Conventional Character Research Articles

Жанр анімалістичного оповідання у малій прозіБогданаЛепкого

The article analyzes the development of the genre of the animalistic story in the work of one of the most famous representatives of early Ukrainian modernism - Bohdan Lepkyi. It was found that the end of the 19th - the beginning of the 20th centuries was an era of radical renewal of European, including Ukrainian literature, a time of changes in artistic thinking and perception of the world, when there was an active expansion of the themes and problems of short prose, and artists paid attention not only on the inner world of a person, but also made attempts to penetrate into the soul of "our little brothers". It has been observed that two main types of prose samples can be conventionally distinguished in the world animalistic literature: 1) works where completely realistic animals are depicted, their way of life, behavior and thinking are presented believably; 2) works where animals embody various forces of nature or qualities and character traits of people are mainly conventional figures and perform a certain symbolic or allegorical role (such works are close to the genre of fairy tales, legends, parables, etc.). It has been analyzed that works about animals are also found in Ukrainian literature at the turn of the century (I. Franko, Lesia Ukrainka, as well as Bohdan Lepkyi). In the short stories of Bohdan Lepkyi, two works were found where animals are the protagonists: the story "Barefoot", written in the early years of the 20th century, and "The Mouse", created during the First World War. In the analyzed stories, B. Lepkyi depicts animals from the "home" space common in the fairy-tale tradition: a dog and a mouse. It was found that in the story "Barefoot" the author tried to convey the lifestyle, behavior and preferences of the dog as accurately as possible, to reveal his way of thinking. At the same time, the finale of the work testifies to the allegorical nature of both the image of the owner of the dog, which is the personification of human cruelty in the treatment of animals, and the image of the central character (the dog), which embodies the inability of an individual who has spent his whole life in captivity, to take advantage of freedom, to find his place in the unknown and often to a hostile world. It is concluded that in the fairy tale "The Mouse" B. Lepkyi resorts to fairy tales as a feature of the poetics of the work. The manner of presentation is condensed and allegorical, built on contrast. If in "Barefoot" the reader gets to know the character of the dog through numerous small episodes, then in "The Mouse" the novelist brings one event into the spotlight. The work expresses the opinion that war is a terrible tragedy that brings pain, grief and suffering to people. The main animal character of the work has a conventional character and is the embodiment of good, which must necessarily defeat evil, punish or teach it. It was concluded that B. Lepkyi's work contains animalistic stories of various types, which indicates the development of Ukrainian prose of the modernist era in the context of world literature, where works about animals gained more and more popularity. The first type of animalistic story by B. Lepkyi (the work "Barefoot") is characterized by a reliable depiction of an animal's lifestyle, an attempt to realistically convey its behavior and way of thinking, in particular in interaction with people. The second type (the work "Mouse") is characterized by the use of fairy tales as an aesthetic code and the depiction of animals as allegorical figures. Their behavior is conditional and reflects certain qualities and traits of a person.

Does the Use of Perennials in Flower Beds Necessarily Imply Sustainability?

Green spaces are becoming increasingly important for cities due to the growing pressures of urbanization and climate change. Along with trees, shrubs, and lawns, flower beds are an important part of urban green spaces. The majority of flower beds in public spaces consist of annual and biennial flower species. Such seasonal flower beds feature eye-catching colors but require significant effort to maintain and manage. Compared to these conventional flower beds, those with herbaceous perennials are more ecologically effective and less costly to maintain, and therefore more sustainable. The aim of this research was to analyze flower beds with perennials in the public green spaces of the city of Zagreb and to develop a tool based on predefined criteria and indicators to evaluate the sustainability of flower beds. In the context of the research, sustainability meant appropriate selection of flower species based on environmental conditions (temperature, light, precipitation), species diversity, greater ground cover and extensiveness of maintenance. The research results showed that there were 327 flower beds with perennials planted in the ground. The constructed Flower Bed Sustainability Index (FBSI) showed that the majority of these perennial beds (56.3%) had a conventional character, as only 28.1% of the beds had a completely correct species selection. This result indicates that the use of perennials does not necessarily guarantee the sustainability of flower beds, since, as in the case of flower beds with seasonal flowers, it depends, among other things, on the correct selection of species adapted to local environmental conditions. The FBSI is shown to be a suitable tool for assessing the degree of sustainability of a flower bed and could be a useful tool in landscape design and management of such types of green spaces.

