For linear discrete-time systems with randomly variable input trail length, a proportional- type iterative learning control law is proposed. To tackle the randomly variable input trail length, a modified control input at the desirable trail length is introduced in the proposed ILC law. Under the assumption that the initial state fluctuates around the desired initial state with zero mean, the designed ILC scheme can drive the ILC tracking errors to zero at the desirable trail length (...) in expectation sense. The designed ILC algorithm allows the trail length of control input which is different from system state and output at a specific iteration. In addition, the identical initial condition widely used in conventional ILC design is also mitigated. An example manifests the validity of the proposed ILC algorithm. (shrink)

Uncovering the wealth of traditional African knowledge and techniques has direct implications for the future development of the continent. This book is written against the background of the tragedy that most Africans are profoundly ignorant of the achievements of the past, let alone the traditions that are still upheld today. It is an exploration and analysis of Africa's historical roots, and the editor is one of Africa's most distinguished philosophers. Rich in detailed and original field research, the volume covers a (...) wide variety of topics, from the probability theory of cowry shell diviners, to hydrology and rainmaking, and the links between sorcery and psychosomatic medicine. Chapters include the use of number systems, ingredients used in pharmaceutical practice, and the mysterious phenomena of foreign objects projected into human bodies. (shrink)

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as being free of prejudice and ideology. Science is expected to represent the truth, state universal facts and make predictions. (...) Thus PISA seeks to rank countries' performances, work out future scenarios and offer policy direction. By what means does PISA gain knowledge and speak with confidence about diverse cultures and distant nations? How does it acquire a ‘voice from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988; Suchman, 2000), and become a modern-day Oracle that countries might consult for policy advice? Modelled on early actor-network accounts of laboratory life, this ethnography traces how PISA knowledge comes to be made, guided by interview data with two ‘insiders’ in the ‘PISA laboratory’. It traces the translations and the circulating reference that turn PISA into a ‘centre of calculation’. It highlights how human and non-human entities are imbricated in the assembling of scientific facts and argues for a suspension of the divide between ‘science’ and ‘politics’. In the process, the paper offers an empirical instantiation of how some concepts from actor-network theory may be applied in the field of education policy, and ponders the implications of such an understanding for evidence based policy making. (shrink)

This article is intended to serve as a roadmap to help new healthcare ethics leaders establish or renew an ethics program in a healthcare organization. The authors share a systemic step-by-step process for navigating this early career passage. In this paper, we describe five critical success strategies and provide explanations and concrete tools to help get you on the road to success as quickly and painlessly as possible. We will discuss how to define your role; diagnose your organization’s needs; build (...) important relationships; and develop a strategic plan for starting or revitalizing an ethics program. We also review some of the more personal challenges that may be encountered along the way, and identify social supports and self-care strategies. The advice we provide grows out of reflections on our collective experience as new ethics leaders in three Ontario healthcare organizations. (shrink)

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is increasingly depended upon by education policy makers to provide reliable measures of their country's education system against international benchmarks. PISA attempts to provide efficient, scientific and technical means to develop educational policies which achieve optimal outcomes (Berg & Timmermans, 2000, p. 31). This kind of scientific evidence is seen by policy makers as being free of prejudice and ideology. Science is expected to represent the truth, state universal facts and make predictions. (...) Thus PISA seeks to rank countries' performances, work out future scenarios and offer policy direction. By what means does PISA gain knowledge and speak with confidence about diverse cultures and distant nations? How does it acquire a ‘voice from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988; Suchman, 2000), and become a modern‐day Oracle that countries might consult for policy advice? Modelled on early actor‐network accounts of laboratory life, this ethnography traces how PISA knowledge comes to be made, guided by interview data with two ‘insiders’ in the ‘PISA laboratory’. It traces the translations and the circulating reference that turn PISA into a ‘centre of calculation’. It highlights how human and non‐human entities are imbricated in the assembling of scientific facts and argues for a suspension of the divide between ‘science’ and ‘politics’. In the process, the paper offers an empirical instantiation of how some concepts from actor‐network theory may be applied in the field of education policy, and ponders the implications of such an understanding for evidence based policy making. (shrink)

Forensics is proposed as a means to understand, trace, and recompile data and computational activities. It has a securitocratic dimension and one that is being developed as a means of opening processes, events and systems into a more public state. This article proposes an analysis of forces at play in the circulation of a ‘screener’ of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and associated files, to suggest that forensic approaches used to control flows of data may be repurposed for dis­semination. (...) The article maps a brief history of digital forensics and sets out some of its political entailments, indicating further lines of enquiry regarding the inter-relation of technosocial powers constituted in the interactions between forensics and coun­ter-measures. The article proposes that the posthumanities are partially constituted by a renewed relationship between questions of culture, subjectivity, knowledge and the technical. Some propositions for the technical as grounds for cultural politics are made. (shrink)

Microtubules, major elements of the cell skeleton are, most of the time, well organized in vivo, but they can also show self-organizing behaviors in time and/or space in purified solutions in vitro. Theoretical studies and models based on the concepts of collective dynamics in complex systems, reaction–diffusion processes and emergent phenomena were proposed to explain some of these behaviors. In the particular case of microtubule spatial self-organization, it has been advanced that microtubules could behave like ants, self-organizing by ‘talking (...) to each other’ by way of hypothetic concentrated chemical trails of tubulin that are expected to be released by their disassembling ends. Deterministic models based on this idea yielded indeed like-looking spatio-temporal self-organizing behaviors. Nevertheless the question remains of whether microscopic tubulin trails produced by individual or bundles of several microtubules are intense enough to allow microtubule self-organization at a macroscopic level. In the present work, by simulating the diffusion of tubulin in microtubule solutions at the microscopic scale, we measure the shape and intensity of tubulin trails and discuss about the assumption of microtubule self-organization due to the production of chemical trails by disassembling microtubules. We show that the tubulin trails produced by individual microtubules or small microtubule arrays are very weak and not elongated even at very high reactive rates. Although the variations of concentration due to such trails are not significant compared to natural fluctuations of the concentration of tubuline in the chemical environment, the study shows that heterogeneities of biochemical composition can form due to microtubule disassembly. They could become significant when produced by numerous microtubule ends located in the same place. Their possible formation could play a role in certain conditions of reaction. In particular, it gives a mesoscopic basis to explain the collective dynamics observed in excitable microtubule solutions showing the propagation of concentration waves of microtubules at the millimeter scale, although we doubt that individual microtubules or bundles can behave like molecular ants. (shrink)

