita asserts her voice by engaging in various levels of mediation: the expectations of her husband and the Florentine and Prato mercantile neighbourhoods, and the complex and gendered relationship with her scribes. The latter is particularly interesting, for in her letters Margherita constantly redefines the boundaries between semi-private and semi-public communication and her dependence on and independence from the male scribe and Lapo Mazzei, her informal and involuntary teacher of calligraphy. The letters...

What makes non-profit, philanthropic discourse so persuasive has not been well explored to date. Using a specialized corpus of direct-mail letters from philanthropic organizations in five different fields, this study seeks to combine the tools of corpus analysis with the specificity of genre analysis in a way that has not been done before to provide a new perspective on a genre that is not well understood. The underlying goal is to look for a methodology that will provide much of the qualitative detail that is common to genre analysis, while at the same time providing the reliability that is best assured by the quantitative power of computerized corpus analysis. Using Bhatia's approach to genre analysis (1993) and his exploratory efforts in investigating fundraising discourse (1997, 1998) as a foundation, key patterns in the rhetorical structure of direct-mail letters revealed through a large-scale corpus analysis are presented.

Occluded person re-identification is a challenging task as human body parts could be occluded by some obstacles (e.g. trees, cars, and pedestrians) in certain scenes. Some existing pose-guided methods solve this problem by aligning body parts according to graph matching, but these graph-based methods are not intuitive and complicated. Therefore, we propose a transformer-based Pose-guided Feature Disentangling (PFD) method by utilizing pose information to clearly disentangle semantic components (e.g. human body or joint parts) and selectively match non-occluded parts correspondingly. First, Vision Transformer (ViT) is used to extract the patch features with its strong capability. Second, to preliminarily disentangle the pose information from patch information, the matching and distributing mechanism is leveraged in Pose-guided Feature Aggregation (PFA) module. Third, a set of learnable semantic views are introduced in transformer decoder to implicitly enhance the disentangled body part features. However, those semantic views are not guaranteed to be related to the body without additional supervision. Therefore, Pose-View Matching (PVM) module is proposed to explicitly match visible body parts and automatically separate occlusion features. Fourth, to better prevent the interference of occlusions, we design a Pose-guided Push Loss to emphasize the features of visible body parts. Extensive experiments over five challenging datasets for two tasks (occluded and holistic Re-ID) demonstrate that our proposed PFD is superior promising, which performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/WangTaoAs/PFD_Net

The article is dedicated to the analysis of a corpus of letters written by N. Sheinfeld in 1939–1941 to the Soviet procuracy and to the USSR authorities. The source is deposited in the State Archive of the Jewish Autonomous Region (a copy is in the CAHJP in Jerusalem). In the letters, Sheinfeld sought justice for her arrested husband Iosif Forer, as well as her own rehabilitation. The case includes 18 letters from Sheinfeld, her father’s letter to the USSR military prosecutor, a letter from her husband Iosif. Forer to his family, internal prosecutorial correspondence, and documents about the revision of Forer’s case. The corpus of letters is analysed within the framework of the methodology of “soviet subjectivity” (I. Halfin, I. Hellbeck). It also considers Sheinfeld’s construction of her husband’s and her own biographies, as well as her construction of a system of evidence in defence of Forer.

Breast cancer and heart disease can be acknowledged as very dangerous and common disease in many countries including Pakistan. In this paper classifiers comparative study has been performed for the tumor and heart disease classification. Around one lac women are diagnosed annually with this life-threatening disease having no family history of the disease. If it is not treated on time it may grow and spread to the other parts of human body. Mammograms are the X-rays of the breast which can be used for the screening of cancer tumor. Prior identification of breast cancer may increase the chance of survival up to 70 percent. Tumors which causes cancer can be categorized into two types: a) Benign and b) Malignant. Benign tumor can be explained as the tumor which are not attached to neighbor tissues or spread in the other parts of the body. In Malignant tumor, other parts may be affected by it as it can grow and spread in the other parts of the body. To classify the tumor as Malignant or Benign is very complex as the similarities of cancer tumor and tumor caused by the skin inflammation are almost same. The early identification of Malignant is mandatory to protect the patient life. Diversified medical methods based on deep learning and machine learning have been developed to treat the patients as cancer is a very serious and crucial issue in this era. In this research paper machine learning algorithms like logistic regression, K-NN and tree have been applied to the breast cancer data set which has been taken from UCI Machine learning repository. Comparative study of classifiers has been performed to determine the better classifier for the robust prediction of breast tumors. Simulated results proved that using Logistic regression, ninety-one percent accuracy was achieved. The research showed that logistic regression can be applied for the accurate and precise early prediction of breast cancer. Cardiovascular disease is very common throughout the world. It has been noticed that health in cardiac patients that there are so many factors which causes heart disease or heart attack. The factors leading to the heart failure includes varying blood pressure, high sugar, cardiac pain, and heart rate, high cholesterol level (LDL), artery blockage and irregular ECG signals. Many researchers proved that stress in patients can also be the reason for the heart disease. Higher numbers of cardiac surgeries like angioplasty and heart by-pass are performed on annual basis. Actually, people don’t care about their lifestyle and diet and fully ignore the symbols. It can be early predicted and cured if proper testing and medication for heart is done. Sometimes there is a false pain which has the same feeling like angina pain depicting cardiovascular disease. To reduce the false alarm and robustly classify the heart disease, several machine learning approaches have been adopted. In proposed research for the accurate classification of heart disease comparison has been performed among support vector machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbors K-NN and linear discriminant analysis. Simulated results demonstrated that Support vector machine was found to be a better classifier having an accuracy of 80.4%.

