Object Of Desire Research Articles

Applicability of teaching aids in extension education

Transference of the bookish knowledge is not enough for effective teaching so teaching should be supplemented with new teaching models or new emerging technology. However, do the students give importance to teaching aids for better instruction and learning? is the concerned area. This question is answered in this study by identifying the importance of teaching aids from students’ perspectives. Data were collected through the questionnaires from secondary school students (aged 14-15 years). Collected data were analysed by employing frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation. Findings indicated that teaching aids bring accuracy to get first-hand knowledge for obtaining the desirable objectives among students. Students’ learning becomes easy, quick and long-lasting as these aids leave high level of impressions on students’ mind and behaviour eventually. Teaching aids are helpful for teaching difficulty and complex concepts. No one can deny the importance of teaching aids in students’ learning. This study urges more practice of technology aids in teaching and training process either being practiced formally or non-formally.

A corneal-PAMPA-based in silico model for predicting corneal permeability

The capability to predict corneal permeability based on physicochemical parameters has always been a desirable objective of ophthalmic drug development. However, previous work has been limited to cases where either the diversity of compounds used was lacking or the performance of the models was poor. Our study provides extensive quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models for corneal permeability predictions. The models involved in vitro corneal permeability measurements of 189 diverse compounds. Preliminary analysis of data showed that there is no significant correlation between corneal-PAMPA (Parallel Artificial Membrane Permeability Assay) permeability values and other pharmacokinetically relevant in silico drug transport parameters like Caco-2, jejunal permeability and blood-brain partition coefficient (logBB). Two different QSPR models were developed: one for corneal permeability and one for corneal membrane retention, based on experimental corneal-PAMPA permeability data. Partial least squares regression was applied for producing the models, which contained classical molecular descriptors and ECFP fingerprints in combination. A complex validation protocol (including internal and external validation) was carried out to provide robust and appropriate predictions for the permeability and membrane retention values. Both models had an overall fit of R2 > 0.90, including R2-values not lower than 0.85 for validation runs, and provide quick and accurate predictions of corneal permeability values for a diverse set of compounds.

Butchering the fat body: Enacting and engaging fatness in an American “anti-obesity” campaign

ABSTRACT While public concern with body weight is not simply a recent phenomenon, the past several decades have witnessed the intensification of a set of discourses that frame the fat/ness of bodies as a public health crisis, particularly in the United States. In 2004, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US-American Advertising Council (Ad Council) co-produced a series of print, radio, and television “public service announcements” as part of a self-described “obesity prevention” campaign, which deploys a cultural framework of healthism to present fat as a pathological entity in need of elimination through the efforts of the responsibilized citizen. In this paper, I bring methodological guidance from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology together with the work of other critical theorists to consider how fat/ness is represented by this campaign as an index of the undisciplined body-self, as a space of abjection, and as a basis for the exclusion of fat bodies as both desired objects and desiring subjects. However, scope may also exist for disruption of the “prescribed” enactments and for new, “queer” orientations toward fat/ness and fat bodies to emerge.

THIRD EYE 360° Object Detection and Assistance for Visually Impaired People

Visual disability is a global issue. Visually impaired people confront several challenges every day. Many times, blindness affects a person’s ability to self-navigate in known or unknown environments. The difficulties faced by them and how they deal with themare largely known and explored. The system we developed is an idea to overcome the challenges of detecting objects in a known environment or room environment with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The idea is based on the approach to aid visually impaired people with voice assistance to detect objects of the surrounding using 360° view cameras. The proposed system uses a 360° view camera of the mobile phone to assist the user for detecting desired objects in the room environment and provide localization. Using this system, users can search for the desired objects by giving voice commands and can be assisted to the object location. When the user wants to search any object, he/she simply gives a voice command using NLP to the system. The system then identifies commands and extracts the object name to be searched. With the help of imageprocessing, first identifies and locates the object in surrounding and navigates the user to that object using a voice assistant.