The limits of currency politics

AbstractIn Locke’s philosophy money is ‘naturalised’ and thus ostensibly removed from political contestation. Locke has been criticised for marginalising monetary politics, and thus downplaying the conventional character of money that could potentially allow for democratic monetary reform. Drawing on Marx’s writings, this paper shows that money is indeed a social convention, but its inherent economic functioning restricts its susceptibility to political contestation. There are limits to the democratic reform of money in a capitalist economy that spring from money’s own nature.Specifically, the politics of money is rooted in the tension between money as measure of value and money as unit of account. The state draws political power from setting the unit of account, but the measurement of value occurs spontaneously among commodity producers, thereby generating tension that curbs monetary politics. In contemporary conditions, this is typified by central banks having the freedom to manage the unit of account but subject to heavy economic constraints rooted in value measurement. In this light, democratic monetary reform requires restricting the spontaneous measurement of value, thus intervening at the heart of the capitalist economy. For money to be democratic it needs to have a much narrower range of economic functioning.

A new cryptic species of Imparfinis (Siluriformes: Heptapteridae) from the Orinoco River basin, revealed by an iterative approach.

An iterative analysis of Imparfinis, combining phylogenetic analysis based on cytochrome oxidase gene and multivariate morphometrics, revealed a new cryptic species from the Andean tributaries of the Orinoco River basin, which is described here. The new species is sister to a clade constituted by Imparfinis hasemani and Imparfinis pijpersi, both from the river basins of the Guiana Shield, being also the most geographically proximate species. Nonetheless, the new species is most similar in general appearance to Imparfinis guttatus from the Madeira and Paraguay River drainages, being almost undistinguishable by conventional characters of external morphology, differing only by morphometric attributes overall. The new species can be distinguished from the remaining congeners by a unique combination of characters, including lower lobe of caudal fin darker than upper lobe, maxillary barbel reaching or surpassing pelvic-fin insertion, 12-15 gill rakers on first gill arch, 40-42 total vertebrae and 9-10 ribs. The new species constitutes the only representative from the Orinoco River basin belonging to Imparfinis sensu stricto.

Music education undergraduates’ construction of music teacher role-identity

The purpose of this study was to explore Chinese music education undergraduates’ music teacher role-identities. Data were collected through focus groups and individual interviews. A qualitative content analysis, using McCall and Simmons theory of role-identity as the theoretical framework, revealed that each of the 25 students’ imaginative view of self as a music teacher was an ongoing process of negotiation during their undergraduate education. Students were consistently negotiating the content of their own music teacher role-identities through balancing their needs for rewards from others and their own self-support. Students described the conventional character of a teacher as being respectful, responsible, and fair and the role of a teacher as acting professionally in music and teaching through cognitive role-taking and improvisation, as well as expressive enactment and negotiations. Students were active agents in constructing their role-identities, bringing their own idiosyncratic interpretations to music teacher positions. McCall and Simmons’ prominence and salience hierarchies helped understand how students valued their music teacher role-identity, compared to their other role-identities. Implications and suggestions for music teacher education policy and practices in China and in other countries are discussed to facilitate undergraduates in constructing music teacher role-identities.

Deep adaptation of CNN in Chinese named entity recognition

AbstractNamed entity recognition (NER) is an important task in the field of natural language processing, but it is more challenging in Chinese because of the lack of natural delimiters. The traditional character‐based Chinese NER model directly uses long short‐term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent units, and other sequence models to extract sentence‐level information from character sequences, resulting in the lack of word‐level information in the model. Therefore, a Chinese NER model called ChineseBERT‐CNNs‐BiLSTM‐CRF was proposed, which uses the ChineseBERT pretrained model as the embedding layer so that the vector representation of each Chinese character contained pinyin, glyph, and conventional character information. In addition, a CNN‐based neural network structure called CNNs was presented to extract word‐level information from character sequences and alleviate the problem of entity boundary recognition. BiLSTM was used to extract global features (i.e., sentence‐level information) and predict the corresponding labels of character sequences. Further, conditional random field (CRF) was employed to impose certain rules on the prediction of BiLSTM to enhance the recognition effect of the model. The experimental results revealed that the F1 values of the model on MSRA, people's Daily, and Weibo datasets reached 95.76, 96.61, and 70.00%, respectively, highlighting the effectiveness of the model.

