Porphyry and ancient scholarship on Iliad 10.252–253: Edition, translation and discussion

In Iliad 10, Odysseus claims that ‘more night has passed | than two parts, but still a third part remains’ (252–253). This gave rise to a Homeric problem, which received a great deal of attention from ancient scholars: If more than two parts of the night have passed, how can a third part remain? The main source for a variety of solutions to it is a lengthy discussion written along the perimeter of three pages of Venetus B, an important manuscript of the Iliad. The source of this text is almost certainly Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. Porphyry presents six different solutions, including those of Apion, Chrysippus and Aristotle (this last a fragment from his lost Homeric Problems), as well as a discussion of Odysseus as astronomer. The present paper includes: a critical edition of this text based on a fresh inspection of the manuscript, yielding new readings; an English translation; notes to the text; and an interpretive essay. The paper demonstrates the limitations of earlier editors of the text, and the hope is that it will serve as an example of how properly to approach and present the fragments of Porphyry’s Homeric Questions. It also turns out that, for quotations from the Iliad and Odyssey, Porphyry often does not provide the text attributed to him in the recent Homer editions of West.

Does Commodity Derivatives Function Effectively? A lengthy Discussion

The present work has been designed to intensely investigate the capability of the commodity futures market in achieving the aim of price discovery. Further, the downside of the cash and futures market and transfer of the risk to other markets has also been studied using VaR, and Bivariate EGARCH. The findings of the work point that the metal commodity derivative market helps in the efficient discovery of price in the spot market except for nickel. But, in the case of the agricultural commodities, the spot is found to be leading and thus there is no price discovery except turmeric. On the other hand, the volatility spillover is bidirectional for both agri and metal commodities except copper, where volatility spills only from futures to spot. Further, the effect of negative shock informational bias differs from commodity to commodity, irrespective of metal or agriculture.

Expansion and Adaptation

The following two chapters show how crucial elements of the educational reforms developed above all by Comenius and propagated by Hartlib and his associates emerged out of common roots in the post-Ramist pedagogical traditions of central Europe. The goal of pansophia—expressed by Comenius as ‘Omnes, Omnia, Omnino’, that is, to teach all things to all human beings thoroughly and completely, by all available means—is the ultimate logical extension of the basic aim of Ramus and the tradition deriving from him: to provide a broader education to a wider segment of the population as quickly, easily, and inexpensively as possible (section 7.i). The means proposed to achieve these goals were also very similar: namely, to produce readily digestible compendia governed by Ramus’ three laws of method (section 7.ii). No less important for Comenius’ pedagogical programme were the praecognita, systemata, and gymnasia which structured Keckermann’s textbooks, together with the lexica added by Alsted. Even the most ‘Baconian’ of Comenius’ textbooks, the famous Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), emerged from a lengthy discussion amongst Hartlib’s friends undertaken in terms far more reminiscent of Keckermann and Alsted than of Bacon himself (section 7.iii).

Jury Considerations in Capital Cases

This chapter examines the types of special consideration that jurors provide in capital cases. This includes not only the instructions provided by the court, but also the weight given to aggravating and mitigating circumstances, as mandated by the decision in Gregg v. Georgia (1976). This chapter explores the issues around juror consideration from a multifaceted lens, examining whether instructions to jurors in capital cases are appropriately effective, given their legal, historical, and empirical context. Particular attention is paid to the context in which jurors consider evidence, testimony, and argument in the bifurcated trial proceedings mandated by Gregg, as well as varied application of the procedural mandates from state to state, and the influence of different legal frameworks. The chapter concludes with a lengthy discussion of the possible human rights and social work implications of juror instructions and provides a terse review of the literature on advocacy for procedural justice reform.

Mediated heroes? Media-made heroes and the mediation of the heroic

The article asks to what extent Daniel Boorstein’s generalized and cultural pessimistic description of the rise of the culture of celebrified visibility and the demise of the hero in the 1960s can be used in order to understand contemporary mediated heroism? In answering the question, the article suggests that it is useful to distinguish between media-made heroism and mediated heroism. Moreover, it argues that celebrification does not in itself mean that heroism vanishes. By contrast, the suggestion is that we should instead look into ways different media genres allow for different kind of heroes. The article goes through three different examples in order to substantiate these claims: the finale of the first Big Brother programme in Denmark from 2001, a CBS 60 Minutes news segment about air captain Chesley Sullenberger’s landing his plane on the Hudson River and rescuing all onboard in January 2009 and finally a more lengthy discussion of the Danish version of the US factual entertainment programme Alene i vildmarken (Alone in the Wilderness). The point of the article is that generic framing is crucial to the negotiation and, hence, to both setting limits and expanding possibilities for contemporary interpretations of heroism.

