Symbolic Level Research Articles

White Supremacist Terrorism in Charlottesville: Reconstructing ‘Unite the Right’

The “Unite the Right” rally that subsumed Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 will be remembered for its haunting torch-lit rally, massive display of neo-Nazi and white nationalist paraphernalia, bloody riots, and murderous car attack. Despite extensive media coverage, a comprehensive, scholarly, synthetic study of the planning and execution of the Unite the Right (UtR) has yet to emerge. Drawing from a repository of 5,000 primary texts and digital artifacts and using the lens of symbolic interactionism and levels of analysis theory, this study details the event as manifested in three theatres: symbolically mediated, systems-technical, and physical. Three findings are discussed: first, the “event” was centrally organized as a simulacrum of a military campaign; second, the agitational propaganda and information warfare was extensive and designed to publicize, recruit, and terrorize; and third, the city of Charlottesville suffered two cyber-attacks timed for meaningful symbolic interaction with movement actors and public officials. Based on these three findings, the authors offer the term “immersive terrorism” to describe the extended, trans-mediated, multi-theatre nature of the UtR terror campaign.

Pengembangan Digital Flipbook untuk Menfasilitasi Kebutuhan Belajar Multiple Representation pada Materi Sel Volta

The voltaic cell teaching materials used in high school are still in the form of textbooks that do not present multiple representations of chemistry, namely the macroscopic, submicroscopic, and symbolic levels. The three levels of chemical representation can be visualized using flipbook teaching materials so that students are expected to understand the voltaic cell material. Teaching materials are used to support the learning process. Current learning still uses conventional learning models that only focus on teachers. Constructivist-based active learning is needed because it involves students so that learning is more meaningful. One of the constructivist learning models is the guided inquiry learning model which includes observing, asking questions, compiling hypotheses, gathering information, testing hypotheses, and concluding. The purpose.of this development.is to.produce a proper guided inquiry-based flipbook teaching material. The flipbook teaching.materials were developed.using the Four-D model (define, .design, .develop,and.disseminate) but the disseminated stage was not carried out. Media and material validation was carried out by five chemistry lecturers. The legibility test was carried out by 50 high school alumni with a specialization in Science. The assessment uses a Likert scale accompanied by comments, suggestions from the validator, and audience. The data obtained from the analysis questionnaire to determine the feasibility level of the product using the percentage technique. The validation of the flipbook teaching materials development product in terms of material obtained an average score of 85.4%, validation in terms of media.obtained.an.average percentage of 85.5%, while the readability test results obtained.an.average.percentage of 87%. Based on the results.of material validation, media, and legibility tests, it can be concluded that the flipbook teaching materials guided inquiry-based voltaic cells are very suitable as a learning resource.

Архитектурное пространство города как фактор формирования идентичности (на примере города Волгограда)

The article is devoted to the study of the architectural space of the hero-city of Volgograd and its role in the formation of urban identity. The methodological basis is the cultural-historical approach, phenomenological and hermeneutic methods. It is concluded that the disparate eclectic architectural environment does not contribute to the creation of regional identity, does not develop ideas about the uniqueness of the place, which negatively affects the formation of the city image and urban identity. At the same time, a conscious approach to the organization of the architectural environment in any of its forms can become the soft power of implicit management, a prerequisite for resource states, a technology for harmonizing and optimizing social space. The scientific novelty of the research consists in the explication of the mechanism of architectural space influence on a person as a biopsychosocial being. The authors distinguish archetypal, symbolic, and conceptual levels of perception, showing that the influence of the archetypal is implicit but necessary. This is the level of perception at the level of sensations, which are the basis of feelings, are the prerequisite for emotions and mental attitudes. This lies at the origins of the identityformation as the involvement of a person in the significant experience of the past, others, relatives. Symbolic and conceptual levels of perception are related to the process of cognition, rational and logical attitudes. In the conditions of modern social dynamics, a competent organization of the architectural landscape, which contributes to the optimization and harmonization of living activities, can become an important factor of integration and a prerequisite for the formation of a positive identity. The authors consider that modern identity can be formed in the course of new practices that remove traditional restrictions around life-affirming values and meanings that underlie the organization of the living environment, taking into account the principles of ecology.

