Symbolic Objects Research Articles

An Analysis of Kite’s Symbolic Meaning in The Kite Runner

Marc Forster adapted the novel The Kite Runner for a movie which had won an Oscar nomination in 2008. The Kite Runner tells a story of two Afghan boys Amir and Hassan. Kite is regarded as a symbolic object throughout the movie. For sure, it plays a significant role to drive the plot. There is something more profound hidden below the surface of story strand. This paper aims to figure out the symbolic meanings of the kite at the social background, interpersonal relationship and humanity level. This way, audience can have a better understanding of this movie.

Tropical Octopus Abdopus aculeatus Can Learn to Recognize Real and Virtual Symbolic Objects.

We used three consecutive operant conditioning tasks to determine whether the tropical octopus Abdopus aculeatus is able to learn to recognize a symbolic object, in either real or virtual forms. In Experiment 1, we examined whether octopuses can be conditioned to a real object (a white ball) and whether such trained individuals can select the conditioned object when they are presented with an unconditioned object. We show that octopuses learned to respond to and select the conditioned white ball in preference to the unconditioned object. In Experiment 2, we examined whether octopuses can be conditioned to an object that gradually changes from real to virtual (i.e., an image of that object on a computer screen). We presented four types of objects, all variations of a white ball, in a stepwise sequence as a conditioned stimulus: a real white ball, a real image of a white ball without a margin, a real image of a white ball centered within a black margin, and a virtual image of a white ball (a video on a computer screen). Individual octopuses learned to respond to all three real objects, and then a subset of these octopuses responded to the virtual object. In Experiment 3, we examined whether an octopus can learn a virtual image of an object with a specific shape not tested in Experiments 1 and 2. We presented octopuses with an image of a white cross, which was placed at various distances (i.e., close, medium, and far). We found that after having learned these images, octopuses could learn the virtual white cross on a computer screen. Furthermore, when we simultaneously presented octopuses with a conditioned virtual object and an unconditioned virtual object, they selected the former. Through these three experiments, we confirmed that A. aculeatus can learn both real and virtual specific objects.

The Matter of the Carriage in Frances Burney's Evelina

The Matter of the Carriage in Frances Burney's Evelina Mary Crone-Romanovski (bio) In Frances Burney's Evelina; or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World (1778), a carriage is the centerpiece of many important episodes, from Evelina's first meeting with her grandmother Madame Duval, to Sir Clement Willoughby's attempts to seduce Evelina, to Captain Mirvan's antagonistic interactions with Madame Duval. As a material object that was central to the lives of eighteenth-century men and women, the carriage served both symbolic and functional needs, and by the second half of the eighteenth century, carriage episodes had become a conventional motif in fiction. Percy Adams explains, "as prose fiction was evolving in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, public stage-coaches and coach travel in general were evolving with it. The new novel then could hardly have avoided making artistic use of the stage-coach."1 As I will show, Burney's artistic use of the carriage negotiates the complex and contradictory ways in which gender circumscribed carriage use in everyday life. Taking a material culture approach, I read the carriages in Evelina through the ways in which actual eighteenth-century carriages were important to the men and women who used or encountered them.2 In other words, I examine how the carriage matters in eighteenth-century culture to better understand its significance in Burney's novel. In this approach, I follow Daniel Miller's use of the term "matters" to shift emphasis "to the concerns of those being studied" and to put "the burden of mattering clearly on evidence of concern to [End Page 159] those being discussed."3 Miller suggests that the idea of mattering coincides with "a move from a primary emphasis with producing things to a concern with consuming things."4 In this sense, the carriage matters because a person's use of it as a multifaceted object—a mode of travel, a symbol of status, a space for conversation, a space of entrapment—shaped perceptions of his or her identity, particularly in regards to rank, reputation, and virtue.5 Attending to the pattern of carriage scenes in the novel through a material culture lens joins previous scholarly attention to the novel's gender ideology to current critical interest in form and offers a solution to a problem described by Marcie Frank: "Burney's contemporary readers have often found it difficult to reconcile the prim didacticism of her novels with the relentlessness, even cruelty, of some of their episodes."6 Rather than disruptive, incongruent scenes, these cruel episodes actually participate in the "prim didacticism" of the novel by demonstrating the difficult choices that a woman must make in the face of contradictory conduct prescriptions. Kenneth W. Graham understands such impossible decisions as exhibiting the "patterns of obligation and entrapment" in the lives of eighteenth-century women, and he explains that for each positive, desirable condition of a prescribed attribute, women also experience a negative, hindering, or threatening condition in response to that attribute.7 Carriage episodes in Burney's novel repeatedly force women into this untenable position. Through her interactions with carriages, Evelina simultaneously learns to enact what is deemed to be the proper feminine behavior and experiences the ways in which that behavior can endanger women. Meanwhile, Madame Duval's assertiveness in her use of carriages results in making her a target for cruel jokes. Thus, focusing on the formal role of the carriage highlights how everyday practices create, maintain, and perpetuate an ideology that values women's silence and complicity in the face of harassment and denigrates women's assertiveness and resistance, attitudes that continue to resonate in contemporary women's everyday experiences. By the eighteenth century, the closed passenger carriage was a common part of daily life in England, and its significance as both a symbolic object and a functional vehicle had been evolving for over three hundred years. Percy Adams dates the invention of the enclosed coach around 1450 and explains that by 1630 it was "a symbol of wealth and prestige in western Europe."8 Over the course of the long eighteenth century, the basic enclosed coach evolved into a variety of types of...

