Epilogue

Actorly pride and infinite variety make Shakespeare’s Cleopatra a diva—surprising, charismatic, endlessly protean. Her energetic “becomings” require enormous effort that is only half concealed. She works so hard to charm that she flubs her lines, calling her attempts “sweating labor,” and her wry self-awareness makes her more vivid than other literary Cleopatras. Disdaining racist norms of beauty, she celebrates her pinched and blackened skin—attribute of the lowly laborer—as sensual and attractive. Her shifting personae draw on the multiracial, gender-fluid impersonations of the star actress and the boy player. As Cleopatra faces death, she predicts that lesser players will mock her, but she scorns their presumption. Her magnificent suicide produces admiration even in Octavius. By artful and strenuous labors, she claims inimitability in the mode of the diva.

Who Watches the Watchmen? Law Diving into “Speaking Clouds”

Comics are an extremely popular, though sometimes underestimated, medium. Yet they are able to convey the image of reality in a potentially infinite variety of genres and styles. Their explicitly fictional approach sends simple and direct messages to the reader, allowing him or her to move into a dimension where original rules, free of superstructures and compromises, apply. In fact, the cultural, political and social interaction between object and subject, which comics inevitably represent, eventually involves the theme of the rule and its relationship with society. The encounter between the comic and the legal often takes place in an almost inevitable and unplanned way and determines a synergy capable of producing original results not only from a narrative point of view. The inherently visual embodiment of the rule ends up enhancing the plot, and the rule’s many expressive potentialities. For this reason, the unusual association between comics and law has also earned the growing and curious attention of the world of the legal profession and may acquire, in the not-too-distant future, a further and absolutely unpredictable possibility of use as an atypical learning tool.

ARCHITECTURE AS A UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLE OF THE SELF-ORGANIZATION OF MATTER

From time to time, mankind moves to new levels of perception of world phenomena and comprehension of the results of its activities, revealing the unity of their structural construction and existence within the general laws of the Universe. Separate sparks of speculation by scientists of antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times about the discovered uniformity of the whole and parts (everything in everything), the universality of formulas for constructing matter from the Universe to an anthill and a molecule, were combined in the 20th century in the theory of fractals and deterministic chaos. The architecture of this hierarchy turned out to be a key link in the circle of concepts of identifying the interrelationships of all its components at different levels of subject-spatial realization: from personal space to socially organized and space systems. The projection of the categorical apparatus of the architecture of people on objects and events of the environment of various scales, on the principles of their methodological comprehension, confirmed the legitimacy of their claims to the privatization of architectural concepts as an attempt to update the approach to measuring the phenomena of the universe and, perhaps, to simplify its understanding, to understand how the whole The technological mechanism creates the universe in an infinite variety of material forms.

Sensors and Sensing for Intelligent Vehicles

Over the past decades, both industry and academy have made enormous advancements in the field of intelligent vehicles, and a considerable number of prototypes are now driving our roads, railways, air and sea autonomously. However, there is still a long way to go before a widespread adoption. Among all the scientific and technical problems to be solved by intelligent vehicles, the ability to perceive, interpret, and fully understand the operational environment, as well as to infer future states and potential hazards, represent the most difficult and complex tasks, being probably the main bottlenecks that the scientific community and industry must solve in the coming years to ensure the safe and efficient operation of the vehicles (and, therefore, their future adoption). The great complexity and the almost infinite variety of possible scenarios in which an intelligent vehicle must operate, raise the problem of perception as an "endless" issue that will always be ongoing. As a humble contribution to the advancement of vehicles endowed with intelligence, we organized the Special Issue on Intelligent Vehicles. This work offers a complete analysis of all the mansucripts published, and presents the main conclusions drawn.

Wage Utilization, Household Decision-making and Role Variations: Implications on Gender Relations among Workers of Teza Tea Company, Burundi

This paper is abstracted from a larger study that was carried out among workers of Teza Tea Company in the Muramvya Province of Burundi. The main objective of the study was to assess the socio-economic push-factors that drove tea workers to seek employment at Teza, how they utilized their wages, and the way wages accrued impacted on intra-household gender relations. In this regard, the study assumed that income earned by workers was not utilized appropriately thereby impinging negatively on intra-household gender relations – the outcome of the study proving this assumption otherwise. Methods used for data collection included; structured and unstructured interviews in the Survey Method, Focus Group Discussions, Key Informant interviews, Informal Discussions, and Observations. A sample of 150 workers was drawn from the study population by means of disproportional stratified and simple random sampling. Data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study was guided by among others, the Bargaining Theory of Krishnaraj [1], the Division of Labour Theory of Arora et. al [2], and Agassi’s [3] Marxist orientation. The study found out that prudent use of wages by the workers had positive effects on intra-household gender relations. Specifically, this enhanced inter-spousal bonding and paved way for more or less symmetrical decision-making powers for both men and women within a marriage situation. Finally, the study also found out that as a result of depressed income for the workers, gender roles within families were not rigid and instead, they took an infinite variety form with no specific responsibilities set aside for either gender.

Atomism

Epicurus maintained that the universe is composed solely of microscopic material entities called “atoms” (Greek for “unsplittable”) and void; atoms have only the properties of shape, size, weight, and resistance, whereas void or space is extended and penetrable. All perceptible qualities, such as sound, color, and even thought, are the result of specific combinations of atoms, which are themselves composed of theoretically indivisible units called minima. Space and time are similarly quantized, and atoms travel at a uniform velocity of one minimum of space per minimum of time. There are infinite atoms in infinitely extended space, but only an incomprehensibly large but not strictly infinite variety of atoms; it is suggested that this quantity is a specific order of magnitude (like the modern “omega number”), and is the inverse of the minimum; in turn, all atoms are composed of an incomprehensibly large number of minima. This conception of point-like but extended minima escapes some of the objections posed to the theory, such as the incommensurability of side and diagonal in a square. The tendency of atoms to fall is a result of the fact that they emerge from collisions in a favored direction, which by definition is down (comparable to the absence of left-right parity in modern physics). The Epicurean swerve is a sideways motion of one minimum, and prevents the perpetual collisions of atoms from resulting in their uniform downward motion.

DAVID BLAKE (b. 1936)Beata L’Alma (1966)

This chapter discusses the Beata L’Alma, a short but compelling cantata by David Blake. This is a piece that adheres strictly to the discipline of twelve-tone composition, yet manages to create within it an infinite variety of brilliantly intricate and satisfying writing for both voice and piano. Though the idiom may seem challenging at first, it eventually brings the rewards of enhanced technical prowess and an improved level of musicianship. An excitingly elaborate piano part reflects the fact that the composer is an excellent pianist. In addition, there is much scope for creating a variety of imaginative vocal timbres, and passages of dramatic tension are contrasted by lyrical phrases that use the voice's fullest range. The work is through-composed in one long span, and a piano solo divides the text's two stanzas. Standard notation is mostly used (without key signatures).