Search Results (1,553)

This paper builds on findings from the first systematic study of military families in Slovenia (2019–2022) to critically examine how military families are perceived and constructed within broader sociocultural and institutional frameworks. Using perspectives from family studies, military sociology, defense studies, and critical military theory, the study investigates whether these perceptions continue to reproduce the traditional binary logic that positions the family as a feminized, private domain and the military as a masculinized, public domain, or whether late modern discourses have begun to disrupt these dichotomies. The analysis focuses on the intersection of gender roles, family practices, parental responsibilities, and the symbolic and practical meanings ascribed to the notion of the “military family.” We used a reflexive approach to thematic analysis, combining qualitative interviews with young adults (aged > 18) who grew up in military families (14 participants), interviews with military and civilian experts (41 participants), survey data from service members, their spouses, and civilian respondents (411 and 125 open-ended responses from separate surveys). Findings reveal significant differences in how military families are understood and experienced. More critically, the study highlights how military institutional power and its greediness extend into the familial realm, not only through logistical demands, but also through the normalization of military values, hierarchical gendered expectations, and parenting practices. Full article

This paper develops a Sustainable Artificial Intelligence-Driven Wind Power Forecasting System (SAI-WPFS) to enhance the integration of renewable energy while minimizing the environmental footprint of deep learning computations. Although deep learning models such as CNN, LSTM, and GRU have achieved high accuracy in wind power forecasting, existing research rarely considers the computational energy cost and associated carbon emissions, creating a gap between predictive performance and sustainability objectives. Moreover, limited studies have addressed the need for a balanced framework that jointly evaluates forecast precision and eco-efficiency in the context of large-scale renewable deployment. Using real-time data from the Dumat Al-Jandal Wind Farm, Saudi Arabia’s first utility-scale wind project, this study evaluates multiple deep learning architectures, including CNN-LSTM-AM and GRU, under a dual assessment framework combining accuracy metrics (MAE, RMSE, R²) and carbon efficiency indicators (CO₂ emissions per computational hour). Results show that the CNN-LSTM-AM model achieves the highest forecasting accuracy (MAE = 29.37, RMSE = 144.99, R² = 0.74), while the GRU model offers the best trade-off between performance and emissions (320 g CO₂/h). These findings demonstrate the feasibility of integrating sustainable AI into wind energy forecasting, aligning technical innovation with Saudi Vision 2030 goals for zero-carbon cities and carbon-efficient energy systems. Full article

William James’s two psychological classics—The Principles of Psychology (1890) and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902)—are widely read but rarely connected. How are James’s psychological theories in The Principles applied in The Varieties? Most scholars say they are not. Our thesis is that, throughout The Varieties, James uses The Principles as the foundation for his psychology of religion. His chapters in The Principles on the brain, habit, the stream of consciousness, the subconscious, the self, attention, association, and emotions all contain passages that anticipate the main themes of The Varieties. These include the psychological roots of a sense of unseen reality, conversion experiences, mystical experiences, saintliness as a character type, and other religious topics. This article highlights ten conceptual connections between the two classic texts. We show that James’s original and core psychological principles guided his approach to studying personal religious experience in The Varieties. In addition, some of James’s psychological principles were broadened and enriched through their interaction with religious data. By placing the two texts in conversation, a more precise and deeper understanding of James’s psychology of religion emerges. Full article

Cosmic demographics—the statistical study of populations of astrophysical objects—has long relied on tools from multivariate statistics for analyzing data comprising fixed-length vectors of properties of objects, as might be compiled in a tabular astronomical catalog (say, with sky coordinates, and brightness measurements in a fixed number of spectral passbands). But beginning with the emergence of automated digital sky surveys, ca. 2000, astronomers began producing large collections of data with more complex structures: light curves (brightness time series) and spectra (brightness vs. wavelength). These comprise what statisticians call functional data—measurements of populations of functions. Upcoming automated sky surveys will soon provide astronomers with a flood of functional data. New methods are needed to accurately and optimally analyze large ensembles of light curves and spectra, accumulating information both along individual measured functions and across a population of such functions. Functional data analysis (FDA) provides tools for statistical modeling of functional data. Astronomical data presents several challenges for FDA methodology, e.g., sparse, irregular, and asynchronous sampling, and heteroscedastic measurement error. Bayesian FDA uses hierarchical Bayesian models for function populations, and is well suited to addressing these challenges. We provide an overview of astronomical functional data and some key Bayesian FDA modeling approaches, including functional mixed effects models, and stochastic process models. We briefly describe a Bayesian FDA framework combining FDA and machine learning methods to build low-dimensional parametric models for galaxy spectra. Full article