Jenny ErpenbeckNot a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces by Kurt Beals

Books in Review Jenny Erpenbeck Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces Trans. Kurt Beals. New York. New Directions. 2020. 212 pages. JENNY ERPENBECK’s fictional worlds offer us glimpses of what exists below the surface—of land, of water, of consciousness . In her novel Visitation (Heimsuchung , 2008), for example, the new tenants of a countryside home near Berlin are puzzled to find a crate filled with porcelain while digging a trench on the property. However, the reader knows what they don’t: that the first occupant of the house buried the family porcelain there in the 1950s before fleeing to West Berlin. In another novel, The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend, 2012), a Jewish family’s prized collection of works by Goethe “resurfaces” in an antique store in the 1990s after having been confiscated in the Nazi era and packed away in a basement. Ironically, the young man who discovers the collection in the antique store does not know it had once belonged to his family. In the novel Go, Went, Gone (Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, 2015), a person has drowned in the lake that is within view of the protagonist’s kitchen window. Because the body has not been found, swimmers do not dare enter the water. Examples of the submerged, buried, silenced, and repressed abound in Erpenbeck ’s worlds. In some of these cases, the symbolic object or person surfaces, as in the case of the porcelain and the works by Goethe, and in others, they do not. They are eventually forgotten, and life goes on aboveground. In Erpenbeck’s fiction, an underground and underwater topography of the socially repressed exists like a geological record of what has happened, and what continues to happen, in the visible world aboveground. To read Erpenbeck’s latest book—a collection of autobiographical essays, acceptance speeches for awards, and university lectures from 1999 to 2014, cleverly titled Not a Novel—is to glimpse at the underground geological record of life experiences and influences that support her fictional worlds. The texts in part 1, “Life,” recount episodes from Erpenbeck’s life that could, in themselves, be the stuff of literature: A love story is preserved in a Stasi file. A family is held together by hope in the face of persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion. A child sneaks into the ruins of an antiquity museum bombed out during World War II in order to look at the classical statues no one else knows still exist. In these essays, Erpenbeck recounts a childhood in East Berlin shaped not by the interdictions of Communist society but rather by the dead ends and illogical spaces created by the artificial division of the city and the ruins left by war. Those abandoned spaces—disregarded by the adults around her and repressed in the collective consciousness—provided her the freedom to play as a child. Now, the memory of them gives her the intellectual space to write fiction and an escape from the mandate to stay busy and productive that drives her adult life in the capitalist system. In the essays and speeches in part 2, titled “Literature and Music,” Erpenbeck reflects on her aesthetic heroes and influences, her writing process, the relationship between author and audience, reading as part of her life experience, and her love of music. In her essays on fairy tales, Ovid, Thomas Mann, Herta Müller, and more, she discusses the transformations and border transgressions that abound in literature. What she seems JENNY ERPENBECK been met with suspicion by those who claim it to be a marketing ploy yet with acclaim by those who see it as a form to destabilize the orthodox ways in which we tend to think of writing and its production. I’d venture to say that the authors of The Ferrante Letters belong to the second group. Their collaboration began in the summer of 2015 through a series of blog posts about the Neapolitan novels. These posts were not originally conceived with a book in mind but rather as an effort to cultivate “a distinct model of criticism: one deliberately oriented to the ongoing labor of thought.” In time, their exchanges evolved into a form of collective criticism...

