scholarly journals A Methodology for the Historiography of Ancient Religion

Author(s):  
Jörg Rüpke

Starting from a discussion about the usefulness of a historical approach to ancient religion, I propose basing the historiography of ancient religion on a set of three concepts, replacing three others that have been widely used. First, I contend that we need to shift our focus from questions of identity to questions of agency, not least in the face of earlier traditions of historiography of regions outside the imperial capitals. The application of an agentic perspective entails a further unavoidable consequence. The concept of “religions” must be replaced by that of “lived religion”, even for the past, once again shifting the focus to the local and the entire range of social agents and their cultural production. This agentic and material focus is further supplemented by a spatial one. Thus, I propose moving away from the widespread focus on civic religion in cities to embrace the perspective of urban religion. Lastly, I briefly touch upon the problem of the selection of forms of contemporary historiography of religion.

Antiquity ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 92 (361) ◽  
pp. 267-274
Author(s):  
Dan Lawrence

Back in 2013, Rob Witcher, in his first NBC, mused on the future of academic publishing, and especially the potential impact of open access and e-books on traditional book reviews. Reading these lines five years later as incoming Reviews Editor, it is striking how little an impression e-books in particular have made on the market, and more generally how persistent print editions of both journals (includingAntiquity) and books have remained in the face of rapidly changing digital technologies. Sales of major e-reader brands have declined since their height in 2014, at least in the UK, and e-book sales have stabilised since then at around 25 per cent of all book purchases. AtAntiquity, we still receive upwards of 300 books per year, and send out over 120 to review across the six issues. NBC is an attempt to provide some critical perspective on a selection of the remaining books, many of which merit reviews in their own right but cannot be included for reasons of space. This section will continue in much the same manner as in the past, safe in the knowledge that, as Groucho Marx put it, ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend . . .’ (the second half of the quotation is less relevant here but perhaps worth including—‘. . . inside of a dog, it's too dark to read’).


2020 ◽  
pp. 133-139
Author(s):  
Sanatan Ratna ◽  
B Kumar

In the past few decades, there has been lot of focus on the issue of sustainability. This has occurred due to the growing concerns related to climate change and the growing awareness about environmental concerns. Also, the competition at global level has led to the search for the most sustainable route in the industries. The current research work deals with the selection of green supplier in a Nickle coating industry based on certain weighted green attributes. For this purpose, a hybrid tool comprising of Fuzzy AHP (Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje) is used. The Fuzzy AHP is used for assigning proper weights to the selected criteria for supplier evaluation, while VIKOR is used for final supplier selection based on the weighted criteria. The three criterions for green supplier selection are, Ecological packaging, Corporate socio-environmental responsibility and Staff Training. The outcome of the integrated model may serve as a steppingstone to other SMEs in different sectors for selecting the most suitable supplier for addressing the sustainability issue.


2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Stephanus Muller

Stephanus Le Roux Marais (1896−1979) lived in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, for nearly a quarter of a century. He taught music at the local secondary school, composed most of his extended output of Afrikaans art songs, and painted a number of small landscapes in the garden of his small house, nestled in the bend of the Sunday’s River. Marais’s music earned him a position of cultural significance in the decades of Afrikaner dominance of South Africa. His best-known songs (“Heimwee,” “Kom dans, Klaradyn,” and “Oktobermaand”) earned him the local appellation of “the Afrikaans Schubert” and were famously sung all over the world by the soprano Mimi Coertse. The role his ouevre played in the construction of a so-called European culture in Africa is uncontested. Yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rich evocations of landscape encountered in Marais’s work. Contextualized by a selection of Marais’s paintings, this article glosses the index of landscape in this body of cultural production. The prevalence of landscape in Marais’s work and the range of its expression contribute novel perspectives to understanding colonial constructions of the twentieth-century South African landscape. Like the vast, empty, and ancient landscape of the Karoo, where Marais lived during the last decades of his life, his music assumes specificity not through efforts to prioritize individual expression, but through the distinct absence of such efforts. Listening for landscape in Marais’s songs, one encounters the embrace of generic musical conventions as a condition for the construction of a particular national identity. Colonial white landscape, Marais’s work seems to suggest, is deprived of a compelling musical aesthetic by its very embrace and desired possession of that landscape.


Author(s):  
Allan Megill

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.


Author(s):  
John Hunsley ◽  
Eric J. Mash

Evidence-based assessment relies on research and theory to inform the selection of constructs to be assessed for a specific assessment purpose, the methods and measures to be used in the assessment, and the manner in which the assessment process unfolds. An evidence-based approach to clinical assessment necessitates the recognition that, even when evidence-based instruments are used, the assessment process is a decision-making task in which hypotheses must be iteratively formulated and tested. In this chapter, we review (a) the progress that has been made in developing an evidence-based approach to clinical assessment in the past decade and (b) the many challenges that lie ahead if clinical assessment is to be truly evidence-based.


