The Horrors of War in the History of German Literature: From Heinrich Wittenwiler and Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen to Rainer Maria Remarque

As terrible as wars have always been, for the losers as well as for the winners, considering the massive killings, destruction, and general horror resulting from it all, poets throughout time have responded to this miserable situation by writing deeply moving novels, plays, poems, epic poems, and other works. The history of Germany, above all, has been filled with a long series of wars, but those have also been paralleled by major literary works describing those wars, criticizing them, and outlining the devastating consequences, here disregarding those narratives that deliberately idealized the military events. While wars take place on the ground and affect people, animals, objects, and nature at large, poets have always taken us to imaginary worlds where they could powerfully reflect on the causes and outcomes of the brutal operations. This paper takes into view some major German works from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century in order to identify a fundamental discourse that makes war so valuable for history and culture, after all. Curiously, as we will recognize through a comparative analysis, some of the worst conditions in human history have produced some of the most aesthetically pleasing and most meaningful artistic or literary texts. So, as this paper will illustrate, the experience of war, justified or not, has been a cornerstone of medieval, early modern, and modern literature. However, it is far from me to suggest that we would need wars for great literature to emerge. On the contrary, great literature serves as the public conscience fighting against wars and the massive violence resulting from it.

Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Diseases: Humankind’s Companions and Competitors

Infectious disease outbreaks had a significant impact on shaping the societies and cultures throughout human history [...]

Human Creation and the Role of the Family

The purpose of the article is to show that the most honest crystallisation of piety and humanity is creation. At the same time, the history of creation shows that the Creator created the world as a single family, the centre of which is man. The Christianity accepts sin as a reality, as an existing inconsistency between man and God. According to this, sin is as a product of human society's behaviour and morals or as a kind of disease. The enormous references in ecclesiastical bibliography, in addition to their unique goals, are designed to reflect on the need to be aware of the mystery of creation, to rediscover the vital connection between the absolute and the moral, and to guarantee the historical memory. In this article Human creation and the role of the family authors see as aspects of Theological theory in Bioinformatics for Human history

Board Games, Zombies, and Minecraft

Games have been played throughout human history and in all cultures, exposing almost everyone to gameplay in some form. Higher education is exploring ways faculty can leverage games to enhance course development and the student learning experience. The primary pedagogical use of games is gamification, in which gaming is used to transform learning activities. This chapter will 1) provide an overview of gamification theory and practice in higher education, 2) share ideas for faculty to consider when using gamification as a teaching tool, and 3) explore how the game Minecraft was used through educational and practical applications to teach a local government course.

Knowledge Management in Big Data Times for Global Health

The 21st century brings an information revolution unprecedented in human history. The knowledge management of the data generated daily is a constant challenge for organizations and in all areas of science. Nevertheless, it is extremely relevant to the health area since it promotes the individual's well-being and health. In this sense, the quality of data, information, processes, and production of products and healthcare for the populations of the countries have increasingly become global concerns. Therefore, thinking about health only as a burden is a short-sighted thought. The new era of big data requires innovative knowledge management for global health, where quality is also guiding the new times. This chapter presents a reflection of the new times and management challenges for quality in global health and One Health.

The Humble Reason. On Education in Kant and Fichte

In this paper I will focus on education as the core function of reason in Kant and Fichte. The notion of reason carries an intrinsic tendency to universality, which is difficult to be reconciled with its local (cultural, historical, anthropological) background and actualisation. I believe that the stress on the importance of learning, which can be seen in the works of both Kant and Fichte, might provide useful clues to approaching the relation between universality and particularity. I will start by focusing on Kant’s narration on the genealogy of human reason in the Conjectural Beginning of Human History, and then move on to the critical writings and selected lectures in order to focus on the role of human dignity and ethical education for the moral appraisal and the practice of virtue. Later, I will consider Fichte’s lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar, the Vocation of Man and The Characteristics of the Present Age, which are crucial to understanding the social, ethical and political role of the scholar. For Fichte, education is the best instrument to eradicate selfishness, regarded as a historical phenomenon which can lead a nation to ruin. I will then provide some conclusions concerning the two accounts and their implications.