Distributed adaptations are cases in which adaptation is dependent on the population as a whole: the adaptation is conferred by a structural or compositional aspect of the population; the adaptively relevant information cannot be reduced to information possessed by a single individual. Possible examples of human-distributed adaptations are song lines, traditions, trail systems, game drive lanes and systems of water collection and irrigation. Here we discuss the possible role of distributed adaptations in human cultural macro-evolution. Several kinds (...) of human-distributed adaptations are presented, and their evolutionary implications are highlighted. In particular, we discuss the implications of population size, density and bottlenecks on the distributed adaptations that a population may possess and how they in turn would affect the population's resilience to ecological change. We discuss the implications that distributed adaptations may have for human collective action and the possibility that they played a role in colonization of new areas and niches, in seasonal migration, and in setting constraints for minimal inter-population connectivity. (shrink)

This chapter presents the main formalism of the book, which is used in subsequent chapters to describe a variety of concepts in Husserlian phenomenology, and thereby unify them. A dynamical systems approach to Husserl is introduced, and several dynamical laws of Husserlian phenomenology are described. The first is an expectation rule according to which expectations are determined by what a person knows, sees, and does. The second is a learning rule according to which background knowledge is updated in a (...) specific way when experiences fulfill or frustrate prior expectations. In addition to these rules, a “supervenience function” is described, which associates how a thing is seen with a “trail set,” the set ways that thing is expected to look, relative to all possible ways of moving around it. This function further illustrates the explanatory dimension of phenomenology described in Chap. 2, whereby how we immanently experience things is determined by how we expect them to look relative to counterfactual movement patterns. (shrink)

The most remarkable about the continuity in Chomsky's thought about language is that it takes place against a theoretical landscape in constant flux, the landscape of generative grammar. Chomsky introduced a central distinction between E‐languages and I‐language, the internalized knowledge of language that each speaker has and which is the result of the interaction between his or her language faculty and the (limited) experience that he or she had of his or her mother tongue during language acquisition. The Faculty of (...) Language narrowly understood corresponds to “the abstract linguistic computational system alone, independent of the other systems with which it interacts”. This chapter aims to follow the trail of Chomsky's strongly reiterated claim throughout the years that language is not primarily a tool for communication, but rather, a tool for thought. (shrink)

1 INTIMACY Among Descartes's most and consequential achievements has been his of the mental as an independent ontological domain. By taking the mind as a substance, with cognitions as its modes, he accorded them a status as self-standing and determinate on their own, without essential regard to other entities. Only with this metaphysical conception in place, could the idea of solipsism-the idea of an intact ego existing with nothing else in the universe-so much as make sense. And behind that engine (...) have trailed the sorry boxcars of hyperbolic doubt. the mind-body problem, the problem of the external world, the problem of other minds, and so on. -/- Although the assumptions have been under fire, off and on. at least since Hegel-including with renewed intensity in recent years … the Cartesian separation that is still so pervasive as to be almost invisible. In particular, inter-relationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal-a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical. (Notice that each of these contrasts can be heard either as higher versus lower’ level" or as inner versus outer 'sphere‘.) The contrary of this separation-or battery of separations-is not inter-relationist holism but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body,and world-that is, to undermine their very distinctness. The challenge is as much to spell out what this could mean as to make a case for it. Indeed, no sooner does such a possibility seem intelligible at all, than ways bring out its plausibility and significance turn up everywhere. -/- There is little original in what follows. The strategy will be to bring some well known principles of systems analysis to bear on the mind- body-world 'system' in a way that refocuses questions of division and unity, and then to canvas a selection of investigations and proposals - some fairly recent, others not-in the light of this new focus. The hope is that these superficially disparate ideas, none of them new, will seem to converge around the theme of intimacy in a way that illuminates and supports them all. Sorting and and aligning issues in this manner has sometimes been discussed under titles like 'embedded computation’ and 'situated cognition'. (shrink)

A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...) that form chemical barriers that it avoids in foraging explorations. Here, environmental building and sensorimotor engagement are part of the same process with P. polycephalum coordinating around self-created, affordance-bearing geographies, which nonetheless exist independently in ways described by ecological realists. For ecological psychologists, affordances are values, meaning values are external to the perceiver. I argue that agent-enacted values have the same status and thus do not obviate ecological realism or generate subjectivism. The constructivist-realist debate organizes around the emphasis that enactivists and ecological theorists respectively place on the inner constitution of organisms vs. the structure of environments. Building on alimentary themes introduced in the P. polycephalum example and also in Gibson’s work, I go on to consider how environment, brain, visceral systems, and even bacteria within them enter perceptual loops. This highlights almost unfathomable degrees of mutually modulating internal and external synchronization. It also shows instances in which internal conditions alter worldly configurations and invert values, in Gibson’s sense of the term, albeit without implying subjectivism. My aim is to cut across the somatic focus of enactive constructivism and the external environment-oriented emphasis of ecological realism and show that enactivism can enrich ecological accounts of value. (shrink)

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) claims that the cognitive processes that materially realise thinking are sometimes partially constituted by entities that are located external to an agent’s body in its local envi- ronment. We show how proponents of HEC need not claim that an agent must have a central nervous system, or physically instantiate processes organised in such a way as to play a causal role equivalent to that of the brain if that agent is to be capable of (...) cognition. Focusing on the case of spatial memory, we make our argument by taking a close look at the striking example of Physarum Polycephalum plasmodium (i.e., slime mould) which uses self- produced non-living extracellular slime trails to navigate its environment. We will argue that the use of exter- nalized spatial memory by basal organisms like Physarum is an example of extended cognition. Moreover, it is a possible evolutionary precursor to the use of internal spatial memory and recall in animals thus demonstrating how extended cognition may have emerged early in evolutionary history. (shrink)

