Idea Of Nature Research Articles

Accessing the Trail, Interpreting the Forest

The Stephen F. Austin Experimental Forest is the site of the first ADA-compliant US Forest Service project in Texas. Offering information about the history of forest management alongside information on Pineywoods ecosystems, the interpretive trail raises questions about how access is framed across “natural” and “built” environments as well as how distinctions between nature and culture operate within US environmental imaginaries. This article draws on feminist, posthumanist, and disability studies to conduct a close reading of the interpretive trail as text. It tracks the trail’s approach to disability access as well as its presentation of forest ecology, analyzing how the ableist logic of capitalist commodification underwrites the management of multispecies actants in the woods. I read against the grain of the trail in search of feminist, crip, posthumanist configurations of interdependence and more fluid human–nature boundaries. I argue that cripping the Austin requires questioning the unevenness of disability access as well as the utilitarian ideas of nature presented on the trail while also imagining how we might access and relate to this postindustrial forest otherwise.

The Imagination of the Forest and the Fear of the Land: The Idea of Nature in Recent Hindi Fiction

This article examines the idea of nature in two Hindi novels set in central India: Dīvār Meṃ Ek Khiṛkī Rahtī Thī (A Window Lived in a Wall) by Vinod Kumar Shukla and Kāle Adhyāya (Black Chapters) by Manoj Rupara. Both novels feature an elephant as a symbol of the forest and its otherness from the human world. The article argues that the elephant reveals a complex and contradictory imagination of the forest in Central India, which troubles both the idyllic pastoral of Shukla’s small town and the story of the violent dispossession of the Gondi Adivasi community in Kāle Adhyāya. The article situates these novels in the context of Hindi literature’s engagement with nature, regionalism and the lower middle class. In so doing, the article contributes to the scholarship on regional literature in Hindi and the study of Hindi literature’s depiction of nature.

“Floral Ornament of Reality”: Flowers in Worldview of E. T. A. Hoffmann and N. A. Polevoy

The relevance of this study is grounded in the scholarly significance of the issue of Russian-German literary connections as a crucial factor in intercultural interaction. This article analyzes works in which the authors articulate a mystical sense of nature, based on the natural philosophical ideas of F. Schelling. The focus of the investigation is the national distinctiveness of Romanticism, manifested in the peculiarities of nature perception, particularly floral imagery. It is demonstrated that the Romantic writers of Germany and Russia perceived love, within the value-emotional framework of the Romantic universe, as a mystical feeling that enables one to penetrate the mysterious forces of nature. The floral motifs within the works contribute an additional allegorical meaning to the artistic worlds of E. T. A. Hoffmann and N. A. Polevoy. The “floral background” of the characters in the analyzed texts (the tulip Gamachea, the thistle Pepush, the bride Tis — Little Rose; Emma — cornflower; Italy — “poor forget-me-not,” among others) establishes a symbolic language of nature. Attention is also given to motifs traditional to German literature: yearning, soul affinity, reminiscence of a “different world,” and the union of lovers in death, which are reflected in the examined works of Russian literature. The novelty of this research lies in its consideration of N. A. Polevoy’s dialogue with the German literary tradition represented by E. T. A. Hoffmann as a result of his philosophical and poetic explorations.

Classification of BCI-EEG Based on the Augmented Covariance Matrix.

Electroencephalography signals are recorded as multidimensional datasets. We propose a new framework based on the augmented covariance that stems from an autoregressive model to improve motor imagery classification. From the autoregressive model can be derived the Yule-Walker equations, which show the emergence of a symmetric positive definite matrix: the augmented covariance matrix. The state-of the art for classifying covariance matrices is based on Riemannian Geometry. A fairly natural idea is therefore to apply this Riemannian Geometry based approach to these augmented covariance matrices. The methodology for creating the augmented covariance matrix shows a natural connection with the delay embedding theorem proposed by Takens for dynamical systems. Such an embedding method is based on the knowledge of two parameters: the delay and the embedding dimension, respectively related to the lag and the order of the autoregressive model. This approach provides new methods to compute the hyper-parameters in addition to standard grid search. The augmented covariance matrix performed ACMs better than any state-of-the-art methods. We will test our approach on several datasets and several subjects using the MOABB framework, using both within-session and cross-session evaluation. The improvement in results is due to the fact that the augmented covariance matrix incorporates not only spatial but also temporal information. As such, it contains information on the nonlinear components of the signal through the embedding procedure, which allows the leveraging of dynamical systems algorithms. These results extend the concepts and the results of the Riemannian distance based classification algorithm.

