Search Results (174)

What does “Big Bang” mean? What was the actual origin of these two words? There are many aspects hidden under this name, which are seldom explained. They are discussed here. To frame the analysis, help will be sought from the highly authoritative voices of two exceptional writers: William Shakespeare and Umberto Eco. Both have explored the tension existing between words and the realities they name. And this includes names given to outstanding theorems and spectacular discoveries, too. Stigler’s law of eponymy is recalled in this context. These points will be at the heart of the quest here, concerning the concept of “Big Bang”, which only a few people know what it means, actually. Fred Hoyle was the first to pronounce these words, in a BBC radio program, with a meaning that was later called inflation. But listeners were left with the image he was trying to destroy: the explosion of Lemaître’s primeval atom (an absolutely wrong concept). Hoyle’s Steady State will be carefully compared with inflation cosmology. They are quite different, and yet, in both cases, the possibility of creating matter/energy out of expanding space is rooted in the same fundamental principles: those of General Relativity. As is also, the possibility of having a universe with zero total energy, anticipated by R.C. Tolman, in 1934 already. It will be shown, how to obtain accelerated expansion from negative pressure; how to reconcile energy conservation with matter creation in an expanding universe; and a curious relation between de Sitter spacetime and Steady State cosmology. Concerning the naming issue, it will be remarked that, today, the same label “Big Bang” is used in very different contexts: (a) the Big Bang Singularity; (b) as the equivalent of cosmic inflation; (c) speaking of the Big Bang cosmological model; (d) to name a very popular TV program; and more. Full article

India is one of the fastest growing economies with significant potential for the use of smart farming operations. Although agriculture is a major sector, implementation of smart technologies in the agriculture sector has not progressed in India. We use a mixed-methods approach to develop knowledge on the factors determining this slow adoption of smart technology and develop strategies for large-scale adoption in the Indian agriculture sector. First, qualitative interviews are used to understand the factors behind the slow diffusion of smart technology in the agriculture sector. Based on the responses, we link the results of the qualitative study from the agri-sector to the well-known Diffusion of Innovations (DoI) theory. We then develop a framework for applying Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to analyze the impact of multiple causal factors. We apply our research findings to help achieve SDG 12 in the agriculture sector. Our findings indicate individual factors on their own may influence adoption, but some reasonable combinations of factors (e.g., a combination of technology, knowhow, experience, benefits-operation, and finance and reliability) could also result in the large-scale adoption of smart technologies in improving Indian agricultural operations. By doing so, we provide a contextual empirical configurational test of the DoI theory in the Indian smart agricultural context. Full article

This paper reports a design-rationale account of building and deploying a small ecosystem of AI-driven educational conversational agents with distinct pedagogical personas. Two strands target school contexts: (i) Talk to Bill, a historically grounded Shakespeare interlocutor intended to support close reading, contextual understanding, and interpretive dialogue; and (ii) Here to Help, a set of UK GCSE subject- and exam-board-specific tutors designed for formative practice in recognised question formats with feedback and iterative improvement. The third strand comprises six complementary assistants for an undergraduate Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) module, each bounded to a workflow-aligned role (e.g., empathise-stage coaching, study planning, course operations), with guardrails to privilege process quality over answer generation. We describe how persona differentiation is mapped to established learning, engagement, and motivation theories; how retrieval-augmented generation and provenance cues are used to reduce hallucination risk; and what early deployment observations suggest about orchestration, integration, and incentives. The contribution is a transferable, auditable rationale linking theory to concrete dialogue and UI moves for multi-persona tutoring ecosystems, rather than a claim of causal learning gains. Full article

This essay examines how Shakespeare’s King Lear and Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia employ fool figures to articulate truths inaccessible through rational discourse. The Fool in King Lear speaks through riddles, songs, and prophecies, revealing uncomfortable realities about power and identity that direct statement cannot safely convey. His performed madness contrasts with Lear’s genuine descent into insanity, yet both states access knowledge unavailable to those maintaining social position and sanity. Tarkovsky’s Domenico embodies the Russian Orthodox tradition of yurodstvo (holy foolishness), performing sacred madness through impossible rituals and apocalyptic prophecy. His mathematical impossibility—“1 + 1 = 1”—expresses spiritual unity that logic cannot grasp. Both figures draw on Plato’s distinction in the Phaedrus between divine madness and human pathology, where four forms of god-sent mania provide superior insight into rational thought. Through Erasmus’s humanist satire and Foucault’s analysis of reason’s violent separation from unreason, the essay traces how Western culture moved from integrating fool-wisdom to confining it as pathology. The protective mechanisms enabling fool-speech—performance frames, liminal positioning, sacred authorization—reveal society’s ambivalent need for dangerous truths. As contemporary culture increasingly medicalizes cognitive deviation, these masterworks preserve essential epistemological functions, demonstrating why certain truths require the fool’s disruptive voice. Full article

