Orphans in post-conflict Liberia: Seeking care in fractured communities

Orphans in post-conflict settings have unique needs that have not been well-characterized. In post-conflict Liberia, maternal orphans are more likely to be without care than paternal orphans. This study examined the experiences of maternal orphans in Liberia, as they attempted to care for themselves and seek care from others, and the barriers they faced. In-depth interviews were conducted with 75 post-conflict Liberian orphans. We performed a secondary narrative analysis of interview transcripts from all maternal or double orphans (n = 17). We identified similar elements across narratives: traumatic loss, disconnection from family and community, and the desire for a savior. Female high-risk orphans were more likely to have formal substitute caregiving arrangements in which they were living with someone who was a relative or had been selected by a relative. Male orphans more commonly lacked arranged substitute care, but this allowed them to form relationships with substitute caregivers of their choosing. Sex also played a role in the provision of caregiving; substitute care was provided by women. Findings highlighted the syndemic relationship between poverty, violence, transactional sex, trauma, and substance use that traps high-risk Liberian orphans. Interventions are needed to improve access to mental health care, sober communities, housing, and education support. The need to integrate these services into indigenous institutions and address barriers related to stigma is explored.

Image of a Shamaness in Khakas heroic epic: the case of S. I. Shulbaevʼs tales

В статье впервые рассматривается образ шаманки в героических сказаниях хакасов, тексты алыптыг нымахов, записанные от сказителя С. И. Шулбаева, вводятся в научный оборот. Целью исследования является определение типа женщин, сведущих во всех трёх мирах, сравнение топосов, встречающихся на пути шаманки в Нижнем мире героического эпоса и в путешествии в «мир мертвых» реального шамана. Для осуществления поставленной цели исследования использованы описательный, сопоставительный методы. В героическом эпосе хакасов типы женщин, сведущих во всех трех мирах, обладающих магическими свойствами, волшебными предметами, встречаются часто. Сказитель обозначает их словами пiлiгҷi, кöрiгҷi.В алыптыг нымахе есть много женщин, умеющих предсказывать будущее, благословляющих главных героев на подвиги, давая ценные советы. Есть героини сказаний, умеющие исцелять, лечить богатырей,женщин, умеющих перевоплощаться в различных птиц и зверей. Богатырки, имеющие «птичье» одеяние,являются переходными, когда образ зооморфных помощников уходит, вера, связанная с тотемом-предком, потихоньку угасает, на смену приходят образы женщин-помощниц и советниц эпического богатыря. Новизна исследования в том, что данный тип женщин в эпосе впервые рассматривается на образе шаманки. Ранее обозначались как защитницы рода, советчицы богатыря. В древних хакасских сказаниях образ мужчины-шамана встречается редко. Как мы знаем, данный персонаж был введён намного позднее, когда помощь шамана, имеющего девять бубнов, стал необходим. В сказании «Хубан Арыг» вводится образ Толгай-хама, подробно описано камлание шамана с девятью бубнами. Мы считаем, что данный эпизод более поздно привнесен в тело эпоса, тем более традиции жанра это позволяют. В статье также проведён сравнительный анализ образа шамана в этнографической литературе и в эпосе хакасов. Выявлены схожие элементы в описании дороги героя в «мир мертвых», шаманы имеют одинаковые средства передвижения по потустороннему миру, аналогичные хитрые уловки, помогающие перемещаться в ином мире, похожие способы проверки состояния «души» умершего. Следует отметить, что данное исследование может способствовать дальнейшему раскрытию образа шаманки в эпосе и более глубокому рассмотрению этой проблемы. The article for the first time examines the image of a shamaness in the heroic tales of the Khakases, the texts of Alyptyg nymakhs recorded from the narrator S. I. Shulbaev are introduced into the scholarly turnover. The aim of the study was to determine the type of women versed in all three worlds, to compare the topoi encountered on the way of a shaman in the Under World of the heroic epic and in the journey to the “world of the dead” of a real shaman. Descriptive and comparative methods were used to achieve the goal of the research. In the Khakas heroic epic, the types of women versed in all three worlds, possessing magical properties and magical objects are common, the narrator denotes them by the words piligchi, kerіgchi. The alyptyg nymakh has many women capable of foretelling the future and blessing the main heroes for feats of arms, giving valuable advice; there are heroines of tales able to heal and treat heroes, women who can transform into various birds and beasts. Bogatyrs dressed as “avian” are transitional, when the image of zoomorphic helpers disappears, the belief connected with the totem ancestor slowly subsides, and images of women assistants and advisers to the epic hero replace them. The novelty of the research is that this type of women in the epic was considered in the image of a shamaness for the first time. Earlier they were designated as protectresses of a family, advisers of a bogatyr. In ancient Khakas tales, the image of a male shaman is rare. As we know, this hero was introduced much later, when the help of a shaman with nine tambourines became necessary. In the tale “Khuban Aryg”, the image of Tolgai-khama is introduced, the shaman's calamation with nine tambourines is described in detail. We believe that this episode was introduced into the body of the epic later, all the more so because the traditions of the genre allow it. The article also provides a comparative analysis of the image of the shaman in ethnographic literature and in the Khakas epic. Similar elements in the description of the hero's road to the “world of the dead” were revealed, shamans have the same means of travel in the other world, similar tricks to help travel to the other world, similar ways of checking the state of the “soul” of the deceased. It should be noted that this study can contribute to the further disclosure of the image of a shamaness in the epic and a deeper consideration of this problem.

