Hasil untuk "History and principles of religions"

Richard de Grijs

In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence of apparatus -- including time balls, noon guns, discs and flags -- operated from 1851 until World War I. Naval officers aboard guard ships used sextants equipped with artificial horizons to determine local noon, thus integrating the colony into the global Greenwich-based cartographic system. This infrastructure was not merely technical; it became a civic ritual, with the daily noon gun structuring urban life and becoming a point of political negotiation between naval commanders and the colonial governor. In contrast, the Dutch Caribbean islands employed simpler, pragmatic systems. Curaçao used a daily time flag, a cost-effective solution suited to its climate and harbour scale, while smaller islands like Aruba and St. Eustatius relied on occasional noon guns. This diversity reflected a decentralised colonial administration that adapted technologies to local conditions and budgets. The history of these time signals reveals a process of hybrid adaptation, not simply replication of European models. They were shaped by environmental challenges, fiscal constraints and local politics, functioning simultaneously as navigational aids and civic landmarks. Their eventual decline, owing to budgetary pressures and new technologies like wireless telegraphy, underscores the fragile and negotiated nature of colonial scientific infrastructures.

Banafsheh Karimian, Alexis Guichemerre, Soufiane Belharbi et al.

Breast cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Longitudinal mammography risk prediction models improve multi-year breast cancer risk prediction based on prior screening exams. However, in real-world clinical practice, longitudinal histories are often incomplete, irregular, or unavailable due to missed screenings, first-time examinations, heterogeneous acquisition schedules, or archival constraints. The absence of prior exams degrades the performance of longitudinal risk models and limits their practical applicability. While substantial longitudinal history is available during training, prior exams are commonly absent at test time. In this paper, we address missing history at inference time and propose a longitudinal risk prediction method that uses mammography history as privileged information during training and distills its prognostic value into a student model that only requires the current exam at inference time. The key idea is a privileged multi-teacher distillation scheme with horizon-specific teachers: each teacher is trained on the full longitudinal history to specialize in one prediction horizon, while the student receives only a reconstructed history derived from the current exam. This allows the student to inherit horizon-dependent longitudinal risk cues without requiring prior screening exams at deployment. Our new Privileged History Distillation (PHD) method is validated on a large longitudinal mammography dataset with multi-year cancer outcomes, CSAW-CC, comparing full-history and no-history baselines to their distilled counterparts. Using time-dependent AUC across horizons, our privileged history distillation method markedly improves the performance of long-horizon prediction over no-history models and is comparable to that of full-history models, while using only the current exam at inference time.

Vladimir Morozan

The article is dedicated to the archpriest, chief priest of the Main Staff of the Guards and Grenadier Corps, confessor of Emperor Nicholas I and his wife Alexandra Fedorovna Nikolai Vasilyevich Muzovsky. The work pays special attention to the family and clan ties of the confessor of the imperial family, as well as the main stages of his career. Considering the extremely scant information about Muzovsky’s relatives, the author considered it possible to talk in more detail about his father and children. Surviving archival documents and private correspondence make it possible to classify Muzovsky as one of the most educated members of the court clergy of the first half of the 19th century. At the same time, according to the recollections of his contemporaries, Muzovsky did not have brilliant oratory and was not one of the talented mentors. In any case, the future Empress Alexandra Feodorovna remained disappointed by her experience with Muzovsky, who was tasked with preparing her to accept the Orthodox faith. However, Muzovsky’s teaching practice at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum showed that the confessor of Grand Duke Nikolai Pavlovich was not completely devoid of teaching talent, given the interest of the lyceum students in his studies on the Law of God. Extremely unpretentious to living conditions and his appearance, Muzovsky spent most of his salary, which in some years exceeded 9 thousand rubles, on the maintenance of his family members. Obviously, after the death of his wife Ekaterina Mikhailovna, Nikolai Vasilyevich took upon himself all the troubles of arranging and supporting his children. In the office documents there are numerous appeals from Muzovsky to the Chief Prosecutor of the Holy Synod and the Minister of the Imperial Court for assistance in arranging the fate of his children.