SOCIAL CONTRACT: COMMUNICATIVE AND HERMENEUTIC ASPECTS

The article discusses the validity of the contractual theory of the origin of the state. Arguments of opponents and supporters are given. Their arguments in support of the existence of this theory are expressed. It is indicated that the natural language of communication has a conventional character, and is an unmanifested collective agreement. It is indicated that new generations join this convention in the process of socialization. From this it is concluded that the idea of the state and the relationship (interaction) with it also has an unmanifested contractual nature. The content of the social contract is considered. It is proposed to use hermeneutical methodology, in particular, the principle of questioning, for the study of such a contract. It is indicated that with the help of this principle, it is possible to identify the unmanifested content of the social contract. It is indicated on the questions and answers that underlie the contract. In the course of the study, the questions that the text of the contract can answer are identified, the ideas of the members of the society about interaction with the state are established. The article highlights the issue of the subjects (participants) of such a contract. It is concluded that the main of them are social groups. The largest group is the "people", which can also be considered as a hermeneutic community, that is, a community of people united by a single picture of the world and language. It is pointed out the importance of taking into account the provisions of the social contract in lawmaking and in the interpretation of law.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CHARACTER OF THE ECHR: OVERVIEW, CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTATION AND LIMITATIONS

The constitutional character of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or Convention) has always been an issue for debate. Having in mind the fact that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or the Court) decides on violations upon fundamental rights that are a constitutional category, there is no doubt that the ECtHR is at least some sort of Constitutional Court while the Convention acts as a supranational constitution. This article focuses on the differences in the implementation of the Convention in national legal systems depending of the monist or dualist approaches and subsequently on the limitations to application of the ECHR. Indeed, the practice shows that most problems arise from the inconsistencies between the national constitutions and the ECHR regarding some issue which is differently regulated in the national law, or the state in question does not want to abide by the provisions of the ECHR regarding the subject in question. The situation is quite complicated when the conflict arises between the Convention and the national constitution on certain core human rights where the obligation to protect them is more important than established national laws and practices. The differences which arise should not be considered as a negative remark, or a system which fails to protect human rights. It is quite a difficult task for the Court to decide on possible violations of the Conventions’ rights, but states should resume their obligations undertaken with the ratification of the Convention and the Court should be more open-minded and flexible in adjusting its case-law to the new developments on the European level.    

The Genealogy of Justice and Laws in Epicureanism

In this paper, we argue that the Epicurean genealogy of justice and laws presuppose an analysis of the just as a modality of the useful, an approach that denies the conventional character of justice. This genealogical pattern differentiates the origin of justice from that of the law and refers to friendship as a relevant explanatory factor of the origin of justice. We maintain that the interpretations that underline the incoherence of this reference to friendship, in the framework of a hedonistic theory, presuppose a non-Epicurean sharp distinction between altruism and selfishness.

