Invisible Connections Research Articles

Commentary on the invisible connection of mothers' BMI, emotional appetite, and food choices with childhood obesity.

Commentary on the invisible connection of mothers' BMI, emotional appetite, and food choices with childhood obesity.

The invisible connection of mothers' BMI, emotional appetite, and food choices with childhood obesity.

This study examined the effects of mothers' body mass index (BMI), emotional appetite, and food choices on children's growth curves and adiposity. Data was collected from 492 mothers. The demographic characteristics and anthropometric measurements were obtained using a questionnaire. The mothers' food choices and emotional appetites were assessed using scales. BMI for age Z score and tripoderal index (TMI) were used in the evaluation of children's anthropometric measurements and adiposity. The mean age of mothers' was 39.10 ± 0.26 and BMI was 25.08 ± 0.21. Among the mothers, 54.5% were classified as normal, 28.4% as pre-obese, and 14.7% as obese. Among the children, 31.5% were overweight or obese. There was a strong positive correlation between the mean BMI of the mothers and the mean TMI and BMI of the children (p < 0.001). The "convenience" food choice factor of mothers had negative correlation with childiren's BMI for age (p < 0.005). This study emphasizes the invisible connection between mothers' emotional appetite and food choices and children's BMI and TMI and highlights the importance of paying attention to mothers' eating habits for children's health outcomes. These findings will be informative in the formulation of future health policies. This research revealed the relationship between mothers' food choices and emotional appetites, and their children's growth curves and adiposity. The study proposes the Triponderal Index as an alternative approach to evaluating growth, introducing a novel perspective in growth monitoring. By highlighting the impact of mothers' emotional appetites and food choices on children's dietary habits and weight status, the research emphasizes the significance of family eating habits. The findings support the promotion of healthy dietary practices within families as a crucial measure in preventing and managing childhood obesity, conveying a significant message to parents and healthcare professionals for a healthier future.

University Architectures Re-Invented: Re-Conceptualizing Forced Migration, Historical Consciousness, and Coalition Building in Ukraine After the Full-Scale Russian Invasion

The purpose of this article is to describe the creation of displaced universities (DUs) as spaces for coalition building, resistance, and decolonial practice that have re-invented the university architecture. This article offers a multi-perspectival and historical exploration of higher education in Ukraine before and after the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, with particular focus on the coalitions around Ukrainian DUs. DUs can be seen as one form of decolonial creations, as a unique organic coalition and intellectual community. This organic coalition includes a process of social resistance, resilience, and policy, which are being shaped by people whose lives were and still are uncertain. These people affiliated with higher education created invisible connections that re-shaped the vision and relationality of DUs. The interwoven life trajectories of forced migrants, Ukrainian academics, administrators, and students who made the decision to move to mainland Ukraine and establish (in)visible DUs while continuing their work and education in Ukrainian territories under the control of the Ukrainian government.

ON SOME NONSTANDARD PROBLEMS ON HARMONIC MOTION

This article is devoted to approaches to solving one type of non-standard problems about harmonic motion and issues of their teaching. The motions observed in such tasks are not of an oscillatory nature, and at first glance it is difficult to notice their hidden connection with oscillatory motion. However, a correct and in-depth analysis of the physical situation can reveal this initially invisible connection. By understanding the relationship between the observed motion and the corresponding harmonic vibrations, the problem can be solved using the idea of similarity. After the introductory part, two non-standard problems are considered, the first of which is solved by the force method, and the second by the energy method. A comparative analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the use of force and energy methods in solving such problems was carried out. The body of the article develops a standard physics problem and brings to the level of an Olympiad task (by adding an additional question). The final part of the paper reveals the possibility of generalizing the discussed approach by implementing the apparatus. The scientific and methodological novelty of this work lies in the revision, development and presentation of problems and their solutions related to the harmonious motions of bodies or those close to them.