Homeopathy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 109 (04) ◽  
pp. 191-197
Author(s):  
Chetna Deep Lamba ◽  
Vishwa Kumar Gupta ◽  
Robbert van Haselen ◽  
Lex Rutten ◽  
Nidhi Mahajan ◽  
...  

Abstract Objectives The objective of this study was to establish the reliability and content validity of the “Modified Naranjo Criteria for Homeopathy—Causal Attribution Inventory” as a tool for attributing a causal relationship between the homeopathic intervention and outcome in clinical case reports. Methods Purposive sampling was adopted for the selection of information-rich case reports using pre-defined criteria. Eligible case reports had to fulfil a minimum of nine items of the CARE Clinical Case Reporting Guideline checklist and a minimum of three of the homeopathic HOM-CASE CARE extension items. The Modified Naranjo Criteria for Homeopathy Inventory consists of 10 domains. Inter-rater agreement in the scoring of these domains was determined by calculating the percentage agreement and kappa (κ) values. A κ greater than 0.4, indicating fair agreement between raters, in conjunction with the absence of concerns regarding the face validity, was taken to indicate the validity of a given domain. Each domain was assessed by four raters for the selected case reports. Results Sixty case reports met the inclusion criteria. Inter-rater agreement/concordance per domain was “perfect” for domains 1 (100%, κ = 1.00) and 2 (100%, κ = 1.00); “almost perfect” for domain 8 (97.5%, κ = 0.86); “substantial” for domains 3 (96.7%, κ = 0.80) and 5 (91.1%, κ = 0.70); “moderate” for domains 4 (83.3%, κ = 0.60), 7 (67.8%, κ = 0.46) and 9 (99.2%, κ = 0.50); and “fair” for domain 10 (56.1%, κ = 0.38). For domains 6A (46.7%, κ = 0.03) and 6B (50.3%, κ = 0.18), there was “slight agreement” only. Thus, the validity of the Modified Naranjo Criteria for Homeopathy tool was established for each of its domains, except for the two that pertain to direction of cure (domains 6A and 6B). Conclusion The Modified Naranjo Criteria for Homeopathy—Causal Attribution Inventory was identified as a valid tool for assessing the likelihood of a causal relationship between a homeopathic intervention and clinical outcome. Improved wordings for several criteria have been proposed for the assessment tool, under the new acronym “MONARCH”. Further assessment of two MONARCH domains is required.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross M. Lawrence ◽  
Eric W. Bridgeford ◽  
Patrick E. Myers ◽  
Ganesh C. Arvapalli ◽  
Sandhya C. Ramachandran ◽  
...  

AbstractUsing brain atlases to localize regions of interest is a requirement for making neuroscientifically valid statistical inferences. These atlases, represented in volumetric or surface coordinate spaces, can describe brain topology from a variety of perspectives. Although many human brain atlases have circulated the field over the past fifty years, limited effort has been devoted to their standardization. Standardization can facilitate consistency and transparency with respect to orientation, resolution, labeling scheme, file storage format, and coordinate space designation. Our group has worked to consolidate an extensive selection of popular human brain atlases into a single, curated, open-source library, where they are stored following a standardized protocol with accompanying metadata, which can serve as the basis for future atlases. The repository containing the atlases, the specification, as well as relevant transformation functions is available in the neuroparc OSF registered repository or https://github.com/neurodata/neuroparc.


Author(s):  
Aurora G. Vincent ◽  
Anne E. Gunter ◽  
Yadranko Ducic ◽  
Likith Reddy

AbstractAlloplastic facial transplantation has become a new rung on the proverbial reconstructive ladder for severe facial wounds in the past couple of decades. Since the first transfer including bony components in 2006, numerous facial allotransplantations across many countries have been successfully performed, many incorporating multiple bony elements of the face. There are many unique considerations to facial transplantation of bone, however, beyond the considerations of simple soft tissue transfer. Herein, we review the current literature and considerations specific to bony facial transplantation focusing on the pertinent surgical anatomy, preoperative planning needs, intraoperative harvest and inset considerations, and postoperative protocols.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 3046
Author(s):  
Shervin Minaee ◽  
Mehdi Minaei ◽  
Amirali Abdolrashidi

Facial expression recognition has been an active area of research over the past few decades, and it is still challenging due to the high intra-class variation. Traditional approaches for this problem rely on hand-crafted features such as SIFT, HOG, and LBP, followed by a classifier trained on a database of images or videos. Most of these works perform reasonably well on datasets of images captured in a controlled condition but fail to perform as well on more challenging datasets with more image variation and partial faces. In recent years, several works proposed an end-to-end framework for facial expression recognition using deep learning models. Despite the better performance of these works, there are still much room for improvement. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach based on attentional convolutional network that is able to focus on important parts of the face and achieves significant improvement over previous models on multiple datasets, including FER-2013, CK+, FERG, and JAFFE. We also use a visualization technique that is able to find important facial regions to detect different emotions based on the classifier’s output. Through experimental results, we show that different emotions are sensitive to different parts of the face.


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