Desiring the Secular: Capital, Cohesion, and the Fantasy of Secularization

Towards the end of the twentieth century, religion re-emerged as a topic of pressing concern in a number of the most self-consciously secularized states of the global north. From disputes over the wearing of headscarves in schools to debates over accommodations for religious practices in the public sphere, religion, particularly the ‘foreign’ religiosity of migrants and other minority religious subjects, appeared on the scene as a phenomenon whose proper place and role in society required both urgent and careful deliberation. This article argues that in order to account for the affective potency produced by the immanence of the figure of the ‘foreign’ religious subject, it is necessary to understand secularization as fantasy. It is within the fantasy of secularization that the secular emerges as an object of desire—as something that, if attained, appears as a solution to the problem of ‘foreign’ religiosity—and figures of inassimilable religiosity assume the role of scapegoats for the failure to resolve these concerns. In this sense, within this fantasy scene, the secular promises to provide ‘us’ with something that we are lacking. However, this promise has been undermined by the apparent persistence of religious difference. As such, as a result of their continued religiosity, ‘they’ appear to be taking something from ‘us’.

A postcolonial feminist dystopia: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract Postcolonial criticism offers a radically new platform for the interpretation of science fiction texts. Mostly preoccupied with the themes of alien other and interstellar colonization, the genre of sci-fi breaths with colonial discourse and postcolonial tropes and imagery. Although Margaret Atwood rejects the label of science fiction writer, her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) explores similar ethical concerns to the anti-conquest narratives of postcolonial authors. Atwood’s identification of Canadian identity as a victim of the former British Empire is challenged by her introduction of a female character rejecting their postcolonial subjugated identity in a patriarchal society. Her variation on dystopian concerns is motivated by sexuality, and her characters are reduced to objects of colonial desire with no agency. The protagonist, Offred, endures double colonization from the feminist perspective; yet, in terms of postcolonial criticism, Attwood’s character of Offred is allowed to reconstruct her subaltern identity through her fragmented narration of the past and speak in an authoritative voice. The orality of her narration only confirms the predisposition of the text to interpretation in the same terms as postcolonial fiction.

Image Matting Using Improved BASNet

In this paper, we propose a method of matting the background of photos, excluding human objects, using an improved BASNet featuring the convolutional block attention module (CBAM). Image matting is widely used in media art as a way to change background images to different settings, except for the desired objects. We added CBAM to BASNet to increase performance by maintaining its speed through end-to-end training. The proposed artwork consists of three steps. First, the improved BASNet is used to detect the area in the image and calculate the saliency and foreground maps. Second, the saliency map is resized through interpolation, and zero-padding is applied to match the size with the background image. Finally, the saturation calculation of the desired background and saliency map is performed, the saliency area is changed to black using thresholding, and the image and foreground map are saturated again. As a result, we can improve BASNet through our proposed method to better mat the background. The method presented can convey this richer visual beauty by providing a visual illusion through image matting without the use of a chroma key.

All-Optical Nonlinear Control of Circularly Polarized Light in Birefringent Fibers

Polarization state manipulation and tunability are two highly desirable objectives of utmost importance for the development of many applications, especially in optical fiber-based systems. In this article, we present in detail a comprehensive theory for describing and controlling the nonlinear polarization conversion of circularly polarized light in birefringent optical fibers (BOFs). We use our theory to provide a nonlinear model that allows obtaining the accurate input powers with which we can tune the most common continuous-wave polarization states at the BOF output. To analyze the polarization instability of the output optical signals, we define a parameter that gives a magnitude of the polarization instability as a function of the input power. The analytical results we provide agree accurately with the results obtained through numerical techniques. Our theory opens up new perspectives and provides considerable physical insight on the all-optical polarization control with BOFs.

Boston in New England, Intoxicant Town

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between a distinctive early modern city, Boston, Massachusetts, and the dramatic expansion of the production and consumption of intoxicants in the emergent Atlantic world. In particular, it attempts to draw together two strands of Boston's history seldom considered together: its origins as an aspirational settlement of English puritans aiming to build a godly city, and the deep involvement of its merchants and consumers in the overseas trade in intoxicants – tobacco, sugar, rum, wine, coffee, tea, chocolate, and others. By considering the cultures of consumption associated with godliness alongside other clusters of consumption in which intoxicants also played a part, it attempts to open new avenues for thinking about the many ways in which new forms and objects of desire transformed the economy and material culture of early modernity.