Human gait is a complex phenomenon involving the motion of various parts of the body simultaneously in a 3 dimensional space. Dynamics of different parts of the body translate its center of gravity from one point to another in the most efficient way. Body dynamics as well as static parameters of different body parts contribute to gait recognition. Studies have been performed to assess the discriminatory power of static and dynamic features. The current research literature, however, lacks the work on the comparative significance of dynamic features from different parts of the body. This paper sheds some light on the recognition performance of dynamic features extracted from different parts of human body in an appearance based set up.

Neuropsychological studies suggest that patients with left parietal lesions may show impaired localization of parts of either their own or the examiner's body, despite preserved ability to identify isolated body parts. This deficit, called autotopagnosia, may result from damage to the Body Structural Description (BSD), a representation which codes spatial relationships among body parts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural mechanisms underlying the BSD. Two human body or building parts (factor: STIMULI) were shown to participants who either identified them or evaluated their distance (factor: TASK). The analysis of the interaction between STIMULI and TASK, which isolates the neural mechanism underlying BSD, revealed an activation of left posterior intraparietal sulcus (IPS) when the distance between body parts was evaluated. The results show that the left IPS processes specifically the information about spatial relationships among body parts and thereby suggest that damage to this area may underlie autotopagnosia.

This paper investigates the lexical representation of sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on data from the corpus of Lithuanian letters and employing the techniques of corpus, statistical and philological analysis, this paper explores the use, frequency and context of occurrence of the four sets of lexical stems: atvir- (‘open’, ‘frank’), nuošird- (‘sincere’, ‘honest’), šird- (‘heart’), and tikr- (‘authentic’, ‘genuine’, ‘real’). As each of these lexical stems foreground different semantic shades of sincerity, they are treated in this paper as lexical variables that inscribe different degrees of an author’s sincere attitude (stance) toward the addressee and the writing act itself. The findings suggest that in Lithuanian epistolarity the use of sincerity lexemes is constrained by the grammatical shape of the lexeme and genre-related factors, namely, formulaic vs. non-formulaic context. Frequent lexical inscription of sincerity lexemes in the speech acts of thanking, wishing and greeting suggests that sincerity (as a stance) is conventionally linked to these specific social acts. When these social acts are evoked in epistolary practice, they thus evoke a particular (sincere) stance meaning.

In this paper, a new impedance control method based on pressure distribution for wearable assist robot on multi-joint part is proposed. Generally, assist robots were designed based on assisting for a simple joint body part of the user such as elbow, knee, limb and so on. These robots can be similar structure to the assisted body part, and they can follow the user's movements. On the other hand, it is difficult that the robots have the similar structure to the multi-joint body part of the user such as shoulder, waist, back part and so on. Therefore, the robots assisting for multi-joint body part cannot follow the user's movements and it can cause unforeseen contact state between the user and the robots. There are conventional methods to follow the user's movements on a simple joint body part based on joint torque between the user and the robots, however, they have not been evaluated on the robots for multi-joint body parts. In addition, because torque is resultant force of physical contact force occurred between the user and robot, the direct contact state have not been considered. In this paper, a conventional method based on torque is implemented to the multi-joint robot for assisting back part of the body. Also, a new impedance control based on physical contact forces measured by pressure sensors is proposed. The conventional method and the proposed method are evaluated based on maximum value of contact forces on computer simulations.

