The deployment of interaction between national and religious, in particular in Ukraine, is one of the most significant phenomena that make history from the distant past to the present. From the writings of the apostles and Europe's oldest chroniclers to the most up-to-date studies of historians, religious scholars, theologians, these issues are analyzed in one way or another. However, scholars, at least domestic, have rarely articulated such an aspect, the identification and the result of interaction between national and religious, as (...) secessionist conflicts. Instead, this is the way to qualify for a number of conflicts, including in our country, that have grown or nourished on religious and denominational grounds. Studying at a given point of view conflicts with religious and denominational components is very important, because it takes the issues from an emotionally crowded, vulnerable delicate field of spirit to a rational and pragmatic legal base, its legal and pragmatic legal field may, at least, begin to resolve the conflict. (shrink)

The study of Catholicism by law is one of the foremost directions in the work of religious scholars. After the Second Vatican Council, when it largely restored its decisive spiritual and moral influence in its traditional habitat and gained an impressive number of professors beyond its boundaries, its development is marked by qualitative transformations that require careful study. If today's characteristics of the progress of Catholicism are relevant in the foreseeable future, it is reasonable to expect that the Catholic Church (...) as a whole will cope with internal difficulties and, more or less, successfully seek the answers to the challenges of history, and therefore its own answers, and therefore positions in the world and will continue to expand them in Ukraine in particular. (shrink)

The phenomenon of modern Greek Catholicism in Ukraine is a prominent phenomenon in the spiritual field of our country. Accordingly, it is the subject of scrutiny by religious scholars. After a considerable amount of research into the history of Ukrainian Greek Catholicism, scholars, especially representatives of Western Ukraine, study the particular manifestations of his present life. There are works that analyze the socially significant work of the UGCC from different angles. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive research, impartially (...) confessional or "post-theistic," among the latter. At the same time, such work is needed now, when the UGCC, as well as other Churches in our country, face new tasks in the new circumstances of social and spiritual life. (shrink)

The assessment of the prospects for the development of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the spiritual field of modern Ukraine should first of all be based on the achievements and problems of this Church that it has today. According to studies of the modern UGCC, it demonstrates a relative stabilization of development. Despite the persistence of self-identity seeking for Ukrainian Greek Catholicism, which is not difficult, the evolution of Greek Catholicism as a Catholic denomination continues, which is particularly evident (...) in the Church's practical activity. The regional features present in it are determined by the local specificity of the social status and, accordingly, the specificity of the tasks of pastoral work in different Ukrainian territories. The Ukrainian status of the UGCC is manifested not in the transfer of its leadership to the capital, but in its significant activities for society, which Greek Catholic factors seek to direct accordingly. In general, the current status of the UGCC can be judged to be sufficiently competitive in the "religion market" in today's pluralistic Ukraine. (shrink)

At the end of the second Christian millennium, Christians united in the church of different denominations and ceremonies. The most devoted ones are looking for ecumenical paths, "that all be one." However, every person is free in his own way to build ties with the Lord. But, as emphasized by the first Metropolitan Rusich Ilarion in the "Word of Law and Grace," every person and the whole people are responsible before God. This statement is based on the authority of biblical (...) texts. Therefore, Christians must worry not only about their own salvation, but also about the best, most natural and most useful arrangement of the Christian life of their nation. (shrink)

In today's conditions, the heavy resistance of Ukrainians to Russian aggression, which is carried out, with the exception of the military, by way of information and economic methods, and now also through a non-gossip "hybrid" confrontation, it is very important to properly evaluate and play an appropriate role in this religious and religious factor. "Russian World" is no less effective weapon of the Moscow Church in the war with Ukraine than the military aid of the Russian state to the separatists.. (...) Religious communities have their potential in educating citizens - patriots of their homeland, or else. Different aspects of the problem of the role of religious-church factors in patriotic education of Ukrainians have long been in the zone of justified attention of domestic secular scholars and representatives of the Churches, among them: A. Kolodny, L. Filippovich, V. Shevchenko, P. Pavlenko, O. Sagan, C. Zdioruk, M. Cherenkov, O. Tuyeshin and others. Particular attention of the RCC and Protestant Churches in this regard was given by P. L. Yarotsky. (shrink)