Vyacheslav Yachmenik

The article introduces for the first time into academic circulation a previously unknown diary for the years 1912–1920. N. S. Pedashenko (1894–1980), a graduate of the Faculty of History and Philology of the Imperial Moscow University (1917) and a future priest (since 1949), is presented for the first time. Based on the diary, the author's religiosity is analyzed in the context of the phenomenon of religious conversion, which became characteristic of Russian intellectuals at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The article reconstructs the circle of reading theological literature of the author of the diary and the circle of his interaction with the clergy and various church figures of the early 20th century. In the university space Pedashenko gets closer to professors of theological sciences — I. V. Popov, S. I. Smirnov and A. I. Almazov. Pedashenko became acquainted with M. A. Novoselov in Orthodox circles in Moscow, at whose meetings he became close to representatives of the student section of the Novoselov Circle, his peers and future priests (V. Nadezhdin, S. Sidorov, and many others). This personal context of relationships was formed in Pedashenko due to his desire to transfer after university to the theological academy. Although this intention was realized only in the postwar 1940s, we show how Pedashenko’s diary already in his early years makes sense of his vocation to the priesthood. In addition to his personal churchliness, this ministry was also motivated by his awareness of the hostility and sinfulness of the secular world, to the transformation of which the future theologian and priest wanted to devote his life.

Hamdi Kızıler

İnsan hem fiziksel hem de metafizik katmanlara sahip bir varlıktır. Bu katmanlar arasında denge sağlanamazsa iç ve dış dünyasında problemler ortaya çıkar. Dengenin sağlıklı olabilmesi için insan, sürekli bir anlam arayışı içine girer ve bunun için de doğru, güzel ve benlik dönüşümünü gerçekleştirmiş yetkin rol modellere ihtiyaç duyar. Şüphesiz bu modeller, peygamberler ve onların izinden giden kâmil insanlardır. Bu noktada sosyal olan insanın diğer varlıklarla etkileşimi ortaya çıkar. Etkileşim, insanın tarihî veya çağdaş şahsiyetleri arasında olduğu gibi, herhangi bir eser, olay veya olgu arasında da olabilmektedir. Bu çalışmada konu ettiğimiz Ebu’l-Hasan Harakânî ve Mevlânâ Celaleddin-i Rumî’nin hem kâmil insan olmaları hem de etkileşimleri, tasavvuf düşüncesi açısından önemli bir yere sahiptir. Harakânî’nin birçok tarikat silsilesinde adının geçmesi, Üveysîlik tarikiyle Bâyezîd-i Bistâmî’nin Tayfuriyye ekolüne mensup olması, Nakşibendiyye tarikatının ilklerinden olan birçok sûfîyi etkilemesi, onun etki alanının oldukça geniş olduğunu göstermektedir. Mevlânâ’nın sadece Harakânî’den değil birçok sûfîden de etkilendiği tespit edilmiştir. Mevlânâ’nın Harakânî’yi manevî mürşid olarak kabul etmesi ve onu övücü sözlerle anması, Harakânî’nin Mevlânâ’nın tasavvuf düşüncesindeki etkisinin büyüklüğünü ve önemini göstermektedir. Bu çalışmada Mevlânâ’nın kendisinden asırlar önce yaşamış olan aşk ve cezbe ehli Harakânî’nin tasavvuf düşüncesindeki bazı etki alanları incelenmiştir. Hedeflenen amaç ise, her iki sûfînin Anadolu’da tasavvuf düşüncesinin kurucu teorisyenlerinden olmalarından yola çıkılarak tasavvuf geleneğindeki aşk, vecd ve cezbe ehlinin hallerinin anlaşılması ve etki alanlarının tespit edilmesidir. Çalışmada ele alınan her iki sûfînin aşk ve cezbe ehli olması ve Mevlânâ’nın büyük bir âlim, şair, mütefekkir gibi çok yönlülüğü, konunun geniş olmasını zorunlu kılmaktadır. Ancak konu Mevlânâ’nın Mesnevî’sinde bizzat Harakânî hakkında söylediği kendi ifadelerinden yola çıkılarak bazı çıkarımlarla sınırlandırılmıştır. Araştırmada yöntem olarak giriş kısmında insanın ontolojik yapısı ve anlam arayışı üzerinde kısaca durulmuş, manevî rehberlerin rol modelliği özetlenmiştir. Mevlânâ’nın etkilendiği diğer sûfîler arasında Harakânî’nin özel bir yeri olduğu tespit edilerek öne çıkan etki alanları belirlenmiştir. Harakânî’nin, Mevlânâ’nın düşünce dünyasında önemli bir yere sahip olduğu, eserinde bazen açık bazen de metaforik anlatımlarla sıkça bahsedilmesinden anlaşılmaktadır. Çalışmanın ilerleyen kısımlarında, Harakânî’nin Mevlânâ üzerindeki etki alanları; meşrep, keşf ve ilham, Üveysîlik, mecaz/sembol veya metaforik anlatım, zâhir ve bâtınî bilgi şeklinde ele alınmıştır. Aslında çalışma konusu olan her iki şahsiyetin şuttârlığından hareketle, zaman ve mekân ötesi birçok alanda etkileşimden bahsetmek mümkündür. Ancak bir makalenin sınırları çerçevesinde, sadece Mesnevî’den hareketle belirli alanların tespiti ve diğer birçok hususu burada özetlemek icap etmiştir.