Efficient Object-Level Visual Context Modeling for Multimodal Machine Translation: Masking Irrelevant Objects Helps Grounding

Visual context provides grounding information for multimodal machine translation (MMT). However, previous MMT models and probing studies on visual features suggest that visual information is less explored in MMT as it is often redundant to textual information. In this paper, we propose an Object-level Visual Context modeling framework (OVC) to efficiently capture and explore visual information for multimodal machine translation. With detected objects, the proposed OVC encourages MMT to ground translation on desirable visual objects by masking irrelevant objects in the visual modality. We equip the proposed with an additional object-masking loss to achieve this goal. The object-masking loss is estimated according to the similarity between masked objects and the source texts so as to encourage masking source-irrelevant objects. Additionally, in order to generate vision-consistent target words, we further propose a vision-weighted translation loss for OVC. Experiments on MMT datasets demonstrate that the proposed OVC model outperforms state-of-the-art MMT models and analyses show that masking irrelevant objects helps grounding in MMT.

Acknowledged authenticity. Or did the origin of rock matter in the Mesolithic?

AbstractThis article explores the concept of authenticity of rock, place and stone tools in the Mesolithic. It uses results from a recent pXRF analysis on a selection of greenstone adzes predominantly originating from a delimited area on the western coast of south Norway as its point of departure. The results show that, although the majority of the 80 analysed adzes were made of greenstone from one specific source, eight clearly stemmed from local outcrops away from this one source area. The quantitative geochemical data are not presented in detail. Instead, the focus is on the social significance of these stone objects and their sources as indicated by the results. I argue that the anomalies demonstrate an acknowledged social value placed on stone from a dedicated source area; they represent deliberate attempts to manipulate perception and thus replicate a specific social affinity. Emphasizing perception and appearance, I consider adzes of green stone as assemblages of knowledge, skill, place and social memory – as desirable objects that enhanced a feeling of belonging and social identity – and I question whether this means that people in the Mesolithic recognized and acknowledged something as authentic.

Purcell’s Three-Link Swimmer: Assessment of Geometry and Gaits for Optimal Displacement and Efficiency

This paper studies the displacement and efficiency of a Purcell’s three-link microswimmer in low Reynolds number regime, capable of moving by the implementation of a motion primitive or gait. An optimization is accomplished attending to the geometry of the swimmer and the motion primitives, considering the shape of the gait and its amplitude. The objective is to find the geometry of the swimmer, amplitude and shape of the gaits which make optimal the displacement and efficiency, in both an individual way and combined (the last case will be referred to as multiobjective optimization). Three traditional gaits are compared with two primitives proposed by the authors and other three gaits recently defined in the literature. Results demonstrate that the highest displacement is obtained by the Tam and Hosoi optimal velocity gait, which also achieves the best efficiency in terms of energy consumption. The rectilinear and Tam and Hosoi optimal efficiency gaits are the second optimum primitives. Regarding the multiobjective optimization and considering the two criteria with the same weight, the optimum gaits turn out to be the rectilinear and Tam and Hosoi optimal efficiency gaits. Thus, the conclusions of this study can help designers to select, on the one hand, the best swimmer geometry for a desired motion primitive and, on the other, the optimal method of motion for trajectory tracking for such a kind of Purcell’s swimmers depending on the desired control objective.

Human infants can override possessive tendencies to share valued items with others

Possessiveness toward objects and sharing are competing tendencies that influence dyadic and group interactions within the primate lineage. A distinctive form of sharing in adult Homo sapiens involves active giving of high-valued possessions to others, without an immediate reciprocal benefit. In two Experiments with 19-month-old human infants (N = 96), we found that despite measurable possessive behavior toward their own personal objects (favorite toy, bottle), infants spontaneously gave these items to a begging stranger. Moreover, human infants exhibited this behavior across different types of objects that are relevant to theory (personal objects, sweet food, and common objects)—showing flexible generalizability not evidenced in non-human primates. We combined these data with a previous dataset, yielding a large sample of infants (N = 192), and identified sociocultural factors that may calibrate young infants’ sharing of objects with others. The current findings show a proclivity that is rare or absent in our closest living relatives—the capacity to override possessive behavior toward personally valued objects by sharing those same desired objects with others.