Among the scientific heritage of B.O.Lobovyk is a particularly interesting work - works devoted to the study of the pre-Christian religiosity of Ukrainians and the peculiarities of the emerging Christianity of Kyivan Rus. In particular, Section III: Religious Beliefs of the Chronicles of Slavs and Section IV: The Old Ukrainian Political Thought 1 so the ten-volume "History of Religion in Ukraine" not only affects the breadth and depth of the problem's coverage, phenomenal encyclopaedic erudition and culture of the author's words, (...) but also wake up new questions and induced to their research. Thus, BOloobovik carried out a detailed analysis of the religious complex of Ukrainians in their pre-Christian period and an analysis of the features of early Christian Ukrainian thought highlights: who believed in the worship of our ancestors. In our opinion, one of the logical directions of the continuation of these studies is the elucidation of what the Ukrainians appreciated before Christianization in the world and what transformations of axiological orientations were experienced by Ukrainian neophytes. (shrink)

The article considers the dynamics of various religious orders and other institutes of consecrated life in the UGCC and the characteristics of their institutionalization in the context of the needs of Ukrainian society.

The development of each Church is denoted by one or another landmark, most of which are well-known to all, although there are also few known or those whose influence on the evolution of the Church is not evident. The Second Vatican Council is an event that, without exaggeration, can be a determinant of the time "before" and "after", not only for the Catholic Church, where it took place. Since this Cathedral was a significant stage of qualitative development, or not the (...) oldest continuously existing institution, the consequences of its decisions, including the consequences of the remote, are interesting to study, in particular, from the point of view of their influence on further institutionalization processes in the Church. This is an interesting field of research for many religious scholars, but in this exploration we are currently focusing on the specifics of the course of institutionalization processes in the modern Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church as a special part of the post-assembly Catholic Church, as one that inherited the advantages and problems of the Christian East, and the Christian West. (shrink)

Today, when Ukraine has entered the path of independence, on the way of joining the European community, it is worth scrutinizing self-critically, so that our course is not burdened and not confused with the burden of old mistakes and miscalculations. Ukrainian history appears as a story of a strict struggle of the nation for self-determination and existence in general. Can you imagine such a Ukrainian fate, spinning the early glorious pages of our writings? The New Christian Kievan Rus during the (...) days of the princes of Volodymyr the Great and Yaroslav the Wise is a powerful and authoritative European country that was proud of its spiritual upsurge and earthly achievements. And now, after five centuries, it became a land without its own statehood, which was lagging behind in full-scale progress and was in deep church decay. The crisis of the Ukrainian church is like a trick and a key to many interconnected Ukrainian problems, was a subject of particular acuity concerns of her contemporaries and the subject of reflection of many generations of her researchers. (shrink)

A rather variegated palette of modern functionalities of denominations both in the world as a whole, and in Ukraine, in particular, is determined by the urgent needs of society. Along with purely traditional religious and religious organizations, such functions that are called in time in one or another community are appearing or reviving. In Ukraine, today the actualization of such functions of the Churches that are most invited in the difficult conditions of external aggression and internal internal problems are being (...) observed. Among them, almost the first place was the function of patriotic education, which prompted scholars to pay special attention to this. The urgency of studying the role of the religious-church factor in patriotic education does not require long proof in the face of the heavy resistance of Ukraine to the bulk of the "Russian world", now not only information, spiritual and cultural, but also in the form of military aggression that has gained insidious forms of undeclared "hybrid warfare" ». (shrink)

The problem of church-religious and spiritual subjects in school subjects, in the educational process of different educational units is not limited to the questions of the introduction or non-introduction of Christian ethics, ethics of faith, religious studies or theology. There is no relevant oral and printed discussion. However, scholars and educators have so far received the same meticulous attention to the fact that, in addition to these special subjects, other humanities have been taught and read in the schools, which deal (...) with issues of faith, religion, spirituality - directly or indirectly, in connection with one or another. historical events or in the composition of various works of art, also not neutral in terms of formation of world outlook and confessional prejudices or preferences. (shrink)

May of this jubilee year was marked, perhaps, by a record number of scientific meetings, in particular, in cities already traditional religious studies activity. International conference "Christianity is the basis of European civilization", scientific conference "Christianity and person" and the X International round table "History of Religions in Ukraine ".