Alexander Avdeev

In the paper created within the framework of the scientific project “Corpus Inscriptionum Rossicarum”, examines two komplex of private acts drawn up in the second half of the 60s of the 16th century by a large Dvinsk landowner Alexej Amosov and boyar Alexej Fyodorovich Bas-manov with the mention of a special type of epigraphic monuments of Moscow Russia — wall synodics or memorial tables. These inscriptions, carved in wood or stone, as well as painted with paint, were placed in the sacred part of the temple, on the wall of the altar opposite the sacrifice. These epigaphic monuments were one of the forms of personal piety, and the right to place them was possessed by the сtitors and donators of the temple or monastery. By their request in the wall synodics records the names of the closest relatives and other people not related to the depositors by ties of kinship. The installation of these epigraphic monuments and their placement in the altar be-came a guarantee of eternal commemoration of the persons inscribed in them during the pros-komidia. The heyday of this type of epigraphic monuments falls on the second half of the 17th — second third of the 18th century, but the earlier period of their existence has not yet served as the subject of special scientific research. Based on the analyzed acts, the paper concludes that at the moment the mention of wall synodics in private acts of the second half of the 60s of the 16th century. They are the earliest evidence of the existence of a stable tradition of creating this type of inscriptions, compiled by order of the ctitors and donators.

Arno Simons

This paper explores the potential of contextualized word embeddings (CWEs) as a new tool in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) for studying contextual and evolving meanings of scientific concepts. Using the term "Planck" as a test case, I evaluate five BERT-based models with varying degrees of domain-specific pretraining, including my custom model Astro-HEP-BERT, trained on the Astro-HEP Corpus, a dataset containing 21.84 million paragraphs from 600,000 articles in astrophysics and high-energy physics. For this analysis, I compiled two labeled datasets: (1) the Astro-HEP-Planck Corpus, consisting of 2,900 labeled occurrences of "Planck" sampled from 1,500 paragraphs in the Astro-HEP Corpus, and (2) a physics-related Wikipedia dataset comprising 1,186 labeled occurrences of "Planck" across 885 paragraphs. Results demonstrate that the domain-adapted models outperform the general-purpose ones in disambiguating the target term, predicting its known meanings, and generating high-quality sense clusters, as measured by a novel purity indicator I developed. Additionally, this approach reveals semantic shifts in the target term over three decades in the unlabeled Astro-HEP Corpus, highlighting the emergence of the Planck space mission as a dominant sense. The study underscores the importance of domain-specific pretraining for analyzing scientific language and demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of adapting pretrained models for HPSS research. By offering a scalable and transferable method for modeling the meanings of scientific concepts, CWEs open up new avenues for investigating the socio-historical dynamics of scientific discourses.