In derivations of a sequent system, $\mathcal{L}\mathcal{J}$, and a natural deduction system, $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{J}$, the trails of formulae and the subformula property based on these trails will be defined. The derivations of $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{J}$ and $\mathcal{L}\mathcal{J}$ will be connected by the map $g$, and it will be proved the following: an $\mathcal{N}\mathcal{J}$-derivation is normal $\Longleftrightarrow $ it has the subformula property based on trails $\Longleftrightarrow $ its $g$-image in $\mathcal{L}\mathcal{J}$ is without maximum cuts $\Longrightarrow $ that $g$-image has the subformula property based (...) on trails. In $\mathcal{L}\mathcal{J}$-derivations, another type of cuts, sub-cuts, will be introduced, and it will be proved the following: all cuts of an $\mathcal{L}\mathcal{J}$-derivation are sub-cuts $\Longleftrightarrow $ it has the subformula property based on trails. (shrink)

The social trackways theory is centered on the remarkable 3.66 mya Laetoli Fossilized Trackways, for they incontrovertibly reveal our ancestors were already obligate bipeds with very human-like feet, and were intentionally stepping in other band members’ footprints to maintain safe footing. Trackways are unique among natural sign systems in possessing a depictive narratively generative structure, somewhat like the symbolic sign systems of gestural languages. Therefore, due to daily embodied reiteration of their own and other band member’s old footprints, (...) both for bipedal safety and as recognizable wayfinding markers for socio-ecological navigation, incrementally our Mid-Pliocene ancestors began to acquire a cognitive capacity for episodic personal memories and episodic future simulations. They began mentally representing themselves as intentional agents continuously travelling from the past into the future. This spatially and temporally self-projecting awareness manifested itself as extra theory of mind and mental space-and-time-travel capacities, which increasingly enabled intentional or conscious, top-down executive adjustment of past behaviors for the sake of achieving better ways of doing things in the future. Future-directed behavioral and cultural adaptations began to increase fitness in all domains, thus creating powerful selective feedback for further entrenchment. Here we focus on overtly or consciously intentional exploratory wayfinding and transmission of elsewhere-and-when information, using pragmatic, discursive modes of communication, which enabled far more cooperative and efficient foraging practices. Selection for better communication thus led to intentional trail marking and the earliest emergence of more conventional/symbolic depictive and gestural “protolanguages.”. (shrink)

This article investigates the palimpsest reception of Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 500) in the metaphysics of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). The article covers Cusa’s political theory and metaphysics, which are intertwined. Reading Cusa against the backdrop of an analysis of Pseudo-Dionysius’ metaphysics in a preceding article, the author, in a synthetic conclusion, isolates seven Dionysic ‘trails’ (S1 to S7) in Cusa’s metaphysics: the interpretation of transcendence as bound to immanence; the affirmation of God’s transcendence in the world (or a metaphysics of ‘creation (...) as teophany’); the radical transcendence and simultaneous radical immanence of God (that is, God as ‘Beingness’); fundamental restrictions of language and the analogical ‘Naming’ of God; creation as a system of dialectical symbols about God; the analogical participation of the subject in creation; and unification (reditus, the ‘flowing of things back to God’). The Dionysic trails in Cusa’s metaphysics are described as a noteworthy, if not important, palimpsest in the corpus of late Medieval philosophy and is indicative of what the author puts forward as ‘discursive memory’, which is presented as a modern-critical concept. (shrink)

The research discussed in this paper centers around the convergence of extended reality (XR) platforms, computational design, digital fabrication, and critical urban study practices. Its aim is to cultivate interdisciplinary and multiscalar approaches within these domains. The research endeavor represents a collaborative effort between two primary disciplines: critical urban studies, which prioritize socio-environmental justice, and integrated digital design to production, which emphasize the realization of volumetric or voxel-based structural systems. Moreover, the exploration encompasses augmented reality to assess its utilization (...) in both the assembly process of the structures and the integration of phygital (physical and digital) data with the physical environment. Within the context of these research scopes, this paper introduces FabriCity-XR as an interactive phygital installation. In addition to presenting an overview of the integrated research driven and performative design to production methodologies, the project showcases the practical implementation of web-based augmented reality trails, eliminating the requirement for external applications for interaction. This approach allows users to seamlessly navigate and engage with phygital content overlaid on physical objects using their personal smart devices. The result is a captivating and immersive user experience that effectively merges the physical and digital realms. (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of twentieth-century life sciences have demonstrated that the choice of experimental organism can profoundly influence research fields, in ways that sometimes undermined the scientists’ original intentions. The present paper aims to enrich and broaden the scope of this literature by analysing the career of unicellular green algae of the genus Chlorella. They were introduced for the study of photosynthesis in 1919 by the German cell physiologist Otto H. Warburg, and they became the favourite research objects in this (...) field up to the 1960s. The paper argues that dealing with Chlorella’s high metabolic flexibility was crucial for the emergence of a new conception of photosynthesis, as a plastic, integrated system of pathways. At the same time, it led to new collaborations between physiologists and phycologists, both of whom started to re-orient their studies in ecologically informed directions. Following Chlorella’s trail, hence, not only elucidates how experimental organisms forced scientists to change their conceptual approaches and techniques, but also provides insight into the interaction of different lines of research of mid-twentieth century plant sciences. (shrink)

