Reading Plato: Between Tragedy and Comedy in Cratylus

This article is a discussion on the Platonic concept of dialogue as comedy. Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language (Ewegen, 2014) was used as the central source for this article, which can provide the basis for positions on this issue in Latin America such as those exposed by Professor Buarque (2011) in our region and more generally by Gregorio Lury et al. (2018) in Ibero-America. In addition to the aforementioned work, a comparison with Plato’s writing was made using a hermeneutic methodology based on Plato’s writings and his multiples references to laughter throughout his work, in addition to Gadamer’s clear interpretations of the work as a whole. This manuscript aims to accurately establish the existence of a Platonic commitment that is much closer to tragedy than comedy as a genre of interpretation. Thus, although there are sections entirely devoted to laughter in which Plato’s humor can be appreciated, it cannot be the key to interpreting Plato’s work, at least from the perspective of Ewegen’s approach, which must be understood as an educational project, that is, a social transformation project.

Avoidance and engagement: Do societal problems fuel political parties’ issue attention?

An important part of political parties’ competition for votes is to what extent parties avoid or engage the issues that rival parties talk about. Despite a large literature on this topic, it remains largely unknown when parties engage. Drawing on research on political attention allocation and party behaviour, this study argues that societal problems are a central source of issue engagement: The engagement is due to a pressure to not ignore electorally important problems. The analysis shows that issue engagement emerges because parties address the same issues in a negative development. Moreover, and particularly important for the issue engagement, parties attend more to a negative development if other parties already attend to the development, particularly at elections. The argument is tested across 16 issue areas through the collection and coding of 5523 press releases from seven parties in Denmark at a quarterly level from 2004 to 2017.

Social Media Information Environments and Their Implications for the Uses and Effects of News: The PINGS Framework

Social media have become a central source for news and current affairs information. This article focuses on the overarching attributes that shape how people come in contact with news, engage with news, and are affected by news on social media. Although all social media are different and change constantly, news experiences on these platforms can consistently be characterized as personalized, incidental, non-exclusive, as well as granularized and social (PINGS). Accordingly, this article introduces the PINGS framework, which acts as a systematization of social media news experiences and can be used to map key opportunities and challenges of using news across various social media platforms. In addition to presenting the framework components, the article also discusses how researchers can investigate PINGS in empirical studies.

The Blazar OJ 287 Jet from Parsec to Kiloparsec Scales

The curved shape of the kiloparsec-scale jet of the blazar OJ 287 is analyzed in the framework of the precession of the central engine, on the existence on which a large number of studies over the past decades are based. The data necessary for the analysis on the kiloparsec-scale jet velocity and angle with the line of sight are obtained based on two competing assumptions about the X-ray emission mechanism of the OJ 287 jet. Namely, there were both the inverse Compton scattering of the cosmic microwave background under the assumption of relativistic kiloparsec-scale jet and the inverse Compton scattering of the central source radiation. For the latter one, we showed that the expected flux from the kiloparsec-scale jet in the gamma range does not exceed the limit set for it according to Fermi-LAT data. We found that only the period of the kiloparsec-scale jet helix, estimated in the framework of the inverse Compton scattering of the central source radiation, agrees with the precession period of the central engine, determined from the modulation of the peak values of 12‑year optical flares.

Intelligent Packing Solution for Safe and Secured Delivery

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. IoT has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the Internet. With IoT, devices typically gather data and stream it over the Internet to a central source, where it is analyzed and processed. With IoT, devices typically gather data and stream it over the Internet to a central source, where it is analyzed and processed. As the capabilities of things connected to the Internet continue to advance, they will become more intelligent by combining data into more useful information. To handle such situations, we propose a solution by automating the parcel collection unit. This paper discusses about the part of IoT in home sophistication, the proposed approach.

What is Arbitrary about Moral Arbitrariness?

John Rawls’s ‘justice as fairness’ is often cited as a central source of inspiration for luck egalitarianism, which is, correlatively, often characterized as a more refined version of justice as fairness. Rawls’s distributive hostility to morally arbitrary endowments is standardly interpreted as betraying hostility to distributions that are skewed by brute luck. This chapter argues otherwise. It has two main aims. First, it replaces the standard ‘Neutralization Interpretation’ of Rawls’s main arguments with the ‘Irrelevance Interpretation’. According to the Irrelevance Interpretation, morally arbitrary person endowments ought to play no role in the selection of principles of justice in the original position. According to the Neutralization Interpretation, by contrast, principles of justice ought to expunge the influence of any inequalities that are due to luck. The Irrelevance Interpretation is more permissive of inequalities, just as long as they serve some other purpose, such as improving the position of the worst-off. The Irrelevance Interpretation is also more congenial to Rawls’s investment in the contractarian machinery of the original position and the veil of ignorance.