COMPLEX CLASSIFIERS OF FORMAL CLASSIFICATION THEORY OF TECHNICAL SYSTEMS: HIERARCHO-MATRIX, ZONE, CYCLIC

The article highlights the different aspects of complex technical systems that can be ordered and classified in accordance with the totality, structure and values of the attributes characterizing these systems by a unified approach to various types of classifications. The most complex classifiers studied in this work are hierarchical-matrix, cyclic and zonal classifiers. Zones are the areas identified in the space of classification attributes that characterized by a similar value of an additional target classification attribute. The dimension of the zonal classification is equal to the number of descriptive classification attributes, the zonal dimension is equal to the number of zones. Adding the zones is carried out according to the target classification criterion, multiplying the zones consists in introducing the new descriptive classification attributes. Cyclicity is repetition of the similar elements that occurs in the space of physical quantities or other parameters. The concept of cycle stages is defined for all cycles, which is a specific (target) classification attribute. The internal dimension of the cycle is equal to the number of stages, the external dimension is equal to the number of acts of the cycle, the descriptive dimension is equal to the number of descriptive classification attributes. Addition of cycles can be carried out both by stages and by descriptive features and consists in increasing the number of values of classification attribute. Multiplication of cycles consists in the introduction of new descriptive classification attributes. Zonal and cyclic classifiers are widely used in the practice of describing and planning technical energy systems. A wide range of classifiers ordered from the standpoint of a unified formal theory of classification will take into account the features of specific technical systems, the conditions for the objects functioning, the context of the interpretation area. As a re-sult, the degree of adequacy of classifiers to the diversity of the interpretation area objects and the representativeness of models based on classifiers will increase

Derivational Potential of Pronouns in German and Russian languages

The question of the use of pronouns as an element in the process of word formation of lexical units of the German and Russian languages is considered. The material was texts related to different genres: journalistic, popular science, scientific, artistic. The novelty of the research is seen in the comparison of the word-formation potential of pronouns in two languages, the word-formation system of which has some differences. The result of a comparative analysis of vocabulary related to different parts of speech is presented. Particular attention is paid to the possibility of using personal pronouns that are involved in nominal word formation. It is shown that lexical units with components — personal pronouns in the Russian language are less typical, however, they are used in texts of a certain subject and in some cases are tracing copies from the corresponding foreign words. Attention is paid to the emergence of neologisms and occasionalisms, the use of borrowings. The question is raised about the role of context in the interpretation of words with pronominal components. It is concluded that the derivational potential of pronouns is higher in German, but the lexical units of the Russian language can also be formed using similar elements. An increase in the number of words of this type in the Russian language is noted due to the translated terminology from the Germanic languages.