Isolation, Foreign Places, and Van Morrison’s “Saint Dominic’s Preview”

Isolation, Foreign Places, and Van Morrison’s “Saint Dominic’s Preview” Geoff Munns (bio) In the late 1970s Greil Marcus invited twenty writers to contribute an essay about what rock and roll record they would take to a desert island. The essays came together in the collection Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.1 I came to this book about thirty years after it was first published, at a time when I was seeking out and researching critical writing about Van Morrison for a study I was doing on the use of place in his songwriting. So M. Mark’s discussion on Morrison’s 1974 live album, It’s Too Late To Stop Now, and Lester Bang’s delving into the lyrical depths of Morrison’s seminal 1968 recording, Astral Weeks, were among those pieces that helped me get closer to an understanding of the ways the songwriter deploys place as a poetic and aural device, and how that both defines and distinguishes his work.2 I was reminded of Stranded in mid-2020 as I sat in my Sydney apartment in COVID-19 isolation and talked over the phone with a friend about how we were both handling the lockdown. “I’m reading that Greil Marcus desert island book,” he told me, “and it seems to be perfect for these times.” He was right, and it got me thinking about my Van Morrison study, and what song of his I would take with me to a desert island that would not only work for me in isolation but would also widely capture his sense of place. My attention was drawn to “Saint Dominic’s Preview” (1972) and the expression of isolation marked out through differences between early Belfast memories and the concerns that now press into the isolation of the San Francisco apartment block. The words and the image of the lonely artist caught within doubts and misgivings seemed, in mood, to capture something of the uncertainties of the current 2020 world. If we accept the suggestion that a song with social isolation as one of its central ideas is a good desert island companion, then I reasoned “Saint Dominic’s Preview” would be a fitting choice. [End Page 44] Furthermore, it is a song that provides a concrete example of the different ways that Morrison utilizes place in his songwriting, highlighting how his songs very often return to and reimagine places through memory, and how there is frequently a fluidity of place and time in their lyrical energies. Added to this, in the song’s often oblique and unsettled series of emblematic spaces are embedded many of the songwriter’s major themes that focus on place—childhood memories, formative musical influences, isolated exile thoughts, music industry blues, and a sense of social and cultural dislocation. “Saint Dominic’s Preview,” then, becomes my Stranded desert island song. ________ When the locations of “Saint Dominic’s Preview” are considered, a picture emerges that highlights many of the different ways Van Morrison employs place. From the opening lines there is a sense of movement that edges restlessly across different places—from the first image of a domestic chore, a city street and a church across the way, to that of a “jagged story block” and a city far removed in distance and time from the comfort of friends and home. Later in the song the scene shifts urgently again between supermarket car parks, country crossroads, railway lines, restaurants, and high-class apartments. As the song proceeds what becomes apparent is that these are also places marking out spaces that are both familiar and foreign, where tensions play out across location and time, between past memories and more immediate and pressing experiences. Beyond descriptive words and phrases, they are also lived “social places,” echoing with the sounds of music and conversation, filled with symbolic objects, caught up with interpersonal relationships. As such, they are embedded with meanings, capturing a range of emotions, including nostalgia, uncertainty, and dislocation. Place thus emerges as a key feature of “Saint Dominic’s Preview.” And this evidence aligns with the general agreement among scholars and critics that “place” is a key poetic device and thematic...

Archaic Vocabulary Relating to Symbolic Hearths

Most generally, the present author’s focus is on the phenomenon of “prolonged continuity”, which manifests itself in the field of symbolic objects as well as in archaic vocabulary that was attached to such objects in days of yore. Along that line, this article represents an approach to the primeval sacredness of hearths and fireplaces, with which a series of common nouns (such as Latin ātrium, Avestan ātarš, Albanian vatër and Romanian vatră) and person-names (such as Greek Atreus and Latin Atrius) appear to have much to do.