BASIL: A biochemistry laboratory CURE with flexibility across learning modalities

Since 2015, a collaboration of instructors at a diverse range of institutions have developed a biochemistry laboratory curriculum known as BASIL (Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Laboratory). Scientific objectives of BASIL focus on characterizing biochemical activities of proteins with known structure and unknown function. BASIL curriculum (freely available on GitHub https://basilbiochem.github.io/basil/) includes modules on computational predictions of protein function, protein purification, and analysis of biochemical activity and kinetics. Three main challenges for our implementation included 1) scaling of research training from the “apprentice” model to the classroom, 2) alignment of course learning objectives, activities and assessments with research goals to create optimal conditions for productive struggle, 3) student buy-in. To understand if/how students in our course develop laboratory research skills, we began assessing anticipated learning outcomes, focusing on students’ evaluation of protein purification experiments. Initial assessment results revealed learning difficulties and led to modifications in instructional activities, including use of simulated experiments. The BASIL curriculum was intentionally designed to provide flexibility in its use in terms of sequencing and scope of experiments, content, and focus to meet desired course learning objectives. This flexibility proved beneficial in maintaining learning objectives when switching from the traditional lab format to online or hybrid delivery necessitated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a combination of lecture and video based explanations students were able to investigate their protein of interest completely online. Students working in this format reported gains in knowledge, experience and confidence. We did find that these gains were more pronounced in the bioinformatic experiments and concepts than about their wet-lab counterparts. In order to address these gaps in understanding interactive online resources are under current development by the BASIL team. In addition to addressing the short-term need for a set of coordinated electronic materials for biochemistry laboratory courses, this adaptation of the BASIL curriculum provides a meaningful distance-learning alternative in future years and may serve as a platform to broaden access to quality STEM education to more diverse student populations well after the pandemic has past.

Matheme of Phantasy and Object of Desire in Hamlet

"“What is a father?” That is the question. This paper discusses Hamlet emphasizing the concept of desire and its formation for any human being. From a Lacanian psychoanalytical point of view, a difference between need, demand, and desire will be considered, in order to better understand how desire appears from the fabric of a topological surface and takes its place in the reality of the subject. Then the matheme of phantasy and the various objects that present themselves in Hamlet, namely Ophelia and others, as well as the stages of the relationship between Hamlet and his object will be analyzed. The analysis of the obsessional structure allows a better understanding of the movement of desire and action in Hamlet, without stating an obsessional structure in the character itself because what is interesting in the end is that Hamlet actually illustrates the place of desire for any human being. Following Lacan’s seminars, the paper will approach the relationship between faith and death, as well as the Borromean place of the Symbolic, with the consequences that emerge when the Symbolic crashes. This way, one could get closer to the fundamental question, pertaining to the function of the father and the unfortunate lifting of the veil that places Hamlet in an impossible position from which he cannot act to fulfill his destiny because the existence of desire is conditioned by the faith in death. The answer to the question would be that a father is seen in the context of actioning as a function, like a mathematical function, to orient the desire of the mother. Instead, in Hamlet, there is only legacy of a sin. Keywords: desire, phantasy, phallus, object, father, law, symbolic, veil, matheme. "