Bricks in the Making of Race and Place: Excavating aLieu de Souvenirin New Orleans

This essay facilitates a multi-dimensional immersion into the life and rhythms of New Orleans, an entrée to the past that equips us to better understand the present and, from there, critically and creatively to envision our possible futures together. We explore the Faubourg Tremé by traversing layers of its lieux de souvenir - places of remembering, a concept inspired by but distinct from Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire - across three time periods. Each lieu de souvenir we visit from 1720 to the present will highlight material and symbolic foundations in Tremé that help us to understand key aspects of New Orleans’s past and present. The object that will guide our travel and meditation through each layer is the lowly but highly serviceable brick. At a purely material level, bricks are the literal building blocks of the city. Roads were paved with them and homes and other buildings were constructed with bricks as well. And at a symbolic level, bricks carry multiple rich and complex significations: Who makes them? How does their manufacturing shape the lives of the laborers who create them? Who buys them, and who profits from their sale? Tracing the brick and its uses throughout each lieu de souvenir sheds light on key social relationships, inequalities, and cultural practices that form the foundation of New Orleans’s past and present.

Students’ Representation Ability in Chemistry

This study aimed to determine the representation ability of students in learning chemistry. The ability of representation consists of three levels, namely macroscopic level, submicroscopic level, and symbolic level. This study was a descriptive study. The subjects in this study were 53 XI grade students. The study instrument was in the form of a description test compiled based on indicators of representation ability. The results showed that the average score of students’ representation ability at the macroscopic level is 66.94, and is in the good category. The average score of students’ representation ability at the submicroscopic level is 47.17, and is in the medium category. The average score of students’ representation ability at the symbolic level is 64.30, and is in the good category.

Learning From the Past and Working in the Present to Create an Antiracist Future for Academic Medicine.

Learning From the Past and Working in the Present to Create an Antiracist Future for Academic Medicine.

Psychological Analysis of Different Types of Discourse

The purpose of this article is to define different approaches to the classification of discourse, to actualize the main criteria for the selection of types of discourse, to show concepts with the help of which we’ll describe great differences between some types of discourse, to propose examples of such exercises-tasks that will help to more clearly and specifically present the practical use of this scientific discourse, to display discourse as one of the main concepts of contemporary Pragmatic Psychology. Methods of the research. The following theoretical methods of the research were used to solve the tasks formulated in the article: a categorical method, structural and functional methods, the methods of the analysis, systematization, modeling, generalization. The results of the research. Scientists identify five types of discourse, which are implemented depending on the situation: discourse as a means of communicative action (for example, conversation for the purpose of information and education or a pre-arranged discussion); discourse as a means of ideological influence, that is the process of communicative action, which only takes the form of discourse (all forms of ideological justification); therapeutic discourse (psychoanalytic conversation between a doctor and a patient); a normal discourse, which has the aim to provide a scientific discussion; new forms of discourse (learning through discourse instead of discourse as a tool for information and instruction, a model of a free seminar discussion). According to these types in the article there were proposed examples of such exercises-tasks that will help pupils more clearly and specifically present the practical use of this scientific discourse. Conclusions. We believe that Pragmatic Psychology can be shown as the independent interdisciplinary field of knowledge that closely interacts with Linguistic Pragmatics and Cognitive Psychology. Pragmatic Psychology in its scientific paradigm focuses on two basic, intertwined concepts – the meaning and the activity. Pragmatic Psychology is the core of a purely activity approach according to people’s speech, a global analysis of purposeful human use of sound structures, such as segmental and prosodic, tokens, word forms, schemes, phrases and sentences, different types of elementary speech acts and their complexes, communicative moves as chains, discourses of different types, etc. Thus, having had such a wide field of scientific research, Pragmatic Psychology is actualized on two levels of its analysis – a superficial (symbolic) level and a deep (cognitive-semantic) one. Thus, Pragmatic Psychology implies the subjective-activity space of the addressee (his / her pragmatic attitudes, deixis, features of quasi-communication), performativity, the theory of speech acts, various explicit and implicit ways of organizing the language code by the subjects of communication (press position, implication, implicative scripts, maxims of cooperative interaction of partners of communication, indirect speech acts, conditions of productivity and success of the process of communication in general); theoretical and applied aspects of relevance; psycholinguistic principles and mechanisms of communication; some aspects of the theory of speech interaction and conversational speech.