Federated learning in heterogeneous data scenarios faces two key challenges. First, the conflict between global models and local personalization complicates knowledge transfer and leads to feature misalignment, hindering effective personalization for clients. Second, the lack of dynamic adaptation in standard federated learning makes it difficult to handle highly heterogeneous and changing client data, reducing the global model’s generalization ability. To address these issues, this paper proposes pFedKA, a personalized federated learning framework integrating knowledge distillation and a dual-attention mechanism. On the client-side, a cross-attention module dynamically aligns global and local feature spaces using adaptive temperature coefficients to mitigate feature misalignment. On the server-side, a Gated Recurrent Unit-based attention network adaptively adjusts aggregation weights using cross-round historical states, providing more robust aggregation than static averaging in heterogeneous settings. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Shakespeare datasets demonstrate that pFedKA converges faster and with greater stability in heterogeneous scenarios. Furthermore, it significantly improves personalization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art personalized federated learning methods. Additionally, we demonstrate privacy guarantees by integrating pFedKA with DP-SGD, showing comparable privacy protection to FedAvg while maintaining high personalization accuracy. Full article

This essay introduces an experiential process through which student actors can explore any Shakespearean play. Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints technique serves as the foundation for a creative process informed by devising exercises and physical composition. In this essay, I demonstrate how this physically based dramaturgical process enables students to pay particular attention to the foundational elements that uniquely shape the story, such as time, space, sound, architecture, and gesture. This process gives student actors the agency to create material inspired by Shakespeare yet infused with their own imagination and curiosity. It allows students to wake up Shakespeare’s text in unexpected ways, embrace collaboration, and embody the richly detailed expression of Shakespeare’s poetic language. This essay aims to be a resource for educators and directors alike who are interested in a collaborative process that can either be integrated into rehearsals or serve as a foundation for classroom-based discussions. As such, this process can be mapped onto any classical or contemporary play, even though this essay features Shakespeare as the foundation for exploration. Full article

Ageing literature, while growing in huge volume in the past decades, is still largely dominated by frameworks and topics of frailty and decline. A shift in attention to conceptualising ageing more holistically to include psychosocial and emotional aspects as well as subjective experience is much needed, in order to better account for the ageing (well) experience and processes in today’s times. There is a large portion of older adults with relatively good health. As life expectancy increases around the world, many older adults are living longer and healthier overall, often wishing for their lives to continue being active, meaningful, and fulfilling. With this changing demographic in mind, we argue for a framework of positive ageing. We define positive ageing as a subjective, intentional experience, which includes the multi-dimensional construction of ageing well. The notion of positive ageing has the potential to widen the scope of gerontological research and to help guide policy and intervention development. Furthermore, this conceptual framework and a cyclic model of positive ageing presented in the current work can effectively complement current models and practices of care in geriatrics by taking a more person-centred and holistic approach to understanding and managing health and well-being. Full article

This essay argues that Hamlet should be read not merely as a domestic or dynastic tragedy, but as a political–philosophical ALLEGORY in which language itself becomes a site of crisis. Beginning with Hamlet’s contemptuous reply to Polonius—”Words, words, words” (2.2.191)—the play dramatizes the death of philosophy in the state, where speech is emptied of wisdom and reduced to surveillance, platitude, or performance. Had events unfolded differently, Prince Hamlet might have become a philosopher-king in the Platonic sense, ruling through reflection and justice. Instead, succession ambiguity, Claudius’s manipulative election, and the corruption of logos foreclose that possibility. The Mousetrap, often interpreted as a test of guilt, can also be read as a thought experiment about succession itself: a theatrical attempt to expose the fragility of legitimacy in an elective monarchy. Hamlet’s wager that words and representation can secure truth collapses, leaving only suspicion and violence. Polonius parodies philosophy’s degeneration into bureaucratic rhetoric, while Horatio inherits the burden of words as memory—tasked with telling a story that remains undecidable. Drawing on Plato, Foucault, Kewes, and recent scholarship, the essay contends that Shakespeare stages the foreclosure of philosophical sovereignty: a tragedy for Denmark and, symbolically, for the world. Full article