A cost–based analysis for risk–averse explore–then–commit finite–time bandits

In this article, a multi–armed bandit problem is studied in an explore–then–commit setting where the cost of pulling an arm in the experimentation (exploration) phase may not be negligible. Identifying the best arm after a pure experimentation phase to exploit it once or for a given finite number of times is the goal of the problem. Applications of this are prevalent in personalized health-care and financial investments where the frequency of exploitation is limited. In this setting, we observe that pulling the arm with the highest expected reward is not necessarily the most desirable objective for exploitation. Alternatively, we advocate the idea of risk aversion, where the objective is to compete against the arm with the best risk–return trade–off. Additionally, a trade–off between cost and regret should be considered in the case where pulling arms in the exploration phase incurs a cost. In the case that the exploration cost is not considered, we propose a class of hyper–parameter–free risk–averse algorithms, called OTE/FTE–MAB (One/Finite–Time Exploitation Multi–Armed Bandit), whose objectives are to select the arm that is most probable to reward the most in a single or finite–time exploitations. To analyze these algorithms, we define a new notion of finite–time exploitation regret for our setting of interest. We provide an upper bound of order ln for the minimum number of experiments that should be done to guarantee upper bound er for regret. As compared with existing risk–averse bandit algorithms, our algorithms do not rely on hyper–parameters, resulting in a more robust behavior in practice. In the case that pulling an arm in the exploration phase has a cost, we propose the c–OTE–MAB algorithm for two–armed bandits that addresses the cost–regret trade–off, corresponding to exploration–exploitation trade–off, by minimizing a linear combination of cost and regret that is called cost– regret function, using a hyper–parameter. This algorithm determines an estimation of the optimal number of explorations whose cost–regret value approaches the minimum value of the cost–regret function at the rate with an associated confidence level, where ne is the number of explorations of each arm.

Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent by Paul Mendes-Flohr

Reviewed by: Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent by Paul Mendes-Flohr Martin Kavka Paul Mendes-Flohr . Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent . New Haven, CT : Yale University Press , 2019 . 405 pp. doi:10.1017/S036400942000063X It has been almost four decades since the dominant biography of Martin Buber, Maurice Friedman's three-volume Martin Buber's Life and Work , totaling over thirteen hundred pages, appeared. Readers of this journal will wonder whether Mendes-Flohr's biography of Buber has qualities that make it deserving of recommendation to students over and above its comparatively short length. It certainly does, and Mendes-Flohr has written a biography that fits many of [End Page 205] the needs of our academic age. That being said, some readers will wish for more, and there are hints that they could have gotten it. The relative brevity of Mendes-Flohr's biography, given Buber's extensive list of publications and activities, is not because of omissions. It covers what the knowledgeable reader would expect: the upheaval of Buber's childhood represented by his mother's having left his father (leading Buber to live with his grandparents until he was a teenager); his becoming a fan of Nietzsche and Simmel as a university student; his youthful Zionist activism; his intellectual turn "from mysticism to dialogue," about which Mendes-Flohr has written previously; the influence of Gustav Landauer and Franz Rosenzweig on Buber's thinking; his emigration to Palestine in 1938; his support of a binational state in Palestine; and the various intellectual and personal relationships that made Buber one of the most important (if to some, also one of the most controversial) Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. In addition to its comprehensiveness, the volume is exceptionally readable. Most refreshingly, Mendes-Flohr grounds his storytelling in Buber's life and its passions at as many steps as possible. On occasion, the thematic focus of various chapters means that Mendes-Flohr does not narrate Buber's life in a linear fashion, but this is a minor cavil. Somewhat more seriously, the biography does not go into the depth that one might hope. For example, Mendes-Flohr limits his account of Buber's 1923 classic I and Thou to a few paragraphs covering not much more than two pages. Nevertheless, this too does not amount to a serious problem. Mendes-Flohr takes care to tell more, and more interesting, stories about Buber. To return to I and Thou , Mendes-Flohr's focus on its poetic qualities allows the reader to get a taste of Buber's influence on Jorge Luis Borges, which is sadly underanalyzed in Anglophone scholarship on Buber. It seems to me that there are three emphases in Mendes-Flohr's biography that might make it a better biography than Friedman's, not just because of its brevity. First, Mendes-Flohr regularly brings the narrative back to Buber's wife Paula, not just as an object of desire during their courtship (which is Friedman's focus), but as a novelist and a wise thinker in her own right, as well as an influence on her husband throughout their marriage. Second, the biography bears the fruit of recent research on Buber. Most notable in this case is the penultimate chapter, which spends significant time on the relationship between Buber and Martin Heidegger, focusing on their meeting in May 1957 at a castle near Lake Konstanz. (Readers with further interest should consult Mendes-Flohr's own article on this topic in a 2014 issue of Journal of Religion .) Lastly, although A Life of Faith and Dissent is a biography, it is also perhaps the clearest one-volume treatment of Buber's relationship to the Zionist idea throughout his lifetime. Mendes-Flohr gives a full treatment of what he persuasively describes as "Buber's own ambivalence about the Zionist project." It is certainly a contribution at the level of Buber's thoughts about Zionism and Arab-Jewish relations. Sometimes the nature of the contribution is surprising. On occasion, discussion among intellectuals of Buber and Arab-Jewish relationships raises the point that in 1942 (Mendes-Flohr claims it was 1944), Nabiha Said, the aunt of Edward Said...