Drury reports Wittgenstein telling him, “I am not a religious man but I can’t help seeing every problem from a religious point of view, I would like my work to be understood in this way”. My paper attempts to make sense of this strange claim. I first consider the meaning Wittgenstein gives to ‘religious’ in speaking of questions he explicitly designates as such, and then explain how that (sort of) meaning could also apply to the (other) characterisations he provides of his philosophical work. I also consider the subsidiary question, and suggest two very different reasons as to why Wittgenstein nonetheless did not consider himself ‘a religious man’. While I find much confusion in what Wittgenstein says about religion, his crucial insight is that both religious and philosophical thinking are characterised by the same kind of difficulty. Both spring from our moral–existential confusion and despair over finding, or accepting the sense we find, in our life with others. In the later parts of this paper, I show how the metaphysical I–world perspective of the Tractatus (the first specific form taken by Wittgenstein’s own ‘religious point of view’) exemplifies this very rootedness of philosophical/religious thinking in despair, and how in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, including in some of his later explicitly religious remarks, an I–You perspective starts to emerge, one where our difficulties in sense-making are seen as the other side of our difficulties in opening ourselves to each other in love. I also suggest, however, that an unresolved tension nonetheless remains in Wittgenstein’s late thinking between an I–You orientation and a focus on collective normativity. Finally, I suggest that foregrounding love tends to dissolve the very idea of specifically ‘religious’ problems quite generally, and so leaves us with a double question about how to understand religion as such, and about whether, or how, we can give coherent sense to Wittgenstein’s idea that his point of view is specifically ‘religious’. Full article

This paper outlines a view of religious language that revolves around the notion of informed interpretation. The view can be summed up by saying that there is no fact of the matter independently of context and informed interpretation as to whether some religious statement or expression has cognitive content, or what that content may be. Where informed interpretation of religious language is impossible, we can give no answer to the question of what the content of a given statement or expression is. Equally, there can be no answer to the question of what that statement or expression presupposes or implies. If this is correct, then the idea that there can be a general and abstract philosophical analysis or theory of religious language should be called into question. Full article

Background: Acquired brain injury (ABI) often produces heterogeneous cognitive and emotional outcomes that are not fully explained by conventional neuropsychological testing. Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography may capture patient-specific patterns of white matter connectivity and thereby complement clinical assessment. Methods: We conducted an exploratory case series of nine patients in the subacute phase of ABI (traumatic brain injury or subarachnoid hemorrhage). Each underwent a brief cognitive-emotional battery and 1.5 T DTI with deterministic tractography of major association tracts and the corpus callosum. Tract lateralization was quantified using the Structural Asymmetry Index (SAI), and individual profiles were compared with neuropsychological and emotional data. Results: Six patients met criteria for clinically significant anxiety, and four for depression, often dissociated from global cognitive screening. Tractography revealed heterogeneous asymmetry patterns, most often in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, uncinate fasciculus, and cingulum. In several cases, structural asymmetries diverged from neuropsychological findings, suggesting dissociations between behavioral testing and connectivity-based measures. Conclusions: Within-subject tract asymmetry analysis provided preliminary, potentially clinically relevant information not captured by tests alone. These findings indicate that individualized tractography could enrich the interpretation of cognitive and emotional profiles and help guide hypothesis generation for connectivity-informed neurorehabilitation. Full article