Complex ekphrasis of the Hermitage moving in the latest russian poetry

Poetic ekphrasis may be not only simple, like a description of a work of art as a system of images that naturally come to life in an artistic description, but also complex, meaning the stay of exhibits in a museum or gallery. Complex ekphrasis is used also be different, in contrast to the type of contextualization of exhibits in the space intended for them, and a special ekphrasis of movement can be distinguished, where it is not the delay in front of the exhibits that is important, but the experience of the museum space itself as strange, existentially significant and associated with key existential moments in the life of a lyric character. In such a subspecies of ekphrasis, it is not the action of the imagination that is essential, but the skills of orientation in a value-marked space, with signs of up and down, openness and closeness, due to which the return of aesthetic experience in a complex existential situation is thought. The article offers a close reading of several examples of such an ekphrasis of gallery movement. In the poetry of Mikhail Eremin, the Saint Petersburg Hermitage turns out to be, first of all, a place of various forms of reflection, and the overlap between the metaphorical (reflection and attention to the phonetics of speech) and literal (mirror) understanding of reflection forms a mechanism for the quickest transition from spatial confusion to the aesthetic experience of the Hermitage collection. In the poetry of Sergei Stratanovsky, on the contrary, the Hermitage is shown through the eyes of a conventional character, immune to culture, where the mechanisms of such a transition are absent, and any attempt to simplify spatial self-awareness turns into a total immunity to art. In the poetry of Asya Veksler, the Hermitage turns out to be a hero with its own subjectivity, modeled on Petersburg in Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero, and this allows the episodes of a love drama to be developed as confirmed by various formal decisions and to erase the border between the aesthetics of space premises and the aesthetics of works. All three solutions imply the general properties of a complex ekphrasis of displacement: 1) a presence of an existential basis of a poetic utterance, detached from the usual modes of relations with time, partially blocking the usual modes of aesthetic perception of works of art, 2) a constant search for means of overcoming this blocking, which can be successful, if associated with the acceleration of sensory experiences, and unsuccessful if associated with frustration and/or routine admiration, 3) a situation in which architectural and design decisions are perceived as deeply symbolic and valuable, while works of art remain mysteries among other mysteries, and only the correctly found speed of mental work with the past and the present allows them to be perceived, 4) uses of the names of artists and plots of works not as symbols, but as part of the route, with the ambiguity of this route, the lack of sufficient motivation for it in the plot, but partial support from the book explications or educational habits, 5) an attention to the formal components of both the interior and individual works, as the only key to integrating these solutions into large value oppositions. A close reading of these poems allows for a better understanding of the importance of formal analysis for a comprehensive understanding of fine art and plastics and their reflection in literature as an art that deals with different modes of sensing time.

Impartiality as an Ethical Behavior in Ancient Egypt: A Textual Investigation

The occasional recurrence of formulae concerning assertion of equality among people is tempting to explore. In shaping the image of the good character, fairness was regarded as a rule establishing connections among human beings in the ancient Egyptian civilization. The research is a study of a personal attitude that strengthens our understanding of the concepts of impartiality in ancient Egypt. The texts identify the principles governing proper conduct, outlining an important self-portrait and identifying a key structural issue in relationships. Several textual sources include warnings to commit morally denied social acts; among which partiality is mentioned. The study is an attempt to contextualizing impartiality, considered as the correct conventional character in the culture of the ancient Egyptian society. Based on the lexicographical and textual study, the analysis brings forth examining contexts in which people conceived favouring someone’s side as unjust and partial. Concerning the topic of impartiality, the ancient Egyptian language was expressive. All the terms are complementary in emphasizing morality and rendering fair judgements. The texts confirm the importance of not favouring one of two persons by supporting one instead of the other. Expressions denoting impartiality made their appearance starting from the Old Kingdom.

Странный романъ, или Абеляр и Элоиза в России XVIII в.

The article gives an analysis of the first Russian translation of Abelard and Héloïse’s letters (The Collection of Abelard and Héloïse’s Letters with the Life Description of These Miserable Lovers) made by A.I. Dmitriev in 1783 from Count Bussy-Raboutin’s French retelling. A comparative analysis of Dmitriev’s translation with the original text shows the conventional character of their connection. Following Bussy, Dmitriev not always sticks to the Latin original even in the main storylines. Even if he retains the canvas of the original medieval text, he supplements it with countless details: a portrait of a lover, a tear-drenched letter, mad passion. A similar transformation takes place with the Historia Calamitatum in the retelling made by Augustus von Kotzebue. In prefaces both authors designate their works as “female” reading. The interest in the story of two lovers is probably caused by the recent release of J.-J. Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise. The choice of material, the nature of its adaptation, the appeal to women and the circumstances of the publication of Dmitriev’s translation and Kotzebue’s retelling demonstrate the commitment of these authors to sentimentalism, which explains their desire to cause tears in the eyes of their readers.