In China as elsewhere in the world, human bodies and body parts have long been used for a wide range of medical and non-medical purposes. In recent decades, China has played a considerable role in some of the public exhibitions of plastinated bodies and body parts, and the commercial trade in organ donations. These contemporary developments have raised numerous challenging ethical and governance questions. In spite of the growing role of China in these, there have been few studies devoted to Chinese ethical thinking that might govern its policies on the use of human bodies and body parts, and in particular on the issue of commercialization. The present study is an attempt to bridge this gap, and concludes that Confucian thinking stresses the primacy of righteousness over profits and utilities. This conclusion is reached directly by drawing on Confucian ethical responses to the peculiar practice of using human body parts, such as placenta and flesh, as drugs in traditional Chinese medicine in imperial China and what has been called "yili zhibian," the major Confucian discourse on yi (righteousness or justice) and li (profit or interest) in its long history. The principle of prioritizing righteousness over profit leads to a general moral opposition to the commodification of human bodies and body parts. While Confucianism may not place an absolute prohibition on any such use, it does require that any commercial uses are made subject to the fundamental moral principles, such as righteousness, as well as adequate ethical governance procedures.

The study analyzes somatic idioms used in business English, which constitute an essential part of the linguistic worldview of native speakers. Phraseological units recorded in lexicographic sources were analyzed, and 212 English somatic idioms were selected. The research examines the semantic classification of somatic idioms covering thematic groups such as external human body parts, internal human body parts and external animal body parts. Idioms referring to external human body parts form the most substantial category of somatic phraseological units, comprising 141 examples or 66.5% of the analyzed corpus. It is followed by idioms involving external animal body parts (45 idioms, making up 21.2%), while idioms with lexemes nominating internal human body parts form the smallest group (26 units, representing 12.3%). The idioms under study were classified by their level of semantic opacity into pure (32.4%), semi-idioms (41.4%), and literal (26.2%). Special attention was given to translation techniques applied for adapting somatic idioms in interlingual communication. Results show that the most common translation methods are analogy (34.9%) and near equivalent (27.4%), whereas absolute equivalents (14.6%), descriptive translation (19.8%) and calques (3.3%) are less frequently used. The external human body parts thematic group exhibited the greatest variability in translation methods, indicating the universality of this group for constructing metaphorical meanings. The study demonstrates that metaphorical expressions involving lexemes that nominate human body parts are a rich source of idioms across languages. Among them, references to external body parts tend to carry meanings that are widely understood and easily translatable across cultures. In contrast, idioms involving lexemes nominating internal organs or animal anatomy often reflect culturally specific associations, making direct translation more challenging and frequently requiring explanation or adaptation. The originality of this paper lies in its focus on semantic features of somatic idioms used in business English, a topic that has received limited attention in linguistic research. By grouping these idioms into thematic categories - external human body parts, internal human body parts, and external animal body parts - and analyzing their meanings and translation techniques employed in rendering them in Ukrainian, the study offers new insights into how figurative language works in professional communication. Conclusion. The study highlights the richness of somatic idioms in business English and their semantic features. It shows that idioms based on external human body parts are the most common and easiest to translate due to their universal meanings. In contrast, idioms involving internal body parts or animal anatomy tend to be more culture-specific, often requiring explanation.

Metadata is key - the most important data after data

Human skin, which mainly consists of epidermis, dermis and hypodermis, is the largest organ of a human body. It has a lot of roles, for example, protection function , moisture maintenance function and sensory function. Moreover, it becomes a parameter that shows the health condition and beauty, because the skin is the outermost layer of a human body. Therefore, the development of the sensor that can measure the skin conditions in various parts of the body is demanded. However, sensors that had been developed before can measure limited parts of body or can measure only in limited condition. In this paper, the sensor that can measure various parts of human body in various conditions is developed and evaluated by measurement of the artifical skins that have various roughness.

Current research deals with the problem of optical clearing during photometry by ellipsoidal reflectors. The specific problem is optical clearing of human skin, specifically the level control tasks during non-invasive conditions of experiment. In silico experiment involve Monte Carlo simulation of light propagation in multi-layered biological tissue and ellipsoidal reflector. The research was made for the set of human skin layers optical properties and their anatomic thicknesses. There were received photometric images in back scattered light for human skin from following parts of body: palm (hand), chest, abdomen, shoulder, back and thigh. Based on the zone analysis there were received illuminance dependencies of middle and external rings of photometric images from the optical clearing time. In addition, there was investigated the influence of optical clearing time on the character of light scattering on human skin from different parts of human body. Ref. 45, fig. 5, tabl. 2.