The Lacan–Badiou constellation in L’immanence des vérités: A limit on the infinite?

In Alain Badiou’s most recent work, L’immanence des vérités ( The Immanence of Truths), psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once again figures peripherally but saliently. What is their specific relation in this text, however? We argue that Badiou responds here to the problem raised precisely by the Lacanian subject, situated as it is between the radical subjectivity of the symptom and the possibility of formalization. In L’immanence, he introduces the term ‘absoluteness’ to secure truths against both relativism and transcendental construction. We show that in drawing on Lacan to establish an understanding of the absolute, Badiou highlights the implicit tension between psychoanalysis and philosophy. We treat central cross-currents – truths, knowledge, the event and love – to help reveal the specific character of their confluence in this third book of Badiou’s trilogy. Although he stresses the unity of his and Lacan’s efforts, the impossible Real marking their divisions also invariably emerges the closer one investigates.

Evaluating the Parameters of a Systematic Long-Term Measurement of the Concentration and Mobility of Air Ions in the Environment inside Císařská Cave

Determining the concentration and mobility of light air ions is an indispensable task to ensure the successful performance and progress of various operations within multiple fields and branches of human activity. This article discusses a novel methodology for measuring air ions in an environment with high relative humidity, such as that of a cave. Compared to common techniques, the proposed method exhibits a lower standard deviation and analyses the causes of spurious oscillations in the measured patterns obtained from FEM-based numerical simulations on the one hand and a model with concentrated parameters on the other. The designed ion meter utilises a gerdien tube to facilitate long-term measurement in cold and very humid spaces, an operation that can be very problematic if executed with other devices. Importantly, the applied procedure for calculating the mobility spectra of air ions from the acquired saturation characteristics is insensitive to fluctuations and noises in the measured patterns, and it also enables us to confirm the presence of very mobile air ions generated by fragmenting water droplets. During the sensing cycles, the concentration of light negative ions was influenced by the active gerdien tube. For the investigated cave, we had designed a measuring sequence to cover not only the time dependence of the concentration of light negative ions but also their mobility; this approach then allowed monitoring the corresponding impact of the patients’ presence in the cave, an effect neither described nor resolved thus far. Such comprehensive research, especially due to its specific character, has not been frequently conducted or widely discussed in the literature; the efforts characterised herein have therefore expanded the relevant knowledge and methodology, thus contributing towards further advancement in the field.

Illustrating the Ostracized : the Depiction of Villain, Soldier and Jew in the Passional of Abbess Cunegund

The first treatise of the so‑called Passional of Abbess Cunegund was composed by the Dominican lector Colda of Colditz at the abbess’ behest in 1312, and illustrated by an unknown artist. In this study, images of three specific character‑types are analysed: villain, soldier and Jew, who not only act out their part in the treatises’ account of Christ’s Passion, but also appear to provide a window onto certain aspects of contemporary, medieval Czech society. By examining the iconography of the illustrations it is shown how, through characterisation, caricature and dress, the viewer is led to adopt an attitude either of disgust towards the malefactors, or a certain sympathy towards a chosen few.

Types of strong earthquake precursor behavior obtained from world and regional catalogs of earthquakes

Typical features of seismicity inherent to the period prior to the strong earthquake occurrence are examined using the regional and world-wide earthquake catalogs by the method of construction of the Generalized vicinity of a large earthquake (GVLE). These features are foreshock power-law cascade, the weak long-term background increase in seismic activity, and the definite clustering of the main events. Worth to note, that all these features appear to indicate the loss of a stability of a system, without any reference to the physical mechanism of development of the instability. Thus, these features are expected to occur in connection with the bifurcation points in systems of other physical nature, examples of such behavior are given. Besides, a tendency of a decrease in earthquakes depth in the close GVLE vicinity was found. This precursor feature has a specific character and evidences in favor of a fluid involvement in the mechanism of earthquake occurrence.

Lexis of a foreign language origin: Arabisms with the meaning of ‘Jewelry and occult objects’

In the article six lexemes of the thematic group ‘Clothes and household items’, the subgroup ‘Jewelry and occult objects’: diamond, fringe, beads, sultan, amulet, and mascot are considered according to the methodology proposed earlier by the authors, including the lexicographic, etymological and semantic aspects of the study of Arabisms, analysis of their syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, adaptation processes in the receiving language and use in its functional styles. Based on the materials of the National Corpus of the Russian language, the specific character of their functioning in the Russian speech is revealed.

SPECIAL LEXICAL ITEMS IN THE DOMAIN AREA OF RECORDS ADMINISTRATION

The purpose of the article. The article deals with peculiarities of terms as components of a purport in the domain area of record administration as well as studying qualitative and quantitative composition of the term system in this domain. Methodology: in the article historical, logical, comparative and statistic methods are used in order to extract types of special vocabulary which belong to the record administration term system; to determine peculiarities of special lexical items, their communities and differences; to describe qualitative and quantitative composition of the term system as a whole. The scientific novelty of the study is as follows: this is the first time the analysis of qualitative and quantitative composition of terms which are functioning in the domain area of record administration was made in order to highlight specialties of creation of their system. Conclusions. Results of the research shows that terms (90,2 % from the total quantity of terminological units), nomens (1,8 %) and identifying names (0,4 %) are used in purports. They have a different degree of concretization of the denoted. In the term system of the domain area of record administration preterms (7,6 %) are also used. Types of special units are presented in different classes unevenly: there are terms at all levels of the system; nomens and identifying names – only on the main ones, which are related to the specific character of record mamnagement concepts; preterms are mainly used on the basic system levels, but were noticed on additional one as well. They can develop the system of terms in the context of the domain area of record administration due to adding to the sphere of work with documents elements of conceptual apparatuses of other sciences. Keywords: nomen, identifying name, preterm, term, terminoid, term system, domain area of records administration.