Khadija Khatun, Chen Shen, Jun Tanimoto et al.

Understanding how cooperation emerges in public goods games is crucial for addressing societal challenges. While optional participation can establish cooperation without identifying cooperators, it relies on specific assumptions -- that individuals abstain and receive a non-negative payoff, or that non-participants cause damage to public goods -- which limits our understanding of its broader role. We generalize this mechanism by considering non-participants' payoffs and their potential direct influence on public goods, allowing us to examine how various strategic motives for non-participation affect cooperation. Using replicator dynamics, we find that cooperation thrives only when non-participants are motivated by individualistic or prosocial values, with individualistic motivations yielding optimal cooperation. These findings are robust to mutation, which slightly enlarges the region where cooperation can be maintained through cyclic dominance among strategies. Our results suggest that while optional participation can benefit cooperation, its effectiveness is limited and highlights the limitations of bottom-up schemes in supporting public goods.

Svetlana Bukalova

The participation of the Russian Empire in the First World War necessitated the creation of a system of public care for the victims – soldiers' families, disabled soldiers, orphans. This task was solved by the Supreme Council for the care of families of conscripts. The executive structure of the Supreme Council was the Committee of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna for providing charitable assistance to the families of conscripts. The article highlights the organizational and financial foundations of the Elizabethan Committee, revealing its spatial structure and main activities. The study was carried out on the basis of materials from the archival fund of the Elizabethan Committee and its periodical. The organizational structure of the Elizabethan Committee included a central body, provincial branches and county commissions. The grassroots level consisted of charitable societies. Hierarchical relations between them were based on the principles of autonomy and subsidiarity. Local branches were headed by governors. The competence of the Elizabethan Committee initially covered the provision of additional assistance to soldiers' families to the state aid, later it included the provision of military invalids and orphans. The priority of labor assistance was declared. The main forms of support were assistance in carrying out agricultural work, establishment of nurseries, opening of orphanages. In the cities, the Elizabethan Committee organized workshops, canteens, and fuel sales. This work was carried out jointly with the local government and charitable organizations. The funds of the Elizabethan Committee were charitable donations and allocations of the Supreme Council. In the second half of 1916, the estimate of the Committee's work exceeded 7.5 million rubles. The conducted research allowed to come to the conclusion that the system of the Elizabethan Committee had a state-public character and can be considered as a precursor of specialized public administration bodies in the social sphere. At the same time, this made it possible to mobilize charitable resources to help the victims of the war.

Ivan Ladynin

The article is intended to refine the dates of two important episodes in the biography of the outstanding Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenishchev (1856-1947), the collector of antiquities that laid the cornerstone for the Egyptian department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. Russian Egyptologists were sure that Golenishchev acquired the first object of his collection at the age of 14; this came to be known from the Soviet Egyptologist and Orientalist Vassiliy Struve, who had once heard it from Golenishchev himself. However, the file-cabinet of Golenishchev’s collection preserves a card for the ushebti of Qeref-en-Ptah bearing a mark that this was the first object that Golenishchev possessed given to him by the ambassador of Greece at St. Petersburg Dimitrios Buduris. As the diplomat started his mission at St. Petersburg in August 1871, he could not make this present before Golenishchev was at least 15 years old. There is also an uncertainty about the time of Golenishchev’s purchasing three important papyri: The Travel of Wenamun to Byblos, the Golenishchev Onomasticon and a literary letter (Pushkin Museum 1,1b 127). Golenishchev dated this purchase to the autumn of 1891 in his publications of 1897 and 1899, but the unpublished account of his travel to Egypt in 1890-1891 (now at the Archives of Vladimir Golenishchev at Paris) makes it perfectly clear that this took place in November and December of 1890. Symptomatically both false dates go back to Golenishchev’s statements. While the former one could be due to a real failure of memory or to the desire to bring the start of his collection closer to his childhood, the latter can be explained by an urge to disguise somehow the circumstances of his purchase by falsifying its date.