Co‐Creatively Producing Knowledge With Other‐Than‐Human Organisms in a (Bio)Technology‐Controlled Artistic Environment

Along with the increasing awareness about the destructive force of humankind on nature, existential questions about how to create a more sustainable relationship with the natural world have emerged. To acquire a more eco‐friendly attitude, we need to go beyond the well‐established knowledge cultures that highlight a nature versus culture dichotomy. This study focuses on bio art as an epistemic vehicle to re‐imagine our understanding of and connection to the natural world. Drawing on the theoretical stance of philosophical posthumanism, we discuss how artistic co‐creation processes involving humans and other‐than‐humans hold the potential to introduce a shift in our worldview from anthropocentric to ecocentric. We further question what this shift might imply for how we approach the complex relationship between humans and other‐than‐humans in our own research. We conducted a within‐case and cross‐case analysis of five bio art projects that previously won the Bio Art &amp;amp; Design Award (2018–2020). To analyze the data, we used a combined approach of visual and context analysis and material semiotics. Qualitative interviews were used as a data collection technique to investigate the lived experiences of both artists and scientists involved in the projects. Our findings suggest that bio art’s epistemic significance can primarily be found in its multispecies perspective: By following the wills and ways of bio‐organisms, bio art makes the invisible connection between nature and culture visible. Bio art can provoke our thinking about how to include and approach other‐than‐human agency in the context of socially engaged research practices.

Матрица иллюзии

The article highlights several methodological levels in the study of illusory forms of consciousness based on the heritage of German classical philosophy (Kant, Hegel) and on the materials of the works of Durkheim, Freud and Marx. The “Kantian” level involves deciphering the content of an illusory complex by isolating unconscious intellectual or social processes, the interweaving of which gives rise to the appearance of ontological connections that do not exist in real­ity. Such an understanding of the nature of illusory forms allows us to single out four regular stages of reflection of these phenomena: naive fetishism, its rational criticism, scientific ideology and critical theory. At the fourth stage, invisible connections are revealed, but the reason for their concealment by an illusory form remains unexplained (fetishized). The “post-Kantian” level implies the re­jection of the subjective understanding of the illusory form and its understanding as a natural generation of content, which requires the rejection of the classical opposition of truth and error. The Hegelian model of absolute reality, for which all knowledge and illusions are its internal, but transient characteristics, can act here as a “methodological measure”. Unlike Durkheim, for whom illusion was the eternal state of society, Freud and Marx viewed it as a transient phenomenon, focusing on the mechanisms of its formation and death, but the opposition of “society and man” characteristic of psychoanalysis did not allow revealing the “systemic secret of form”. Marx partly took this step, and Durkheim’s innova­tion consisted in revealing the reflexive nature of the connection between the fetish and its sign.

Музыка Сергея Прокофьева к кинофильму «Пиковая дама» Михаила Ромма

Among the artists-creators who have turned to the musical-theatrical or musical-cinematographic interpretation of Alexander Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and thereby risked to enter into a dialogue, or even into polemics with Piotr Tchaikovsky’s immortal opera, Sergei Prokofiev presents a striking example. His artistic tandem with cinema producer Mikhail Romm was formed in 1936, however, the film The Queen of Spades for various reasons turned out to be inaccessible to the viewing audience. The music to the film project, which failed to be realized, was almost completed by the composer and has for many years attracted conductors and film producers. Within the focus of the scholarly interest of the author of the present article is the story of the creation of the music for the film, as well as its analysis based on art studies. This work of the composer turns out to be simultaneously quite organic for the master’s legacy, possessing the traits of his style, and quite original, when compared to other works connected with Pushkin’s immortal novelette. Research experience has made it possible to compensate for the prior perceptions of Prokofiev as a cinematic composer, and also to make a certain contribution in the questions connected with the dialogue of the arts and, more broadly, with the cultural dialogue. Developing itself within the framework of musical Pushkiniana, the sought dialogue overcomes space and time, initiating the invisible connection between past, present and future.