NN-based analytic approach to symbol level recognition for degraded Bengali printed documents

Analysis of degraded printed documents has been a research topic for last several years. In this article the contribution lies in segmentation of word images into symbols and recognition of the symbols of degraded printed document images of Bengali, the 7th most popular language in the world. A novel approach to symbol level segmentation based on a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) network is proposed. A database of segmenting and non-segmenting image columns is developed from the ISIDDI page level database and segmentation is treated as a two-class classification problem. The MLP weights are learnt based on this database using the back propagation algorithm. We have introduced certain new metrics, based on which the F-score of the proposed segmentation algorithm is determined. Our method utilizes information that is relevant for character segmentation, ignoring other highly variable information contained in a printed text document, thus allowing for efficient transfer learning between datasets and alleviating the need for labelled training data. Other than Bengali, we have tested on English, Tamil and Devnagari scripts. For the classification purpose we have identified 336 symbols, and the corresponding training and test sets have been developed. The ISIDDI database is used for this purpose. Two classifiers, one CNN based and the other LSTM based, have been developed for this 336-class problem. The classification accuracies obtained on the test set by the CNN classifier and the LSTM classifier are 86.05% and 88.11%, respectively. The proposed classifiers outperform the existing classifiers for the ISIDDI database.

Image and word as forms of iconic depiction

Abstract This paper focuses on the relation between icon and depiction and their equally central role both in verbal and in nonverbal artistic texts. For this purpose, I will examine the contact points between Jakobson and Bakhtin’s theory of text. In particular, I will dwell on Jakobson’s “Quest for the essence of language” and on Bakhtin’s “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences.” Both Jakobson and Bakhtin build their idea of text on this dialogue between different dimensions. According to Bakhtin dialogical logic is the specific logic of the text. Though indispensable in the initial phase of understanding, the first is reductive if it claims to exhaust the semantic import of the text. Both in Bakhtin and in Jakobson, this idea of text based upon a dialogue between different dimensions implies that sign expression cannot be exhausted in representation because there is something which exceeds representation. I will call this excedent element “depiction.” Depiction is what is at stake in the artistic text, what exceeds the symbolic level of representation. “Depiction” can be configured, both in verbal and non-verbal text, as an idea of iconicity which exceeds resemblance and immediate visibility.

Chinggis Khan Defeated: Plano Carpini, Jūzjānī and the Symbolic Origins of the Mongol Empire

AbstractThis article aims to clarify an obscure passage in Plano Carpini's text, and subsequently in C. de Bridia's one, referring to a crushing defeat of Chinggis Khan, which has so far not been identified with certainty. The record of such a defeat is found in identical terms under the pen of Jūzjānī, and it actually appears that this strange narrative follows the pattern of the Mongol myth of origin, which is also common to the myths of the Türks, of the Kimeks and others. Here the argument is made that these accounts written outside the Mongol territory are therefore not only the result of confusion and distortion, contrary to what has long been thought. They testify to the existence of a legend of Chinggis Khan, built in an imperial propaganda effort directed at all the nomadic subjects of the Mongol Empire, and which placed the birth of the empire and the story of the origins contained in the myth on the same symbolic level.

“No gray middle folk did he see”: Constructions of Race inSuttree

AbstractCriticism of race in Suttree has focused on its intersection with class and on its lack of historical context; however, it overlooks the machinations of race at the symbolic and narrative levels. My article argues that the recurrent use of racial language in the text merits a symbolic examination of race. By using Toni Morrison's Africanist perspective to examine blackness and Richard Dyer's theoretical approach to analyze whiteness, I question the intentionality and purpose of racial representations in the text. Drawing also from Luce, Watson, McCoy, and Prather, my article will demonstrate how narrative techniques such as metonymic displacement, metaphysical condensation, fetishization, and repetition make not only blackness, but also whiteness strange. Ultimately, I argue McCarthy's racial caricatures undermine the black and white binary and deconstruct the ontological basis of race in American literature.

