Quintilian: The Biographical Tradition

In addition to the biographical testimonies in Martial (Epigrams 2.90.2), Ausonius (Professors of Bordeaux 1.7), and Jerome (Chronicon, notes at year 68 and 88), there are some autobiographical remarks in Quintilian’s Institutio, most of which are difficult to mark with a date. Using this scant evidence, scholars from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards have attempted to construct the life of Quintilian. The most extensive and probably most influential biography is Henry Dodwell’s 109-page-long Annales Quintilianei (1698), which offers a chronologically very detailed but fundamentally speculative account of Quintilian’s life. This chapter discusses, after a general outline of the biographical tradition from Poliziano (1481) to Clarke (1967) and Kennedy (1969, revised edition 2013), the suggestions which have been made throughout the centuries to fill out the gaps in our knowledge of Quintilian’s life, focusing on his birth (it is possible that he was born in Rome, not Calagurris), his early life and education, his career as teacher and orator, his retirement and death, and the chronology of the writing of the Institutio. It also explains the origin of the erroneous claim, still often repeated today, that Quintilian was the first teacher of rhetoric who had a public chair of rhetoric in Rome, and gives a summary of the long debate on whether Tacitus’ Dialogus de oratoribus is Quintilian’s lost treatise De causis corruptae eloquentiae, and on the authorship of the two collections of Declamationes.

The FDM Technique in Processes of Prototyping Spare Parts for Servicing and Repairing Agricultural Machines: A General Outline

The aim of this research was to determine the possibility of applying alternative techniques for the production of prototypes for spare parts in agriculture and to determine the possible directions of development of their applications in the engineering industry. Then, to determine which spare parts could be produced using the FDM technique, comparisons of the most important parameters of spare parts produced independently (using the FDM technique) and obtained from producers (produced using traditional methods in professional factories) were made. A number of factors were analysed, from technical parameters such as machine type, processed material and its consumption including required as support structures, to economic issues such as manufacturing or purchase delivery total time and cost. The FDM technique has proven itself in many ways in the production of spare parts for agricultural machinery.

Online hate speech in Belarus: Highlighting the topical issues

Summary Hate speech can be viewed as a form of socio-political conflict that might be considered an inevitable result of the shift of the historical paradigm in the former Soviet republics. In the meantime, the study of hate speech in Belarus demonstrates its relevance not only in the context of the current socio-political situation, but also because of the lack of the related research in the country. This study provides a general outline of hate speech in the Belarusian online discourse at the present time. At the beginning of the article, a brief literature review and the definition of the key terms are given. Afterwards, extralinguistic factors that influence hate speech functioning within the discourse community are described. Most attention is paid to the linguistic analysis of the legal documents of the Republic of Belarus as compared to those of other countries. Then, based on the analysis of the Internet users’ comments to online news, the most topical issues are determined and some observations on labeling as a move aimed at creating an image of a social group are provided.

Writing memory: Three visual diaries related to ‘pharmacy’

Diaries offer a private space to play tic-tac-toe with intellectual, artistic and personal complexities, practice wielding or calling upon language, confess amorous feelings, sharpen the switchblades of resentment, and so on. Accompanied by this general outline of what a diary is for, the diaries made by contemporary Chinese artists related to COVID-19 are neither written for themselves or for their future readers. It should belong to the third category as a public diary for living contemporary people. It challenges the concept of ‘author’ both in literal and art discourse and might make the identity of the diary more and more obscure. Are these diaries still private art? Or before it was created, has it already become public art? This article will focus on visual diaries made by three contemporary Chinese artists, and study how the artists ‘write’ their own ‘memory’.

Temporal Control of Seed Development in Dicots: Molecular Bases, Ecological Impact and Possible Evolutionary Ramifications

In flowering plants, seeds serve as organs of both propagation and dispersal. The developing seed passes through several consecutive stages, following a conserved general outline. The overall time needed for a seed to develop, however, may vary both within and between plant species, and these temporal developmental properties remain poorly understood. In the present paper, we summarize the existing data for seed development alterations in dicot plants. For genetic mutations, the reported cases were grouped in respect of the key processes distorted in the mutant specimens. Similar phenotypes arising from the environmental influence, either biotic or abiotic, were also considered. Based on these data, we suggest several general trends of timing alterations and how respective mechanisms might add to the ecological plasticity of the families considered. We also propose that the developmental timing alterations may be perceived as an evolutionary substrate for heterochronic events. Given the current lack of plausible models describing timing control in plant seeds, the presented suggestions might provide certain insights for future studies in this field.