Unforgotten Names. Mikhail Belashov and Georgy Kranz

The article “Unforgotten Names. Mikhail Belashov and Georgy Kranz” is the first in the cycle “VKHUTEIN, VKHUTEMAS. Sculptors. Teachers and Students”, dedicated to the unique creative and educational project, VKHUTEMAS - VKHUTEIN, which laid the foundation and within the framework of which a galaxy of outstanding Russian sculptors, who brought fame to our Fatherland in the fine arts immediately after the end of the Civil War in the country, was prepared. The author analyzes the work of outstanding sculptors. These masters of plastic art had a profound positive impact on the development of Russian and Soviet sculpture both through their creativity and their purposeful teaching activities. A start was made by some sculptors who were then students still studying at the Russe Studio in Paris in 1909. The VKHUTEMAS and VKHUTEIN sculptors-teachers’ pedagogical range was measured by the highest level of knowledge, teaching methods, laid down by the Russian Imperial Academy by taking into account relevant at that time new trends in art, sometimes extremely radical. Fortunately, this basic, main fundamental practice of studying sculptural craft was not interrupted but only improved. The invisible connection of generations of sculptural craft masters did not dissapear completely; it moved forward. The students who studied with the VKHUTEMAS and VKHUTEIN artist-teacher developed the methodology with their followers and students; in their own creative search, they addressed their teacher for advice in moments of artistic searches and doubts. The author of the article points out that such bright teachers-sculptors were the founders of the Russian, Soviet school of sculpture. They were masters and teachers of a whole galaxy of remarkable Russian sculptors who, by their example, their method and creativity, made a huge impact on the development of modern Russian plastic art not only in the USSR but throughout the world. They were organizers and ideological inspirers, active participants in many creative associations of the first third of the 20th century. The author notes that the works of sculptors-teachers and their talented students give us the opportunity to get an idea of their views, worldview, attitude to the creative process and, in general, to the profession of an artist-sculptor. This article presents the dialogues with teachers preserved in the notes and memoirs of students, their statements, which the Author believes is of exceptional relevance not only to the tasks of teaching in the field of sculptural craft, but also to the formation of the worldview of master sculptors and the concept of the school. The author analyzes and convincingly proves by concrete examples that the school of Vkhutein and Vkhutemas is a logically competently built pedagogical system based on the experience and skill of previous generations of artists, going from antiquity and Byzantium and related to classicism to Western European aesthetics and traditions and foundations of the Russian plastic school, its basic foundations and principles, ascending to the geniuses of the Quatrechento era. In this work, the author highlights the creative and pedagogical activities of these teachers and students of I.Efimov, S.Bulakovskiy, B.Korolev, V.Favorskiy, I.Tchaikov, V.Mukhina, N.Nisse-Goldman, M.Aisenstadt, N.Slobodinskaya, D.Schwartz, M.Belashov, A.Zelenskiy, E.Herzenstein, A.Grigoriev, G.Krantz, E.Belashova, I.Slonim, L.Pisarevskiy, A.Arendt, E.Abalakov. The author analyzes the learning processes of teachers-sculptors, names the main dates of their work, reveals the details of sculptural craft, talks about the variety of moves in plastic methods and principles of work in sculpture, shows the attitude of students to their teachers, and highlights the whole course of historical milestones in the creative biography of the sculptor. Today, the article is dedicated to two remarkable sculptors, classmates, peers, sculptors Mikhail Belashov and Georgy Krantz who went missing in the war.

Poetry of Emily Dickinson in the Light of the Bhagavad-gita

Emily Dickinson, now a celebrated poet, is still studied more from the subjective angles which belittle her stature than the objective ones which may contribute in highlighting her genuine poetic worth. This perspective is a modest attempt to decipher Dickinson’s poetry in the light of the Bhagavad-gita, the flashes of which are flashed in her concept of soul, self, non-attachment, renunciation, equanimity, happiness within, removal of false ego for peace and rejection of sense objects for a higher taste. A few relevant excerpts from the Bhagavad-gita and Dickinson’s poems have been analysed to trace out the spiritual light that reveals the path leading to her invisible connection with India. In her poems, she exhorts like Krishna of the Bhagavad-gita and reveals the truth of the material existence while making her journey from outside to inside. The application of the objective approach helps in bringing out the real worth of Emily Dickinson and contributes in connecting the threads of her poetry to the other parts of the world claiming for a universal appeal of her poetry.