The abandonment of the ideal of wilderness: Rewilding as the consequence of the Anthropocene metaphysics on restoration ecology

The idea of wilderness is being abandoned in restoration ecology due to metaphysical changes in the conception of nature. These changes are associated with the hybridization of nature and culture, an ontological distinction of modernity that touches its end in the Anthropocene. The notion of wilderness is falling because it was based on a static idea of nature, inherited from the modern conception of nature as passive, and this is affecting ecological restoration practices. The pursuit of wilderness has been abandoned in favor of wildness, vindicated by the so-called “rewilding philosophy.” Both restoration ecology and rewilding are based on the same corpus of ecology, but the first has historically operated in a period under the modern ontological distinction between nature and culture, while the second operates already in the hybridization of both categories. Rewilding does not pursue wilderness, no longer possible in the hybrid Anthropocene, but aims to restore the spontaneous order of the wildness.

Letter from the President

Dear Readers,I am proud to announce the publication of the 2021-22 edition of the Columbia Under-graduate Science Journal! The Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal is our original namesake publication, dedicated to sharing scientific knowledge of the highest quality of scholarship resulting from undergraduate scientific research.The need for accurate scientific research and reporting is ever-present, especially now more than ever before. A significant issue that plagues society today is misinformation. Opinions uninformed by science present a danger to society - we need not look any further than the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic for an example of the consequences of unscientific misinformation. A society misinformed miscalculates. So, in a world of chaotic opinion, we must remain steadfast in our pursuit of scientific knowledge. Although scientific facts should inform our opinions, it is important to remember that science itself is not a list of facts, but rather a process of discovery. Students all over the world contribute to this collective process as scientific researchers. Through scientific research we explore nature, discover truths, and debate ideas in our relentless pursuit of knowledge. The Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal is a platform for student scientists to share their knowledge so that we may become a better informed society.It was an honor to read, edit, and review submissions made to our journal. I am grate-ful to our Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal team and editorial board for their significant contributions to our scientific review process. I am especially grateful to Kazi Rabbe, Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal, whose lead-ership made this publication a success. I would also like to thank the Columbia Un-dergraduate Science Journal Faculty Advisory Board, a group of esteemed Columbia University professors whose support ensures publication of the highest quality of schol-arship.Congratulations to our authors, and thank you to our readers!Arjun KudinoorPresident, Chief Editorial OfficerColumbia Undergraduate Science Journal

The beauty of nature in a teleological perspective

In this work we will focus on the relationship between aesthetic reflection and teleological reflection based on Kant’s concern for the inclusion of beauty in the idea of nature as a system of ends, as expressed in §67: “Even beauty in nature, i.e., its agreement with the free play of our cognitive faculties in the apprehension and judging of its appearance, can be considered in this way as an objective purposiveness of nature in its entirety.” Admitting such a possibility requires addressing at least two issues: The possibility of a teleological approach to aesthetic judgments. This will lead us to determine to what extent the aestheticjudgment of natural objects can also be considered from the teleological faculty of judgment. Here we will show aesthetic reflectionas a propaedeutic for teleological reflection; 2. Beauty in the external relationship between the beings of nature. We will address the location of beauty in the total set of nature as a teleological system in which the human being is a member. We will put beauty in reference to the idea of interest, the ultimate end and the final end of nature

A tour into untouched land: Enacting wilderness through relational engagements

Drawing upon an ethnographic study of guided tours in Svalbard, in this article I explore how is the wilderness enacted as a situational and contextual outcome of more-then-human relations, emerging from engagements with the environment. As the engagements during the guided tours contest the often expected ‘purity’ of wilderness, I further investigate in detail when and how nature-culture dichotomy is both contested and re-produced in the enactment of wilderness. I argue that the nature-culture dichotomy constituting wilderness on Svalbard shifts from the idea of human-less nature to life in harmony with nature in which some human traces are present. This dichotomy then emerges from more-than-human relations. Further, I show that the character of wilderness is also emerging from different situations and contexts, where temporality, knowledge and dependency on self or others influence the engagements and more-than-human relations.