Background: Posttraumatic growth (PTG) refers to positive psychological change following trauma. While its psychological aspects are well-documented, the biological mechanisms remain unclear. Epigenetic changes, such as DNA methylation (DNAm), may offer insight into PTG’s neurobiological basis. Aims: This study aimed to identify epigenetic markers associated with PTG using an epigenome-wide association study (EWAS), the first of its kind in a trauma-exposed population. Methods: A longitudinal EWAS design was used to assess DNAm before and after trauma exposure in first-year paramedicine students (n = 39). Genome-wide methylation data were analyzed for associations with PTG, applying epigenome-wide and gene-wise statistical thresholds. Pathway enrichment analysis was also conducted. Results: The study identified two CpGs (cg09559117 and cg05351447) within the PCDHA1/PCDHA2 and PDZD genes significantly associated with PTG at the epigenome-wide threshold (p < 9.42 × 10^–8); these were replicated in an independent sample. DNAm in 5 CpGs across known PTSD candidate genes ANK3, DICER1, SKA2, IL12B and TPH1 were significantly associated with PTG after gene-wise Bonferroni correction. Pathway analysis revealed that PTG-associated genes were overrepresented in the Adenosine triphosphate Binding Cassette (ABC) transporters pathway (p = 2.72 × 10⁻⁴). Conclusions: These results identify genes for PTG, improving our understanding of the neurobiological underpinnings of PTG. Full article

Background: This technical note presents a methodological approach to agrichemical inventory documentation. It complements exposure assessments in field settings with time-restricted observational periods. Conducted in Michoacán, Mexico, this method leverages large language model (LLM) capabilities for categorizing agrichemicals from brief video footage. Method: Given time-limited access to a storage shed housing various agrichemicals, a short video was recorded and processed into 31 screenshots. Using OpenAI’s ChatGPT (model: GPT-4o^®), agrichemicals in each image were identified and categorized as fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, or other substances. Results: Human validation revealed that the LLM accurately identified 75% of agrichemicals, with human verification correcting entries. Conclusions: This rapid identification method builds upon behavioral methods of exposure assessment, facilitating initial data collection in contexts where researcher access to hazardous materials may be time limited and would benefit from the efficiency and cross-validation offered by this method. Further refinement of this LLM-assisted approach could optimize accuracy in the identification of agrichemical products and expand its application to complement exposure assessments in field-based research, particularly as LLM technologies rapidly evolve. Most importantly, this Technical Note illustrates how field researchers can strategically harness LLMs under real-world time constraints, opening new possibilities for rapid observational approaches to exposure assessment. Full article

In his 1926 “Criteria of Negro Art,” W.E.B. Du Bois advocates for art’s role in the quest for liberation while acknowledging the challenges facing the creation of Black art, observing, “We can go on the stage; we can be just as funny as white Americans wish us to be; we can play all the sordid parts that America likes to assign to Negroes; but for anything else there is still small place for us.” He elaborates, “As it is now we are handing everything over to a white jury.” Almost 100 years later, the issues Du Bois raises about Black art, the quest for Black freedom, and the structures of white supremacy that stymie this striving remain troublingly relevant for contemporary Shakespearean performance. As scholars have noted, complex challenges (the Shakespeare system, capitalist pressures, etc.) continue to make contemporary American Theater, and Shakespeare within it, “still a small space” for Black artists. In the face of these forces, what can and does resistance look like for Black artists within predominantly white theatrical spaces? Here, I tackle this question, thereby continuing the scholarly interrogation of the relationship between contemporary Shakespeare performance, race, and social justice. I turn to a recent lauded adaptation of Shakespeare that, in its move from local theater to Broadway, inevitably had to engage with the structures of American theater’s (and Shakespeare’s) racial capitalism—James Ijames’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Fat Ham (2021). Fat Ham, I contend, tackles head on the historical racial scripts imposed on Black subjects and, through a range of adaptive moves, exposes and resists them, offering counterscripts that insist on the personal and interpersonal complexity and flourishing of Black subjectivity. Full article