Multi-Regge limit of the two-loop five-point amplitudes in mathcal{N} = 4 super Yang-Mills and mathcal{N} = 8 supergravity

In previous work, the two-loop five-point amplitudes in mathcal{N} = 4 super Yang-Mills theory and mathcal{N} = 8 supergravity were computed at symbol level. In this paper, we compute the full functional form. The amplitudes are assembled and simplified using the analytic expressions of the two-loop pentagon integrals in the physical scattering region. We provide the explicit functional expressions, and a numerical reference point in the scattering region. We then calculate the multi-Regge limit of both amplitudes. The result is written in terms of an explicit transcendental function basis. For certain non-planar colour structures of the mathcal{N} = 4 super Yang-Mills amplitude, we perform an independent calculation based on the BFKL effective theory. We find perfect agreement. We comment on the analytic properties of the amplitudes.

Gender and the “Jews’ War”: Women, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-War Campaigns in Britain, 1938-1940

ABSTRACT The study of the gender complexion of pacifist movements has greatly expanded in recent decades, a product of the convergence of the new international history and study of transnationalism with the ever firmer rooting of women’s and gender history. Yet the study of pacifism in wartime has received less attention, and that of unlikelier pacifists emerging from the far Right even less. The British Union of Fascists and National Socialists [BU] launched its ‘Peace Campaign’ in 1938, and women fascists played leading roles on both practical and symbolic levels. It culminated in the launch of their own Women’s Peace Campaign in 1940, relying heavily on tropes of women’s innate pacifism and, more narrowly, domestic concerns in the home and on the home front. The BU’s policy shift from para-militarism to a militant non-interventionism and a racially motivated isolationism was more accurately an anti-war and stop-the-war campaign. Even before 1939, they dubbed the world war the ‘Jews’ War’, and women contributed in equal measure to the xenophobic and racialist charge of the BU’s campaign. However, situating anti-war fascist women amongst other women’s groups who organised to oppose the Second World War, in particularly in the Peace Pledge Union – which had launched a Women’s Peace Campaign in December 1939 – exposes the variegated nature of British women’s activism and attitudes from the high water mark of appeasement to the end of the Phoney War.

Масонская мифология в творчестве В. А. Моцарта на примере оперы «Волшебная флейта»

The paper aims to reveal interaction of masonic notions represented in mystical symbols and musical images of the fairy opera “The Magic Flute” by W. A. Mozart. The article analyses representation of masonic mythological themes at different levels of the musical composition: storyline, dramaturgic, prosodic. Scientific originality of the study involves a comprehensive philosophical and musicological analysis of the musical text focused on identifying interrelation of the musical material and masonic symbols. The research findings are as follows: the authors prove that masonic notions and symbols determine the storyline development, the author’s intention and the personages’ images interpretation; reveal importance of number symbolism for the dramaturgy and composition; distinguish two levels of musical-prosodic masonic symbols (overall prosodic complex and concrete symbols-figures).

SkillMaN — A skill-based robotic manipulation framework based on perception and reasoning

One of the problems that service robotics deals with is to bring mobile manipulators to work in semi-structured human scenarios, which requires an efficient and flexible way to execute every-day tasks, like serve a cup in a cluttered environment. Usually, for those tasks, the combination of symbolic and geometric levels of planning is necessary, as well as the integration of perception models with knowledge to guide both planning levels, resulting in a sequence of actions or skills which, according to the current knowledge of the world, may be executed. This paper proposes a planning and execution framework, called SkillMaN, for robotic manipulation tasks, which is equipped with a module with experiential knowledge (learned from its experience or given by the user) on how to execute a set of skills, like pick-up, put-down or open a drawer, using workflows as well as robot trajectories. The framework also contains an execution assistant with geometric tools and reasoning capabilities to manage how to actually execute the sequence of motions to perform a manipulation task (which are forwarded to the executor module), as well as the capacity to store the relevant information to the experiential knowledge for further usage, and the capacity to interpret the actual perceived situation (in case the preconditions of an action do not hold) and to feed back the updated state to the planner to resume from there, allowing the robot to adapt to non-expected situations. To evaluate the viability of the proposed framework, an experiment has been proposed involving different skills performed with various types of objects in different scene contexts.