Construction of Historical Memory through Youth Music: Example of the City of Kazan

This article is devoted not only to how language, traditions and the past can serve as a creative resource for the creative activity of youth, but also about the ways music becomes a tool for social memory development by youth at the level of everyday life. In this article we want to consider how the historical memory of modern youth is actualized through cultural practices and interests. Actualization should be understood on the one hand, as referring to the themes of the past, not only to legitimize certain decisions of the state, social movements and public persons, but also to justify, with the help of the past, a certain assessment of current events and incitement to action. Also, a significant layer of research draws attention to the creation of symbolic objects (including music) to demonstrate the specific content of historical representations of various groups and those remembering practices that are relevant to them. Moreover, the level of these practices can be both organized, associated with the actions of formal institutions (the World Forum of Tatar Youth, for example), and relate to direct interaction between people at the everyday level - in our study the thing is about the latter.

CONSUMPTION AS A SOCIAL PHENOMENON

Formulation of the problem. In the processes of socio-cultural dynamics of modern society, a significant role is played by the consumption process, which is not only a marker of the development of society because it creates new semantic connections and forms a symbolic continuum of social relations, but also significantly influences the processes of personality socialization and formation of social practices. Moreover, just the discourse of consumption that creates and represents patterns of behavior, shapes values and norms that make up the socio-cultural aspect of the late-20th-the beginning of the 21st century, which they call “consumption society”. Consumerism is the ideology of “consumption society” is the dependence of the level of personal happiness and enjoyment on the value and prestige of things, that are consumed. In sociological discourse, consumption is interpreted as the conscious activity of people to construct their own identity through consumption.Analysis of recent research and publications. Consumption as a phenomenon and society of consumption as a new image of society during a long period of time has been on the focus of Western researchers, especially economists, sociologists, philosophers, the most illustrative are the works of K. Marks, M. Weber, T. Veblen (consumption is interpreted as a process of socio-economic stratification), J. Baudrillard, G. Marcuse (consumption as a symbolic exchange), P. Bourdieu (field of consumption as a lifestyle), E. Giddens (consumption as a process of identity construction), N. McCendrick, J. Brewer, J. G. Plumb, etc., among Ukrainian researchers, these issues are studied by O. Gerus, A. Doroshkevich, N. Zinchenko, O. Serdyuk.Formation of goals. The purpose of the article is to reveal the essence of the phenomenon of consumption and consumer practices, to reveal their influence on the processes of socio-cultural dynamics of modern society.Presentation of the main material. The concept of “consumption” has become on the focus of attention of intellectuals in connection with the philosophy of “consumption society”, which was developed by J. Baudrillard as a result of rethinking K. Marx’s theory of political economy and its replacement with the theory of symbolic objects. J. Baudrillard interprets consumer society as a practical reality that contains a “mythological dimension” in its own “objective” definition.J. Baudrillard proves that consumption is not reduced to satisfaction of needs, but encourages their production, turns into an “active mode of relation” to objective reality. Beyond consumption, it is impossible to explain human behavior. Not only goods and services are consumed, but the whole system of objects as a symbolic structure, whereby the need becomes a structural mode of productivity, and the product is reduced to values-signs, not things, but ideas of things are consumed.The specificity of the consumption process is conditioned by the influence of purposeful pressure of economic levers and the system of value determinants, which are constructed within a certain society, mainly through the media space, as well as by the fact that the objects of consumption are not material but socio-cultural objects. Significant importance is attached to the peculiarities of consumer behavior and reproduction of their consumption practices, because it is through consumption that person realizes and asserts.Conclusions. Consumption in the processes of social dynamics and social transformation becomes functional, significantly influencing the status position of the individual in the structure of social relations. It is a means of social reproduction and a marker of the individual’s position in the social hierarchy system. Through advertising and fashion, individual consumes a set of certain images and lifestyles, values and patterns, which then he reproduces in everyday practice, in communication, in social interactions. Consumption of certain goods, services is important for self-identification and self-affirmation of the individual.

