Eseistyczna chopinologia Piotra Wierzbickiego

Piotr Wierzbicki’s deep interest in Chopin’s music has been revealed in his volumes of essays published since 1993. What appears to make his music writings exceptional in comparison with other Polish essays dealing with Chopin’s life and work is the prevailing concentration on particular pieces or even single performances chosen by famous pianists. Wierzbicki develops his project of extradisciplinary essayistic Chopinology that blends together the musicological knowledge, critical involvement, philosophical reflection and highly individual psychosomatic experience. Having stated a fundamental difficulty of ‘translating’ sounds into words, he tries to elaborate a ‘musical’ style and form for his writing, e.g. he includes ekphrases full of metaphors and synesthetic figures. This wide array of music-centred properties encourages readers to treat these essays as a starting point for coming up with the question of whether it is possible to differentiate a type of ‘musical’ essay.

Married Dostoevsky? The History of Relations between V.V. Rozanov and A.P. Suslova

The article examines in detail the history of the relationship between A.P. Suslova and V.V. Rozanov in connection with the notion existing in the historical and literary science that Rozanovs marriage to Suslova was based on his deep interest in the work of F.M. Dostoevsky and his desire in such an unusual way to penetrate deeper into the secrets of the life and work of the author of The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. However, an appeal to various documentary evidence shows that Rozanovs marriage motives came from the warehouse of his nature and constituted a complex of rather complex reasons, among which the human, and not literary, research principle still dominates. The desire for a benevolently objective study of the life history of A.P. Suslova makes it possible to clarify at the modern scientific level the important facts of the biography of F.M. Dostoevsky and V.V. Rozanov, to free them from the stratifications of legends and myths.

The Estonian Mycological Collections of Heinrich August Dietrich (1820–1897)

Heinrich August Dietrich was a gardener with a deep interest in mycology. He published a two-volume monograph dealing with over 1,000 fungal and fungal-like taxa, the first cryptogamic research of this kind for the Baltic region. Between 1852 and 1857, H. A. Dietrich issued nine volumes of exciccatae named Centuria Plantarum Florae Balticae cryptogamarum. The preserved eight Centuriae and additional collections from Estonia (then the Imperial Russian Baltic province, Estonian Governorate) are revised and their current status in collections is presented. As a result, a new myxomycete species for Estonia, Physarum gyrosum, and the once doubtfully-reported species, Arcyria oerstedii, are recorded, and the earliest vouchers of some endangered ascomycetes, such as Poronia punctata and Sabuloglossum arenarium, are identified in his material. The most remarkable findings among lichenized fungi are Alectoria sarmentosa, Dibaeis baeomyces, Flavoparmelia caperata, Lasallia pustulata, Nephroma laevigatum, Peltigera venosa and Ramalina calicaris, as well as the oldest Estonian specimen of Lobaria pulmonaria.

The influence of some physico-therapeutic stimuli on the nature of the inflammatory reaction

Inflammation belongs to those chapters of pathology that, being well studied, are, however, subject to frequent fundamental re-examination and arouse deep interest and attention among pathologists of all ages. If for every doctor of any specialty it is necessary to have a clear idea of the essence of the phenomenon that makes up the inflammatory reaction, then this is all the more necessary for a physiotherapist, since the result of the influence of most physiotherapeutic stimuli is a reaction approaching the type of inflammatory in its clinical manifestation, and when the stimulus increases, it directly passes into it (burn). The exact differentiation of these reactions and the clinical significance of such a facet can be clarified only by knowing the dynamic characteristics of an organism or a separate tissue site both in cases of inflammation and when exposed to physiotherapeutic stimuli. The latter provision formed the basis of this work,

Carlos's First Steps in Parapsychology

In this short commentary I describe the early interest that Dr. Carlos S. Alvarado demonstrated toward parapsychology and psychical research. I present some anecdotes when Carlos was in his late teens and his deep interest in the history of the field.

An adaptive hybrid XdeepFM based deep Interest network model for click-through rate prediction system

Recent advances in communication enable individuals to use phones and computers to access information on the web. E-commerce has seen rapid development, e.g., Alibaba has nearly 12 hundred million customers in China. Click-Through Rate (CTR) forecasting is a primary task in the e-commerce advertisement system. From the traditional Logistic Regression algorithm to the latest popular deep neural network methods that follow a similar embedding and MLP, several algorithms are used to predict CTR. This research proposes a hybrid model combining the Deep Interest Network (DIN) and eXtreme Deep Factorization Machine (xDeepFM) to perform CTR prediction robustly. The cores of DIN and xDeepFM are attention and feature cross, respectively. DIN follows an adaptive local activation unit that incorporates the attention mechanism to adaptively learn user interest from historical behaviors related to specific advertisements. xDeepFM further includes a critical part, a Compressed Interactions Network (CIN), aiming to generate feature interactions at a vectorwise level implicitly. Furthermore, a CIN, plain DNN, and a linear part are combined into one unified model to form xDeepFM. The proposed end-to-end hybrid model is a parallel ensemble of models via multilayer perceptron. CIN and xDeepFM are trained in parallel, and their output is fed into a multilayer perceptron. We used the e-commerce Alibaba dataset with the focal loss as the loss function for experimental evaluation through online complex example mining (OHEM) in the training process. The experimental result indicates that the proposed hybrid model has better performance than other models.

Distinctive National Traits as Highlighted in the Dark Avenues by Ivan A. Bunin

The essay highlights traditions, customs, relationships, morals and manners of the Asians and the Europeans as represented in Ivan Bunin’s famous collection Dark Avenues. This article is an attempt to demonstrate the specificity of Bunin’s vision of national mentality shaped both by national identity and by the place where a person belongs to, be it a civilized urban space or a countryside. Russian mentality reveals itself to the fullest when explored against the background of the Russian estate house that became a spiritual home for Bunin in emigration. Bunin discloses the ambiguity of the Russian national character that combines spirituality with vulgarity, empathy and compassion with unrestrained craving for living life to its fullest each day and lack of discipline. The impetuous nature of the Russians is opposed to the more reserved character of other nations. Different attitudes to life and death disclose different cultural codes affected by Catholic and Orthodox traditions. In his ontology of love, Bunin explores, with deep interest, the dark avenues of the human soul, beamed through the national mentality.

PRODICUS ON CORRECTNESS OF NAMES

Prodicus of Ceos was rightfully considered one of the most famous sophists of his time. However neither research in the field of rhetoric, nor examples of eloquence and sophisticated argumentation (although, undoubtedly, all this was also his area of interest) are his main legacy. This paper will focus on his method of comparing synony-mous words, which was used to determine their exact meaning and identify differences. This method was the result of a deep interest in the study of language and, perhaps, was a response to the skepticism of contemporaries about what can be considered real and the moral relativism that flowed from such views.