This essay highlights how, in lieu of a supportive community, Toni Morrison’s artistic daughter-protagonist, Sula, creates her own safe space within her liberated imagination through self-mothering. Thematic motifs of creative identity, the social role of the artist, and revolutionary self-care are relevant not only to Sula but to how Morrison herself conceived of transformative, safe spaces for Black women writers through her work as a writer and editor. In addition to discussing Sula, I briefly expound on Morrison’s novels, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, and Bluest Eye, showing how audacious self-preservation undergirds the moral, political, and social dimensions of art, leading to personal and communal good. Reflecting on how Morrison flourished as a writer and editor after her divorce, while being the single parent to two young boys, I explicate Morrison’s understanding of motherwork as a complement to her artistic life, instructive of the ways in which carework, including self-care, helps artists and communities thrive. Morrison praised self-mothering in her unconventional artistic characters to reveal how female community and self-love are essential to sustain Black women artists. Full article

A graph G is said to be perfect if $\omega \left(H\right)=\chi \left(H\right)$ for every induced subgraph H of G, where $\omega \left(H\right)$ and $\chi \left(H\right)$ denote the clique number and the chromatic number of H. We say that a graph G admits a perfect division if its vertex set can be partitioned into two subsets A and B such that $G\left[A\right]$ is perfect and $\omega \left(G\right[B\left]\right)<\omega \left(G\right)$. If every induced subgraph of G admits a perfect division, then G is called perfectly divisible. A graph $P_3\cup P_4$ is the disjoint union of paths $P_3$ and $P_4$. A bull refers to the graph consisting of a triangle with two disjoint pendant edges. A homogeneous set X is a proper subset of $V\left(G\right)$ with at least two vertices such that every vertex in $V\left(G\right)\setminus X$ is either complete or anticomplete to X. In this paper, we prove that every ($P_3\cup P_4,P_6$, bull)-free graph G with $\omega \left(G\right)\ge 3$ admits a perfect division, provided that G contains no homogeneous set. Moreover, we establish that this clique number condition is tight by presenting a counterexample with clique number of exactly 2. Full article

In this paper we will be concerned with zeta-symmetry—the functional equation for the (Riemann) zeta-function (equivalents to which are called modular relations)—and reveal the reason why so many results are intrinsic to PFE (Partial Fraction Expansion) for the cotangent function. The hidden reason is that the cotangent function (as a function in the upper half-plane, say) is the polylogarithm function of order 0 (with complex exponential argument), and therefore it shares properties intrinsic to the Lerch zeta-function of order 0. Here we view the Lerch zeta-function defined in the unit circle as a zeta-function in a wider sense, as a function defined in the upper and lower half-planes. As evidence, we give a plausibly most natural proof of Ramanujan’s formula, including the eta transformation formula as a consequence of the modular relation via the cotangent function, speculating the reason why Ramanujan had been led to such a formula. Other evidence includes the pre-Poisson summation formula as the pick-up principle (which in turn is a generalization of the argument principle). Full article

In “Notes on Talks with Wittgenstein”, Waismann reports Wittgenstein saying that in speaking about ethics “I can only appear as a person speaking for myself.” If we combine this with another remark, “What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics”, it suggests that an understanding of Wittgenstein’s personal involvement with the teachings of Christianity is fundamental for an interpretation of his “Lecture on Ethics” (1929) and “Lectures on Religious Belief” (1938). From the evidence of his personal writings, in particular the coded notebooks of 1914–16 and MS183, which record remarks made in 1930–32, 1936–37, Wittgenstein’s relationship to the teaching of Christianity is complex. During WW1, Wittgenstein found a form of Christian teaching immensely helpful, it seemed to him the only sure way to happiness. This influence is still apparent in “Lecture on Ethics”. Remarks made in 1936–37 show Wittgenstein’s relationship with Christianity becoming more troubled, as his critical self-consciousness arising from thoughts about the teaching of the New Testament become increasingly debilitating. He begins to find that the Christian teaching is becoming a source of madness rather than one of happiness. He accepts that a life of faith would require him to live a completely different life from the one that suits him. He begins to think that an ordinary life and his philosophical work might be the solution to his state of unhappiness. In “Lectures on Religious Belief”, Wittgenstein’s remarks are made from a position which is more personally disengaged. Wittgenstein is now investigating religious belief as a human phenomenon and not as something with which he is any longer personally involved, but his personal experience, particularly his experience of loss of faith, is still fundamental to how he understands the phenomenon. Full article