Memes war

In order to analyse pictures shared in WhatsApp groups of Jair Bolsonaro supporters, I will explore the idea that the act of sending someone a picture through social media performs a speech act. Thus we can separate the utterance act (of sending the picture to the receiver in a certain context), the locutionary act (what is said through the pictorial content), the illocutionary act (what is done by uttering that pictorial content), and the perlocutionary act (of affecting the receiver). The pictures analysed were collected from January to September 2019, using the WhatsApp Monitor. My main philosophical argument will be in section 3, in which I develop the idea of pictorial speech acts and its conceptual bases. To understand the communicational role of pictures it is necessary to supplement picture theories (visual semantics) with a communicative act theory based on speech act (visual pragmatics). The development of the general outline of visual pragmatics is the main philosophical contribution envisaged in this paper. My last step it to argue that there are at least three forms of naivety that render the receivers prone to the uptake of the illocutionary act performed: aesthetic naivety, communicational naivety, and epistemic naivety.

How Cultural Heritage Studies Based on Dendrochronology Can Be Improved through Two-Way Communication

A significant part of our cultural heritage consists of wood. Research on historical wooden structures and artefacts thereby provides knowledge of people’s daily lives and the society in which they lived. Dendrochronology is a well-established dating method of wood that can also provide valuable knowledge about climate dynamics, environmental changes, silviculture, and cultural transformations. However, dendrochronology comes with some limitations that end users in cultural heritage sciences must be aware of, otherwise their surveys may not be ultimately performed. We have drawn attention to studies in which dendrochronological results have been misinterpreted, over-interpreted, or not fully utilized. On the other hand, a rigorous dendrochronological survey may not respond to the request of information in practice. To bridge this rigour-relevance gap, this article has considered and reviewed both the dendrochronology’s science-perspective and the practitioner’s and end user’s call for context appropriate studies. The material for this study consists of (i) interviews with researchers in dendrochronology and end users represented by cultural heritage researchers with focus on building conservation and building history in Sweden, and (ii) a review of dendrochronological reports and the literature where results from the reports have been interpreted. From these sources we can conclude that a continuous two-way communication between the dendrochronologists and end users often would have resulted in improved cultural heritage studies. The communication can take place in several steps. Firstly, the design of a sampling plan, which according to the current standard for sampling of cultural materials often is required, is an excellent common starting point for communication. Secondly, the survey reports could be developed with a more extensive general outline of the method and guidance in how to interpret the results. Thirdly, the potential contribution from dendrochronology is often underused, foreseeing historical information on local climate, silviculture, and choice of quality of the wooden resource, as the focus most often is the chronological dating. Finally, the interpretation of the results should consider all the available sources where dendrochronology is one stake for a conciliant conclusion.

Legalization of Central Bank Digital Currency under Blockchain Industry

In recent years, private digital currency based on blockchainindustry has caused many doubts, such as privacy infringement, money laundering tools, consumer protection and financial stability. However, as digital currency has gradually become the important issue, the central banks of various countries have already started to study the central bank digital currency (CBDC). In this paper, firstly, the concept of private digital currency and its derivative issues are explained. Secondly, based on the two chains scheme of the blockchain, a CBDC system is established to facilitate supervision, which stores and accesses transaction information and verification information separately to balance the user privacy security and the convenience of supervision. Meanwhile, the consortium blockchain is settled to the public chain to protect the reliability of the data. Moreover, although some countries have started to develop CBDC, laws and regulations which regulate various aspects of it are still deficient. Therefore, in this paper, in addition to proposing a general outline of the legal system regulating the CBDC, it also illustrates separately the monetary rights and obligations of the central bank, merchant banks and the public, which will be helpful for the future legal construction.

N.I. Tezyakov. The incidence of the population of the Saratov province in 1904. General outline and materials. Publication of the Saratov Provincial Zemstvo.

The author examines the results of the card registration of patients, carried out by zemstvo doctors.

A Model for Integrating Rail Services with other Transportation Modalities: Identifying the Best Practices and the Gaps for California’s Next State Rail Plan

The California State Rail Plan (CSRP) is among the best rail plan documents published by any jurisdiction in the United States to date. As such, the CSRP is used in this paper as the basis of comparison to other state rail service plans. These plans will have been submitted to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) on record as of June 2020—as required under Section 303 of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act (PRIIA) of 2008. The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices and gaps that may inform California and other states in their future rail service plan development. This paper is grounded in the realization that, while the general outline of FRA requirements is uniform for all states, the actual content and inclusion of these requirements in the myriad state plans varies greatly. For example, California was granted an exception to help update FRA Rail Plan Guidance for its 2018 Rail Plan, other states have complained that FRA guidance and requirements on rail service planning have put state rail agencies in the position of constantly writing plans with little or no time to implement them. Throughout this research, the authors identify all the elements of FRA guidelines as reflected in the CSRP and rail plans of other states. This report also identifies the best features and planning strategies that may inform and improve the state rail planning process going forward, steps that will positively contribute to the public benefit of enhanced rail systems.