Search Results (112)

In this article, I analyze the use of Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic texts—and the Kaddish in particular—as esoteric tongues in Jewish–American narratives, including poems, plays, television shows, and films. I suggest that by doing so, the creators of these works evoke the Lurianic notion of millin setimin or “secreted words”—utterances that transcend the communicative function of everyday speech and partake in some profound revelations. I hope to show that from Allen Ginsberg, through Tony Kushner, to the Coen Brothers and beyond, Jewish–American creators have been evoking Jewish tongues both as symbols of a lost past and as millin setimin that aspire to restore the connection to that past, within the Jewish–American community and beyond. Full article

This study provides a detailed analysis of COVID-19-related social media discourse in Italy, using 535,886 tweets from 10 major cities between 30 August 2020 and 8 June 2021. The tweets were translated from Italian to English for analysis. A multifaceted methodology was employed: Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) identified 20 key themes; sentiment analysis, using TextBlob, Flair, and TweetNLP, and emotion recognition using TweetNLP, revealed the emotional tone of the discourse, with 453 tweets unanimously positive across all algorithms. TextBlob was used for lexical analysis to rank the most salient positive and negative terms. The results indicated that positive sentiments centered on hope, safety measures, and vaccination progress, while negative sentiments focused on fear, death, and quarantine frustrations. This research offers valuable insights for public health officials, enabling tailored messaging, real-time strategy monitoring, and agile policymaking during the pandemic, with implications for future health crises. Full article

Interpretation of the New Testament (NT) in general and the Pauline corpus in particular still appears to be at a crossroads. Scholars continue to publish articles and monographs in binary opposition to one another. The terminology used to designate the overarching perspectives of these binary publications sharply contrasts a “traditional” perspective (Protestant in general, and Lutheran in particular) with a variously named “new” or “radical new” perspective. Most recently, beyond the imprecise “new” terminology, the non-traditional perspective is being referred to as the “post-supersessionist”, “nonsupersessionist”, or “within Judaism” perspective and is still strongly being contested. Historically speaking, these antithetical perspectives cannot both be completely correct. Arguably, then, the time has come to explore what the study of Kuhnian paradigms might reveal about this state of affairs in NT scholarship. Most important, in proffering a twofold hermeneutical way forward that is focused on better understanding the emic perspective of the texts that we interpret—to the extent humanly possible—it is hoped that we might become more keenly aware of the ethical implications of our paradigms, terminology, and exegesis for those who rely on our work for their understanding and appropriation of the Scriptures in their everyday living. Full article

Background: Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) remains a global health challenge despite significant advancements in antiretroviral therapy and prevention strategies. Developing a safe and effective vaccine that protects people worldwide has been a major goal, yet the genetic variability and rapid mutation rate of the virus continue to pose substantial challenges. Methods: In this review paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of previous vaccine candidates and the progress made in HIV vaccine clinical trials, spanning from the late 1990s to 2025. PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov were searched for English-language Phase 1–3 HIV vaccine trials published from 1990 to March 2025. After de-duplication, titles/abstracts and then full texts were screened; trial phase, regimen, immunogenicity, efficacy, and correlates were extracted into a structured spreadsheet. Owing to platform heterogeneity, findings were synthesized narratively and arranged chronologically to trace the evolution of vaccine strategies. Results: Early vaccine trials demonstrated that a protein subunit vaccine failed to protect against infection, revealing the complexity of HIV evasion strategies and shifting the focus to a comprehensive immune response, including both antibody and T-cell responses. Trials evaluating the role of viral vectors in generating cell-mediated immunity were also insufficient, and suggested that targeting T cell response alone was not enough. In 2009, the RV144 trial made a breakthrough by showing partial protection against HIV infection and providing the first indication of efficacy. This partial success influenced subsequent trials, prompting researchers to further explore the complex immune response required for protection and consider combinations of vaccine technologies to achieve robust, long-lasting immunity. Conclusion: Despite setbacks, decades of rigorous efforts have provided significant contributions to HIV vaccine discovery and development, offering hope for preventing and protecting against HIV infection. The field remains active by continuing to advance our understanding of the virus, refining vaccine strategies, and employing novel technologies. Full article