Странный романъ, или Абеляр и Элоиза в России XVIII в.

The article gives an analysis of the first Russian translation of Abelard and Héloïse’s letters (The Collection of Abelard and Héloïse’s Letters with the Life Description of These Miserable Lovers) made by A.I. Dmitriev in 1783 from Count Bussy-Raboutin’s French retelling. A comparative analysis of Dmitriev’s translation with the original text shows the conventional character of their connection. Following Bussy, Dmitriev not always sticks to the Latin original even in the main storylines. Even if he retains the canvas of the original medieval text, he supplements it with countless details: a portrait of a lover, a tear-drenched letter, mad passion. A similar transformation takes place with the Historia Calamitatum in the retelling made by Augustus von Kotzebue. In prefaces both authors designate their works as “female” reading. The interest in the story of two lovers is probably caused by the recent release of J.-J. Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise. The choice of material, the nature of its adaptation, the appeal to women and the circumstances of the publication of Dmitriev’s translation and Kotzebue’s retelling demonstrate the commitment of these authors to sentimentalism, which explains their desire to cause tears in the eyes of their readers.

Immanuel Kant and the Pragmatic Turn of Science Through the Prism of Sergei Bulgakov’s Metaphysics

In the early 20th century, science reveals its instrumental and conventional character. These pragmatic features, according to Sergei Bulgakov, underscore the dependence of scientific claims on human qualities and purposes. Science is anthropologised; therefore, philosophy of science can be regarded as a part of philosophical anthropology. The pragmatic turn of science, Bulgakov argues, had a Kantian impulse. In 1912 book “Philosophy of Economy”, Bulgakov advances a metaphysical view on science in a dispute with his critical interlocutors – Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Heinrich Rickert, and their prominent predecessor Immanuel Kant. This paper shows that despite a fundamental disagreement concerning the notion of the transcendental subject, Bulgakov does not disprove the utility of Kant’s transcendental theory of knowledge. He rather points out the limits of this theory (Kant primarily insisted on) and overrides those limits as dispensable for philosophy, which does not have to be a formal science.

The Muffled Voice. On The Conventional Character of Literature

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 59 (2011), issue 1.
 In the article a reflection is proposed on literature’s inner problems concentrated around the concept of literary convention. It seems that in the postmodernist demands to give more attention to those voices in literature that up till now have been “muffled,” “passed over” and “oppressed,” the meaning of the concept of “convention” has been distorted. However, its proper understanding is as elementary for the existence and development of literature as treating a literary work as an artificially organized form, and not as the writer’s confession. The author of the article, on the basis of the definitions formulated by the formalist-structuralist school, discusses the inner, aesthetic laws of literature dictated and defined by literary convention and tradition, and he indicates that it is them – more than political, social or moral causes—that in the natural process of creation and development of literature cause that some voices, perhaps, cannot be fully heard.

La frontière politique intérieure: le sens de l’esclavage dans les Lois et dans le Politique de Platon

The presence of slavery in Plato’s political and ethical thought is marked by two contrary tendencies: one signals the conventional character of statutory slavery and tends to reduce the moral boundary between free people and servile people; the other one, going in the opposite direction, strongly reaffirms the functional frontier between these two categories, and makes it impassable. What does this double gesture of integration and exclusion of slavery mean with respect to Plato’s political thought? My claim, based on the analysis of a passage in Book vi of the Laws and some excerpts from the Statesman, is the following: for Plato, the statutory slavery fulfills the function of drawing the inner civic boundary on which the political field must be built if it is to have a true conceptual autonomy, by contrast with what contributes to its construction but without being fully political.

