MOTIFS OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN ZACHARIAS TOPELIUS POETRY

The article analyzes the motifs of Christian ethics in the poetry of a Finnish poet, writer, historian, and journalist Zacharias Topelius, whose artistic world view was shaped under the influence of the ideological and aesthetic Christian tradition. The relevance of the topic is determined by the growing interest in studying the representation of the motives of Christian morality in the works of European writers, as well as by the fact that the topic has not been sufficiently studied in Russia. References to the biblical texts enable us to trace the spiritual development of Topelius’s lyrical hero into the conscious cognition of his purpose. The author identifies the dominant set of Christian motifs represented by the motifs of purification and humility of soul through suffering. It is proved that Topelius’s works form a consistently built individual author’s model of the artistic embodiment of the main provisions of Christianity.

On the dominant set selection problem and its application to value alignment

Decision makers can often be confronted with the need to select a subset of objects from a set of candidate objects by just counting on preferences regarding the objects’ features. Here we formalise this problem as the dominant set selection problem. Solving this problem amounts to finding the preferences over all possible sets of objects. We accomplish so by: (i) grounding the preferences over features to preferences over the objects themselves; and (ii) lifting these preferences to preferences over all possible sets of objects. This is achieved by combining lex-cel –a method from the literature—with our novel anti-lex-cel method, which we formally (and thoroughly) study. Furthermore, we provide a binary integer program encoding to solve the problem. Finally, we illustrate our overall approach by applying it to the selection of value-aligned norm systems.

“I've Never Seen You When You Weren't Pregnant”

This essay posits in Vaginal Davis's 1987 video That Fertile Feeling a strategy of resistance to HIV/AIDS rooted in the dynamic of transfeminine pregnancy and fertility, arguing that Davis develops a range of aesthetic strategies for undermining, inverting, and appropriating mainstream discourses of reproduction as they intersect with legal strictures and cultural scripts around normative understandings of embodiment, health, and the notion of morality embedded in the period's dominant set of “family values.” AIDS is not, on the surface of things, a central referent in That Fertile Feeling, but the author shows how precisely this submerged status of the crisis as a signifier in the video allows Davis to visualize a broad biopolitical field and situate the epidemic within that field to address the interrelated, mutually supporting injustices perpetuated at its peak in Los Angeles. The figure of the excessively fertile trans woman emerges as useful for theorizing this oblique yet radiant approach to developing a coalitional ethos to confront both the politics around the AIDS crisis in LA at the time and its material and psychic impact.

SETNDS: A SET-Based Non-Dominated Sorting Algorithm for Multi-Objective Optimization Problems

Non-dominated sorting, used to find pareto solutions or assign solutions to different fronts, is a key but time-consuming process in multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs). The best-case and worst-case time complexity of non-dominated sorting algorithms currently known are O(MNlogN) and O(MN2); M and N represent the number of objectives and the population size, respectively. In this paper, a more efficient SET-based non-dominated sorting algorithm, shorted to SETNDS, is proposed. The proposed algorithm can greatly reduce the number of comparisons on the promise of ensuring a shorter running time. In SETNDS, the rank of a solution to be sorted is determined by only comparing with the one with the highest rank degree in its dominant set. This algorithm is compared with six generally existing non-dominated sorting algorithms—fast non-dominated sorting, the arena’s principle sort, the deductive sort, the corner sort, the efficient non-dominated sort and the best order sort on several kinds of datasets. The compared results show that the proposed algorithm is feasible and effective and its computational efficiency outperforms other existing algorithms.

Исследование влияния плотности упаковки аксонов на диффузию

Диффузионно-взвешенная МРТ чувствительна к архитектуре биологической ткани на микрометровом масштабе. Исследование конкретных механизмов, лежащих в основе изменений в DW-MRI, может привести к введению новых диффузных контрастов, специфичных для конкретных процессов дегенерации белого вещества мозга. Мы разработали метод ренормализационной группы для изучения влияния большого диапазона микропараметров на коэффициент диффузии и применили его к различным видам тесселяций биологической ткани. Наш подход учитывает влияние беспорядка и позволяет количественно исследовать чувствительность коэффициента диффузии к изменениям доминирующего набора микропараметров. Diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) is sensitive to biological tissue architecture on a micrometer scale. Determining whether it is possible to infer the specific mechanisms that underlie changes in DW-MRI could lead to new diffusion contrasts specific to particular brain white-matter degeneration processes. We have developed a renormalization group method in order to explore the effects of a large range of microparameters on apparent diffusion and have applied it to different kinds of biological tissue tessellations. Our approach takes the influence of disorder into the consideration and it allows quantitative investigation of the sensitivity of apparent diffusion to the variations of the dominant set of microparameters.

The social meaning of financial wealth: Relational accounting in the context of 401(k) retirement accounts

Behavioral economics has become a dominant set of theories in explaining economic behavior, yet such behavior remains under the limited purview of psychological, cognitive, or neural approaches. This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer’s social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a sociological counterpoint, focusing in particular on the social and symbolic meaning attached to individual 401(k) retirement accounts. Following a market downturn, neoclassical and behavioral economics predict various types of behavioral responses, in particular loss aversion – where investors seek to increase risk-taking rather than locking in a sure loss (a loss is more painful to bear than an equivalent gain). A sociological theory that understands the shared meaning of retirement saving would predict something different, a behavior I call durable conservatism. In this article, I show how this concept better explains observed risk behavior in Americans’ 401(k) accounts following the 2002 and 2008 bear markets in stocks, and how that response differed from the behavior documented in non-retirement brokerage accounts.