As an important green infrastructure, urban greenways can provide a range of socio-ecological benefits and play an important role in improving the urban ecological environment and enhancing the quality of living. Currently, the relationship between service quality and the actual benefits of greenways has not been sufficiently explored in urban greenway research. This study introduces the concept of “efficiency”, determines service efficiency and service effectiveness as the evaluation dimensions, selects 4 first-level indicators and 12 second-level indicators to evaluate the service efficiency of greenways, and constructs an evaluation model using a combination of subjective and objective assignments. This study uses the overall service effectiveness index and the efficiency–effectiveness balance index to measure the overall performance of the greenway space in the hope of revealing the key factors and reasons that affect the service effectiveness of the greenway and providing a theoretical basis for optimizing the planning and management of the greenway. Using ArcGIS network analysis technology, image semantic segmentation technology, a questionnaire survey, network text analysis, and other methods to quantify the indicators, this paper conducts an empirical study on four municipal greenways in Nanjing. This research shows that the factors affecting the service effectiveness of greenways mainly include the landscape environment, greenway functions, transportation conditions, and supporting facility factors. The contradiction between the single-function positioning and the variety of user needs is the main reason for the imbalance between the efficiency and effectiveness of urban greenways. This study provides a new path to quantify greenway service effectiveness and enriches the greenway evaluation theory. Full article

In an earlier essay, I drew on Sara Ahmed’s formulation of a “homing device” to describe U.S. Latine uses of biblical texts and traditions, as well as “scriptures” more broadly conceived. In this essay, I hope to complicate that idea a little further. I draw on ethnographic methods and share two stories of two people who came from the same generation and lived in geographic proximity in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, but who represent important differences in Latine contexts. These two case studies, when read comparatively, demonstrate how the Bible serves as a homing device, as an object around which both people look for and make sense of ideas of “home”, but the understandings of home and the ways they relate to biblical texts and traditions remain quite distinct. Full article

Abstractive summarization tasks are commonly without options for sentimental tendencies, which leads to a lack of summary personalization and a simplification of the understanding of the text content. Recognizing the crucial role of sentimental tendency in shaping reader interest and perception, such as prompting hopeful outlooks or critical evaluations, we introduce the summaries with multiple optional sentimental tendencies (SMOST) task, which involves generating summaries with various sentiment options and particularly benefits the news domain. Due to a scarcity of labeled data for sentiment-supervised summarization, we utilize sentiment sentences from original texts as positive samples in the training process, augmented with a prompt learning method. Our method achieves a better result on the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets regarding sentiment scores and has a small influence on the semantic information of summaries. Further analysis also shows that our method can present the different distributions of sentiment and semantic information on different datasets. Full article

The turn away from phenomenology in 20th century French philosophy was in large part due to an increased emphasis on Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of “linguistic structure”, i.e., that language is the internal system of differences between signs. Thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur and Jean-François Lyotard famously offered a “semiological challenge” to phenomenology. The idea was that phenomenology, especially Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, reduces to the sensible world and cannot think linguistic structure. Thus, the argument goes that phenomenology leaves out a basic element of human life: not only can it not think linguistic structure, but it also cannot think about elements, e.g., writing and text, which are its result. This paper takes up this challenge, especially in reference to Merleau-Ponty’s terminology in Phenomenology of Perception of “speaking speech” (parole parlante) and “spoken speech” (parole parlée). I point out that, in retrospect of his later work, Merleau-Ponty very clearly did want to take linguistic structure seriously. This, however, means that we need to reconsider some of the basic themes in his work. Taking inspiration from the recently published “problem of speech” lectures, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s idea that speech is a concrete limit situation from which we get both the idea of a language structure in which there are differences and of an ontological difference between being and beings. This is an internal criticism of both linguistic structure and formal ontology. I begin the paper by noting that, in Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the tacit and spoken cogito, also in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty criticizes the notion of a subject to which language refers and highlights the notion of a subject that defies representational and denotational structure. I do not, however, go along with Merleau-Ponty’s own criticism of the tacit ego, which he ultimately declared too subjectivistic. Ultimately, I hope to stress the importance of linguistic structure and writing in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. This is an ontology of that is fragile and requires symbolization. This paper emphasizes under-developed themes in Merleau-Ponty’s work such as bodily event, difference, symbolization, and the writing of philosophy. Full article