THE DYNAMIC OF THE SOCIO-AFFECTIVE RELATIONS IN A ROMANIAN RURAL HANDBALL SCHOOL TEAM

ABSTRACT. Introduction. It is human nature to interact with the other. Interpersonal relationships appear as an invisible connection beyond the spoken words and the informational content of the communication. Starting from the age peculiarities of the students, from their motor possibilities, but also from the personality of each one, taking into account the affinities in the relationship with the others, the teacher can form a group in which to obtain performance with a rural school team. Objectives: 1) identifying the types and meanings of relationships between group members (acceptance, rejection, indifference relationships) and 2) identifying gender influences on the dynamics of relationships between target group members. Methods: The sociometric test was applied on the handball team of the Romanian rural school, 28 students, 14 14 boys and 14 girls), of different ages, between 11 and 14 years old. The average age of the group is 12.89 years, 13 years for boys and 13.64 years for girls. Results: Male subjects received more positive choices than rejections compared to female subjects. 3 subjects (2 boys and a girl) are the most popular. Most members of the group, 14, are in zone B (Liked more than disliked), 8 b and 6f. Another 7 (1b and 6f) are in zone C (Disliked more than liked). None are in zones E (Rejected) and F (Neglected). Conclusions: The first positive elections were aimed at members of the same gender. Male subjects focused their first positive choices more on same-sex subjects, but most girls focused more on male subjects. The rejection options are oriented towards the other gender. There is at the group level an individualized acceptance according to the personality, qualities and sports abilities of each member of the group.

From Waste to Climate

Abstract It has often been said that the problem with climate change is its invisibility. People do not mobilize about climate change because they cannot see it; even less can they see CO2 emissions—that is, the most relevant material element causing climate alternations. Although I would argue that for some people climate change is more visible than for others, it remains a global environmental problem not easily felt on the ground. On the other hand, waste appears to be an incumbent presence, almost impossible to avoid; it also seems more localized than global climate change. People mobilize around waste because it stands in front of their eyes and noses. This is how the story has been told so many times. This article instead tells another story, one in which climate activism is rooted in struggles against waste contamination. In Naples, Italy, twenty years of mobilization against toxicity—which, by the way, is much less visible and much more harmful than the urban garbage in the streets—has generated an epistemic community trained to understand the invisible connections linking local problems, global issues, and socioenvironmental inequalities. Their original elaboration of biocide as the theoretical framework explaining the production of toxic communities provided them with an equally original framework to understand climate change and its unequal impacts on people and ecosystems. In moving between waste and climate, local and global, those epistemic communities have not only changed the ways in which climate activism has been conceived but have also changed themselves.

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’sAusterlitz

Confounded Dwelling: Architectures of Association in W. G. Sebald’s<i>Austerlitz</i>

A Modernist Education in Pandemics

A Modernist Education in Pandemics

The Semantics of Participation in the Russian Language as a Reflection of the Cultural Universal «Own/Foreign» Concept and the «West/East» Opposition

This paper deals with the issues of an important ethnic trait through the reflection in the Russian language and in the speech behavior of native speakers. This trait is focused around the need for actualization of «participation» or complicity in speech and social behavior as an invisible connection established in the inner world of the subject of the relationship of participation with other persons, animals, objects, spatial and social objects and even eras and ideas. The developed semantics of participation in the Russian language reflects the cultural universal concept of «own/foreign». L. Levy-Bruhl studied one member of that opposition theoretically and on the basis of extensive empirical material created the anthropological theory of participation. Russian linguists V. V. Ivanov, Yu. D. Apresyan, V. S. Khrakovsky and A. P. Volodin, I. I. Kovtunova studied concepts associated with the notion of participation in the mid‑1980s using the material of Russian deixis and the category of possessiveness. In the Russian language, the semantics of participation is expressed by various linguistic means: the means of verbal and pronominal deixis, diminutives, possessive syntactic constructions and affixes, words with the semantics of emotional attitude and assistance

A New Species of Spongilla (Porifera, Demospongiae) from a Karst Lake in Ha Long Bay (Vietnam)

Cahong in Ha Long Bay (Vietnam) is a small lake with a reduced, invisible connection with the open sea. The water column conditions locally experience notable fluctuations across the year, mostly driven by biannual monsoon seasons. Salinity, temperature, and pH often reach extreme values, unsustainable for the majority of the marine fauna. Therefore, the biodiversity of the benthic macrofauna in this peculiar habitat is remarkably low. In particular, a single sponge species new to science was found solely populating this characteristic brackish lake during our last survey in August 2018. Spongilla manconiae sp. nov. is a new Porifera species described here. It belongs to an exclusively freshwater taxon and seems to have acquired adaptive traits to tolerate extreme peaks of temperature and salinity. The mitochondrial Cytochrome C Oxidase subunit 1 (COI) and the nuclear Internal Transcribed Spacers 1 and 2 (ITSs) gene markers were used for barcoding tagging and phylogenetic analyses. The new species revealed large genetic distances and separate clustering in the tree topology, with respect to other reference spongillid sequences from various geographic areas. The study provides evidence for an urgency to protect these unique marine lake systems because they represent rare, fluctuant, fragile habitats that may speed up speciation processes.