Vera Yarnykh

The paper explores the dismounted knight as the personification of Pride in the context of Southern French art and hagiography of the 11th–12th centuries. This motif is based on the Psychomachia, the Late Antique allegorical poem by a 4th-century Christian poet Prudentius that visualizes a series of combats between Virtues and Vice. The key point in the sequence is the battle between Humility and mounted Pride culminating in the fall of the latter into the pit. The metaphor of Pride brought low literally visualized as the fall of a proud she-warrior from her steed resonates in the literature of the 11th–12th century. In the society where the image of an armed horseman is strongly associated with a member of the secular elite, the classical motif acquires a new social dimension. The Southern French hagiography of the 11th – early 12th century adapts it to the stories of punishment and derision of violent knights. Since the late 11th century allegorical figures of Virtues and Vices pass from the manuscript pages of illuminated treatises to the sculpted and painted decor of Romanesque churches. The Prudentius’ armed and armored she-warriors grow progressively abstract in this novel visual space. Following this development, Pride is the only vice to show little change in the way it is visualized. Within the iconographic programs of some church spaces mostly oriented towards constructing a social model using hagiographical topoi, Pride comes to be the only vice to keep her military attributes. Still personified as the dismounted cavalier, Pride becomes part of the universal eschatological perspective of the Last Judgment within the carved portal of the basilica of Sainte-Foy de Conques. The image has a local parallel in the episode of a knight’s fatal fall in the 11th century Book of Miracles of Saint Foy, with recent events remodeled on the episode of Prudentius’ learned poem. Thus, the image of a dismounted knight comes to stay in the visual allegory of the Middle Ages as an articulation of the aristocratic vice, one of the military elite. Starting as a mere episode in the allegorical combat of Virtues and Vices, the motif of Pride’s fall is shown to crystallize into a self-sufficient iconographic formula and literary topos.

Ksenija Ramovš

The Anton Trstenjak Institute for Gerontology and Intergenerational Relations is named after its co-founder, academician Prof. Anton Trstenjak, Ph.D. The work of the Institute is based on a holistic view of the human being. In the spirit of its co-founder, the Institute researches, publishes, teaches and develops practical programmes in all the areas for which it has been founded; in addition to ageing and coexistence, it also includes psychology and logotherapy, which were in its title when it was founded, including intoxication and addictions, which have been the lifelong focus of the Institute’s co-founders. This article presents some of the outlines of Trstenjak’s life and work and their significance for the development of the Anton Trstenjak Institute up to 2022, when it celebrates its thirtieth anniversary.

Ulyana Piterbarg, Lerrel Pinto, Rob Fergus

Neural Language Models (LMs) offer an exciting solution for general-purpose embodied control. However, a key technical issue arises when using an LM-based controller: environment observations must be converted to text, which coupled with history, results in long and verbose textual prompts. As a result, prior work in LM agents is limited to restricted domains with small observation size as well as minimal needs for interaction history or instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce diff history, a simple and highly effective solution to these issues. By applying the Unix diff command on consecutive text observations in the interaction histories used to prompt LM policies, we can both abstract away redundant information and focus the content of textual inputs on the salient changes in the environment. On NetHack, an unsolved video game that requires long-horizon reasoning for decision-making, LMs tuned with diff history match state-of-the-art performance for neural agents while needing 1800x fewer training examples compared to prior work. Even on the simpler BabyAI-Text environment with concise text observations, we find that although diff history increases the length of prompts, the representation it provides offers a 25% improvement in the efficiency of low-sample instruction tuning. Further, we show that diff history scales favorably across different tuning dataset sizes. We open-source our code and data to https://diffhistory.github.io.

Martin Lopez-Corredoira

Since the beginning of the 20th century, a continuous evolution and perfection of what we today call the standard cosmological model has been produced, although some authors like to distinguish separate periods within this evolution. A possible historical division of the development of cosmology into six periods is: (1) the initial period (1917-1927); (2) the period of development (1927-1945); (3) the period of consolidation (1945-1965); (4) the period of acceptance (1965-1980); (5) the period of enlargement (1980-1998); and (6) the period of high-precision experimental cosmology (1998-now). The last period started with a epistemological optimism that has declined with time, and the expression "crisis in cosmology" is now stubbornly reverberating in the media. The initial expectation of removing the pending minor problems arising from the increased accuracy of measurements has backfired: the higher the precision with which the standard model tries to fit the data, the greater the number of tensions that arise, the problems proliferating rather than diminishing.