Following the “intertextual turn” in adaptation studies, scholars of Shakespearean performance have embraced the interpretive possibilities offered by infidelity, focusing increasingly on the corrective potential of recent stagings and adaptations. Such productions are not primarily valuable as progressive rewrites, however. In claiming not to be “Shakespeare”, these productions make testable claims about the nature of the Shakespearean playtext. In this paper, I examine two recent stage productions and one non-traditional film adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing: Kenny Leon’s 2019 Public Theater production, Chris Abraham’s 2023 Stratford Festival production, and Will Gluck’s 2023 romantic comedy Anyone But You. All three performances are consciously unfaithful to Shakespeare’s text or setting, and their revisions attend to making the characters’ behavior more palatable for a contemporary liberal–progressive audience. Yet when we compare these revisions with the original playtext, Shakespeare’s own views come into sharper relief, as does our own inclination to identify with characters that Shakespeare’s immediate audience may have felt quite distanced from. I argue that in their drive to correct the play and make the characters more likable, these productions paper over Shakespeare’s critique of the arbitrary construction—and violent enforcement—of social hierarchy. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida’s notion of the parergon, I show that Shakespeare’s deliberate narrative framing invites a more skeptical, disapproving understanding of his characters. My hope is that this discussion leads to an understanding of Much Ado About Nothing as a “problem play” rather than a “problematic” one. Full article

Understanding sports presents a fascinating challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to its intricate and ever-changing nature. Current NLP technologies struggle with the advanced cognitive demands required to reason over complex sports scenarios. To explore the current boundaries of this field, we extensively evaluated mainstream and emerging large models on various sports tasks and addressed the limitations of previous benchmarks. Our study ranges from answering simple queries about basic rules and historical facts to engaging in complex, context-specific reasoning using strategies like few-shot learning and chain-of-thought techniques. Beyond text-based analysis, we also explored the sports reasoning capabilities of mainstream video language models to bridge the gap in benchmarking multimodal sports understanding. Based on a comprehensive overview of main-stream large models on diverse sports understanding tasks, we presented a new benchmark, which highlighted the critical challenges of sports understanding for NLP and the varying capabilities of state-of-the-art large models on sports understanding. We also provided an extensive set of error analyses that pointed to detailed reasoning defects of large model reasoning which model-based error analysis failed to reveal. We hope the benchmark and the error analysis set will help identify future research priorities in this field. Full article

This article offers a theological reflection on the leadership discourse of four senior evangelical leaders in the Church of England. The justification for a discourse-led approach within the discipline of practical theology is that discourse is itself a socially informed practice. Discourse is constructive for meaning-making and has ongoing constituting effect for practice. Thus, any theological bias found in evangelical discourse is of interest since that discourse has a practice-shaping effect. Using the method of content analysis, I undertake an audit of four leadership texts to find out how often God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are referenced. The content analysis reveals a quantitative disparity. The Person of the Spirit is referenced far less, and any references to Spirit are qualitatively limited. These quantitative results offer evidence to suggest that a full account of the Divine Move that is Spirit, and the leading activity of the Spirit, fails to be disclosed in these texts. I suggest that these findings indicate an imbalance in the discourse which I hope prompts evangelicals to further reflect on, and explore, the place of the Spirit in their theology and practice. Full article