Obviously, it is about the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. I, the author of the article, suggest looking at her, taking into account all her hypostasis, its ritual and organizational peculiarities, but to focus on how this Church performs one of the functions that are inherent in religious systems and organizations: a value-controlling function, and how this performance correlates with the national interests of Ukrainians.

Adequate study of Catholicism in Ukraine is impossible without taking into account its progress in the world, especially in the last century. The experience of comprehending the reality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and rethinking its entire historical path led to qualitative transformations of this denomination. After the Second Vatican Council, and especially with the pontificate of Pope John Paul II on Catholicism, we can speak of a significant phenomenon of modern spiritual life.

The election of the Russo-Ukrainian Christian path belongs to one of the most enviable events in Ukrainian history, which directly or indirectly programmed its further progress. Kievan Rus on the eve of the official introduction of Christianity was a powerful and respectable European state. The free country had a rich choice of priorities of geopolitical, economic, cultural orientation, the election of which was greatly influenced by the peculiarities of Ukrainian development. How exactly was this choice - it is necessary to (...) investigate further, but what he brought to Ukraine - is now obvious. Today, when the Ukrainian state, with great losses and tensions, returns to its natural, European path, it is extremely important to analyze what contributed to the deviation from it. To do this, let us return to the first centuries of Ukrainian Christianity - the period of establishing long-term self-identification archetypes of Ukrainians and establishing their views on neighbors. (shrink)

Among the significant religious factors that influenced and influence the cultural orientation of the Ukrainian nation, the phenomenon of Ukrainian Greek Catholicism is a unique place. In recent years, researchers of this phenomenon have focused their efforts primarily on identifying the national and consoli- datory role of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in identifying the opportunities and achievements of the Greek-Catholic denomination in identifying Ukrainian Greek Catholics in their identity between the neighboring-Polish Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox - ethnic groups.

The article informs about the international scientific conference "Universal values of religions of the world: history and modernity", which took place on October 24-25, 2019 in Kyiv.

The transfer of the governing seat of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to the capital of Ukraine, though not equal to the Church's exit to “Greater” Ukraine, but prompts an analysis of the respective possibilities of the heir to the baptism of Vladimir. This is what the Head of her Church calls her, emphasizing essentially the main motive behind the decision to move her residence. In his "Address on the Construction of the Temple of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in (...) Kiev." Lubomyr Husar stressed that the UGCC, as "part of the Kyiv root", is now free in a free state. There is now an opportunity "to return the heart of our Church to the capital city of Kyiv, from where it was born, from where it was removed by cruel circumstances.". (shrink)

The polemic around the visit to Ukraine of Pope John Paul II served a meaningful test to identify the integrative potential of all the Churches in the state, and in particular their openness or xenophobia, the willingness or the actual refusal to cooperate, the real recognition and cultivation, or the practical neglect of the spiritual components of a democratic society.

Religious history of Ukraine in its dates.

This is a part of an in-depth study of a set of the manuscripts related to the Jayadrathayāmala. Taking JY.3.9 as a test-chapter, a comparative paleography analysis of the 11 manuscripts was made within READ software framework. The workflow within READ minimized the effort to make a few important discoveries (manuscripts containing more than one script, identification of the manuscripts potentially written by the same person) as well as to create an overview of the shift from Nāgarī to Newārī and, (...) finally, to Devanāgarī scripts within the history of manuscript transmission of a single chapter. Exploratory statistical analysis in R of the syllable frequency in each manuscript, based on the paleography analysis export from READ, helped to establish that there are potentially two lines of manuscript transmission of the JY.3.9. (shrink)

The paper analyses and evaluates the linguistic policy of the Court of Justice of the European Union against the background of other multilingual courts and in the light of theories of legal interpretation. Multilingualism has a direct impact upon legal interpretation at the Court, displacing traditional approaches with a hermeneutic paradigm. It also creates challenges to the acceptance of the Court’s case-law in the Member States, which seem to have been adequately tackled by the Court’s idiosyncratic translation policy.