A assexualidade no discurso jornalístico: uma análise discursiva

O presente trabalho teve por objetivo analisar como o discurso jornalístico significou a assexualidade, bem como os efeitos de sentido que nele irromperam a partir da reportagem “Assexuais: a quarta orientação sexual?”, que circula na página eletrônica do jornal espanhol El País. Buscamos ainda verificar se o discurso jornalístico colaborou para sedimentar sentidos sobre a assexualidade ou rompeu com padrões já estabelecidos na nossa formação social. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida pelo viés da Análise de Discurso de linha francesa, fundada por Michel Pêcheux, na década de 1960, na França, e desenvolvida por Eni Orlandi (1996, 2003), no Brasil, e demais pesquisadores que com ela (com)partilham do mesmo escopo teórico. Após as análises, verificamos que, na reportagem, a assexualidade é significada como uma orientação sexual cujos indivíduos buscam reconhecimento. Verificamos também que houve a quebra de padrões estabelecidos em nossa sociedade, não só em relação a sentidos acerca dos assexuais como acerca do sexo em si. Desse modo, asseveramos que o objeto simbólico recortado para análise rompe com pré-construídos acerca da assexualidade, pois coloca em xeque padrões e valores já impostos sobre o sexo em nossa formação social, permitindo ao sujeito aceitá-los, questioná-los ou negá-los.

Food transformed? Taphonomical investigation into a potentially symbolic role of crops at two Neolithic settlements in northern Germany

Abstract The two studied Neolithic sites in northern Germany, Oldenburg LA232 and Oldenburg LA191, yielded remains of residential architecture and evidence of every-day activities, including food storage and processing. None of the excavated features were attributed a symbolic or ritual meaning. However, in more than one case relatively large amounts of food have been found in contexts unlikely to contain food, even as a result of post-depositional disturbance. These contexts are postholes, and this phenomenon is also seen at some other sites in the region from this and later periods. Was food intentionally deposited in these features and was it given a different meaning? Was it transformed into a symbolic object, perhaps with a role in a ritual performed during house construction or demolition? We try to answer these questions by studying the quantity and taxonomic range of the plant remains recovered from these and other plant-rich deposits at the two sites, and by analysing the nature of the context and of the associated ecofacts and artefacts. We highlight possible symbolic or ritual aspects of behaviour by the residents of the two Neolithic settlements and we put forward the idea of a potential house closure act in which plants seem to have played a part.

On inhibited eventualities

The existence of negative descriptions denoting events is controversial in the literature, since it implies enriching the semantic ontology with negative events. The goal of this article is to argue that the readings that have been called ‘negative events’—in contrast to sentential negation reading—should be analysed as inhibited eventualities. We will argue that the inhibited eventuality reading emerges when negation scopes over the verbal domain. Sentential negation, in contrast, scopes above the existential closure of the event variable. We will implement the analysis in a framework where the verbal domain combines symbolic objects that yield partial event-descriptions. These descriptions do not entail the existence of a Davidsonian eventuality with time and world parameters until they transition to the aspectual level. We will show that an analysis on these terms can capture the empirical properties of non-sentential negation without the need to propose negative events as objects in the ontology.

Haciendo de las transiciones educativas procesos participativos: desarrollo de herramientas metodológicas

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar, con un enfoque retrospectivo, la construcción colaborativa de un Plan de apoyo a la Transición en un centro de educación infantil y primaria en Galicia (España). El Plan se elaboró siguiendo un proceso de consenso metodológico, basado en el diálogo y el análisis compartido de experiencias diseñadas y desarrolladas con diferentes participantes, incluidos 25 alumnos/as, 13 familias y 4 maestras. Para recopilar datos se diseñaron actividades e instrumentos participativos como escritura y conversación reflexiva, dibujo-conversación, recorridos y visitas escolares, elaboración y análisis de objetos simbólicos y foto-elicitación. El análisis de datos consistió en un análisis de contenido temático, interpretativo y cronológico. Los resultados identificaron tres elementos inusuales que contribuyen en gran medida a la solidez y el éxito de proceso: el abordaje comunitario, el diseño participativo y procesual, y el carácter situado del Plan que considera las condiciones y necesidades personales y estructurales del entorno en que se desarrolla.

Face Recognition Through Symbolic Modeling of Face Graphs and Texture

Face recognition helps in authentication of the user using remotely acquired facial information. The dynamic nature of face images like pose, illumination, expression, occlusion, aging, etc. degrades the performance of the face recognition system. In this paper, a new face recognition system using facial images with illumination variation, pose variation and partial occlusion is presented. The facial image is described as a collection of three complete connected graphs and these graphs are represented as symbolic objects. The structural characteristics, i.e. graph spectral properties, energy of graph, are extracted and embedded in a symbolic object. The texture features from the cheeks portions are extracted using center symmetric local binary pattern (CS-LBP) descriptor. The global features of the face image, i.e. length and width, are also extracted. Further symbolic data structure is constructed using the above features, namely, the graph spectral properties, energy of graph, global features and texture features. User authentication is performed using a new symbolic similarity metric. The performance is investigated by conducting the experiments with AR face database and VTU-BEC-DB multimodal database. The experimental results demonstrate an identification rate of 95.97% and 97.20% for the two databases.