Prevailing political and popular narratives often treat the issue of trans death as an inevitability and reduce complex stories of trans life to their endings. This paper investigates the transformative potential of creative forms of resistance—specifically a selection of Canadian poetry, personal essays, and comics—and how their artistic affordances engage with transfeminism as an approach to narratives of trans existence. Rooted in Canadian author Kai Cheng Thom’s reckoning with the shortcomings of trans-exclusionary feminist thought, and informed by Chinua Achebe’s conceptualization of re-storying, this article explores how I Hope We Choose Love and Falling Back in Love with Being Human by Kai Cheng Thom, Death Threat by Canadian creatives Vivek Shraya and Ness Lee, and comics from Assigned Male by trans activist and Canadian comic artist Sophie Labelle re-story “necessary” trans death to orient queer death spaces around a trans-for-trans (t4t) praxis of narrativization. Addressing the (inter)disciplinary possibilities of trans-inclusive feminism and comics studies, this article celebrates how these texts disavow and re-story the “Good” Trans Character, who dies to satisfy transmisogynistic ideologies, and theorizes the T4t Dead Trans Character, who dies to reclaim instances of trans death and recodify trans personhood as a site of hope, agency, and self-determination. In their re-storying, these texts recognize the transformative potential of trans existence and echo Thom in their urging of trans-inclusive feminism to renounce narratives of disposability and invest in the dignity of all human life. Full article

Large language model-related technologies have shown astonishing potential in tasks such as machine translation, text generation, logical reasoning, task planning, and multimodal alignment. Consequently, their applications have continuously expanded from natural language processing to computer vision, scientific computing, and other vertical industry fields. This rapid surge in research work in a short period poses significant challenges for researchers to comprehensively grasp the research dynamics, understand key technologies, and develop applications in the field. To address this, this paper provides a comprehensive review of research on large language models. First, it organizes and reviews the research background and current status, clarifying the definition of large language models in both Chinese and English communities. Second, it analyzes the mainstream infrastructure of large language models and briefly introduces the key technologies and optimization methods that support them. Then, it conducts a detailed review of the intersections between large language models and interdisciplinary technologies such as contrastive learning, knowledge enhancement, retrieval enhancement, hallucination dissolution, recommendation systems, reinforcement learning, multimodal large models, and agents, pointing out valuable research ideas. Finally, it organizes the deployment and industry applications of large language models, identifies the limitations and challenges they face, and provides an outlook on future research directions. Our review paper aims not only to provide systematic research but also to focus on the integration of large language models with interdisciplinary technologies, hoping to provide ideas and inspiration for researchers to carry out industry applications and the secondary development of large language models. Full article

Nowadays, polycrystalline lead telluride is one of the premier substances for thermoelectric devices while remaining a hopeful competitor to current semiconductor materials used in mid-infrared photonic applications. Notwithstanding that, the development of reliable and reproducible routes for the synthesis of PbTe thin films has not yet been accomplished. As an effort toward this aim, the present article reports progress in the growth of polycrystalline indium-doped PbTe films and their study. The introduction foregoing the main text presents an overview of studies in these and closely related research fields for seven decades. The main text reports on the electron-beam-assisted physical vapor deposition of n-type indium-doped PbTe films on two different amorphous substrates. This doping of PbTe is unique since it sets electron density uniform over grains due to pinning the Fermi level. In-house optimized parameters of the deposition process are presented. The films are structurally characterized by a set of techniques. The transport properties of the films are measured with the original setups described in detail. The infrared transmission spectra are measured and simulated with the original optical-multilayer modeling tool described in the appendix. Conclusions of films’ quality in terms of these properties altogether are drawn. Full article

The Mar Menor (Murcia, Spain) has faced a eutrophication crisis in recent decades, significantly affecting local residents, including children. Considering the importance of involving children in scientific activities and the potential societal benefits of working with them, we conducted two environmental citizen science activities with students from the Los Nietos school. The study aimed to evaluate their knowledge about the Mar Menor crisis, understand their opinions and experiences, and assess the broader social impact of these activities. The children first created drawings related to the Mar Menor during a visit to Los Nietos beach, followed by a survey completed weeks later. Analysis of the drawings and survey responses revealed that while children may not fully grasp the causes of the ecological catastrophe, they are aware of its existence and maintain a hopeful perspective on the lagoon’s future. Additionally, a social network analysis of texts referencing children highlighted the societal reach of their actions and voices regarding the Mar Menor crisis. Our findings demonstrate that citizen science activities not only engage and educate children but also position them as influential communicators within their communities. This underscores the potential of such initiatives to amplify environmental awareness and drive social change by empowering younger generations as advocates for ecological sustainability. Full article