In the aftermath of the Fukushima power plant disaster, autoradiography became an increasingly widespread artistic technique for producing cameraless photography. By exposing photographic film directly using contaminated objects and materials, contemporary artists autoradiograph the geopolitics and local histories of atomic contamination due to bombing, testing, nuclear reactor explosions, mining or uranium disposal cells. In my article, I discuss the implications these autoradiographic works have for the concept of photography by drawing on Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects. Being hyperobjective, radioactivity confronts (...) human beings with a vast non-human temporality, which, in turn, necessitates a shift in our understanding of photography. While photo theory has often been modelled on snapshot photography, privileging instantaneity and pastness, autoradiography is a durational and pluri-temporal procedure that points emphatically towards the future and invites us to reconceptualize the basis of photographic ontology. (shrink)

Confronted with an unprecedented scale of human-induced environmental crisis, there is a need for new modes of theorizing that would abandon human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism and instead focus on developing environmentally ethical projects suitable for our times. In this paper, we offer an anti-anthropocentric project of an ethos for living in the Anthropocene. We develop it through revisiting the notion of sustainability in order to problematize the linear vision of human-centric futurity and the uniform ‘we’ of humanity upon which it (...) relies. We ground our analyses in posthumanism and material feminism, using works by posthumanist and material feminist thinkers such as Stacy Alaimo, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett, among others. In dialogue with them, we offer the concept of posthuman sustainability that decenters the human, re-positions it in its ecosystem and, while remaining attentive to difference, fosters the thriving of all instances of life. (shrink)

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally (...) ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios; and interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding. (shrink)

This essay explores the return of the subject in the computational context, which I address as a digital subject. This digital subject encompasses a digital identifier, correlations in data or a data profile, moving between biological characteristics and symbolic expression. I focus on the processes through which digital subjects are constructed by matching, correlating, modelling, as well as how they become enactive. The ways of pulling data together into a digital subject is often presented as a logic of fact, where (...) data is equated with documentary evidence. Instead, I propose the notion of the distance in which digital subjects are produced. Indexicality comes from outside of data, whereas the regard for the thick distance becomes a mark of the form of knowledge. I conclude by arguing for a posthumanities approach that establishes the distance while allowing for different subjects to be called upon. (shrink)

BackgroundCurrent preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) technologies enable embryo genotyping across the whole genome. This has led to the development of polygenic risk scoring of human embryos (PGT-P). Recent implementation of PGT-P, including screening for intelligence, has been extensively covered by media reports, raising major controversy. Considering the increasing demand for assisted reproduction, we evaluated how information about PGT-P is communicated in press media and explored the diversity of ethical themes present in the public debate.MethodsLexisNexis Academic database and Google News were (...) searched to identify articles about polygenic embryo screening. This led to 535 news articles. 59 original articles met the inclusion criteria. Inductive content analysis was used to analyse these articles.Results8.8% of articles gave embryo polygenic scoring a positive portrayal, while 36.8% expressed a negative attitude. 54.4% were neutral, mostly highlighting limited practical value of the technology in in vitro fertilization settings. We identified five main ethical themes that are also present in academic literature and the broader debate on reproductive technologies: a slippery slope towards designer babies, well-being of the child and parents, impact on society, deliberate choice and societal readiness.ConclusionsImplementation of embryo polygenic profiling engenders a need for specific recommendations. Current media analysis discloses important ethical themes to consider when creating future guidelines for PGT-P. (shrink)

Since the beginning of signed language research, the linguistic units have been divided into conventional, standard and fixed signs, all of which were considered as the core of the language, and iconic and productive signs, put at the edge of language. In the present paper, we will review different models proposed by signed language researchers over the years to describe the signed lexicon, showing how to overcome the hierarchical division between standard and productive lexicon. Drawing from the semiotic insights of (...) Peirce we proposed to look at signs as a triadic construction built on symbolic, iconic, and indexical features. In our model, the different iconic, symbolic, and indexical features of signs are seen as the three sides of the same triangle, detectable in the single linguistic sign. The key aspect is that the dominance of the feature will determine the different use of the linguistic unit, as we will show with examples from different discourse types. (shrink)