RE-READING MUSTANG IN THE CONTEXT OF THE IDEOLOGICAL COMPONENTS OF NARRATIVE

Representation of the female body has been one of the most emphasized issues in gender debates. To refrain from reproducing the patriarchal ideology, it is important to be careful with the distinction between the body being tabooed and covered or transformed into an object of consumption under the name of freedom. The sexualization and objectification of the female body has taken place in the historical process. In many products from works of art to mass media, the woman, who is a passive object in front of the man who is the active/subject, is presented to the consumption of the male gaze. In almost every branch of art, from photography to cinema, the female body has been the object of the gaze and has been turned into an object of desire by being removed from the subject identity. Even in films that are claimed to be made with a woman's point of view and against gender discourses, the female body is sometimes objectified with elements such as the stage order, lighting, and perspective preferences. In this study, which aims to reveal how cinematographic elements can change the world of meaning, the first film of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Mustang (2015), was discussed with feminist criticism in the axis of object-body by giving examples from various art branches in terms of cinematographic preferences. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the film, which claims to have set out with critical point of view, reproduces the discourses it tries to criticize. The reason for this is that the film falls into the traps of patriarchal ideology.

A Fluorogenic Assay: Analysis of Chemical Modification of Lysine and Arginine to Control Proteolytic Activity of Trypsin

The chemical modification of amino acids plays an important role in the modulation of proteins or peptides and has useful applications in the activation and stabilization of enzymes, chemical biology, shotgun proteomics, and the production of peptide-based drugs. Although chemoselective modification of amino acids such as lysine and arginine via the insertion of respective chemical moieties as citraconic anhydride and phenyl glyoxal is important for achieving desired application objectives and has been extensively reported, the extent and chemoselectivity of the chemical modification of specific amino acids using specific chemical agents (blocking or modifying agents) has yet to be sufficiently clarified owing to a lack of suitable assay methodologies. In this study, we examined the utility of a fluorogenic assay method, based on a fluorogenic tripeptide substrate (FP-AA1-AA2-AA3) and the proteolytic enzyme trypsin, in determinations of the extent and chemoselectivity of the chemical modification of lysine or arginine. As substrates, we used two fluorogenic tripeptide probes, MeRho-Lys-Gly-Leu(Ac) (lysine-specific substrate) and MeRho-Arg-Gly-Leu(Ac) (arginine-specific substrate), which were designed, synthesized, and evaluated for chemoselective modification of specific amino acids (lysine and arginine) using the fluorogenic assay. The results are summarized in terms of half-maximal inhibitory concentrations (IC50) for the extent of modification and ratios of IC50 values (IC50arginine/IC50lysine and IC50lysine/IC50arginine) as a measure of the chemoselectivity of chemical modification for amino acids lysine and arginine. This novel fluorogenic assay was found to be rapid, precise, and reproducible for determinations of the extent and chemoselectivity of chemical modification.

An ADRC-based backstepping control design for a class of fractional-order systems

A combined fractional tracking controller based on backstepping and active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) is proposed in this work to control uncertain fractional-order systems (FOSs). The proposed method is constructed in two parts: first, all internal and external uncertainties are estimated by a fractional-order extended state observer (FO-ESO). Second, fractional backstepping method is used to determine the control law and lead the system to the desired control objectives. The control system stability is verified by fractional Lyapunov-like lemma and two numerical simulations confirm the efficiency of the proposed combined ADRC-based backstepping controller.