Word-embedding Based Text Vectorization Using Clustering

It is known that in the tasks of natural language processing, the representation of texts by vectors of fixed length using word-embedding models makes sense in cases where the vectorized texts are short.The longer the texts being compared, the worse the approach works. This situation is due to the fact that when using word-embedding models, information is lost when converting the vector representations of the words that make up the text into a vector representation of the entire text, which usually has the same dimension as the vector of a single word.This paper proposes an alternative way for using pre-trained word-embedding models for text vectorization. The essence of the proposed method consists in combining semantically similar elements of the dictionary of the existing text corpus by clustering their (dictionary elements) embeddings, as a result of which a new dictionary is formed with a size smaller than the original one, each element of which corresponds to one cluster. The original corpus of texts is reformulated in terms of this new dictionary, after which vectorization is performed on the reformulated texts using one of the dictionary approaches (TF-IDF was used in the work). The resulting vector representation of the text can be additionally enriched using the vectors of words of the original dictionary obtained by decreasing the dimension of their embeddings for each cluster.A series of experiments to determine the optimal parameters of the method is described in the paper, the proposed approach is compared with other methods of text vectorization for the text ranking problem – averaging word embeddings with TF-IDF weighting and without weighting, as well as vectorization based on TF-IDF coefficients.

Cleansing Macau's Image as the ‘Wickedest City in the World’: Eurasia, Long Way, and Luso-tropical film production in Macau in the 1950s

This article discusses the Eurasia Film Company (hereafter Eurasia), which was established in Macau in 1954; the making of its film Long Way, released in 1955; and more generally the issue of film production in Macau in the 1950s. This was a period of crisis for Portugal: despite the beginning of decolonization in the post-war era, the regime's policy was to preserve the colonies. It appropriated ‘Luso-tropicalism’, a theory developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, which argued that the Portuguese had created a harmonious hybrid civilization in the ‘tropics’ through biological and cultural miscegenation. Luso-tropicalism became a major propaganda tool used by Portugal to deflect decolonization. Eurasia, which had links to the colonial government, presented a Luso-tropical ideal not only in terms of the content of the film Long Way which celebrated interracial love but also by its very nature—it was a Sino-Portuguese enterprise that also had Eurasians as shareholders—and in its production method. Its main objective was to propagate a positive image of Macau, in response to its pervasive negative portrayal in the international press and films, which often characterized it as a centre of vice. Long Way specifically responded to Hollywood and French films set in Macau by using similar elements, plot, and characterization, but it transformed Orientalist tales of crime, smuggling, and sin into a Luso-tropical story of refuge, order, and interracial love. Eurasia aimed to cleanse Macau's image and thereby justify Portuguese sovereignty in the territory in a period of crisis and uncertainty marked by decolonization, the Cold War, and tense Sino-Portuguese relations.

A New Semantic Approach to Improve Webpage Segmentation

Webpage analysis is carried out for various purposes such as webpage segmentation. The goal of webpage segmentation is to divide a page into blocks that have similar elements. A fusion approach that combines different analyses is required in order to obtain high segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new fusion model for webpage segmentation, where we (1) merge webpage content into basic-blocks by simulating human perception; and, (2) identify similar blocks using semantic text similarity and regroup these similar blocks as fusion blocks. This approach is applied to three public datasets and evaluated by comparing with state-of-the-art algorithms. The results characterize that our proposed approach outperforms other existing webpage segmentation methods, in terms of accuracy.

Типические места Малодербетовского цикла эпоса «Джангар» как средство определения авторства сказителя