This paper attempts to be a contribution to the epistemological project of explaining complex conceptual structures departing from more basic ones. The central thesis of the paper is that there are what I call “functionally structured concepts”, these are non-harmonic concepts in Dummett’s sense that might be legitimized if there is a function that justifies the tie between the inferential connection the concept allows us to trace. Proving this requires enhancing the russellian existential analysis of definite descriptions to apply to (...) functions and using this in proving the legitimacy of such concepts. The utility of the proposal is shown for the case of thick ethical terms and an attempt is made to use it in explaining the development of natural numbers. This last move could allow us to go one step lower in explaining the genesis of natural numbers while maintaining the notion of abstract numbers as higher order entities. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the decolonization of Ukrainian culture as an important factor of nation-building in the European perspective. At the same time, decolonization is a current trend in Western academic thought, which is embodied in social activism, in particular, in the wok movement and the culture of abolition. Postcolonial studies has become an intellectual battleground. These studies draw a new front line in the culture wars. Rethinking Western culture in light of its imperial expansionist past defines the goal (...) of decolonization. However, the tendency towards the politicization of vouk and the culture of cancellation. carries the risks of undermining the basic values of Western culture - freedom of thought and the rule of law, while the decolonization of Ukrainian culture has a different purpose. Unlike cultural decolonization in Western countries, cultural decolonization in Ukraine is aimed at legitimizing modern European values (Lisbon Agreement, 2007) by overcoming the «Russian-oriented» (Eurasian) tradition of thinking.Identifying the authentic contents of Ukrainian culture and refuting its imperial-Soviet interpretations is one of the main tasks of the decolonization of Ukrainian culture. The article offers a comparative analysis of Ukrainian and Western versions of cultural decolonization in order to avoid uncritical borrowings and ignoring the peculiarities of the Ukrainian context. The successful decolonization of Ukrainian culture requires the development of its 1) concept, 2) methods of theoretical substantiation, and 3) methods of practical implementation. The article states that the decolonization of Ukrainian culture becomes possible if its research strategies are deprived of colonial influences, which reveal indications of the imperial and Soviet scientific paradigm of social and humanitarian knowledge. The key concepts of the research are referring to the works of Nigel Giggar (2023), Douglas Murray (2022), Linda Martín Alcoff (2023), Jonh Darwin (2009), Kwasi Kwarteng (2013), Yaroslav Hrytsak (2022), Serhii Plokhii (2021, 2023), Timothy D. Snyder (2017, 2918) and others. (shrink)

The paper defends the argument that the Resemblance Paradox (RP), or the problem of the ‘under-determination of meaning’, and the Rule-Following Paradox (RFP) are two sides of the same paradox threatening meaning from opposite extremes. After presenting the case, the paradox is reconsidered anew and the supposition that the threat is a pervasive one is challenged.

This article addresses the issue of how team identity is constructed between two people during a series of regular meetings of a work group in Serbia. Using conversation analysis to investigate social actions, this study looks at the recurrent construction of an implicit team identity by focusing on management of speaking rights and co-construction of units, and displays of knowledge and accountability. With its longitudinal perspective, the article contributes to the existing body of research on teams in interaction in general, (...) as it builds upon previous research on interactional parties and conjoined participation. The results are especially relevant for the investigations of teams in meetings, as they provide evidence of how formal features of interaction are recurrently employed to display institutionally relevant epistemics and accountability. (shrink)

While the implementation of digital technology in psychiatry appears promising, there is an urgent need to address the implications of the absence of ethical design in the early development of such technologies. Some authors have noted the gap between technology development and ethical analysis and have called for an upstream examination of the ethical issues raised by digital technologies. In this paper, we address this suggestion, particularly in relation to digital healthcare technologies for patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The introduction (...) of digital technologies in psychiatry offers a broad spectrum of diagnostic and treatment options tailored to the health needs and goals of patients’ care. These technologies include wearable devices, smartphone applications for high-immersive virtual realities, smart homes, telepsychiatry and messaging systems for patients in rural areas. The availability of these technologies could increase access to mental health services and improve the diagnostics of mental disorders.Additional Instruction AbstractIn this descriptive review, we systematize ethical concerns about digital technologies for mental health with a particular focus on individuals suffering from schizophrenia. There are many unsolved dilemmas and conflicts of interest in the implementation of these technologies, such as (1) the lack of evidence on efficacy and impact on self-perception; (2) the lack of clear standards for the safety of their daily implementation; (3) unclear roles of technology and a shift in the responsibilities of all parties; (4) no guarantee of data confidentiality; and (5) the lack of a user-centered design that meets the particular needs of patients with schizophrenia. mHealth can improve care in psychiatry and make mental healthcare services more efficient and personalized while destigmatizing mental health disorders. To ensure that these technologies will benefit people with mental health disorders, we need to heighten sensitivity to ethical issues among mental healthcare specialists, health policy makers, software developers, patients themselves and their proxies. Additionally, we need to develop frameworks for furthering sustainable development in the digital technologies industry and for the responsible usage of such technologies for patients with schizophrenia in the clinical setting. We suggest that digital technology in psychiatry, particularly for schizophrenia and other serious mental health disorders, should be integrated into treatment with professional supervision rather than as a self-treatment tool. (shrink)