Insignificance of the Act in Criminal and Administrative Tort Law: Nature and Content

The study develops an idea of the criminal legal nature of the insignificance of the act. The author arguments in favor of the fact that such nature is due to the differentiated approach of the federal legislator to assessing the level of public danger of actions and inaction provided for by criminal law. At the same time, the high role of the law enforcement officer in determining the scale of the threat posed by a specific offense for the object of criminal law protection is stated. Studying the mitigating and aggravating circumstances of the act, the personal characteristics of the offender and the line of their behavior, the court decides on the degree of public danger of the relevant act. Its minimal value becomes the reason for raising the question of recognizing the committed action or inaction as insignificant. The paper considers issues on categories of crimes that the offense formally falls under and thus can be assessed on the grounds of insignificance. It is argued against a well-known judgment that the insignificance of the act containing structural elements of the corpus delicti serves as the basis for evaluating what was done according to the norms and provisions of another branch of Russian legislation. A mechanism for developing the insignificance category potential at the level of an individual criminal wrong, known as a criminal offense, is proposed. The study offers a set of arguments proving the inconsistency of the position of the legislator and law enforcement officer on the issue of the possibility of recognizing an administrative offense as insignificant. Their essence boils down to the fact that the formal essence of administrative offenses excludes their differentiation into groups according to the level of harmfulness. This implies the inexpediency of using the category of insignificance in the legislation on administrative offenses.

Working on the future of group analysis – breaking the certainty

The idea of a social nature of humans clarifies that the phenomena, usually called intrapsychic, such as mind, freedom and ethics are shared property of the group. How does this idea manifest in the group situation? I present some of my reflections and experiences from practice related to this issue. We can see how the desire for sharing and addressing others creates a new, deeper understanding of relations in the group. I describe how a fellow member unpredictably can become the Other. The I-Thou relations, developed in the group, are ethical in their essence, and it is in these ethical relations that trust is created. Such processes never give the feeling of complete understanding and equality. Something is always missing and this is what drives the group to go beyond.

Average User-Side Counterfactual Fairness for Collaborative Filtering

Recently, the user-side fairness issue in Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms has gained considerable attention, arguing that results should not discriminate an individual or a sub-user group based on users’ sensitive attributes (e.g., gender). Researchers have proposed fairness-aware CF models by decreasing statistical associations between predictions and sensitive attributes. A more natural idea is to achieve model fairness from a causal perspective. The remaining challenge is that we have no access to interventions, i.e., the counterfactual world that produces recommendations when each user has changed the sensitive attribute value. To this end, we first borrow the Rubin-Neyman potential outcome framework to define average causal effects of sensitive attributes. Next, we show that removing causal effects of sensitive attributes is equal to average counterfactual fairness in CF. Then, we use the propensity re-weighting paradigm to estimate the average causal effects of sensitive attributes and formulate the estimated causal effects as an additional regularization term. To the best of our knowledge, we are one of the first few attempts to achieve counterfactual fairness from the causal effect estimation perspective in CF, which frees us from building sophisticated causal graphs. Finally, experiments on three real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed model.

A framework for visual-based adaptive object-robot interaction of a mobile service robot

The COVID-19 pandemic (hereinafter “the pandemic”) necessitated social distancing measures and limited physical contact, prompting the exploration of alternative methods for tasks like object delivery. Mobile service robots emerged as a potential solution, offering a bridge between humans and various tasks. While existing techniques have been introduced to enable robots to deliver objects in an end-to-end manner, they come with limitations. Grippers, for instance, can deliver only one object per round, cabinet robots require manual speed tuning to keep the object in place, and object holders lack generalizability. Inspired by the idea of human nature to use a tray to deliver the object, we developed the Visual-Based Adaptive Interaction System (hereinafter “VAIS”), a novel learning system, to improve service delivery using visual information and a fast neural learning mechanism. Within this system, the robot learns the optimal angular rotational and linear translational moving speeds to effectively transport objects placed on a tray without an extra holder. The robot validates these learnt movements by successfully completing multiple-object delivery tasks along designated routes. The results exhibit that the robot can utilize online learning after a few attempts to determine its proper moving speed and deliver different objects to a given location.

Role Reversals and Permeable Bodies in the Modern Robinsonade: From Postcolonialism to Ecocriticism

This essay argues that the particular lens of Bakhtinian body theory as developed for the Robinsonade by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower will help to shed light on a process observable over the past fifty years, in which colonial and postcolonial authors first embraced and then quickly abandoned the technique of role reversal in drafting their castaway stories. Enamoured of its comedic potential, Adrian Mitchell wrote Man Friday (1973). Derek Walcott was somewhat more circumspect in his Pantomime (1978), based on the realisation that role reversal demands the ascription of univocal roles and identities, something he did not see in evidence in the creolised world of the Caribbean. Later colonial and postcolonial writers such as J. M. Coetzee and Patrick Chamoiseau were then at pains to avoid questions of identity altogether, making epistemology and discourse their preferred topics. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the clichéd identities formerly applied to Indigenous peoples (physical strength, close connection to nature) could be brought to bear on the idea of nature itself, thus making animal Robinsonades such as Life of Pi (2001) and The Red Turtle (2016) tremendous successes that could forgo the messiness of human affairs and simply champion the everlasting superiority of nature over civilisation as an expression of contemporary environmental preoccupations.