British Ornithologists’ Union

British Ornithologists’ Union

An Ethico-Onto-Epistemological Approach to Literacy Research

Entanglements among humans, nonhuman objects, and spatial matter in a research site necessitate greater attention to the interwoven and sometimes invisible connections across relational bodies. This piece comments on how reevaluating approaches to participant observations in qualitative research can lead to better understandings of the dynamic interconnectedness among participants, researchers, and observational tools. Drawing from the theory of thinking without method, this research explores the complexity of documentation in an out-of-school literacy setting and argues that ethico-onto-epistemology can highlight intersections between literacy researchers and technological attachments.

DigGCN: Learning Compact Graph Convolutional Networks via Diffusion Aggregation.

Recent interests in graph neural networks (GNNs) have received increasing concerns due to their superior ability in the network embedding field. The GNNs typically follow a message passing scheme and represent nodes by aggregating features from neighbors. However, the current aggregation methods assume that the network structure is static and define the local receptive fields under visible connections, which consequently fails to consider latent or high-order structures. Besides, the aggregation methods are known to have a depth dilemma due to the over-smoothness issues. To solve the above shortcomings, we present in this article a compact graph convolutional network framework which defines the graph receptive fields based on diffusion paths and explicitly compresses the neural networks with sparsity regularization. The proposed model seeks to learn from invisible connections and recover the latent proximity. First, we infer the high-order proximity and construct diffusion paths by diffusion samplings. Compared with random walk samplings, the diffusion samplings are based on regions instead of paths. The network inference then obtains accurate weights that can be leveraged to build small but informative receptive fields with salient neighbors. Second, to utilize the deep information while avoiding overfitting, we propose learning a lightweight model by introducing a nonconvex regularizer. Numerical comparisons with the existing network embedding methods under unsupervised feature learning and supervised classification show the effectiveness of our model.

Complex Neutrosophic Hypergraphs: New Social Network Models

A complex neutrosophic set is a useful model to handle indeterminate situations with a periodic nature. This is characterized by truth, indeterminacy, and falsity degrees which are the combination of real-valued amplitude terms and complex-valued phase terms. Hypergraphs are objects that enable us to dig out invisible connections between the underlying structures of complex systems such as those leading to sustainable development. In this paper, we apply the most fruitful concept of complex neutrosophic sets to theory of hypergraphs. We define complex neutrosophic hypergraphs and discuss their certain properties including lower truncation, upper truncation, and transition levels. Furthermore, we define T-related complex neutrosophic hypergraphs and properties of minimal transversals of complex neutrosophic hypergraphs. Finally, we represent the modeling of certain social networks with intersecting communities through the score functions and choice values of complex neutrosophic hypergraphs. We also give a brief comparison of our proposed model with other existing models.

Rural idylls and urban economies: the making of metropolitan wine regions

ABSTRACTIn our quest to understand wine industries and their location and development worldwide, much emphasis has been given to key environmental, cultural and economic factors. The concept of terroir is used widely to describe, delimit and promote favoured wine regions. In this, we see constructions of rurality that tend to render invisible important connections between wine regions and urban places. However, many if not most wine regions owe much to their urban neighbours. Cities are sources of labour, capital and customers. Indeed, many wine regions are, in effect, metropolitan wine regions that owe as much to their proximity to cities than they do to any putative environmental distinctiveness and advantages. Wineries in such places develop strategies to survive and prosper not by producing bottles of wine that are widely sold on global markets – and compete on the basis on price or global reputation – but rather because they develop strong and loyal local markets tied to urban economies and because they appeal to the rural idylls held by urban consumers. This paper explores the way urban places have been critical in the development of certain wine regions in New Zealand.