On the Relation between Memory and Language from a Cultural-historical Perspective in Neurolinguistics

In this essay, we reflect about the relationship between memory and language, conceiving both as complex functional systems, developed along the human history and strongly influenced by culture. We give special emphasis to the mediating role of signs, mainly based on the (neuro)psychological principles postulated by Vygotsky and Luria, but also in dialogue with several authors from the fields of Linguistics, Philosophy of Language and Semiotics, among which Mikhail Bakhtin, Aleida Assmann, Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli. Two data are presented in order to contribute to our reflection – the first is extracted of a dialogical episode with a subject diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and the second episode with an aphasic individual. In sum, we argue that the cultural-historical approach may provide a better understanding of the interdependent and constitutive nature of the relationship between language and memory. Key-words: Memory, Language, Historical-Cultural perspective, Neurolinguistics, Semiotics

Trans-AI: How to Build True AI or Real Machine Intelligence and Learning

We are at the edge of colossal changes. This is a critical moment of historical choice and opportunity. It could be the best 5 years ahead of us that we have ever had in human history or one of the worst, because we have all the power, technology and knowledge to create the most fundamental general-purpose technology (GPT), which could completely upend the whole human history. The most im-portant GPTs were fire, the wheel, language, writing, the printing press, the steam engine, electric power, information and telecommunications technology, all to be topped by real artificial intelligence technology. Our study refers to Why and How the Real Machine Intelligence or True AI or Real Su-perintelligence (RSI) could be designed and developed, deployed and distributed in the next 5 years. The whole idea of RSI took about three decades in three phases. The first conceptual model of Trans-AI was published in 1989. It covered all possible physical phenomena, effects and processes. The more extended model of Real AI was developed in 1999. A complete theory of superintelligence, with its reality model, global knowledge base, NL programing language, and master algorithm, was presented in 2008. The RSI project has been finally completed in 2020, with some key findings and discoveries being published on the EU AI Alliance/Futurium site in 20+ articles. The RSI features a unifying World Metamodel (Global Ontology), with a General Intelligence Framework (Master Algo-rithm), Standard Data Type Hierarchy, NL Programming Language, to effectively interact with the world by intelligent processing of its data, from the web data to the real-world data. The basic results with technical specifications, classifications, formulas, algorithms, designs and patterns, were kept as a trade secret and documented as the Corporate Confidential Report: How to Engineer Man-Machine Superintelligence 2025. As a member of EU AI Alliance, the author has proposed the Man-Machine RSI Platform as a key part of Transnational EU-Russia Project. To shape a smart and sustainable fu-ture, the world should invest into the RSI Science and Technology, for the Trans-AI paradigm is the way to an inclusive, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent world.

Climate Sadness: The Fragile Beauty of Tonlé Sap

Tonlé Sap is the large fresh water lake-river near the geographic center of Cambodia. Visiting Tonlé Sap, following an academic conference in Phnom Penh, demanded a response at a personal and more visceral human level. Writing this poem attempted to express disquiet beyond academic examination of the biophysical dimensions of Tonlé Sap. The poem is sad for Tonlé Sap, for Cambodia, and implicitly for all of us on this planet. For thousands of years people have lived around Tonlé Sap, adapting to weather, the flow of water from mountain to sea, and the changing ebb and flow of civilizations. Anthropogenic sea level rise challenges all of this human history, unnecessarily.

The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality

Whereas President Barack Obama identified inequality as “the defining challenge of our time,” this book claims more: it is the defining issue of all human history. The struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving human history’s unfolding. Drawing on the dynamics of inequality, this book reinterprets history and society. Beyond according inequality the central role in human history, this book is novel in two other respects. First, transcending the general failure of social scientists and historians to anchor their work in explicit theories of human behavior, this book grounds the origins and dynamics of inequality in evolutionary psychology, or, more specifically, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Second, this book is novel in according central importance to the critical historical role of ideology in legitimating inequality, a role typically ignored or given little attention by social scientists and historians. Because of the central role of inequality in history, inequality’s explosion over the past 45 years has not been an anomaly. It is a return to the political dynamics by which elites have, since the rise of the state, taken practically everything for themselves, leaving all others with little more than the means with which to survive. Due to elites’ persuasive ideology, even after workers in advanced capitalist countries gained the franchise to become the overwhelming majority of voters, inequality continued to increase. The anomaly is that the only intentional politically driven decline in inequality occurred between the 1930s and 1970s following the Great Depression’s partial delegitimation (this should remain delegitimation globally) of elites’ ideology.