Introduction. Russian folklorists have tended — and still do — to focus on formula-type language patterns inherent to traditional epic poetry. The shaping of epic songs would be facilitated by the wide use of structurally identical and stylistically similar descriptions and situations referred to as loci communes (‘typical passages’). Goals. The paper aims at identifying the personality of the taleteller to have recited the Baga Dorbet (Russ. Maloderbetovsky) cycle of the Jangar epic. With this in view, the work reveals typical passages of the Cycle, provides comparative insights into ones within prologues of the Cycle, compares the typical passages to similar elements from other cycles and individual repertoires. Materials and Methods. The study employs the methodology developed by P. D. Ukhov for the classification of Russian bylinas, and analyzes Jangar epic songs from the Baga Dorbet and Baga Tsokhor cycles, repertoires of such renown jangarchis as Eelyan Ovla, Mukӧvün Basangov, Dava Shavaliev, Nasanka Baldyrov, and Badma Obushinov. Conclusions. Typical passages of the Baga Dorbet cycle are structurally identical and stylistically homogenous descriptions where both syntactic patterns and described details and grammatical forms of parts of speech coincide which attests to that the texts were authored by (recorded from) one and the same taleteller. The opinion is confirmed by the below given examples of typical passages from other cycles that differ not only in terms of style or structure, but the very depicted objects, events, participants of the feast, the seating chart of theirs, and even numbers and sequence of stanzas significantly vary. The differences are determined by that the taletellers were representing different epic performance traditions with certain narrative patterns inherited from their predecessors. The comparative analysis of typical passages from the Baga Dorbet cycle shows the taleteller not only reproduces the once learnt song but rather creatively approaches every single performance maintaining standard elements of typical passages, modifies epic formulas employing synonyms, rearranging stanzas, reducing or adding details of descriptions, etc. This can be explained by that ‘above all in epic memory is not the formula precisely and intactly articulated in words but the artistic content, the taleteller (who) adheres to the framework of epic knowledge <...> (to) select one of the possible paths’, since this epic knowledge is wider than the text recited. So, the study concludes the whole of the Baga Dorbet cycle was recorded from (authored by) one taleteller and students whose names still remains unknown.

AN APPROACH FOR TRAFFIC COLLISION AVOIDANCE: MEASURING THE SIMILAR EVIDENCE ON THE CAUSAL FACTORS OF COLLISIONS

The lessons learned from each Traffic Collision (TC) will help safety practitioners to avoid similar occurrences in the future. However, few studies and methods have focused specifically on the similar features among different collisions. Thus, the development of a measurement method for investigating the best evidence on the causal factors of TCs was warranted. In this study, a similarity analysis method based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Similarity (S) theory, the AHP-S method, was constructed. This method was designed to identify the similar elements and similar units of collision scenes according to the analysis criteria and sub-criteria and further to calculate the degree of similarity between recognized similar pairs among TCs. Six TC cases were randomly selected as examples, and the degrees of similarity between cases 1 to 5 and case 6 were calculated separately. The calculation results showed that out of the five collision cases (cases 1–5), case 1 provided the best evidence for analysing the causal factors of case 6. This study promotes the development of quantitative analysis methods for collision incidents and provides an effective evidence-based method for TC avoidance.

Beethoven's String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, and Brahms's String Sextets: A Wallflower Blooms

Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 29, has been described as a ‘wallflower’ work that, without enough suitors, remains on the sidelines of the string chamber music repertoire. But in the nineteenth century it had a prominent champion, Joseph Joachim, whose performances of the quintet must have attracted the attention of his close friend, Johannes Brahms. The opening theme of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18, is clearly reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's quintet. Evidence from Donald Francis Tovey's recollections of Joachim, Joachim's correspondence with the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, and the manuscript of Op. 18 shows that Joachim influenced an important revision that aligns the beginning of Brahms's sextet closely with the opening of Beethoven's Op. 29 also in terms of texture and formal design. The striking tremolo opening and virtuosic scale passages in the finale of Beethoven's quintet prefigure similar elements in the last movement of Brahms's Op. 36 sextet. But the deeper relationship between these movements lies in certain shared formal elements: a common emphasis on sound, texture and sharp contrasts between agitato and pastoral elements as defining features of the overall form – and several distinctive similarities of contrapuntal strategy, form and tonal design between the substantial fugatos that dominate the development sections of both movements. It is often observed that Brahms wrote chamber works in pairs. Scholars have often posited that his two string sextets form such a pair, but the separation of four years in their inceptions and his extensive use of Baroque-style materials composed in the 1850s in the later sextet have made this argument tenuous. It now emerges that an unusual pairing feature of Brahms's string sextets is that both works respond to Beethoven's ‘wallflower’ masterpiece.