Eseistyczna chopinologia Piotra Wierzbickiego

Piotr Wierzbicki’s deep interest in Chopin’s music has been revealed in his volumes of essays published since 1993. What appears to make his music writings exceptional in comparison with other Polish essays dealing with Chopin’s life and work is the prevailing concentration on particular pieces or even single performances chosen by famous pianists. Wierzbicki develops his project of extradisciplinary essayistic Chopinology that blends together the musicological knowledge, critical involvement, philosophical reflection and highly individual psychosomatic experience. Having stated a fundamental difficulty of ‘translating’ sounds into words, he tries to elaborate a ‘musical’ style and form for his writing, e.g. he includes ekphrases full of metaphors and synesthetic figures. This wide array of music-centred properties encourages readers to treat these essays as a starting point for coming up with the question of whether it is possible to differentiate a type of ‘musical’ essay.

Evolvability in the fossil record

The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, but paleontological thinking has tended to neglect recent discussions, because many tools used in the current evolvability literature are challenging to apply to the fossil record. The fundamental difficulty is how to disentangle whether the causes of evolutionary patterns arise from variational properties of traits or lineages rather than being due to selection and ecological success. Despite these obstacles, the fossil record offers unique and growing sources of data that capture evolutionary patterns of sustained duration and significance otherwise inaccessible to evolutionary biologists. Additionally, there exist a variety of strategic possibilities for combining prominent neontological approaches to evolvability with those from paleontology. We illustrate three of these possibilities with quantitative genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, and phylogenetic models of macroevolution. In conclusion, we provide a methodological schema that focuses on the conceptualization, measurement, and testing of hypotheses to motivate and provide guidance for future empirical and theoretical studies of evolvability in the fossil record.

PENGEMBANGAN APLIKASI PEMBELAJARAN TUNANETRA (APTUN) BERBASIS TEKNOLOGI ASISTIF UNTUK PENCARIAN KONTEN PEMBELAJARAN MAHASISWA TUNANETRA

Blind students have barriers and unique learning styles compared to other regular students. The fundamental difficulty is the absence of accessible content and tools that can help facilitate learning, including in the final project of blind students. The Blind Learning Application wants to accommodate the learning gaps experienced by blind students in the PGRI Yogyakarta University environment. Assistive technology in APTUN to find references that combines speech to text, Non Visual Desktop Access and text to speech that can be accessed online is one of the driving forces for fulfilling the needs and services of inclusive education at Universitas PGRI Yogyakarta through effective and efficient learning based on needs special education and services for students with visual impairments.

The abyss, or the insufficiency of ethical nihilism for Nietzsche’s Übermensch

In this paper, I critique the prevalent notion that only in the abyss can one emerge to be the Übermensch, or to use Hollingdale’s term, the Superman. To support this, I will first expound on the notion of the abyss as ethical nihilism from the perspective of the death of God to Nietzsche’s critique of morality. I argue that ethical nihilism as an abyss is insufficient in constituting Nietzsche’s Superman. I will then set how the Superman emerges through counter-stages. The paradox is that such tragic an abyss that serves as conditio sine qua non for the Superman falls flat when looked at in the perspective of life. There underlies a fundamental difficulty in simply accepting the proposals of acknowledging the abyss or ‘becoming what one is.’ Later, Nietzsche’s anti-romanticism and anti-Darwinism are explored to support such difficulty.

Lying, computers and self-awareness

From the initial analysis of John Morris in 1976 about if computers can lie, I have presented my own treatment of the problem using what can be called a computational lying procedure. One that uses two Turing Machines. From there, I have argued that such a procedure cannot be implemented in a Turing Machine alone. A fundamental difficulty arises, concerning the computational representation of the self-knowledge a machine should have about the fact that it is lying. Contrary to Morris’ claim, I have thus suggested that computers – as far as they are Turing Machines – cannot lie. Consequently, I have claimed that moral agency attribution to a robot or any other automated AI system, cannot be made, strictly grounded on imitating behaviors. Self-awareness as an ontological grounding for moral attribution must be evoked. This can pose a recognition problem from our part, should the sentient system be the only agent capable of acknowledging its own sentience.