Extracellular spreading of Wingless is required for Drosophila oogenesis

Recent studies have investigated whether the Wnt family of extracellular ligands can signal at long range, spreading from their source and acting as morphogens, or whether they signal only in a juxtacrine manner to neighboring cells. The original evidence for long-range Wnt signaling arose from studies of Wg, a Drosophila Wnt protein, which patterns the wing disc over several cell diameters from a central source of Wg ligand. However, the requirement of long-range Wg for patterning was called into question when it was reported that replacing the secreted protein Wg with a membrane-tethered version, NRT-Wg, results in flies with normally patterned wings. We and others previously reported that Wg spreads in the ovary about 50 μm or 5 cell diameters, from the cap cells to the follicle stem cells (FSCs) and that Wg stimulates FSC proliferation. We used the NRT-wg flies to analyze the consequence of tethering Wg to the cap cells. NRT-wg homozygous flies are sickly, but we found that hemizygous NRT-wg/null flies, carrying only one copy of tethered Wingless, were significantly healthier. Despite their overall improved health, these hemizygous flies displayed dramatic reductions in fertility and in FSC proliferation. Further, FSC proliferation was nearly undetectable when the wg locus was converted to NRT-wg only in adults, and the resulting germarium phenotype was consistent with a previously reported wg loss-of-function phenotype. We conclude that Wg protein spreads from its source cells in the germarium to promote FSC proliferation.

Terrestrial Sagnac delay in scalar–tensor–vector–gravity

The scalar–tensor–vector–gravity (STVG), a prototype of modified gravity developed by Moffat, can correctly explain galaxy rotation curves, cluster dynamics, Bullet Cluster phenomena and cosmological data without invoking the observationally elusive general relativistic (GR) dark matter. Further, recent observations of neutron star masses are shown to defy some GR predictions, whereas STVG turns out to be more consistent with those observations. These successes indicate that STVG could be a potential candidate for a new theory of gravity. However, an important question concerns the possible range of values of the STVG dimensionless parameter [Formula: see text] imposed by various physical scenarios. In the literature, the range [Formula: see text] corresponding to different central source masses has been suggested. We show here that the [Formula: see text] can be considerably constrained into the range [Formula: see text] assuming that the updated GPS fluctuation does not exceed the [Formula: see text]-dependent correction to the terrestrial Sagnac delay.

Inverse Compton scattering of radiation of the central source as a mechanism for the formation of X-Ray radiation from kiloparsec jets of quasars

For the interpretation of X-ray radiation from kiloparsec jets of quasars, the inverse Compton scattering of the cosmic microwave background has been widely used for almost 20 years. A recent analysis of the Fermi-LAT observational data showed that this assumption is inapplicable for jets of several quasars. In this paper, we consider the inverse Compton scattering of photons from a central source as a possible mechanism for the formation of X-ray radiation from kiloparsec jets of the quasars PKS 0637–752, 3C 273, PKS 1510–089, and PKS 1045–188. Estimates of the angle between the line of sight and the velocity of kiloparsec jets are obtained. The predicted gamma-ray flux for all objects turned out to be below the upper limit on the flux from a kiloparsec jet obtained from the Fermi-LAT data. It is shown that our assumption about the mechanism of X-ray radiation from kiloparsec jets is consistent with all data of multiwavelength observations available to date.

Africans and the Power of Socio-Cultural Belief: To Break or to Keep the Status Quo? Analysis of Emmy Unuja Idegu’s the Legendary Inikpi

Every single society has its dos and don’ts, and African is not an exception. What is more, Africans are strongly attached to their socio-cultural beliefs. However, as time is dynamic, there is need toreflect on the context of situation to evaluate our tradition.Thus, The Legendary Inikpi, the play under discussion, does not only serve as a central source to enable the readers find outhow African societies hold on to their religious beliefs and practices as part of their cultural identities, but also serves as a media tool that calls Africans for a change of attitude. The author considershuman sacrifice as a murder.To redirect the mentality towards certain religious practices such as human sacrifice, Emmy Unuja is able to create a female character named Daughter whose role is to convince people for a change of mentality. If we want African societies to move forwards, it is high time people change their mentality for the better.