The conditions of hunting and gathering through which one line of primates evolved into humans form the basis of what I term the wild self, a self marked by developmental needs of prolonged human neoteny and by deep attunement to the profusion of communicative signs of instinctive intelligence in which relatively “unmatured” hominids found themselves immersed. The passionate attunement to, and inquiry into, earth-drama, in tracking, hunting, foraging, rhythming, singing, and other arts/sciences, provided the trail to becoming human, and (...) provide external grammatical structures that became the basis of human language and animate mind. I outline my new philosophy of history as a progress in precision, counteracted by a regressive contraction of mind. The progress associated with history since the beginning of agriculturally-based civilizations can be considered as a regressive contraction from animate mind of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary past, to anthropocentric mind, and finally to the ghost in the machine world-view of mechanico-centric mind. Contemporary consumption culture represents an inversion of the original conditions of the human self, and indeed, targets aspects of developmental neoteny to condition conformity to its rational-mechanical system imperatives. (shrink)

We considered peculiarities of the evolution of a region with sharp boundaries that is filled with a partially ionized plasma and is a part of the volume of a condensed target. The creation of such a region in the near-surface layer of the target can be related to the action of an external impulse symmetric ionizator or to the action of an intense small-extension shock wave on the target surface. We defined the conditions such that their fulfilment during the establishment (...) of the equilibrium between the Coulomb attraction of electrons and ions with atom ionization multiplicity Z* 1 and the kinetic pressure of electrons causes both the compression of this region and its ionization to the state with Z* 2 > Z* 1. The last leads to a further additional compression and ionization. Under these conditions, the spontaneous avalanche-like ionization of atoms of the target to the state of ‘‘bare’’ nuclei occurs synchronously with the avalanche-like metallization and the self-compression of the target. We showed that the avalanche-like ionization and the self-compression of the target happen in the case where the gas of degenerate electrons has drift momentum. If the region with initial ionization has the form of thin spherical layer, the process of avalanche-like ionization and self-compression of the target in this region is accompanied by the accelerated movement of the plasma layer to the target center. One of the reasons for the accelerated movement is the surface tension in a bounded domain of the nonequilibrium plasma layer neutralized by ions of the target. With increase in the velocity of movement of this layer to the target center, the additional self-compression of the system of electrons and nuclei to the state of degenerate electron gas occurs. At the leading edge of the running layer with extremely high electron density which is neutralized by nuclei of the target, the formation of a collapse of the electron--nucleus system proceeds, and the binding energy maximum for the electron--nucleus system shifts from A≈60 to A ≫ 60. This result makes possible the fast synthesis of superheavy nuclei. The decay of the collapse state, a partial restoration of the target structure, its rapid cooling, and the condensation of a part of the products of nuclear reactions happen in the target volume at the trailing edge of the moving plasma layer. Upon such a scanning propagation of the wave with high electron density, all the target substance is involved, step-by-step, to the process of nuclear transformations. At the target center, the moving plasma layer is squeezed with the formation of the state of quasistationary collapse under inertial confinement. Then the collapse state decays irreversibly. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss how information theory has been used in the study of animal communication, as well as how these uses are justified. Biologists justify their use of Shannon’s information measures by the work they do in allowing for comparisons between different organisms and because they measure a quantity that is purported to be important for natural selection. I argue that there are problems with both sorts of justification. To make these difficulties clear, I focus on the use (...) of Shannon’s information measures to quantify the amount of information transmitted by the fire ant’s odor trail and the honeybee’s waggle dance. Both of these systems are relatively simple and well understood, and the application of Shannon’s information measure to these systems initially seemed very promising and relatively straightforward. They are therefore particularly suitable for revealing the benefits and difficulties of applying Shannon’s information measures to biological systems in general, and animal communication systems in particular. (shrink)

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the (...) dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike. (shrink)

Satisfaction or contentment is deficient in our intelligent world, for entropy is at its prodigality accompanying the egoistic human mind. The lesser beings are content with what is provided, seem more beholden of being created, rather than the selfish unsatisfied human, whose desire to gain has no limit leaving the body unsatisfied to deteriorate thy own soul and its existence and of the others. The cause of entropy is human intelligence and the falsified superiority of human consciousness that leaves the (...) body unsatisfied and the soul to writhe; for it creates a resistance in the flow of consciousness that makes the human loose its value of life and all that resides within. Egoism enhances superiority promotes an indestructible feeling; denies consciousness that flows within and across the system; a loss of revere to the cosmic bridge of consciousness that links the body, mind and soul to the universe. Satisfaction can be gotten when one clearly differentiates the subjectivity from the objectivity of consciousness; for the subjectivity of consciousness cannot be taken for granted over its trailing objectivity that ceaselessly deceives. (shrink)