‘Cropaganda’: Mythology of Corn Belt agriculture

Even as scholars have increasingly recognized the role of industrial agricultural practices in contributing to non-point source pollution, drinking water in the Corn Belt remains perilously contaminated with excess nitrates, which pose a significant risk to human health and the environment. A recent lawsuit filed by the city of Des Moines, Iowa against three upstream counties over chronic nitrate pollution sparked heated debate around the roles and responsibilities of agricultural production. Drawing on Barthes’ theory of mythology, this paper explores how three core myths influence agricultural management paradigms and practices that contribute to the water quality crisis in Iowa and shape how key stakeholders have responded (Barthes, R. 1972 [1957]. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang). This article relies on ethnographic data to explain agricultural nitrate pollution and the stalled progress on water quality improvement. Together these myths draw on post-enlightenment ideas of nature, security, and modernity to perpetuate productivist behavior, claim resources for conventional commodity agriculture, and impede widespread adoption of alternative agricultural practices. By identifying and interrogating each myth, I aim to reveal and complicate the inherent contradictions in its representation of reality to strip it of ideological function and, in doing so, cultivate opportunities to imagine and create an alternative system that benefits both people and the planet.

Switching Triple-Weight-SMOTE in Empirical Feature Space for Imbalanced and Incomplete Data

Most existing techniques to handle imbalanced data might be invalid in the presence of data missing since they are based on the assumption that the data is complete. To shorten such a gap, a novel synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE), i.e., Non-negative latent factor analysis-incorporated and Switching triple-weight-SMOTE (NSS), is proposed. The main idea of NSS is 4-fold: 1) a Lagrange non-negative matrix factorization (LNMF) method is put forward to impute the missing values with a guaranteed non-negativity according to the original distribution owing to the consideration of the global feature information; 2) by mapping the complete data after imputation into an empirical feature space (EFS), a more separable dataset is achieved, which rigidly maintains the same geometrical structure as the original data while efficiently reducing the redundant features to enhance model generalization and operational efficiency; 3) after fulfilling the fuzzy <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$c$</tex-math> </inline-formula> -means (FCM) clustering, the inter-cluster distance, the capacity of each minority cluster and its sparsity are comprehensively taken into account to develop a triple-weight assignment strategy, which contributes to allocate the number of synthetic samples to each cluster appropriately; 4) a switching oversampling strategy is provided in response to the clusters with different distributions (i.e., either Gaussian or uniform distribution). Moreover, a posterior is used to check the correctness of the synthetic samples. Finally, experiments on a real dataset and <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$12$</tex-math> </inline-formula> public datasets show that the proposed NSS outperforms other <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$11$</tex-math> </inline-formula> state-of-art methods. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</i> —Data classification is an important computer task, which has been successfully used in many domains, including but not limited to, the medical domain, finance domain, and manufacturing domain. However, there are two big challenges when a classifier is to handle real-world data in the presence of imbalanced data and missing values. More specifically, the model performance is very likely to be degraded due to the missing information and the inclination of classifiers to the majority class. To surmount this problem, a natural idea is to use the LNMF model to obtain the desired recovery. Then, for the complete data after imputation, the empirical-feature-space-based switching triple-weight-SMOTE is applied to synthesize safe and correct data (i.e., lie solidly on the region of minority class) to achieve the balance. Such a working principle generates a novel NSS strategy. The proposed NSS strategy has the following obvious merits: 1) the imputation guarantees the similarity to the original dataset; and 2) new synthetic data are safely generated by taking adequate consideration of the information and distribution of datasets. Thus, the proposed NSS can greatly help improve the classification accuracy of real-world datasets.

Immortality in Veda: An Analysis with Special Reference to the Rigveda

Abstract: The Vedas are regarded as one of the earliest instances of written literature and as the epitomes of Indian knowledge and philosophical tenets. The inherent philosophical framework of the Vedas is great facilitator of human insight about seminal issues like Life, Death, Mortality, and Immortality and so on. Vedas are always prescribing a balanced and measured way of life by bridging the gap between life and death. Life and Death are not two extremes; rather they are interrelated and co-existed. In the perspective of transitoriness of human body and the immortality of soul, the Vedas talk about the attainment of Immortality by understanding the truth about the cycle of life and death. Rigveda, in particular, does have significant instances and references about the idea of Immortality-its nature and the means of attaining the same. The present Paper looks into the idea of immortality represented in the Rigveda with a view of extracting the philosophical and pragmatic understanding of the same with the help of a descriptive and analytical approach.

