scholarly journals More Virulent Than Disease

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 188-191
Author(s):  
Stephanie Gage
Keyword(s):  
Historical Novel ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Nobel Prize Winner ◽  
Head Physician ◽  
The Tropics ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Journal Entries ◽  
Ramón Y Cajal

            “More Virulent than Disease” is a chapter from the historical novel, Painted Butterflies. This excerpt is written through the voice of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852 – 1934), Nobel Prize Winner, who is credited with being “The Father of Modern Neuroscience.” In this piece, Santiago is in his mid-twenties recounting the four years since his return from the Separatist War in Cuba (Ten Years War), where he served as a head physician in a remote jungle hospital. Here, he ruminates about his recovery from illnesses which he acquired in the tropics, from which he barely survived. His hopefulness, his need for artistic expression, his passion for the natural world and the courage he observed from others brought Santiago through one of the darkest periods of his life.  Painted Butterflies follows the life and scientific work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal through his journal entries. His story is expressed through his 19th century lens, but is also seen through the eyes of a modern, fictional neuroscientist, Rebecca Calhoun, who is navigating graduate school in the United States. Across two centuries and continents, these scientists discover themselves and what drives their passions for living deeply and the excitement of discovery. When Santiago’s journal falls mysteriously into Rebecca’s hands, they become connected by a scientific theory, spurned by Santiago’s prescience into how memory works. As if Santiago is whispering in her ear, Rebecca pursues her idea on how to enhance the brain’s capacity for memory (and succeeds), but there is a caveat that takes her findings to an unexpected and more personal place.

The Proximity of Other Skins

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celine Parreñas Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Korea ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Pain And Suffering ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Existing Frames ◽  
The Voice

Transnational films representing intimacy and inequality disrupt and disgust Western spectators. When wounded bodies within poverty entangle with healthy wealthy bodies in sex, romance and care, fear and hatred combine with desire and fetishism. Works from the Philippines, South Korea, and independents from the United States and France may not be made for the West and may not make use of Hollywood traditions. Rather, they demand recognition for the knowledge they produce beyond our existing frames. They challenge us to go beyond passive consumption, or introspection of ourselves as spectators, for they represent new ways of world-making we cannot unsee, unhear, or unfeel. The spectator is redirected to go beyond the rapture of consuming the other to the rupture that arises from witnessing pain and suffering. Self-displacement is what proximity to intimate inequality in cinema ultimately compels and demands so as to establish an ethical way of relating to others. In undoing the spectator, the voice of the transnational filmmaker emerges. Not only do we need to listen to filmmakers from outside Hollywood who unflinchingly engage the inexpressibility of difference, we need to make room for critics and theorists who prioritize the subjectivities of others. When the demographics of filmmakers and film scholars are not as diverse as its spectators, films narrow our worldviews. To recognize our culpability in the denigration of others unleashes the power of cinema. The unbearability of stories we don’t want to watch and don’t want to feel must be borne.

Childhood and the Classics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheila Murnaghan ◽  
Deborah H. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
The United States ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Charles Kingsley ◽  
Special Relation ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Children's Stories

This book explores the childhood reception of classical antiquity in Britain and the United States over a century-long period beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with a focus on two genres of children’s literature– the myth collection and the historical novel—and on adults’ literary responses to their own childhood encounters with antiquity. The book recognizes the fundamental role in writing for children of adults’ ideas about what children want or need, but also attends to the ways in which child readers make such works their own. The authors first trace the tradition of myths retold as children’s stories (and as especially suited to children) from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley to Roger Lancelyn Green and Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, treating both writers and illustrators. They then turn to historical fiction, particularly to the roles of nationality and of gender in the construction of the ancient world for modern children. They conclude with an investigation of the connections between childhood and antiquity made by writers for adults, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Naomi Mitchison, and H.D., and with a reading of H.D.’s novella The Hedgehog as a text on the border between children’s and adult literature that thematizes both the child’s special relation to myth and the adult’s stake in children’s relationship to the classics. An epilogue offers a brief overview of recent trends, which reflect both growing uncertainty about the appeal of antiquity to modern children and an ongoing conviction that the classical past is of perennial interest.

Mid-Nineteenth Century New England Women in Evangelical Foreign Missions: Seraphina Haynes Everett, A Missionary Wife in The Ottoman Mission Field

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
Women’S Perceptions ◽  
Islam And Christianity ◽  
Mission Field ◽  
Journal Entries

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.