Proponents of the “literacy” thesis share with proponents of the “extended mind” thesis the viewpoint that communication systems such as language or writing have cognitive implications that go beyond their purely social and communicative purposes. Conceiving of media as extensions of the mind thus has the potential to bring together and cross-fertilize research programs that are currently placed in distant corners of the study of mind, language, and society. In this issue, we bring together authors with a diverse set (...) of interests to identify promising areas of overlap, blaze new trails for us to explore, but also to highlight dissonances and challenges that will have to be addressed in future work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:19. AN 'INCONVENIENCE' OF ANTHROPOMORPHISM In Part II of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Cleanthes maintains that the similarities between the works of nature and those of human contrivance, namely, the presence of means to ends relations and a coherence of parts, are sufficient to enable us to reason analogically to the conclusion that the cause of the design of the world resembles human intelligence. Cleanthes insists in Part (...) IV that the ideas which -we have of mind are 'just and adequate and correspondent' to God's nature. Philo, who throughout the discussion has insisted on 'the adorable mysteriousness ' of the divine nature, responds to Cleanthes by saying that he will endeavour to show the inconveniences of that anthropomorphism, which you have embraced; and shall prove, that there is no ground to suppose a plan of the world to be formed in the divine mind, consisting of distinct ideas, differently arranged; in the same manner as an architect forms in his head the plan of a house which he intends to execute. (D160) It is the aim of this paper to explicate this 'inconvenience of Cleanthes' anthropomorphism. Philo begins by claiming that nothing is gained by Cleanthes' position whether it is assessed by 'reason' or by 'experience'. The judgment of reason is that a mental world or universe of ideas requires a cause as much as does a material world or universe of objects ; and if similar in its arrangement must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject, which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an ahi: L ra.-t view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attenda the one supposition, which is not common to both of them. (D160) Similarly, experience cannot perceive any material difference in this particular, between these two kinds of worlds, but finds them to be governed by similar principles, and to depend upon an equal variety of causes in their operations. (D16ÌÌ 20. Philo concludes that the type of argument employed by Cleanthes leads to an infinite regress: How therefore shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being, whom you suppose the Author of nature, or, according to your system of anthropomorphism, the ideal world, into which you trace the material? Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle. (D161) He then suggests, as though it will prove to be more satisfactory, that we should not go beyond the material world itself: But if we stop, and go no farther; why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? How can we satisfy ourselves without going on in infinitum? And after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression?... If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better... never to look beyond the present material world. (D161-162) In suggesting that it is better never to look beyond the material world, what precisely is it that Philo is 2 advocating? George Nathan maintains that "Cleanthes is unaware that Philo is trying to eliminate only the externality of the cause. He is not trying to deny its intelligence ". (Chappell 410) Pike, on the other hand, interprets Philo' s position as eliminating the requirement for a causal account of the order present in the world: If we introduce an ordered mind in an effort to explain the existence of an ordered world, must we not provide a similar explanation of the ordered mind? But if we accept this demand, we shall have to introduce yet another intelligent being as the creator of the first. This explanatory chain can end only in an infinite regress. We would probably do better to assume that order in the material world is an ultimate fact that does not require explanation. Once we take the first step down the explanatory trail we are committed to go on forever. (Pike 157) 21. I will now examine critically the interpretations suggested by Nathan and Pike. Certain questions suggest themselves regarding Nathan's position. First, what does Nathan mean by the intelligence of... (shrink)

The 1840s brought a certain revival both in intellectual life and efforts to modernize agriculture in the Kingdom of Poland. Count Andrzej Zamoyski (1800–1874) played an inspiring role here. In all his properties replaced feudal service by rents. Moreover, even though the villein system was still in place, he was a spokesman for a transition to this more modern form of managing for the totality of the landed gentry. On his initiative, the periodical “Roczniki Gospodarstwa Krajowego” (“Polish Farming Annual”) came (...) out. “Roczniki” brought in representatives of the Kingdom’s landed gentry supporting actions aimed at economic development and the promotion of civilization, soon to be called organic work. Representatives of the landowning party supporting the idea of organic work were popularly called “klemensowczycy”, because of their participation in conventions held in Andrzej Zamoyski’s estate in the village of Klemensów. The leader of the “klemensowczycy” blazed a trail for Poland’s progress of civilization, where he was characterized by Occidentalism, understood as referring to historical experiences of the Western world. (shrink)

The formation of blood vessels within the vascular system entails a variety of cellular processes, including proliferation, migration and differentiation. In many cases, these diverse processes need to be finely coordinated among neighbouring endothelial cells in order to establish a functional vascular network. For instance, during angiogenic sprouting specialized endothelial tip cells follow guidance cues and migrate extensively into avascular tissues while trailing stalk cells must stay connected to the patent blood vessel. The vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and Notch (...) signalling pathways have emerged as the major players in governing these different cellular behaviours. In particular, recent work indicates an important role for Notch signalling in determining how an endothelial cell responds to VEGF. In this review, we provide an overview of these biochemically distinct pathways and discuss how they may interact during endothelial cell differentiation and angiogenesis. BioEssays 30:303–313, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

Purpose. Our study aims at developing a conceptual model of transdisciplinary synthesis of philosophical-anthropological, sociopolitical and epistemological aspects of co-evolution of the scientific and technical designs of High Hume class and the socio-cultural / political context in the process of anthropo-socio-cultural genesis. The relevance of the topic is justified by the technologization of all spheres of human existence and the emergence of High Hume class technologies, which can be called technology-driven equally. As a result, the concepts of "bio-power" and "biopolitics" (...) have become ones of the most frequently mentioned in modern philosophical and anthropological discourse and attract increasing attention of philosophers, sociologists, and, in the last decadecades, experts in the field of practical political science and economics (Foucault, Agamben, Žižek, Kebnik, Nadesan, etc.). Theoretical basis. It is problem-theoretical research; We synthesize the results of our publications in recent years. We proceed from the fact that the main question of the informational phase of the development of a technogenic civilization lies in the rationalization and technologization of the evolutionary process, i.e. in the removal of the fundamental ontological antinomy “Evolution versus Reasonable Design”, as a result for modern neoliberal political democracy, biopower and its theoretical understanding (biopolitics) are effective tools and technologies to form of optimal trends of the global evolutionary process, in the framework of this ideological system. We have chosen the comparative conceptual analysis combining with the results of the content analysis of Web publications by the main method of the study. Originality of the research is in the fact that the central core of such a model is the use of a conceptual and terminological apparatus for describing the mechanisms of the progressive evolution of complex systems, known as the “triple spiral” by Ledeisdorf-Itskovich. This allowed us to integrate the bio-power phenomenon into the general scheme of a stable evolutionary strategy of a technogenic civilization. The conclusions. We justified the transformation of biopolitics into the main factor in the global evolution of self-organizing human-sized systems, including the biosphere as a whole. This is achieved through the creation of a specific (bio) ethical system of imperatives and the activities of individuals in relation to themselves and other agents of social actions. Bioethics with a trail of associated conceptual areas (biosociology, bioeconomics, biohistory, etc.) turned out to be the only rationalized regulator of the process of biological and sociocultural evolution. The triple spiral biotechnology – bioeconomy – bioenergy as the material substance of the life of technological civilization is reflected in the ideal world as a triad of bioethics – biosociology – biopolitics. Both triads form closed cycles of evolutionary transformations that transmit and amplify the initial momentum of transformations on each other through a cascade mechanism with positive feedback. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