Greek Constitutionalism and Patterns of Government

The holding of general elections at regular intervals, universal suffrage, and parliamentary government were fundamental characteristics of modern Greek constitutionalism as early as the last third of the nineteenth century. These characteristics are so deeply ingrained in the country’s cultural traditions that they form an integral part of its identity. In that sense, Greek constitutionalism lies behind the failure of the extreme political forces to attract mass support throughout the twentieth century, as was and continues to be the case in many other European countries. At the same time, though, by being deeply divisive and conflictual, Greek constitutionalism has been obstructing real reforms in state organization and action, in crucial fields which include, among other sectors, public administration, education, social security, and health care. Moreover, through disastrous government spending, with the sole aim of winning the next election, extreme party polarization led to an unprecedented debt crisis that brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy in 2010. That being said, the fundamental difficulty in carrying out long-awaited reforms lies in overcoming conflictual partisanship, without, however, killing the zest that still attracts large portions of the electorate to mainstream politics.

Expected hypothetical completion probability

Using high-resolution player tracking data made available by the National Football League (NFL) for their 2019 Big Data Bowl competition, we introduce the Expected Hypothetical Completion Probability (EHCP), a objective framework for evaluating plays. At the heart of EHCP is the question “on a given passing play, did the quarterback throw the pass to the receiver who was most likely to catch it?” To answer this question, we first built a Bayesian non-parametric catch probability model that automatically accounts for complex interactions between inputs like the receiver’s speed and distances to the ball and nearest defender. While building such a model is, in principle, straightforward, using it to reason about a hypothetical pass is challenging because many of the model inputs corresponding to a hypothetical are necessarily unobserved. To wit, it is impossible to observe how close an un-targeted receiver would be to his nearest defender had the pass been thrown to him instead of the receiver who was actually targeted. To overcome this fundamental difficulty, we propose imputing the unobservable inputs and averaging our model predictions across these imputations to derive EHCP. In this way, EHCP can track how the completion probability evolves for each receiver over the course of a play in a way that accounts for the uncertainty about missing inputs.

Utopische Potenziale des Idyllischen in der Narration: Ivan Gončarovs Oblomovka und Jan Nerudas Kleinseite

The relationship between the idyll and narration has a paradoxical nature: In its state of complete harmony, the idyll is beyond any change or development. In terms of narration, however, this poses a fundamental difficulty. This was a problem already recognized in Schiller’s reflections on the idyll in the context of the philosophy of history, expounded in his essay On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (Über naive und sentimentale Dichtung). By depicting a golden age, i. e., a state that can only ever be appreciated in retrospect, the idyll, according to Schiller, inspires, above all, the pursuit of such a state of harmony in the present. In identification of the idyllic consciousness, representation can only take the form of endangerment by external threats, and in certain cases, the successful overcoming of these threats. Conversely, it is only possible to show the idyll as a state not yet realized, still to be pursued from a perspective outside of the idyllic consciousness. Consequently, the device of a distant, masterful narrator is instrumental to the nuanced depiction of both Prague’s Lesser Quarter (Malá Strana or Kleinseite) in Jan Neruda’s eponymous tales and the Oblomovka country estate in Ivan Gončarov’s novel Oblomov. In both instances, the narrative allows for a critique of the premature realization of pseudo-idyll. Furthermore, the idyll is put into perspective so that beyond signifying loss, its potential to inspire visions of the future is summoned.

Lessons From Influenza Pandemics of the Last 100 Years

Seasonal influenza is an annual occurrence, but it is the threat of pandemics that produces universal concern. Recurring reports of avian influenza viruses severely affecting humans have served as constant reminders of the potential for another pandemic. Review of features of the 1918 influenza pandemic and subsequent ones helps in identifying areas where attention in planning is critical. Key among such issues are likely risk groups and which interventions to employ. Past pandemics have repeatedly underscored, for example, the vulnerability of groups such as pregnant women and taught other lessons valuable for future preparedness. While a fundamental difficulty in planning for the next pandemic remains their unpredictability and infrequency, this uncertainty can be mitigated, in part, by optimizing the handling of the much more predictable occurrence of seasonal influenza. Improvements in antivirals and novel vaccine formulations are critical in lessening the impact of both pandemic and seasonal influenza.

Comparative evaluation of full-length isoform quantification from RNA-Seq

Full-length isoform quantification from RNA-Seq is a key goal in transcriptomics analyses and an area of active development. The fundamental difficulty stems from the fact that RNA transcripts are long, while RNA-Seq reads are typically short. We have generated realistic benchmarking data, and have performed a comprehensive comparative analysis of isoform quantification, including evaluating them on the level of differential expression analysis. Genome, transcriptome and pseudo alignment-based methods are included; and a naive approach is included to establish a baseline. Kallisto, RSEM, and Cufflinks exhibit the highest accuracy on idealized data, while on more realistic data they do not perform considerably better than the naive approach. We determine the effect of structural parameters, such as number of exons or number of isoforms, on accuracy. Overall, the tested methods show sufficient divergence from the truth to suggest that full-length isoform quantification should be employed selectively.