The scientific work of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment

1952 ◽  
Vol 139 (896) ◽  
pp. 300-313
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Engineering ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Atomic Energy ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Energy Research ◽  
Creative Development ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Service Commission ◽  
Under Construction

The Atomic Energy Research Establishment was founded five years ago and has been built up round the buildings and grounds of the Royal Air Force station at Harwell in Berkshire. The four large hangars of the airfield (figure 1, plate 22) have been used to house the major experimental tools of the Establishment—the two atomic piles; the cyclotron (figure 2, plate 22), the Van de Graaf generator and linear accelerator; the electromagnetic separator. They also house the large central workshop of the Establishment. A new radiochemistry laboratory has been built, a building for inactive chemical engineering, a central block for library, theoretical physics, engineering and drawing offices, whilst buildings for the medical and health physics divisions and active chemical engineering are still under construction. For the rest of our work we have converted the old buildings of the airfield into laboratories— every one of these is in use—even the three navigational trainers and the underground fuel store. We have also built metallurgical and electronics laboratories in standard hutting. The scientific and technical staff of the Establishment has been built up round the scientists who worked on atomic energy in Canada, the United States and Britain during the war years. This staff came mainly from Universities, and this nucleus has given to the Establishment a character which is rather unusual in government establishments. To this war-time staff were added scientists who came from other government establishments when their staffs were reduced at the end of the war. We have also recruited staff through the standard machinery of the Civil Service Commission. We have now almost reached our equilibrium numbers and are satisfied that we have a staff capable of carrying out creative development work as well as contributing to basic scientific and technological knowledge.

scholarly journals IVAN SLESHYNSKY AS A POPULARIZER OF THE IDEAS OF MATHEMATICAL LOGIC IN UKRAINE

2020 ◽  
pp. 99-107
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mathematical Logic ◽  
Mathematical Reasoning ◽  
Mathematical Proof ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Belief ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Mathematical Sciences

The first half of the twentieth century was marked by the simultaneous development of logic and mathematics. Logic offered the necessary means to justify the foundations of mathematics and to solve the crisis that arose in mathematics in the early twentieth century. In European science in the late nineteenth century, the ideas of symbolic logic, based on the works of J. Bull, S. Jevons and continued by C. Pierce in the United States and E. Schroeder in Germany were getting popular. The works by G. Frege and B. Russell should be considered more progressive towards the development of mathematical logic. The perspective of mathematical logic in solving the crisis of mathematics in Ukraine was noticed by Professor of Mathematics of Novorossiysk (Odesa) University Ivan Vladislavovich Sleshynsky. Sleshynsky (1854 –1931) is a Doctor of Mathematical Sciences (1893), Professor (1898) of Novorossiysk (Odesa) University. After studying at the University for two years he was a Fellow at the Department of Mathematics of Novorossiysk University, defended his master’s thesis and was sent to a scientific internship in Berlin (1881–1882), where he listened to the lectures by K. Weierstrass, L. Kronecker, E. Kummer, G. Bruns. Under the direction of K. Weierstrass he prepared a doctoral dissertation for defense. He returned to his native university in 1882, and at the same time he was a teacher of mathematics in the seminary (1882–1886), Odesa high schools (1882–1892), and taught mathematics at the Odesa Higher Women’s Courses. Having considerable achievements in the field of mathematics, in particular, Pringsheim’s Theorem (1889) proved by Sleshinsky on the conditions of convergence of continuous fractions, I. Sleshynsky drew attention to a new direction of logical science. The most significant work for the development of national mathematical logic is the translation by I. Sleshynsky from the French language “Algebra of Logic” by L. Couturat (1909). Among the most famous students of I. Sleshynsky, who studied and worked at Novorossiysk University and influenced the development of mathematical logic, one should mention E. Bunitsky and S. Shatunovsky. The second period of scientific work of I. Sleshynsky is connected with Poland. In 1911 he was invited to teach mathematical disciplines at Jagiellonian University and focused on mathematical logic. I. Sleshynsky’s report “On Traditional Logic”, delivered at the meeting of the Philosophical Society in Krakow. He developed the common belief among mathematicians that logic was not necessary for mathematics. His own experience of teaching one of the most difficult topics in higher mathematics – differential calculus, pushed him to explore logic, since the requirement of perfect mathematical proof required this. In one of his further works of this period, he noted the promising development of mathematical logic and its importance for mathematics. He claimed that for the mathematics of future he needed a new logic, which he saw in the “Principles of Mathematics” by A. Whitehead and B. Russell. Works on mathematical logic by I. Sleszynski prompted many of his students in Poland to undertake in-depth studies in this field, including T. Kotarbiński, S. Jaśkowski, V. Boreyko, and S. Zaremba. Thanks to S. Zaremba, I. Sleshynsky managed to complete the long-planned concept, a two-volume work “Theory of Proof” (1925–1929), the basis of which were lectures of Professor. The crisis period in mathematics of the early twentieth century, marked by the search for greater clarity in the very foundations of mathematical reasoning, led to the transition from the study of mathematical objects to the study of structures. The most successful means of doing this were proposed by mathematical logic. Thanks to Professor I. Sleshynsky, who succeeded in making Novorossiysk (Odesa) University a center of popularization of mathematical logic in the beginning of the twentieth century the ideas of mathematical logic in scientific environment became more popular. However, historical events prevented the ideas of mathematical logic in the domestic scientific space from the further development.