The Others of the Ravine

In the society and culture of the Canary Islands, ravines (barrancos in Spanish) are spaces that contain a wealth of meanings and perceptions attached to a collective imagination. These natural scars that mark and characterize the island's geography represent scenes of dissidence, as will be shown through the spatial and geographic stories of various transsexuals and transvestites who lived in Tenerife between 1970 and 1990; the specific character of their testimonials is situated in a specific context: El Cabo, a barrio in Tenerife, as well as the Santos Ravine (Barranco de Santos in Spanish). The state repression, marginalization, and violence against sexually dissident people during this age will be the main context of analysis. In a brief journey through history, these aspects will be placed in relation to key events from the Francoist dictatorship on the islands, a travel journal of the nineteenth century, and passages from the conquest of the Canary Islands in which the ravines, among them the Santos Ravine itself, take on a relevant importance. Finally, this study will mention the existence of a chapel consecrated to the Virgin of Candelaria in this environment as possibly the most significant crystallization of the otherness of the ravine. This study thereby contemplates reviewing these spaces on the basis of their formation as media in which specific Canary Island subjectivities can be located.

On some general scheme of constructing iterative methods for searching the Nash equilibrium in concave games

The subject of the paper is finite-dimensional concave games id est noncooperative $n$-person games with objective functionals concave with respect to `their own' variables. For such games we investigate the problem of designing iterative algorithms for searching the Nash equilibrium with convergence guaranteed without requirements concerning objective functionals such as smoothness and as convexity in `strange' variables or another similar hypotheses (in the sense of weak convexity, quasiconvexity and so on). In fact, we prove some assertion analogous to the theorem on convergence of $M$-Fej\'{er iterative process for the case when an operator acts in a finite-dimensional compact and nearness to an objective set is measured with the help of arbitrary continuous function. Then, on the base of this assertion we generalize and develop the approach suggested by the author formerly to searching the Nash equilibrium in concave games. The last one can be regarded as "a cross between" the relaxation algorithm and the Hooke-Jeeves method of configurations (but taking into account a specific character of the the residual function being minimized). Moreover, we present results of numerical experiments with their discussion.

Creativity of Phraseology in Contrast: Cinematic Discourse vs Discourse of Children’s Literature

The article features the results of contrastive analysis of phraseological creativity in two discourse types, cinematic discourse and discourse of children’s literature. In the study, we develop the parametric approach to linguistic creativity, with the parameter of phraseology displaying both language and discourse specific character. Two compiled subcorpora of cinematic discourse and discourse of children’s literature contingent in size, genre, creation period, addressee orientation and key pragmatic strategy, serve to explore the activity (frequency) distribution of phraseology as well as its creative language productivity. The Theory of Phraseological Creativity provides the criteria for demarcating creative and non-creative uses of phraseological units. Their further analysis in two subcorpora has shown that whilst their total activity in both discourses is similar, it is the cinematic discourse that demonstrates significant prevalence in phraseological modification, which evidences in favor of its higher discourse creativity potential. The study helped reveal the specificity in the phraseological modification strategies applied in cinematic discourse in contrast with discourse of children’s literature. Furthermore, we addressed the problem of parametric contingency which brought forward other criteria in demarcating creative and non-creative uses of phraseology in discourse. To explore the linguistic creativity parametric contingency, we assessed the joint activity of parameters correlating with phraseology use. Following the procedures of parametric activity processing in HETEROSTAT software and vector-space modelling, we received two discourse-specific phraseological contingency profiles. Their contrastive analysis revealed higher contingency values in the discourse of children’s literature. Moreover, it disclosed discourse-specific functional differences in creative and non-creative phraseology use in the discourse types contrasted. Whereas non-creative phraseological units in cinematic discourse displayed low correlation with other parameters of linguistic creativity, their creative uses displayed higher correlation. The same did not stand true for discourse of children’s literature, which demonstrated high correlation in both cases. Consequently, we concluded that the stimulating function is more typical of linguistic creativity parameters activation contingent with the creative uses of phraseology. In discourse of children’s literature apart from the stimulating function, the contingent parameters also display the compensatory function, with both functions stimulating the children’s comprehension of phraseology and simultaneously enhancing discourse creativity. The results suffice to show that the distribution of two functions – compensatory and stimulating – is discourse-specific, which extends the knowledge about linguistic and discourse creativity.

Specific character of objective methods for determining weights of criteria in MCDM problems: Entropy, CRITIC and SD

The comparative analysis of objective methods for determining the weights of criteria in the problems of multi-criteria decision-making is carried out. It is shown that the use of methods for determining the weights of criteria, based on formal processing of the decision matrix (Entropy, CRITIC, Standard deviation) for MCDM problems in some cases is not correct. It is demonstrated that the Entropy weighting method (EWM) is highly sensitive to evaluation of probabilities of states based on the decision matrix. For the Entropy method two modifications of estimation of probabilities of states are proposed that partially eliminate the contradictions of the basic EWM method. The first modification (EWM.df) is based on a statistical approach and it estimates the probabilities of states based on attribute distribution function. The second modification (EWM.dsp) estimates the probabilities of states based on the relative dispositions of attributes. Two options both have their supporting rationale. The analysis of integrated weighing methods is carried out and various options for aggregation of weights are given. An integrated EWM-Corr-method is proposed which allows to re-allocate the weights obtained by the Entropy method among correlated criteria.