Символика обрядовых действий в практике мирян-буддистов (обряд подношения лампадки)

Introduction. Relations between religious and social everyday life are always close enough — lifestyles influence approaches to religion, and religious norms influence lifestyles. Mundane activities of lay Buddhists — regardless of whether the latter have taken any religious vows or not — comprise a number of obligatory practices to be performed accompanied by certain ritual actions. Oil lamp offering is one such traditional and definitely important rite integral to virtually all types of religious activity. The preparation and offering of an oil lamp is accompanied by recitation of the traditional well-wishing prayer. Goals. The article introduces a text of the well-wishing prayer and analyzes the symbolism of oil lamp offering, seeking to reveal hidden meanings behind the ritual action and prayer. Methods. The study employs the historical-philosophical and comparative analysis methods. It is noteworthy that despite oil lamp offering has long become workaday, the ritual and accompanying prayer have never been duly explored. Results. The symbolic meaning of Buddhist oil lamp offering proves based on fundamentals of Buddhist doctrine, and the prayer contains a hidden level aimed at cultivating compassion within the stream of consciousness. Finally, the ritual action and prayer together facilitate detachment from everyday life, and emphasize the need to observe the Refuge vow. Conclusions. So, the analysis reveals the symbolic and hidden levels of the oil lamp offering rite and its prayer.

Is resistance always counter-hegemonic?

ABSTRACT Current reflections on practices of opposition are informed by the resistance/hegemony paradigm. The shortcomings of the resistance/hegemony paradigm are, as many critics have pointed, both a result of the wide extension and romanticization of resistance, and the mis-construal of hegemony as a top/down process of manipulating consciousness. The present article proposes to address some of the limitations of the resistance/hegemony paradigm by pondering when practices of resistance may be considered part of a counter-hegemonic struggle. To answer this question, it presents a typology of the different forms of resistance according to their relationship with counter-hegemony. This typology is based on the degree to which certain practices are incorporated or tolerated by the hegemonic model; how they articulate between challenges at the symbolic level and challenges to the production and distribution of material resources; and whether there is a process of articulation at play among different practices that may create a collective subject capable of putting forward claims to achieve political power.

Interference Exploitation Precoding for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Communication System

In this letter, we propose a novel precoding design for a multi-user multi-input-single-output (MU-MISO) communication system with the assistance of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). By jointly designing the precoder at the base station (BS) and the phase shift matrix at the IRS, we exploit the constructive effect of the multi-user interference (MUI) to improve the performance of the communication system. While the objective function and constraints of the problem are both non-convex, an alternating optimization (AO) based algorithm with two different solvers is proposed. This algorithm is guaranteed to converge to at least locally optimal solution. Simulations show that by applying the proposed symbol level precoding technique, the communication performance can be significantly enhanced compared with the existing linear precoding method, at the price of slightly increased computational overhead.

Deconstruction and fractalization of urban identity

The research, by referring to the Dur Untash city at the Symbolic level, seeks to answer the question that how in urban semiotics, the city's identity has acquired a semantic significance beyond its significance. The situation of the city expresses a state that any kind of dominant discourses has lost their accreditation capacity and authority, and the audience cannot rely on any of the currents that were considered as definitive. City identity is nothing but fractal games that there is no source of authority that indicates the fixed meaning of these formulas and this is a social contract. These contracts derive from the semiotic rules which is agreed upon in the community. In this game will be try to impose certain meanings on the city identity using the symbolic function; to internalize meta-narrative (internalization process) and in this way, the identity and the presence of the Dur-Untash city will be recorded in time and reach an immortal realm.

How the Brain might use Division

One of the most fundamental questions in Biology or Artificial Intelligence is how the human brainperforms mathematical functions. How does a neural architecture that may organise itself mostly throughstatistics, know what to do? One possibility is to extract the problem to something more abstract. This becomesclear when thinking about how the brain handles large numbers, for example to the power of something, whensimply summing to an answer is not feasible. In this paper, the author suggests that the maths question can beanswered more easily if the problem is changed into one of symbol manipulation and not just number counting.If symbols can be compared and manipulated, maybe without understanding completely what they are, then themathematical operations become relative and some of them might even be rote learned. The proposed systemmay also be suggested as an alternative to the traditional computer binary system. Any of the actual maths stillbreaks down into binary operations, while a more symbolic level above that can manipulate the numbers andreduce the problem size, thus making the binary operations simpler. An interesting result of looking at this is thepossibility of a new fractal equation resulting from division, that can be used as a measure of good fit and wouldhelp the brain decide how to solve something through self-replacement and a comparison with this good fit.