On Various Things: How They Were Created and How Their Adversaries Came

Chapter 24 discusses the mythical creatures that play a role in the earthly battle against evil animals and in Zoroastrian eschatology. Among others, the chapter devotes a lengthy discussion to the three-legged donkey and its function in rainmaking. However, in this and other cases, though the donkey and other creatures are mentioned already in the Zoroastrian sacred scripture, the Avesta, their mythic function remains obscure. The second part of the chapter lists which good animals oppose which evil creations and demons.

Newton’s Mathematics

This article introduces a number of critical features of Newton’s mathematics with specific reference to his views on controversial contemporary topics, including mathematical notations, infinitesimals, and the relationship between geometry and algebra. It pays attention to Newton’s lengthy discussion of the solution of the “inverse problem” by transformation of areas, its partial publication in De Quadratura curvarum (1704), and the Continental influence this treatise exerted. The substantial gap between Newton’s unpublished contributions and the published record is introduced as essential background for the priority quarrel and for the reception of Newton’s calculus generally. The paper argues that Newton’s uncommon (for the period) views on algebra and his cavalier attitude towards symbolization were major factors in shaping Newton’s fluxional calculus at variance with Leibnizian infinitesimal calculus.

Introduction

Hitchcock’s clearest articulation of a pure cinema method appears in a lengthy discussion with François Truffaut in 1962. Discussing landmark works such as Rear Window and Vertigo, Hitchcock frames pure cinema as a philosophical approach to film style. It is both medium-specific and part of a larger narrative describing the evolution of moving image art forms in the twentieth century. The introduction situates the relationship between Hitchcock and his “imitators,” filmmakers who reflexively evolved the pure cinema method. Brian De Palma emerges in the 1970s as the Hitchcockian imitator par excellence, the New Hollywood director who strove to take Hitchcock’s pure cinematic method further in terms of mise en scène, montage, and sound design.

Amplifying Participant Voices Through Text Mining

Text mining presents an efficient, scalable method to separate signals and noise in large-scale text data, and therefore to effectively analyze open-ended survey responses as well as the tremendous amount of text that students, faculty, and staff produce through their interactions online. Traditional qualitative methods are impractical when working with these data, and text mining methods are consonant with current literature on thematic analysis. This chapter provides a tutorial for researchers new to this method, including a lengthy discussion of preprocessing tasks and knowledge extraction from both supervised and unsupervised activities, potential data sources, and the range of software (both proprietary and open-source) available to them. Examples are provided throughout the paper of text mining at work in two studies involving data collected from college students. Limitations of this method and implications for future research and policy are discussed.

Discourse Deployment under Conditions of Shortage of Information

The famous Skripal case and organization of its lengthy discussion in mass media generated a new phenomenon – a discourse that develops for quite a long time lacking a foundation for a substantive conversation. The paper uses materials from official and anti-establishment mass media to research the fundamental aspects of this discourse – its informational content, modality, emotional tonality and temporal limitedness, which leads to identifying the specific features of this poorly studied occurrence. The informational content is marked by a propensity to conflict and shortage of substantive information with the abundance of media materials about the Skripal family. The paper demonstrates how data that is insignificant from the perspective of clarifying the major event that has generated the whole discourse creates informational fluff around this hot subject and as a result the event itself is questioned. The paper explores the hypothetical modality caused by lack of reliable facts and extreme secrecy of the chemical weapons subject in general. Emphasis is made on the vivid sentiment of the discourse discussing the “Skripal case” and the lack of a visible conclusion of this speech communication dependent on its participants. This communication is deployed jerkily, through periodical information inputs. We arrive at the conclusion that the infinite prolongation of this subject is artificial by nature and servers some political and economic goals in the conflict between the West and Russia.