Kabir Mansingh Heimsath

Andrea Grimaldi

In an ethnically mixed village in the Chitwan district of Nepal, large numbers of young Tharu men are migrating for labor to the Arab Gulf countries and Malaysia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this essay examines the impact labor migration has on the lives of women who stay behind. I focus on two ways that local women participate in this process: first, by financing migration through microcredit loans and second, by managing the remittances they receive from abroad. I argue that, while women now play a significant role in helping finance migration, they are still subject to societal oversight when it comes to managing the remittance money, which creates new sources of conflict within families, and reinforces women’s desires to become more independent. Microcredit loans and remittances, as a social agreement and the material outcome of migration, are altering traditional gender roles, although it is still too early to determine their lasting effect.

Aysu Akcan

Błażej Ciarkowski

Celem artykułu jest analiza obecnej sytuacji powojennych modernistycznych zespołów zabudowy zlokalizowanych w naturalnym krajobrazie o szczególnych wartościach oraz wyróżnienie potencjalnych szans i zagrożeń na przyszłość. Analiza przeprowadzona została jako studium przypadku dwóch wyróżniających się kompleksów: dzielnicy uzdrowiskowej Ustroń Zawodzie oraz dzielnicy wczasowej Ustroń Jaszowiec.  Modernistyczne dzielnice wypoczynkowe stanowią przykład kompleksowych projektów urbanistyczno-architektonicznych obejmujących nowoczesną, modernistyczną architekturę o ważnej roli społecznej, dostosowanej (skalą, technologią, formą) do warunków naturalnych oraz powstających w duchu poszanowania wartości krajobrazu (rozumianego w duchu modernizmu). Ich ochrona powinna wykraczać poza skalę pojedynczego obiektu architektonicznego, traktując jako punkt wyjścia postrzeganie dzielnic wypoczynkowo-uzdrowiskowych jako krajobrazu kulturowego.