Optimized Dimensionality Reduction Methods for Interval-Valued Variables and Their Application to Facial Recognition

The center method, which was first proposed in Rev. Stat. Appl. 1997 by Cazes et al. and Stat. Anal. Data Mining 2011 by Douzal-Chouakria et al., extends the well-known Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method to particular types of symbolic objects that are characterized by multivalued interval-type variables. In contrast to classical data, symbolic data have internal variation. The authors who originally proposed the center method used the center of a hyper-rectangle in as a base point to carry out PCA, followed by the projection of all vertices of the hyper-rectangles as supplementary elements. Since these publications, the center point of the hyper-rectangle has typically been assumed to be the best point for the initial PCA. However, in this paper, we show that this is not always the case, if the aim is to maximize the variance of projections or minimize the squared distance between the vertices and their respective projections. Instead, we propose the use of an optimization algorithm that maximizes the variance of the projections (or that minimizes the distances between the squares of the vertices and their respective projections) and finds the optimal point for the initial PCA. The vertices of the hyper-rectangles are, then, projected as supplementary variables to this optimal point, which we call the “Best Point” for projection. For this purpose, we propose four new algorithms and two new theorems. The proposed methods and algorithms are illustrated using a data set comprised of measurements of facial characteristics from a study on facial recognition patterns for use in surveillance. The performance of our approach is compared with that of another procedure in the literature, and the results show that our symbolic analyses provide more accurate information. Our approach can be regarded as an optimization method, as it maximizes the explained variance or minimizes the squared distance between projections and the original points. In addition, the symbolic analyses generate more informative conclusions, compared with the classical analysis in which classical surrogates replace intervals. All the methods proposed in this paper can be executed in the RSDA package developed in R.

캐살 블랙의 영화 󰡔코리아󰡕(Korea)에 나타난 해방 후 아일랜드 가족의 시적 재구성

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the poetic techniques in Cathal Black’s Korea, a film in which he reconstructs the trajectory of the postliberation Irish family in the 1950s. In focusing on poetic aspects of repetition, defamiliarization, and irony in relation to the filmic techniques of symbol, montage, and voiceover, I will demonstrate how Black’s poetic reconstruction of the era goes against the grain of the forward movement of the narrative. First, Black adopts the repetition of symbolic objects like eels and electricity to represent the state of an era in which hope and despair coexist. Second, Black’s montage technique produces a defamiliarization effect. Juxtaposing disparate images and sounds, Black delivers a sense of shock and confusion, a key to understanding the spirit of the age. Finally, the ironic voiceover that unsuceessfully drives the narrative of the film works as a device for the reconstruction of recent Irish history. The narrator who lacks the capacity to overview his circumstance holds ambivalent attitudes toward the past, neither indiscriminately critical nor blindly nostalgic. With the repetition of symbolic objects, the radical montage, and the ironic voiceover, Black shows the anomalous state of postliberation Ireland in the 1950s, in which the trauma and nostalgia of the old generation and the hope and apprehension of the young generation are commingled like an oxymoron.

Investigating ‘collective individualism model of learning’: From Chinese context of classroom culture

In the current global push to examine the diverse and complex approach in which classroom culture contributes to the shaping of students’ learning cultural identity. Classroom culture plays a fundamental role in constructing students’ learning competencies, perceptions and behaviors. Thus, this study conceptualizes and contextualizes a collective individualism learning model to explicate a specific learning model in classroom culture at Chinese particular context historically and traditionally. The collective individualism model is identified as the individualized learning style of students in Chinese classroom culture characterized by nine symbolic objects, including a textbook, an exercise book, a pen, a blackboard, a screen, a computer, a table, a chair and platform in a Chinese collective class. In addition, two core components of formal collectivism and substantive individualism derived from constructive learning theory, social learning theory, Mezirow’s transformative learning theory and Kolb’s experiential learning theory. The implications for examining the collective individualism model of Chinese classroom culture are likewise linked to innovative talent cultivation and fulfillment of ‘Four Good Teachers’ goal. Both the discussion and conclusion led to the construction of promising classroom culture at Chinese context practically.