This article offers a new perspective on Miriam’s red jewel in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), interpreting it as a symbol of Jewish femininity, diasporic memory, and aesthetic resistance. Although the jewel has received little critical attention, this study suggests that it plays a central role in shaping Miriam’s identity and in articulating broader cultural anxieties around gender, ethnicity, and visibility. Through intertextual readings of Shakespeare’s Jessica and Walter Scott’s Rebecca and Rowena, the essay situates Miriam within a literary tradition of Jewish women whose identities are mediated through symbolic adornments. In addition to literary analysis, the article draws on visual art history—particularly Carol Ockman’s interpretation of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1848 portrait of Baronne de Rothschild—to explore how 19th-century visual culture contributed to the eroticization and exoticization of Jewish women. By placing Hawthorne’s portrayal of Miriam in dialogue with such visual representations, the essay highlights how the red jewel functions as a site of encoded cultural meaning. The analysis is further informed by feminist art theory (Griselda Pollock) and postcolonial critique (Edward Said), offering an interdisciplinary approach to questions of identity, marginalization, and symbolic resistance. While not claiming to offer a definitive reading, this article aims to open new interpretive possibilities by foregrounding the jewel’s narrative and symbolic significance. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing conversations in Hawthorne studies, Jewish cultural history, and the intersections of literature and visual art. Full article

The use of Shakespeare within warzones and at the frontline of conflict centralizes vital questions about the role of the arts during times of profound crisis, when lives and liberties are under direct attack. This article first considers Shakespearean productions linked to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, concentrating on the inaugural Ukrainian Shakespeare Festival and two documentaries that reveal how staging Shakespeare can serve humanitarian needs, promote political debate, and help individuals to process their wartime experiences. It then expands to include examples from other conflicts, including the First World War and the ongoing crisis in Gaza, and argues that warzone productions—in addition to embracing what theatre can achieve at times of conflict—also address its limitations. Warzone performances often acknowledge a gulf between representation and lived experience, between tragedy as a dramatic form and reality, which is reinforced when the individuals staging Shakespeare are also ‘actors’ in the war. This article proposes that what unites war and theatre is the power of narrative for shaping action and interpretation, and this recognition underlines the responsibilities of political and theatrical narratives at times of war, as well as the role of the critic. Full article

Peking opera The Revenge of Prince Zi Dan reinterprets Shakespeare’s Hamlet by integrating supernatural elements and traditional rituals from Chinese folk religion. The religious transformation is revealed through the reworking of lines, incorporation of ritual traditions, and portrayal of supernatural figures. The divine entity that is invoked in Hamlet’s prayers (2.2.169, 5.2.316) and Claudius’s repentance (3.3.36–72) is translated as tian 天 (Heaven) in Revenge, thus introducing the concepts of the worship of tian and tianming 天命 (Mandate of Heaven). Revenge also adapts Claudius’s command of “give me some light” (3.2.261) by associating it with ancient exorcisms, thereby dramatizing his attempts to conceal the guilt for regicide. Ophelia’s “maimed rites” (5.1.208) are depicted as a deviation from Confucian funeral rites in Revenge, reflected in the simplified funeral banners and Hamlet’s transgressive mourning. The “sulphurous and tormenting flames” (1.5.3) and the morning cock’s crow (1.2.217) are reinterpreted through the introduction of the judicial system of the underworld. These changes are not merely transitions in performing conventions but reflect the deep connection between folk religion and traditional Chinese theater through these prayers, rituals, and supernatural elements, thus creating a specific theatrical “field” in which Chinese folk religion interacts with Western classics. Full article

I use Shakespeare to teach acting to students. A key to my work is impression management: what Shakespeare called reputation. I view the management of reputation as a route into Shakespearean character, which I present to students as a mask attuned to sacred values. The physical basis from which the actor can discover the mask is what Hamlet calls ‘smoothness’, which I explain with an acting exercise. We discover the force of sacred values by noticing the ubiquity of keywords in the text such as honor, virtue, reason, shame and faith. By holding characters to the fire of their sacred values, I shift the actor’s attention from an individualist idea of authentic representation towards a sense of character as a battleground of mind-shaping. The resulting performance work is scaled up to a more expansive and energized degree than the actor may be used to delivering in a social media-saturated environment in which what is often prioritized is a quasi-confessional self-revelation. The revelation of an inner life then emerges through a committed exploration of antithetical relations, a strategy basic both to mask work and to Shakespeare’s poetics. The actor finds their personal connection to the material by facing the contradiction between the objective standards of behavior demanded of the character and the character’s attempt to control their status, that is, how they are seen. The final value of the performance work is that the actor learns how to manage their reputation so that they come to appear like a giant who is seen from a distance. Full article