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Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s'In Praise of Shadows' and critical transparency
Get PDFMainstream reception of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s literary essay In’ei Raisan/ In Praise of Shadows (1933) has tended to swing between writing it off as a nostalgic nationalist exceptionalism and marketing it as a melancholic hymn to everyday beauty, although recently much more nuanced positions have emerged in terms of the text’s aesthetic ‘authenticity’. There is much more at stake in In’ei Raisan, however, including a perception of the evisceration of negativity and a surrender to a cybernetically foreclosed, capital-driven future, and this should be located relative to much older and much newer concerns. This themescape becomes more obvious when the essay’s driving image of the shadow is understood as part of a long negotiation to the total control of space by a property-owning subject, whose rise had been naturalised as progress during Japan’s unification and ‘modernisation’, primarily via a British empire which was morally sustained by a Scottish Enlightenment ‘empiricism of history’. This unification of, and dominion over, space gives In’ei Raisan such extraordinary similarities to the field recently identified as Critical Transparency Studies, similarities which are explored here
A short proof of Allard's and Brakke's regularity theorems
Get PDFWe give new short proofs of Allard’s regularity theorem for varifolds with bounded first variation and Brakke’s regularity theorem for integral Brakke flows with bounded forcing. They are based on a decay of flatness, following from weighted versions of the respective monotonicity formulas, together with a characterization of non-homogeneous blow-ups using the viscosity approach introduced by Savin
Child hyperactivity, mother–child negativity, and sibling dyad negativity : a transactional family systems approach
Get PDFAttention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is among the most common mental disorders in children and adolescents. While most studies in this field have focused on the genetic and neurobiological underpinnings of the disorder, research focusing on the family environment as a critical context contributing toward the manifestation and maintenance of child ADHD symptoms is still less extensive. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine longitudinal and bidirectional associations between child hyperactivity, mother–child negativity, and sibling dyad negativity. Data were analyzed of up to 4,429 children from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, a nationally representative prospective birth cohort study in the United Kingdom, at three time points (T1–T3, children aged 4, 7, and 8 years). At baseline (T1, n = 4,063), the child sample (98.8% White ethnic background) composed of 51.6% males. Child hyperactivity symptoms, mother–child negativity, and sibling dyad negativity were examined based on maternal reports. The random intercepts cross-lagged panel model was adopted to parcel out between-family differences from within-family fluctuations and test bidirectional associations. On the between-family level, families with higher child hyperactivity reported higher mother–child and sibling dyad negativity. On the within-family level, unidirectional spillover processes between sibling dyad negativity and mother–child negativity as well as between mother–child negativity and child hyperactivity emerged. Future work in the area of child hyperactivity should implement a transactional family systems approach incorporating both parent–child and sibling subsystems. Interventions to reduce negative interactions between parents and hyperactive children may offer promising improvements in child symptoms and thus alleviate family burden
Caregiver sensitivity supported young children’s vocabulary development during the Covid-19 UK lockdowns
Get PDFPrevious studies have shown that caregivers’ sensitive, responsive interactions with young children can boost language development. We explored the association between caregivers’ sensitivity and the vocabulary development of their 8-to-36-month-olds during COVID-19 when family routines were unexpectedly disrupted. Measuring caregivers’ sensitivity from home interaction videos at three timepoints, we found that children who experienced more-sensitive concurrent interactions had higher receptive and expressive vocabularies (N=100). Children whose caregivers showed more-sensitive interactions at the beginning of the pandemic showed greater expressive vocabulary growth six (but not 12) months later (n=58). Significant associations with receptive vocabulary growth were not observed. Our findings highlight the importance of sensitivity at a time when other positive influences on language development were compromised
Mental agency and rational subjectivity
Get PDFPhilosophy is witnessing an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought that explaining certain distinctive features of human mentality requires conceiving of many mental phenomena as acts, and of subjects as their agents. We raise a challenge for three central explanatory appeals to mental agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and an agentialist explanation of the delusion of thought insertion: agentialists either commit themselves to implausibly strong claims about the kind of agency involved in the relevant phenomena, or make appeals to agency which seem explanatorily redundant. The agentialist literature does not contain a clear answer to this Agentialist Dilemma, and we put it forward here as a core challenge for the Agential Turn. But we also accept the fundamental motivation behind the Agential Turn, its critique and rejection of a purely passivist and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by urging the recognition of a broader category of rational subjectivity, a category which includes states which are neither active nor passive, but nevertheless form part of a subject’s rational point of view on the world
The Hamilton compression of highly symmetric graphs
No full textWe say that a Hamilton cycle C = (x₁,…,x_n) in a graph G is k-symmetric, if the mapping x_i ↦ x_{i+n/k} for all i = 1,…,n, where indices are considered modulo n, is an automorphism of G. In other words, if we lay out the vertices x₁,…,x_n equidistantly on a circle and draw the edges of G as straight lines, then the drawing of G has k-fold rotational symmetry, i.e., all information about the graph is compressed into a 360^∘/k wedge of the drawing. We refer to the maximum k for which there exists a k-symmetric Hamilton cycle in G as the Hamilton compression of G. We investigate the Hamilton compression of four different families of vertex-transitive graphs, namely hypercubes, Johnson graphs, permutahedra and Cayley graphs of abelian groups. In several cases we determine their Hamilton compression exactly, and in other cases we provide close lower and upper bounds. The cycles we construct have a much higher compression than several classical Gray codes known from the literature. Our constructions also yield Gray codes for bitstrings, combinations and permutations that have few tracks and/or that are balanced
Forcing generalized quasirandom graphs efficiently
Get PDFWe study generalised quasirandom graphs whose vertex set consists of q
parts (of not necessarily the same sizes) with edges within each part and between each pair of parts distributed quasirandomly; such graphs correspond to the stochastic block model studied in statistics and network science. Lovász and Sós showed that the structure of such graphs is forced by homomorphism densities of graphs with at most (10q)q+q
vertices; subsequently, Lovász refined the argument to show that graphs with 4(2q+3)8 vertices suffice. Our results imply that the structure of generalised quasirandom graphs with q≥2 parts is forced by homomorphism densities of graphs with at most 4q2−q vertices, and, if vertices in distinct parts have distinct degrees, then 2q+1
vertices suffice. The latter improves the bound of 8q−4 due to Spencer
Assembly and Symbola
No full textIn the numerous and thorough studies on the Athenian Assembly, Mogens Hermann Hansen has commented on tokens with the following words: ‘The citizens passed through the entrances to the Assembly-place under the eye of the thirty syllogeis tou demou (Conveners of the People) who handed to each a token (symbolon), which had to be handed back when pay was distributed after the meeting’. With the above statement symbola have been enshrined in the History of the Athenian Assembly. Hansen based his conclusion on three textual sources which attest the use of tokens in the Athenian Assembly. What these symbola looked like and the procedures related to them remained completely unknown until Stamatoula Makrypodi had published a lot of clay lettered tokens which had once been found in the immediate neighbourhood of the Pnyx. John H. Kroll in a careful analysis of the find ascertained that the clay lettered tokens presupposed seating for a fixed number of men, like the lettered tokens for seating of Athenian jurors .
In this contribution, I will first present the literary sources on tokens used in the Assembly. Then, after an overview of the earlier theories on the use of symbola in the Assembly, I will focus on the contribution of the newly discovered lot of clay lettered tokens in augmenting our knowledge in regards to the practices of the Assembly. Next I will take up questions regarding the meaning of the imagery. I will finally turn to why I think tokens were an indispensable part of Athenian public finance by fixing in advance the number of participants and controlling public expenditure