This book is a survey of how law, language and translation overlap with concepts, crimes and conflicts. It is a transdisciplinary survey exploring the dynamics of colonialism and the globalization of crime. Concepts and conflicts are used here to mean 'conflicting interpretations' engendering real conflicts. Beginning with theoretical issues and hermeneutics in chapter 2, the study moves on to definitions and applications in chapter 3, introducing cattle stealing as a comparative theme and global case study in chapter 4. Cattle stealing (...) is also known in English as 'rustling, duffing, raiding, stock theft, lifting and predatorial larceny.' Crime and punishment are differently perceived depending on cultures and legal systems: 'Captain Starlight' was a legendary 'duffer'; in India 'lifting' a sacred cow is a sacrilegious act. Following the globalization of crime, chapter 5 deals with human rights, ethnic cleansing and genocide. International treaties in translation set the scene for two world wars. Introducing 'unequal treaties' (e.g. Hong Kong), chapter 6 highlights disasters caused by treaties in translation. Cases feature American Indians (the 'trail of broken treaties'), Maoris (Treaty of Waitangi) and East Africa (Treaty of Wuchale). (shrink)

The welfare reform law of 1996 completely overhauled the nation's system of assistance to low-income families. The reauthorization of that law, now several months overdue because of congressional delays, presents an opportunity for religious social ethicists to evaluate the adequacy of our nation's anti-poverty efforts. This paper surveys policy developments from 1996 to 2003 and analyzes five key issues in the reauthorization debate: the size and structure of welfare block grants; work requirements; welfare time limits, sanctions, and exemptions; marriage promotion (...) and the family cap; and ancillary programs providing work supports such as food stamps, Medicaid, and child care subsidies. A variety of ethical critiques of policy proposals is offered, some of them from the perspective of Catholic social teaching. The trail of missed opportunities in welfare reform will probably continue, as American social policy fails to act upon an accurate portrayal of the challenges facing poor families today. (shrink)

Proponents of the “literacy” thesis share with proponents of the “extended mind” thesis the viewpoint that communication systems such as language or writing have cognitive implications that go beyond their purely social and communicative purposes. Conceiving of media as extensions of the mind thus has the potential to bring together and cross-fertilize research programs that are currently placed in distant corners of the study of mind, language, and society. In this issue, we bring together authors with a diverse set (...) of interests to identify promising areas of overlap, blaze new trails for us to explore, but also to highlight dissonances and challenges that will have to be addressed in future work. (shrink)

The main proposal of this paper is that boundary objects and the trading zones in which they occur are the analogue of pheromone trails in the foraging of a termite colony. The colony can be construed as a _stigmergic_ system where the traces of the actions of individual termites coordinate their further actions without the existence of any central control or planning structures. The coordinated systems approach proposed by this paper lends support to the idea that such a system (...) is minimally cognitive in the sense that it is responsible for goal-directed behaviour. Boundary objects and trading zones in scientific practice play a similar functional role to pheromone traces because they are responsible for the same kind of coordination. This approach therefore provides a cognitive account of the social notions of boundary object and trading zone without making representationalist or computationalist assumptions. Moreover, it is scale-invariant—the same analytical technique can be applied at multiple scales simultaneously. It therefore provides a framework for an understanding of the complementarity of cognitive and social approaches to scientific investigation and points to areas for further ethnographic research. (shrink)

The harvest and the pigeons. A note on the summit course of the pillar of Prusias at Delphi The remains of the pillar of Prusias, next to the temple of Apollon at Delphi, have generated much comment. Indeed, the course that supported the equestrian statue of the king of Bithynia presents 112 mortises, above and beyond the attachment holes of the statue itself. Until the present, it has been thought that these cavities served to attach vegetal elements, ears of corn (...) reaped by a laborer or, after the identification of the base as belonging to the pillar of Prusias, a field of corn signifying the beneficence of the king. A trail of textual and archaeological indications prompts a different interpretation for this enigmatic arrangement. The mortises would have served the insertion of bronze points (obeloi or meniskoi) forming a system of protection against defacement by birds, as is occasionally the case in sculpture and in temple architecture. (shrink)

Recently, psychological phenomena have been expanded to new domains, crisscrossing boundaries of organizational levels, with the emergence of areas such as social personality and ecosystem learning. In this contribution, we analyze the ascription of an individual-based concept (personality) to the social level. Although justified boundary crossings can boost new approaches and applications, the indiscriminate misuse of concepts refrains the growth of scientific areas. The concept of social personality is based mainly on the detection of repeated group differences across a population, (...) in a direct transposition of personality concepts from the individual to the social level. We show that this direct transposition is problematic for avowing the nonsensical ascription of personality even to simple electronic devices. To go beyond a metaphoric use of social personality, we apply the organizational approach to a review of social insect communication networks. Our conceptual analysis shows that socially self-organized systems, such as isolated ant trails and bee’s recruitment groups, are too simple to have social personality. The situation is more nuanced when measuring the collective choice between nest sites or foraging patches: some species show positive and negative feedbacks between two or more self-organized social structures so that these co-dependent structures are inter-related by second-order, social information systems, complying with a formal requirement for having social personality: the social closure of constraints. Other requirements include the decoupling between individual and social dynamics, and the self-regulation of collective decision processes. Social personality results to be sometimes a metaphorical transposition of a psychological concept to a social phenomenon. The application of this organizational approach to cases of learning ecosystems, or evolutionary learning, could help to ground theoretically the ascription of psychological properties to levels of analysis beyond the individual, up to meta-populations or ecological communities. (shrink)

