Leadership Lessons From Ratan N. Tata

Ratan Tata is an Indian industrialist and philanthropist. He is a visionary leader and managing change is second nature to him. His leadership exudes confidence in others and has inspired many to become leaders in his own company, and through his service-oriented nature, influenced several others outside of his organizational space. Tata's leadership commands respect throughout the world, which is highlighted by the numerous prestigious awards bestowed upon him. This chapter aims to present and explain his leadership practices through case scenarios. These lessons on leadership are transferable and may guide future leaders of tomorrow to lead our world with wisdom, dignity, humility, and authenticity.

US Flood risk management in changing times

The traditional regulatory and policy approach to flood risk in the US has been the optimization of benefits and costs, broadly mandated by federal policy. However, optimization may not be the best approach to flood risk management in light of the deep uncertainties we now face. A more incremental approach using a satisficing strategy may be. Flood risk is a function of the hydrologic factors that produce a hazard and the consequences of the hazard interfacing with the people and property exposed. Regretfully, both hydrologists and climatologists seem unable to provide the clairvoyant guidance needed by the water community facing major decisions on flood risk management in the coming years. As the seminal ‘Red Book’ noted, two things have become second nature to policy analysts and risk managers: absolute safety is unachievable, and it is necessary to distinguish between science and policy. The forcing elements and largest unknowns in determining risk rest with understanding the hydrologic factors involved in shaping the hazard.

Research on Nie Weigu's Art Education Thought and Creative Practice

Nie Weigu is a great master with great attainments in higher art education and painting practice. He is familiar with the psychology of art education and the principles of education and teaching, and has a strong interest in exploring a new way of integration between China and the West. He embraces both Chinese and Western heuristic teaching, focuses on shaping students' sound personality, and carefully cultivates students' noble quality. Facing nature and reality, he took the lead in setting an example and kept writing. He widely absorbed nutrition from other categories and foreign art, expressed his true feelings, made personalized creation, pointed to Western architecture with a Chinese brush, talked with the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, and displayed the second nature - Architecture created by mankind in an unprecedented artistic way, Creatively opening up the art category of "freehand painting" is of milestone significance in the history of contemporary Chinese art.

Is the fiṭra mutable? A reformist conception of human perfection in Shāh Walī Allāh's Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bāligha

This article examines the question of whether the created human nature, or fiṭra, is portrayed as mutable in Shāh Walī Allāh's (d. 1762) Ḥujjat Allāh al-Bāligha. I argue that Walī Allāh uses the fiṭra — or the perfection of four qualities that make for human flourishing — to anchor a unified concept of human perfection that can fit different ages without essentially changing. Walī Allāh accomplishes this by affirming the particularity of divine laws and the efficacy of local customs in realising the eternal demands of the human form. More specifically, he posits that established practices can become second nature to a community, enter the divine system of requital, and thus help a people develop the necessary qualities through highly contingent means, all without violating the Qur'anic and traditional claim that the original nature itself never changes. With recourse to some of his other works and potential influences, I conclude that Walī Allāh's conception of the fiṭra accommodates traditional theological assertions regarding the singularity of human perfection, on the one hand, and the possibility of reformed norms, on the other.

Second Nature and the Sonic Sublime

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.

Metaphoric national accents in the novels by Ransom Riggs and Mariam Petrosyan (“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”–“The House in Which...”)

The article provides an aspectual literary assessment of R. Riggs's pentalogy and M. Petrosyan’s trilogy (“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”–“The House in Which...”) based on a comparative analysis of the works. Demonstrates the relevance of the fantasy genre in modern literary study, in particular, the strengthening of myth-making processes and the corresponding growth of influence of the fantasy component in the literary and artistic process of the first decades of the XXI century. It is shown that urban fantasy as one of the most productive varieties of the genre subtly reflects the realities and prospects of the “second nature” of the contemporary and receives an increasing ideological load in the XXI century. For the first time the main configurative fantasy parameters of the cycle in the context of the crisis of mythmaking of the early XXI century are defined.