Productive and healthy soils are essential in agriculture and other economic uses of land which depend on plant growth, and are under increasing pressure globally. The physical properties of soil, its porosity and pore structure, also have a significant impact on a wide range of environmental factors, such as surface water runoff and greenhouse gas exchange. Methods exist for evaluating soil porosity that are applied in a laboratory environment or by inserting sensors into soil in the field. However, such methods do not readily sample adequately in space or time and are labour-intensive. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the potential for estimation of soil porosity and pore size using the strength of reflection of audio pulses from natural soil surfaces. Estimation of porous material properties using acoustic reflections is well established. But because of the complex, viscous interactions between sound waves and pore structures, these methods are generally restricted to transmissions at low audio frequencies or at ultrasonic frequencies. In contrast, this study presents a novel design for an integrated broad band sensing system, which is compact, inexpensive, and which is capable of rapid, non-contact, and in situ sampling of a soil structure from a small, moving, farm vehicle. The new system is shown to have the capability of obtaining soil parameter estimates at sampling distances of less than 1 m and with accuracies of around 1%. In describing this novel design, special care is taken to consider the challenges presented by real agriculture soils. These challenges include the pasture, through which the sound must penetrate without significant losses, and soil roughness, which can potentially scatter sound away from the specular reflection path. The key to this new integrated acoustic design is an extension of an existing theory for acoustic interactions with porous materials and rigorous testing of assumptions via simulations. A configuration is suggested and tested, comprising seven audio frequencies and three angles of incidence. It is concluded that a practical, new operational tool of similar design should be readily manufactured. This tool would be inexpensive, compact, low-power, and non-intrusive to either the soil or the surrounding environment. Audio processing can be conducted within the scope of, say, mobile phones. The practical application is to be able to easily map regions of an agricultural space in some detail and to use that to guide land treatment and mitigation. Full article

Background: The tumor microenvironment offers a new perspective in gynecologic oncology. In ovarian cancer, numerous preclinical studies, especially organoid models, have highlighted cellular, immune, and biochemical mechanisms. Beyond these sophisticated findings, more practical aspects require attention, such as the role of vaginal microbiota, which represents an interplay between external agents and internal genitalia, and its potential profiling role in early detection beyond the promise of microbiota-targeted therapies. Objectives: This review aims to assess whether such a correlation is speculative or scientifically grounded. Methods: A focused literature search was conducted on vaginal microbiota and its correlation with ovarian cancer to define the current state of knowledge. Results: Mixed outcomes have been reported, yet there is a rational and scientific basis supporting further investigation. Clinical approaches increasingly consider vaginal microbiota as relevant. However, we have to say that most available evidence is still preliminary and largely preclinical to set realistic expectations for readers. Although additional studies are needed, emerging insights highlight its importance and practical implications. We present a diagnostic–therapeutic management flowchart summarizing current evidence). Discussion: Most links between the vaginal microbiota and ovarian cancer are correlational rather than causal. The idea that microbes ascend from the vagina to the ovaries is proposed but still definitely not demonstrated. Confounding factors like age, hormones, and BRCA status complicate interpretation, and ovarian cancer itself could secondarily alter the microbiota. Mechanistic studies and longitudinal data are still needed to clarify whether dysbiosis contributes to carcinogenesis or is merely a consequence. As gynecologists, we summarize key aspects and emphasize to colleagues the importance of incorporating these findings into daily clinical practice. Vaginal dysbiosis should be considered not only a local imbalance but also a potential strategy for primary cancer prevention. Conclusions: Future research on the tumor microenvironment and vaginal microbiota will expand scientific knowledge and guide innovative preventive and therapeutic strategies. Full article

One of the central themes of this journal is to ‘re-boot’ the mystical tradition for the contemporary seeker. The author, a practising psychotherapist, undertakes this in the present article by connecting three strands of thought and practice to propose a ‘mystical therapy’. First, there is the Christian mystical tradition as exemplified by the medieval tradition of theologia mystica. Second, the practices and insights of present-day therapy and counselling arising from the pioneering work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and his successors, including recent approaches from practitioners such as James Hillman and Wilfred Bion. Finally, the philosophical reflections of Freud’s Viennese contemporary Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), especially in regard to das Mystische and the choreography of saying and showing. All three strands are blended together as the author reflects on three decades of work in the area and the possibility of ‘re-booting’ the mystical through these means. Full article