Dans le champ de la linguistique francaise, Olga Galatanu est de ceux qui ont muni l'analyse du discours et des interactions verbales d'un modele semantique de description. La Semantique des Possibles Argumentatifs qu'elle developpe depuis une vingtaine d'annees adhere aux visions argumentative, stereotypique, referentielle, cognitiviste de la langue, et s'attache a rendre compte de la construction des representations en langue et en discours.<BR> Les articles que ses collaborateurs et amis lui offrent dans ce volume se rapportent de pres ou (...) de loin a la SPA. Certains en partagent les postulats: sens referentiel et denomination, interfaces semantique-syntaxe et semantique-pragmatique, construction discursive du sens, valeurs; d'autres reprennent et developpent des elements specifiques de la SPA: possibles argumentatifs, deploiements argumentatifs, modalites; d'autres encore montrent les convergences et complementarites entre la SPA et des theories voisines.<BR> Les analyses portent notamment sur l'attitude metalinguistique des locuteurs, la malleabilite semantique des mots, la negociation des sens et des valeurs, les principes et strategies discursives qui regulent la communication, l'heterogeneite discursive, la presentation de soi, la construction d'objets discursifs, les actes de langage indirects, etc.". (shrink)

This article examines the discourse competence of high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders to participate in narrative introduction sequences with family members. The analysis illuminates the children’s own efforts to launch narratives, as well as their ability to build upon the contributions of others. Ethnographic, discourse analytic methodology is integrated with the theory of discourse organization and the weak central coherence account of autism. Introductions of both personal experience narratives as well as fictional narratives are examined. The children were especially (...) competent in the use of stable introductory practices when launching fictional narratives, pre-organized by the media of expression. Their challenge was not in the introduction, but in the narrative co-telling, which often was not globally organized over an extended course of propositions. The heterogeneity of the ASD children’s discourse competence and its implications for discourse analysis are discussed. (shrink)

Experience-dependent neural plasticity is high in the developing brain, presenting a unique window of opportunity for training. To optimize existing training programs and develop new interventions, it is important to understand what processes take place in the developing brain during training. Here, we systematically review MRI-based evidence of training-induced neural plasticity in children and adolescents. A total of 71 articles were included in the review. Significant changes in brain activation, structure, microstructure, and structural and functional connectivity were reported with different (...) types of trainings in the majority of the studies. Significant correlation of performance improvement with neural changes was reported in 51% of the studies. Yet, only 48% of the studies had a control condition. Overall, the review supports the hypothesized neural changes with training while at the same time charting empirical and methodological desiderata for future research. (shrink)

When young children learn to use language, they start to use their hands in co‐verbal gesturing. There are, however, considerable differences between children, and it is not completely understood what these individual differences are due to. We studied how children at 4 years of age employ speech and iconic gestures to convey meaning in different kinds of spatial event descriptions, and how this relates to their cognitive abilities. Focusing on spontaneous illustrations of actions, we applied a semantic feature (SF) analysis (...) to characterize combinations of speech and gesture meaning and related them to the child's visual‐spatial abilities or abstract/concrete reasoning abilities (measured using the standardized SON‐R test). Results show that children with higher cognitive abilities convey significantly more meaning via gesture and less solely via speech. These findings suggest that young children's use of cospeech representational gesturing is positively related to their mental representation and reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Liberal-Democratic changes in the Russian Society have brought a number of acute problems threatening national security and leading to converting Russia into a peripheral socio-cultural system («national self-identification crisis»). Scientific research shows that the main indicator of the said crisis is not only the critical economic differentiation of people into the «poor» and «rich» Russia (with the different ways of life, needs, mentality) but also spiritual degradation, spread of aggressive – depressive syndrome (growth of hatred, feeling of injustice, loss of (...) meaning of the life, anger, melancholy, hopelessness, loneliness etc.). Twothirds of the citizens (74.9%) interviewed in 2006 think that their social status does not correspond to their personal achievements in education and professional abilities. One of the main reasons of their distrust towards the government bodies is insufficient professional and cultural level, absence of unity of a word and business. It is worth mentioning that books and articles of scientists and ideologists who resist Western liberalism are freely published, but you can hardly see these people close to the President. Russians are openly and secretly under pressure of ideas propagandizing negative past which undermine national self-identification, national pride for the great history of their country. The original sphere of influence of Russian language and Russian culture is shortening under the press of mass-culture. Meanwhile, 67% of Russians expressed their negative attitude towards massive Western cultural expansion. The Futureof Russia is in safeguarding national intellectual and spiritual values, Science, education and in supporting the person of work and creativity. (shrink)