INFLUENCE OF FARMING SYSTEMS ON INDICATORS OF BEEF CALVES GROWTH

The aim of this study was to evaluate growth ability of Charolais calves in different systems of farming. The observations were performed in period of 8 years (2007 - 2014) in one herd, which was transiting from conventional to ecological farming system. Period from 2007 to 2010 was of conventional character, 2010 to 2012 transition phase, and from 2012 to 2014 ecological phase. This transfer is directly linked to changes in cow´s welfare and nutrition. Growth ability (live weight at birth, 120, and 210 days of age, average daily gain from birth to 120, from birth to 210, and from 120 to 210 days of age) of 518 Charolais calves was measured. Statistical analyses were performed using SAS 9.3 software, GLM procedure. The model equations contend effect of sex, number of parity, month of calves birth and type of farming system. Difference in birth weight of calves between farming systems was small and insignificant. This fact may be due to breeding system focused on easy calving. Increase of values measured in different age and average daily gains were statistical significant (P < 0.05) between conventional and ecological farming. The increase of parameters of weight and average daily gain could be largely connected with genetic progress in Charolais population in Czech Republic and following good selection of bulls to insemination and natural breeding. Nevertheless, the transition from conventional to ecological farming system did not affected growth ability of beef cattle negatively and, in contrary, results of growth improved farm economy.

The Origins of Natural Law Thinking in the Ideas of Ancient Greek Sophists: Protagoras and Antiphon

Protagoras and Antiphon are the first authors known to us who offered their views on the correlation between human nature, on the one hand, and the requirements of the law and positive morality, on the other. With Protagoras and Antiphon, the conventional character of law and morality, as well as the existence of a moral obligation to obey the law, became vital subjects of philosophical discussion. Protagoras, according to Plato’s testimony in the dialogues "Protagoras" and "Theaetetus", attempted to reconcile individual and public interests with the help of the concept of universal virtue, which all citizens of the polis should participate in. This attempt, however, is difficult to regard as successful, since, according to the logic of Protagoras, virtue is only a means for the survival of individuals and ensuring their security. While providing justification of the paramount importance and natural character of civic virtues, Protagoras at the same time allows for the possibility of following them only for appearance, as a cover for selfish motives.Antiphon views the contract between people as the sole and sufficient basis of law and morality. Approaching the problem from an individualistic point of view, Antiphon sharply contrasts nature and convention. Nevertheless, he considers the former rather in terms of benefits and harms of following it, and not as a source of objective moral prescriptions. According to this interpretation, nature and convention are two different worlds; one may chose which of them to follow, but it is impossible to reconcile them. Neither Protagoras, nor Antiphon offers any consistent concept of human nature, and that is why their ideas could not be characterized as natural law in the full sense of the word. Their views of nature do not yet contain fundamental standards, with which human law and conventional morality could be compared. The main weakness of both theories is their inability to give account of the social character of human nature. At the same time, the undoubted merit of Protagoras and Antiphon is the very statement of the question of the priority of nature or the convention, individual or public interests, as well as of the possibility of their harmonization. The ideas of two senior sophists played a decisive role in shaping the intellectual climate, in which, primarily in direct controversy with them, Plato and Aristotle produced much more elaborate concepts of human nature; and the natural law tradition emerged.

Taxonomic studies on the gaudy grasshoppers (Orthoptera: Pyrgomorphoidea: Pyrgomorphidae) from the northeastern states of India

A survey of the northeastern states of India recorded 10 species representing five genera belonging to four tribes of the family Pyrgomorphidae. For identification, in addition to conventional morphological characters, the detailed structures of male and female genitalia were also included. All the genera studied are described. Morphometry and distribution of each species are also given.

Observation of interface superconductivity in a SnSe2 /epitaxial graphene van der Waals heterostructure

We report on the direct observation of interface superconductivity in single-unit-cell SnSe2 films grown on graphitized SiC(0001) substrate by means of van der Waals epitaxy. Tunneling spectrum in the superconducting state reveals rather conventional character with a fully gapped order parameter. The occurrence of superconductivity is further confirmed by the presence of vortices under external magnetic field. Through interface engineering, we unravel the mechanism of superconductivity that originates from a two-dimensional electron gas formed at the interface of SnSe2 and graphene. Our finding opens up novel strategies to hunt for and understand interface superconductivity based on van der Waals heterostructures.