The process of formation and socio-cultural determination of identity in contemporary culture

The article analyzes the phenomenon of identity, as well as the process of its formation, based on the initial intra-subjective stage of distinction. The typologization of identification components is described, based on the concept of the totality of sub-identities of the individual’s personality. The idea of the cyclic nature of the process of subjective identification is proposed.

Towards Balanced Alignment: Modal-Enhanced Semantic Modeling for Video Moment Retrieval

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to retrieve temporal segments in untrimmed videos corresponding to a given language query by constructing cross-modal alignment strategies. However, these existing strategies are often sub-optimal since they ignore the modality imbalance problem, i.e., the semantic richness inherent in videos far exceeds that of a given limited-length sentence. Therefore, in pursuit of better alignment, a natural idea is enhancing the video modality to filter out query-irrelevant semantics, and enhancing the text modality to capture more segment-relevant knowledge. In this paper, we introduce Modal-Enhanced Semantic Modeling (MESM), a novel framework for more balanced alignment through enhancing features at two levels. First, we enhance the video modality at the frame-word level through word reconstruction. This strategy emphasizes the portions associated with query words in frame-level features while suppressing irrelevant parts. Therefore, the enhanced video contains less redundant semantics and is more balanced with the textual modality. Second, we enhance the textual modality at the segment-sentence level by learning complementary knowledge from context sentences and ground-truth segments. With the knowledge added to the query, the textual modality thus maintains more meaningful semantics and is more balanced with the video modality. By implementing two levels of MESM, the semantic information from both modalities is more balanced to align, thereby bridging the modality gap. Experiments on three widely used benchmarks, including the out-of-distribution settings, show that the proposed framework achieves a new start-of-the-art performance with notable generalization ability (e.g., 4.42% and 7.69% average gains of R1@0.7 on Charades-STA and Charades-CG). The code will be available at https://github.com/lntzm/MESM.

Exploring desired urban futures: the transformative potential of a nature-based approach

Amidst multiple crises and calls for transformative change, the demand to reassess human-nature relationships has increased. Rethinking the future of cities is vital in this process, yet positive urban visions prioritizing nature beyond human-centred perspectives are lacking. To address this gap, we propose a “nature-based desired futures” approach for envisaging and building collective discussion around transformative change. We explore four concepts underpinning (i) why such alternative urban futures are needed (human-nature disconnect and changing urban imaginaries) and (ii) how they might be approached (transformative change and leverage, and the ‘education of desire’). This provides the basis for a participatory approach that adapts the Three Horizon method to explore desired urban futures for nature in 2050. Six workshops involving 111 participants linked to ‘Conexus’, a project on nature-based solutions in European and Latin American cities, explored emerging desired futures, evolving ideas of nature, human-nature relationships, and agency. The approach offers space for reflection creative exploration, and weaving together of new, hopeful, caring, emancipatory stories. Its effectiveness hinges on the mutually reinforcing power of deep leverage, and of structural, systemic, and enabling approaches, to give purpose and direction to the exploration of desired futures.

Religious foundations of duty

It is noted that, simultaneously with the emergence and development of human society, the presence of certain general rules in regulating the behavior of members of society arises. Social life at all stages of its development required the presence of such rules with which we humans could coordinate our behavior and actions and count on a certain predictable result from such behavior or actions. At various stages of the development of society, these or other social regulators become a tool for ensuring such a need. Historically, social norms formed under the influence of requirements and patterns of development of primitive society become the first social regulator. To a greater extent, such societies normalized their focus on the duties of the individual by installing a large number of prohibitions that required members of the society to refrain from undesirable behavior.&#x0D; It is indicated that with the complication and branching of social relations in society, general social norms support the impetus for further development and are differentiated in the following form of social regulators, in particular, morality, religion, and law. In our opinion, this order of progression of the development of social regulators is correct and natural. That is, initially the individual in the first society is aware of his responsibility to this or that social association, which is engaged in the creation of moral obligations. Gradually, certain beliefs appear in the primitive society, which contribute to the emergence of religious duties, which do not exclude moral positions, but complement them and values in interaction with them. And only with the appearance of the first state entities, we can talk about introducing obligations into the legal field with their further legal consolidation. It is important to note that in the pre-state period of human development, which occupies a sufficiently long period of time, duties developed outside the law and arose in accordance with human nature, customary norms, traditions, religious dogmas or moral ideas, based on the simplest rules of interpersonal interaction. All these factors - religion, morality, customs and traditions, to a greater or lesser extent changed their role in shaping the future idea of duties, that is why we consider it necessary to investigate the foundations of the institution of duty, in particular through the prism of religious influence.