Performing the Elements in Indian Eco-Theatre: Deepan Sivaraman’s The Legends of Khasak

This article considers The Legends of Khasak, a Malayalam play by Deepan Sivaraman, as a landmark Indian eco-theatrical production. I argue for the play as an important development in a nascent Indian eco-theatre, telling an ecologically significant tale about the relationship between humans and nature through performative and scenographic innovations that transform the theatrical space into a sacred grove, a place of deep significance in terms of ecological balance. This essay elaborates on how the play celebrates the pancha bhutas, the five elements of nature, by displaying their agency and invoking the pancha indriyas, or the five pathways of human perception, and thereby awakening an awareness of our status as ecological beings enmeshed in the non-human world. In The Legends of Khasak, Sivaraman has evolved an eco-material aesthetics of performance that, influenced by traditional folk performance forms and rituals and post-independence syncretic theatre, makes a lasting contribution to the development of an Indian eco-drama.

DICE: Deep Significance Clustering for Outcome-Driven Stratification

We present deep significance clustering (DICE), a framework for jointly performing representation learning and clustering for “outcome-driven” stratification. Motivated by practical needs in medicine to risk-stratify patients into subgroups, DICE brings self-supervision to unsupervised tasks to generate cluster membership that may be used to categorize unseen patients by risk levels. DICE is driven by a combined objective function and constraint which require a statistically significant association between the outcome and cluster membership of learned representations. DICE also performs a neural architecture search to optimize cluster membership and hyper-parameters for model likelihood and classification accuracy. The performance of DICE was evaluated using two datasets with different outcome ratios extracted from real-world electronic health records of patients who were treated for coronavirus disease 2019 and heart failure. Outcomes are defined as in-hospital mortality (15.9%) and discharge home (36.8%), respectively. Results show that DICE has superior performance as measured by the difference in outcome distribution across clusters, Silhouette score, Calinski-Harabasz index, and Davies-Bouldin index for clustering, and Area under the ROC Curve for outcome classification compared to baseline approaches.

The principle of balance in civil procedural relations

The article is devoted to the study of a new principle of civil procedural law – the principle of balance of civil procedural legal relations. The article contains conclusions about the deep significance of the principle of balance for the effective functioning of the justice system. The analysis of the effect of this principle in simplified procedures of civil proceedings is carried out. We distinguish the principle of the balance of civil procedural relations and understand it as achieving the equilibrium of the specified system - a stable balance of elements of the system in a limited period of time (at this stage of existence). Simultaneously with constancy, any system is characterized by instability as a resource for system development and improvement, for entropy prevention and system catastrophe. The principle of the balance of civil procedural relations is manifested primarily in the fact that the amount of legal interest is directly proportional to the amount of procedural rights conferred on the subject of the process. When applying the simplified procedures of civil litigation, the following is observed: the equilibrium in the judicial process at first glance is broken due to the proper simplification of the judicial procedure, the absence of traditional stages, institutions of civil litigation. Meanwhile, the aforementioned is offset by the speed of consideration and resolution of the case. The principle of the balance of civil procedural relations is of particular importance at the stage of modern lawmaking, when there is a change in outlook and the formation of a new understanding of justice in the civil process, namely, the purpose of civil justice is more widely disclosed. Such conclusions are led by the analysis of the novelties of the Civil Procedure Code of Ukraine - simplified (in comparison with the general lawsuit) civil litigation procedures in which there is one way or another no dispute about the law – there is a weakening or absence of dispute. Key words: principles of civil procedural law, efficiency of legal proceedings, simplified judicial procedures, principle of balance, civil procedural legal relations.

Raphael's Platonic Vision

The four frescoes by Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Museum visually embody close approximations of several numerical ratios that are of deep significance in the material grounding of musical harmonies in the physics of natural harmonics. Of special significance is the Pythagorean musical frequency ratio of 9:8, the (discordant) whole tone interval, which in Plato's Timaeus is called the epogdoôn (‘and an eighth’).

The principle of balance in civil procedural relation

The article is devoted to the study of a new principle of civil procedural law – the principle of balance of civil procedural legal relations. The article contains conclusions about the deep significance of the principle of balance for the effective functioning of the justice system. The analysis of the effect of this principle in simplified procedures of civil proceedings is carried out. We distinguish the principle of the balance of civil procedural relations and understand it as achieving the equilibrium of the specified system – a stable balance of elements of the system in a limited period of time (at this stage of existence). Simultaneously with constancy, any system is characterized by instability as a resource for system development and improvement, for entropy prevention and system catastrophe. The principle of the balance of civil procedural relations is manifested primarily in the fact that the amount of legal interest is directly proportional to the amount of procedural rights conferred on the subject of the process. When applying the simplified procedures of civil litigation, the following is observed: the equilibrium in the judicial process at first glance is broken due to the proper simplification of the judicial procedure, the absence of traditional stages, institutions of civil litigation. Meanwhile, the aforementioned is offset by the speed of consideration and resolution of the case. The principle of the balance of civil procedural relations is of particular importance at the stage of modern lawmaking, when there is a change in outlook and the formation of a new understanding of justice in the civil process, namely, the purpose of civil justice is more widely disclosed. Such conclusions are led by the analysis of the novelties of the Civil Procedure Code of Ukraine – simplified (in comparison with the general lawsuit) civil litigation procedures in which there is one way or another no dispute about the law – there is a weakening or absence of dispute. Key words: principles of civil procedural law, efficiency of legal proceedings, simplified judicial procedures, principle of balance, civil procedural legal relations.