Volume 6, Issue 3, September 2015, Page 310-346.

In common law jurisdictions, legal professionals cite facts and legal principles from precedent cases to support their arguments before the court for their intended outcome in a current case. This practice stems from the doctrine of stare decisis, where cases that have similar facts should receive similar decisions with respect to the principles. It is essential for legal professionals to identify such facts and principles in precedent cases, though this is a highly time intensive task. In this paper, we present (...) studies that demonstrate that human annotators can achieve reasonable agreement on which sentences in legal judgements contain cited facts and principles. We further demonstrate that it is feasible to automatically annotate sentences containing such legal facts and principles in a supervised machine learning framework based on linguistic features, reporting per category precision and recall figures of between 0.79 and 0.89 for classifying sentences in legal judgements as cited facts, principles or neither using a Bayesian classifier, with an overall κ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\kappa$$\end{document} of 0.72 with the human-annotated gold standard. (shrink)

This article describes the discovery of nuclear DNA‐like RNA (dRNA or hnRNA) and ribonucleoprotein particles in eukaryotes. Native hnRNA particles were isolated by sucrose gradient sedimentation and their structural organisation – nucleic acid (i.e. RNA) wrapped in a regular way on the surface of a series of globular protein particles – was determined. This led to the formulation of the informofer cycle hypothesis for the synthesis of hnRNA as a giant precursor molecule, its transport in informosomes within the nucleus, and (...) subsequent splicing before export from the nucleus as free mRNA. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to shed light on women’s experience of informal trade on one of the EU external borders: Belarus–Lithuania. The article suggests looking at the informal economy beyond the notion of precarity and to pay attention to how women themselves understand their involvement in trading practices. The author argues that, although economic necessity is an important motivation for women to start trading activities, this experience rewards them not only financially but also through non-economic aspects such as (...) self-respect, solidarity and socializing. Theoretically, the article brings together the discussion of the gendered nature of informal work with the feminist theory of agency. It shows that women’s experience of informal cross-border trade is agentive. Trade provides women with a sense of pride, self-confidence and respect and enables them to recognize their self-sufficiency. However, it is also argued that agency is not synonymous with autonomy and individualism. Theoretically and empirically, the article stresses a relational understanding of agency. On the one hand, women acknowledge their financial achievements as the capability to take proper care of their children, especially in situations when the second breadwinner is absent. On the other hand, they also value their trading experience as a space of socializing with other women. The success of cross-border trade depends on the sense of solidarity and collective action to resist the system represented by customs and border control. (shrink)

Although epidemiology as a scientific study of disease in populations claimed an independent disciplinary status already in the mid–nineteenth century, its history in the twentieth century can be seen as a continuous and often contentious attempt to define the field’s social and intellectual boundaries vis-à-vis a variety of neighboring scientific fields and public health practices. In a period dominated by laboratory biomedical sciences, epidemiologists repeatedly tried to spell out how their discipline met the requirements of scientificity despite its focus on (...) disease as a collective phenomenon and its reliance on nonlaboratory methods. This article asks about the relationship between the changing institutional and intellectual contexts of British epidemiological practice and the epidemiologists’attempts to define both science in general and epidemiology in particular. An examination of the epidemiologists’boundary-making endeavors is also used to reflect on the circumstances in which scientists engage in the discourse of disciplinary demarcations. (shrink)