The first topic of concern is anonymity, specifically the anonymity that is available in communications on the Internet. An earlier paper argues that anonymity in electronic communication is problematic because: it makes law enforcement difficult ; it frees individuals to behave in socially undesirable and harmful ways ; it diminishes the integrity of information since one can't be sure who information is coming from, whether it has been altered on the way, etc.; and all three of the above contribute to (...) an environment of diminished trust which is not conducive to certain uses of computer communication. Counterbalancing these problems are some important benefits. Anonymity can facilitate some socially desirable and beneficial behavior. For example, it can eliminate the fear of repercussions for behavior in contexts in which repercussions would diminish the availability or reliability of information, e.g., voting, personal relationships between consenting adults, and the like. Furthermore, anonymity can be used constructively to reduce the effect of prejudices on communications. Negative aspects of anonymity all seem to point to a tension between accountability and anonymity. They suggest that accountability and anonymity are not compatible, and they even seem to suggest that since accountability is a good thing, it would be good to eliminate anonymity. In other words, the problems with anonymity suggest that individuals are more likely to behave in socially desirable ways when they are held accountable for their behavior, and they are more likely to engage in socially undesirable behavior when they are not held accountable. I am not going to take issue with the correlation between accountability and anonymity, but rather with the claim that accountability is good. To examine this problem, let's look at a continuum that stretches from total anonymity at one end, and no anonymity at all at the other end. At the opposite extreme of anonymity is a panopticon society. The panopticon is the prison environment described by Foucault in which prison cells are arranged in a large circle with the side facing the inside of the circle open to view. The guard tower is placed in the middle of the circle so that guards can see everything that goes on in every cell. In a recent article on privacy, Jeffrey Reiman, reflecting on the new intelligent highway systems, suggests that we are moving closer and closer to a panopticon society. When we contemplate all the electronic data that is now gathered about each one of us as we move through our everyday lives- intelligent highway systems, consumer transactions, traffic patterns on the internet, medical records, financial records, and so on- we see the trend that Reiman identifies. Electronic behavior is recorded and the information is retained. While actions/transactions in separate domains are not necessarily combined, it seems obvious that the potential exists for combining data into a complete portfolio of an individual's day to day life. So it would seem that as more and more activities and domains are moved into a IT-based medium, the closer we will come to a panopticon society. A panopticon society gives us the ultimate in accountability. Everything an individual does is observable and therefore available to those to whom we are accountable. Of course, in doing this, it puts us, in effect, in prison. The prison parallel is appropriate here because what anonymity allows us is freedom; prison is the ultimate in lack of freedom. In this way the arguments for a free society become arguments for anonymity. Only when individuals are free will they experiment, try new ideas, take risks, and learn by doing so. Only in an environment that tolerates making mistakes will individuals develop the active habits that are so essential for democracy. In a world without information technology, individuals have levels or degrees and various kinds of anonymity and consequently different levels and kinds of freedom. Degrees and kinds of anonymity vary with the domain: small town social life versus urban social life, voting, commercial exchanges, banking, automobile travel, airplane travel, telephone communication, education, and so on. Drawing from our experience before IT-based institutions, we might believe that what we need is varying levels or degrees and kinds of anonymity. This seems a good starting place because it suggests an attempt to re-create the mixture that we have in the physical, non-IT-based world. Nevertheless, there is a danger. If we think in terms of levels and degrees of anonymity, we may not see the forest from the trees. We may not acknowledge that in an electronic medium, levels and kinds of anonymity mean, in an important sense, no anonymity. If there are domains in which we can be anonymous but those domains are part of a global communication infrastructure in which there is no anonymity at the entry point, then it will always be possible to trace someone's identity. We delude ourselves when we think we have anonymity on-line or off-line. Rather, what we have both places is situations in which it is more and less difficult to identify individuals. We have a continuum of situations in which it is easy and difficult to link behavior to other behavior and histories of behaviors. In the physical world, we can go places and do things where others don't know us by name and have no history with us, though they see our bodies, clothes, and behavior. If we do nothing unusual, we may be forgotten. On the other hand, if we do something illegal, authorities may attempt to track us down and figure out who we are. For example, law enforcement officials, collection agencies, those who want to sue us may take an active interest in removing our anonymity, ex post facto. Think of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols-the men who apparently bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Much of what they did, they did anonymously, but then law enforcement officials set out to find out who had done various things, e.g., rented a car, bought explosives, etc. The shrouds of anonymity under which McVeigh and Nichols had acted were slowly removed. Is this any different than behavior on the internet? Is there a significant difference in the kind or degree of anonymity we have in the physical world versus what we have in an IT-based world? The character of the trail we leave is different; in the one case, its an electronic trail; while in the other it involves human memories, photographs, and paper and ink. What law enforcement officials had to do to track down McVeigh is quite different from tracking down an electronic law breaker. Also, the cost of electronic information gathering, both in time and money, can be dramatically lower than the cost of talking to people, gathering physical evidence, and the other minutia required by traditional detective work. We should acknowledge that we do not and are never likely to have anonymity on the Internet. We would do better to think of different levels or kinds of identity. There are important moral and social issues arising as a result of these varying degrees and kinds of identity. Perhaps the most important matter is assuring that individuals are informed about the conditions in which they are interacting. Perhaps, even more important is that individuals have a choice about the conditions under which they are communicating. In the rest of this paper we explore a few examples of levels and kinds of identity that are practical on the Internet. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages that we see for these "styles" of identity for individuals, and we examine the costs and benefits of these styles for society as a whole. (shrink)