scholarly journals Nothing in This World Is Indifferent to Us': The Primacy of Encounter and the Intersubjectivity of Nature

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Terry Tempest Williams ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Wendell Berry ◽  
End Times ◽  
Ethical Response

“We’re moving from one plane of reality to another,” says Terry Tempest Williams in an interview with Yes! Magazine, “and what is required of us is spiritual.” Many people alive in the United States today have grown up bombarded by the seemingly futile refrain that if we don’t cut back on x (activity) in y (years), z (catastrophe) will ensue – with x becoming broader in scope, y becoming smaller in number, and z becoming more horrific with each passing year. Among the natural responses to such daunting and repetitive premonitions are anxiety and anguish: “Accept the anxiety, embrace the deeper anguish,” suggests Robert Jensen, “and then get apocalyptic.” Drawing upon Laudato si, liberation theology, and eco psychology, this paper argues for the importance of encounters (increasingly scarce) with the natural world, human and other-than-human, as a necessary spiritual practice grounding a commitment to ecojustice in times which are indeed end times of sorts. In a consideration of theological anthropology, I suggest, along with ecopsychologist Will Adams, that our subjectivity is indeed an intersubjectivity, arising out of our ethical response to not only the human other but also the other-than-human. We are by nature relational beings, and we must remember that this relation is not only relevant in human-human relationships. Liberation theologians have articulated the foundational nature of the encounter with poor – an experience which at once inspires awe, evokes mercy, and demands action – in grounding liberative praxis. Likewise, the encounter with nature, when its intersubjectivity is considered, grounds a praxis of ecojustice. Finally, understanding apocalypse in its etymological sense as “unveiling,” I argue for the role of the apocalyptic imagination, in making possible sustained exposure to such encounters, which entail both joy and despair. “Expect the end of the world,” writes Wendell Berry, “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts…Practice resurrection.”

scholarly journals The dominance of big teams in China’s scientific output

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Linlin Liu ◽  
Jianfei Yu ◽  
Junming Huang ◽  
Feng Xia ◽  
Tao Jia
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Output ◽  
Large Size ◽  
Global Trend ◽  
Innovative Work ◽  
Small Team

Modern science is dominated by scientific productions from teams. A recent finding shows that teams of both large and small sizes are essential in research, prompting us to analyze the extent to which a country’s scientific work is carried out by big or small teams. Here, using over 26 million publications from Web of Science, we find that China’s research output is more dominated by big teams than the rest of the world, which is particularly the case in fields of natural science. Despite the global trend that more papers are written by big teams, China’s drop in small team output is much steeper. As teams in China shift from small to large size, the team diversity that is essential for innovative work does not increase as much as that in other countries. Using the national average as the baseline, we find that the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) supports fewer small teams than the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States does, implying that big teams are preferred by grant agencies in China. Our finding provides new insights into the concern of originality and innovation in China, which indicates a need to balance small and big teams.

scholarly journals Richard Pipes: A Life Against the Tide (1923-2018)

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Wojciech Łysek
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Scientific Activity ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Political Studies ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Academy Of Sciences

The article discusses the life and work of the outstanding Sovietologist Richard Pipes, who was born in a Polonized Jewish family in Polish Cieszyn. After an adventurous trip to the United States in 1939 and 1940, he graduated in history from Harvard University and devoted himself to scientific work. For the next half a century, Pipes dealt with the historical and contemporary aspects of Russia. In his numerous publications, including more than 20 monographs, he emphasised that the Soviet Union continued rather than broke with the political practice of tsarist Russia. In his professional work, he thus contested views prevailing among American researchers and society. From the 1960s, Pipes was involved in political activities. He was sceptical about détente, advocating more decisive actions towards the Soviet Union. Between 1981 and 1983, he was the director of the Department of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the National Security Council in the administration of President Ronald Reagan. Although retiring in 1996, he did not give up his scientific activity. Pipes died on 17 May 2018; according to his last will, his private book collection of 3,500 volumes has been donated to the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Ecological Identity, Empathy, and Experiential Learning: A Young Child's Explorations of a Nearby River

2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloe Humphreys ◽  
Sean Blenkinsop
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
Experiential Learning ◽  
Environmental Education ◽  
West Coast ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Ecological Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Working Together ◽  
Journal Entries

AbstractThis article uses an unconventional format to explore the role of parent and nature and the development of a young child's ecological identity. It follows journal entries from a mother observing her young son, Julian, as he explores, interacts with, and learns from the Stawamus River on the west coast of British Columbia. By creating questions, discussing and analysing these written observations, we explore the role of parenting and nature and the implications this might have for environmental education. Some of the ideas explored in this article include early ecological identity, empathy, relational existence, experiential learning, and affordances in the natural world. We further suggest that nature and parent working together might become key educators for a child.

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