Expanding transnational care networks: comparing caring for families with caring for homes

AbstractAlthough many factors may motivate a migrant to own a house in their country of origin, significant practical labour is needed to maintain it, as both a material structure intended for shelter and as a symbolic object reflecting attachment to a place of origin. Most research in this area focuses on the significance accorded to transnational houses by their owners and families connoted by the ‘myth of return’, but little attention has been given to how the labour of ownership – constructing, maintaining, overseeing and improving the house – is accomplished. In the light of emerging studies on the care labour that remittance houses require, this article suggests a theoretical framework for studying networks of transnational house maintenance on three dimensions of care – trust, communication, and remittances – observed in networks for transnational family care provisions. A review of literature on transnational home ownership indicates that these dimensions are also present, with some differences in application.

Automated real-time damage detection strategy using raw dynamic measurements

Over the last decades, several techniques have been developed in the context of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) programs. However, when it comes to novelty (or damage) detection, these methods are generally based on human decisions. Moreover, most strategies already published in this topic mainly focus on modal identification procedures and tracking their outputs i.e., structural modal parameters. Such approaches usually lead to high computational costs and can still be insensitive to minor changes in structural behavior, thus missing crucial damage scenarios in their initial manifestations. To circumvent these drawbacks, recent researches showed that the use of symbolic representations derived directly from raw time-domain data (e.g. acceleration measurements) could provide more damage-sensitive responses with lower computational effort. Indeed, good results were achieved by representing raw measurements in terms of their statistical distributions over time. Nevertheless, the lack of information regarding the frequency spectrum represents a decisive drawback. Therefore, this paper presents a novel symbolic object, which considers both time and frequency responses of structural dynamic measurements. The proposed methodology employs a k-medoids clustering over such objects within a moving time-window framework and uses a single-valued index to indicate whether a novelty is present in the acquired data. Numerical simulations and two practical studies – a 3D frame tested in laboratory and a motorway bridge – show that the proposed approach provide an unsupervised and adaptive scheme for SHM applications.

The Mirroring Phenomenon in Cultural Consciousness of Russia

The article considers the understanding of the phenomenon of mirroring. In particular, the specifics of the mirroring phenomenon interpretation in scientific studies is analyzed with the help of the comparative historical method and the integral method of literary work analysis. Mirroring is considered as a philosophical and aesthetic phenomenon, as well as a category of modern cultural studies, semiotics and literary studies. The paper in question follows the history of mirror not as a materialistic object, but rather as the phenomenon which meaning goes beyond “physical” nature; it is traced what meanings mirroring acquires in different epochs in the European and Russian culture – from ancient times (the folklore understanding of a mirror as a boundary between worlds) to modern interpretations. It is mentioned in the work that the mirror was not only a common household item, but also a symbolic object that accompanies an individual’s search for himself in the process of self-understanding since one’s own reflection can reveal similarities or differences, kinship or alienity within oneself. The article examines the interpretation of the phenomenon of mirroring in the humanitarian thought of the twentieth century, primarily in the research of M. M. Bakhtin. The entire corpus of the most important scientific works of M. M. Bakhtin has been analyzed: “Author and hero in aesthetic activity”, “Man at the mirror”, “Problems of Dostoevsky's creativity”, “Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics” etc. It is found that the phenomenon of mirroring in the works of M. M. Bakhtin is directly associated with the categories of the “other”, “out-of-search”, “double”, which are dominant in the dialogical concept of the scientist (the other as an “I-twin” turns “others” into objects of his own vision with the help of the mirror). The mirror appears as the object of a character’s identification with his own reflection, himself, and is connected with the conception of “strange consciousness” as a means of “internal” self-equality on looking at yourself with “other’s” eyes.

Understanding the suffering of the elderly

Alzheimer's disease is an organic disease of the brain affecting mainly elderly people. Drawing on patients' imaginations on a daily basis or art therapy allow them, despite the cognitive impairments, to construct symbolic objects, analogues, to help give back meaning to their life. If the use of symbolisation when evoking the real object is not possible, the meaning is therefore constructed using the figurative dimension, an analogue substituting the lost and absent object, too painful to evoke again.