Rare diseases are a heterogenic group of disorders with a little in common except of their rarity affecting by less than 5 : 10.000 people. In the world is registered about 6000-8000 rare diseases with 6-8% suffering population only in the European Union. In spite of rarity, they represent an important medical and social problem due to their incidence. For many rare diseases have no treatment, but if it exists and if started on time as being available to patients, there (...) is a good prognosis for them to be able for normal life. The problems of patients affected by rare diseases are related to the lack of diagnosis and timely undergoing as well as their treatment or prevention. Orphan drugs are products intended for treatment, diagnosis or prevention of rare diseases, but for their development and marketing the industry has not been interested in yet because of their marketing reasons. Patients suffering from a rare disease although belonging to the vulnerable group for their specific health needs, is becoming invisible in the health care system due to their additional needs un properly recognized. Ethical problems faced by patients, but also health care professionals are related to the allocation of medical diagnostics, unequal approach to health care, inappropriately specialized social services as well as therapy and rare orphan drugs unavailability. Ethical questions related to clinical trails on orphan drugs, population screening and epidemiology testing on rare diseases will also be discussed in this paper. [Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 41004: Rare diseases: Molecular pathophysiology, the diagnostic and therapeutical modalities, social, ethical and legal aspects] Retke bolesti su veoma heterogena grupa poremecaja i imaju malo toga zajednickog osim retkosti, posto pogadjaju manje od pet osoba na 10.000 ljudi. U svetu je evidentirano izmedju 6.000 i 8.000 retkih bolesti koje pogadjaju sest do osam procenata stanovnistva samo u Evropskoj uniji. Dakle, iako retke, one predstavljaju vazan medicinski i socijalni problem s obzirom na broj obolelih. Za mnoge retke bolesti nema terapije, a ukoliko ona postoji i ako se na vreme zapocne i bude dostupna pacijentima, postoje dobri izgledi da ce oboleli moci da zive normalnim zivotom. Problemi s kojima se susrecu pacijenti sa retkim bolestima vezani su za dijagnostikovanje u smislu nemogucnosti ili nepravovremenog postavljanja dijagnoze, kao i same terapije ili prevencije pojave bolesti. Orphan lekovi su proizvodi koji su namenjeni za lecenje, dijagnozu ili prevenciju retkih bolesti, za ciji razvoj i marketing industrija nije zainteresovana iz trzisnih razloga. Pacijenti s retkim bolestima, iako pripadaju osetljivoj grupi, jer imaju specificne zdravstvene potrebe, ostaju nevidljivi u zdravstvenom sistemu, jer se njihove dodatne specificne potrebe ne prepoznaju. Eticki problemi s kojima se susrecu pacijenti, ali i zdravstveni radnici, ticu se alokacije zdravstvene dijagnostike, nejednakog pristupa zdravstvenoj zastiti i nezi, nedostatka specijalizovanih socijalnih usluga, kao i nepostojanja i nedostupnosti terapije orphan lekovima. Eticka pitanja retkih klinickih ispitivanja orphan lekova i populacionih i skrining ispitivanja u vezi sa retkim bolestima takodje su razmatrani u ovom radu. PR Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 41004: Rare diseases: Molecular pathophysiology, the diagnostic and therapeutical modalities, social, ethical and legal aspects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the SelfBrian KarafinMeeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. By Anne Carolyn Klein. Boston: Beacon, 1995. 307 pp.“When the iron bird flies and carriages run on wheels, the dharma will come to the land of the red man”: this saying attributed to the semilegendary founder of Buddhism in Tibet, Padmasambhava, stands as (...) an oft-cited marker for the sense that the meeting between Tibetan Buddhism and North American culture was somehow a [End Page 227] fated one, a confluence emergent from some karmic relationship or mythical dependent-arising. Karmic connection or historical product of the near-simultaneous exile of Tibetans from their homeland in 1959 and the burgeoning of Western interest in Eastern religions and philosophies, the encounter of these two mutually and exotically other traditions is, nearing the second Christian millennium, proceeding apace. Especially since the 1989 awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetans—and now international pop icon—the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, the Western fascination for things Tibetan has exponentially increased, transforming what had been the preserve of scholars and eccentric spiritual seekers into a media sensation.The reception of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has proceeded in stages and phases that overlap and mutually affect each other, from pop phantasms of Tibet as a mythical Shangri-La (as in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon) and theosophical hopes in Tibet as the domain of the Wise Mahatmas overseeing the spiritual evolution of humanity to the relatively recent development of Tibetan studies as an academic discipline centered on the translation of texts, as well as the growing population of westerners practicing Tibetan Buddhist religion under the guidance of exiled lamas. With these latter two groups—scholars and practitioners who often overlap memberships—the phenomenon of Tibetan Buddhism in the West has reached a point where critical self-reflection is now possible. Donald Lopez’ recent Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West is the first full-length critical examination of the cultural confluence I’ve been noticing thus far. Lopez represents a movement in the field of Tibetan studies from philological scholarship of texts, in which the scholarly effort consists largely of translation along with commentary that closely follows the commentarial literature of the Tibetan tradition being translated, to cultural criticism of the underlying dynamics in the encounter itself.This critical self-consciousness in the field of Tibetan studies is likewise the motivating impetus behind Anne Klein’s recent work as represented by the book under review here. Klein, like Lopez, was a student of the dean of American Tibetan studies, Jeffrey Hopkins, at the University of Virginia. As such, her early work followed Hopkins in pursuing an essentially philological approach to Tibetan tradition with a focus on the philosophical scholasticism of the Gelukpa lineage. Klein’s three philological-philosophical books—Knowledge and Liberation; Knowing, Naming, and Negation; and Path to the Middle—are excellent examples of the genre of translation/commentary above mentioned, treating the Sautrantika and Madhyamika tenet systems in which the Gelukpa tradition systematized Indian Buddhist philosophy for the purposes of monastic study and debate. Meeting the Great Bliss Queen is something else entirely; in this work Klein blazes a trail out from recondite translation work toward cultural critique and psychosocial self-reflection in which the previously submerged subtext of the encounter between the Tibetan tradition and the Western psyche and society is allowed to surface and its issues probed and reflected upon.Klein frames her work in terms of a dialogue between Buddhism (by which she mainly means meditation practices and some associated philosophy) and feminism (by which she means both academic feminist theory and her own autobiographical [End Page 228] experience as a Western woman personally experiencing the confluence of Western and Tibetan exigencies). Klein is a salient example of a scholar-practitioner, someone who occupies positions both in the academic field of Tibetan studies and in the population of students of Tibetan lamas in exile. As such, she is exactly situated to embark on such a project of cultural and psychological reflection. She knows... (shrink)