Najmedin Gilani, Mokhtar Fili

1. Introduction During the course of history, music has always occupied an extraordinary position among different cultures and nations. Plato regards music learning as one of children’s educational principles (Plato, Book III, 2004, p. 399). Furthermore, the role of music in humans’ every-day lives is quite clear. Whether in ancient times or today, humans have always paid special attention to music, attempting to convey their messages to God through music and rhythmic words. Despite today’s progress in technology, there are still traditions alive among the people of Zagros which are deeply rooted in mythologies; they are connected to a universe beyond the material world and are mostly accompanied by the sound of Sornā musical instrument. Various functions of this instrument in the culture of the people of Zagros include martial arts, festivities, providing comfort in grief, conveying messages, promising hope, and mythical and mystical functions such as asking for rain, asking for a male offspring, driving the moon out of the hands of evil forces, and helping to find lost corpses in rivers. The present study seeks to provide answers to the following questions: What are the functions of Sornā musical instrument in the culture of the people of Zagros? What are the origins and philosophies behind those functions?   2.Methodology The present study was conducted using the descriptive-analytical method. Data were collected using library studies, field research and references to the comments of philosophers including Aristotle, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Durant.   3.Discussion The nature of music is complex and mystical. During the course of history, man has always had an exceptional outlook towards music. Particularly in the spiritual culture and folkloric and mythological beliefs of Iranian ethnicities, music has always occupied a special position. Sublime instances of music are manifested through different religions, faiths, and ethnicities. Various rituals and ceremonies of all religions are somehow accompanied by a specific type of music. As two ethnicities that safeguard the Iranian culture, Lurs and Kurds have always had a special place for music in their hearts. In this study, seven cases of the religious functions of Sornā musical instrument in the culture of the people of Zagros is examined; these people play Sornā musical instrument in martial arts, festivities, funerals, wedding ceremonies, and other folkloric traditions.    In Lorestan and Bakhtiari, Sornā musical instrument is used to induce excitement and a sense of epic feeling into warriors. Albeit, this type of music is deeply rooted in the Iranian ancient history; in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, there has been many instances of trumpet playing to announce the commencement of wars. In funerals, Sornā musical instrument would be played in a sorrowful tone which also stems from Iranian ancient history and mythology. What makes music in Zagros region a unique genre are the mystical and mythological functions of this musical instrument in the modern world. People of Zagros would seek help from this instrument in order to ask for rain, ask for male offspring, find lost corpses drowned underwater, and seek shelter from natural disasters such as lunar eclipse. Subsequently, it can be expressed that Sornā musical instrument is an inseparable part of the lives of people who live in Zagros region.   4.Conclusion Music occupies an exceptional position in the hearts of all ethnicities and nations throughout the globe. Ancient civilization and humans from past historical periods have had an extraterrestrial perspective towards music; they would attempt to convey their messages to gods through music and rhythm. In ancient times, there has been an inseparable bond between music and temples. Music has retained its special position in the modern world as well. Though Sornā is an international musical instrument with a variety of functions, it has a special bond with souls and minds of the people of Zagros. This instrument has always accompanied these people in battles, festivities, sickness and health. In addition, the instrument serve mystical and mythological functions in the culture of the people of Zagros which is worth reflecting upon in terms of mythological point of view. One of the functions of this instrument involves conveying terrestrial and extraterrestrial messages. In the past where modern messaging services were non-existent, Lurs and Kurds would convey their messages of happiness or sorrow to distant lands using the instrument. Moreover, they would also convey their wishes and requests to God through the magical sound of Sornā musical instrument; a subject also reflected upon by Nietzsche. The majority of common traditions in the culture of the people of Zagros are deeply rooted in myths and incredibly reflect mythological beliefs, all of which are performed using this instrument. One of these rituals is a ceremony held to ask for a male offspring. In this ceremony where Sornā musical instrument is played, a woman who desires to bear a male child would climb a mountain with a group of instrument players and would ask the sun for a male offspring through beautiful poems pertaining to the greatness and fairness of the sun. The song in this ceremony is very similar to a pray written in Mehryasht. She would also bestow upon the sun a piece of bread; according to Iranian and Greek mythological beliefs, the Sun was the god of music and growth and people would bread and flour upon the Sun as well. Additionally, in ceremonies held to ask for rain which is a common affair among almost all faiths and religions, Lurs and Kurds would play Sornā to convey their wishes to God; a subject that is discussed clearly in Tiryasht. Moreover, the people of Zagros believed that lunar eclipses occur as a result of a battle between evil and godly forces. According to their beliefs, the Jinn intended to curse the moon as a force of God; a subject that is mentioned in Avesta and advocated by Al-Biruni. Therefore, people would attempt to curse the Jinn using music (Sornā) which was considered as a godly weapon. Similar to the people from the South and North of Iran, these people would also use the magical force of Sornā to find corpses lost in rivers.

Jiaxin Qi, Yulei Niu, Jianqiang Huang et al.

This paper unravels the design tricks adopted by us, the champion team MReaL-BDAI, for Visual Dialog Challenge 2019: two causal principles for improving Visual Dialog (VisDial). By "improving", we mean that they can promote almost every existing VisDial model to the state-of-the-art performance on the leader-board. Such a major improvement is only due to our careful inspection on the causality behind the model and data, finding that the community has overlooked two causalities in VisDial. Intuitively, Principle 1 suggests: we should remove the direct input of the dialog history to the answer model, otherwise a harmful shortcut bias will be introduced; Principle 2 says: there is an unobserved confounder for history, question, and answer, leading to spurious correlations from training data. In particular, to remove the confounder suggested in Principle 2, we propose several causal intervention algorithms, which make the training fundamentally different from the traditional likelihood estimation. Note that the two principles are model-agnostic, so they are applicable in any VisDial model. The code is available at https://github.com/simpleshinobu/visdial-principles.