Supermarket Sociology

Taking Latour's engagement with the literary as a point of departure, this chapter offers a new model for thinking between the disciplines of literary studies and sociology. At the crux of this model is a site, the supermarket, that dramatizes nonhuman agency as a mundane yet complex fact of social experience—a fact that Latour theorizes throughout his writings and that a host of literary authors, above all Don DeLillo, have sought to explore in different ways. It offers a reading of the novel in terms of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and demonstrates how a site that is crucial to both the novelist and the sociologist can facilitate a new interdisciplinary conversation, a mode of inquiry that would divert from a more traditional sociology of literature whose objective would be to identify the deep significance of literary form in the social forces that subtend aesthetic production.

Analytical philosophy

Philosophical analysis is a method of inquiry in which one seeks to assess complex systems of thought by ‘analysing’ them into simpler elements whose relationships are thereby brought into focus. This method has a long history, but became especially prominent at the start of the twentieth century and, by becoming integrated into Russell’s development of logical theory, acquired a greater degree of sophistication than before. The logical positivists developed the method further during the 1930s and, in the context of their anti-metaphysical programme, held that analysis was the only legitimate philosophical inquiry. Thus for them philosophy could only be ‘analytical philosophy’. After 1945 those philosophers who wanted to expand philosophical inquiries beyond the limits prescribed by the positivists extended the understanding of analysis to include accounts of the general structures of language and thought without the earlier commitment to the identification of ‘simple’ elements of thought. Hence there developed a more relaxed conception of ‘linguistic analysis’ and the understanding of ‘analytical philosophy’ was modified in such a way that a critical concern with language and meaning was taken to be central to it, leading, indeed, to a retrospective re-evaluation of the role of Frege as a founder of analytical philosophy. At the same time, however, Quine propounded influential arguments which suggest that methods of analysis can have no deep significance because there is no determinate structure to systems of thought or language for the analytical philosopher to analyse and assess. Hence some contemporary philosophers proclaim that we have now reached ‘the end of analytical philosophy’. But others, who find Quine’s arguments unpersuasive, hold that analytical philosophy has virtues quite sufficient to ensure it a role as a central philosophical method for the foreseeable future.

Mircea Eliade y la Historia de las Religiones. Lecturas y aportes para una difusión historiográfica / Mircea Eliade and the History of Religions. Readings and Contributions for a Historiographical Dissemination

This paper has as main purpose to review and discuss the principal contributions made in the field of the history of religions during the 20th century with the emphasis in one of its foremost and more discussed representatives, the Romanian intellectual Mircea Eliade. We shall defend that this field, somewhat marginalized today, offers a general and comparative perspective of the religious phenomenon that enables to highlight its cultural connotations and deep significance, beyond a political and memory viewpoint. This contributes in this way to provide more complexity to current analysis of religion.Key WordsHistory of religions, Mircea Eliade, comparative method.ResumenEste artículo tiene como propósito principal el revalorizar y poner en discusión las aportaciones realizadas en el siglo veinte en el campo de la historia de las religiones, con el acento puesto en uno de sus principales y más discutidos representantes, el intelectual rumano Mircea Eliade. En el texto defendemos que dicho terreno, un tanto marginado hoy, ofrece una óptica generalista y comparativa del fenómeno religioso, lo que que permite el estudio de este en sus connotaciones culturales y en su significado profundo, más allá del punto de vista político y memorial. Se contribuye de ese modo a arrojar complejidad a los análisis actuales sobre la religión.Palabras claveHistoria de las religiones, Mircea Eliade, método comparado.

The whole of physics

How the Principle of Least Action underlies all physics (all physics that can be reduced to mathematical equations) is explained at a qualitative, semi-popular level. It even applies to smartphones. The domains of classical mechanics, continuum mechanics, materials science, light and electromagnetic waves, special and general relativity (Einstein’s Theory of Gravitation), electrodynamics, quantumelectrodynamics (QED), hydrodynamics, physical chemistry, statistical mechanics, and the quantum world, are examined. It is shown that the Principles of Least Time, Least Resistance, and Maximal Ageing, and Lenz’s Law are, in fact, examples of the Principle of Least Action. It is also shown how Planck’s constant is a measure of “absolute smallness,” and its units are the units of action. Never again, post quantum mechanics, can there be any doubt about the deep significance of action in physics.

3. Dwelling and dwellings

Dwelling is both an activity and a location in which that activity takes place. ‘Dwelling and dwellings’ considers some of the many types of abodes in which dwelling has occurred or does so today, and reflects further on the deep significance that may be attached to dwelling. It looks at the shape and function of areas of the home and how previous dwellers of a home may affect the dwelling for future inhabitants. It also discusses the transient accommodation of nomadic peoples. It concludes that homes provide ways of connecting with one another, with our surroundings, and with the history of the place we are in.