Peculiarities of Heroization of Health Care Workers in the Mass Media Discourse during a Pandemic

The article examines the linguistic features of the heroization of medical workers in the mass media discourse during the pandemic of the novel coronavirus infection. During the fight against the spread of the coronavirus, doctors acquired the status of heroes. The heroic image of a doctor who is at the forefront of the fight against a new threat is fully expressed in various discursive and non-discursive constructs: mass media discourse, creolized texts, photo and video materials, comments from users of the Internet services, etc. The headlines of publications, the names of projects, competitions, and actions indicate the heroization of doctors. The process of heroization is also implemented in creolized texts of social advertising. The main linguistic means of heroization is metaphorization: the doctor is represented as a soldier in war, a superhero, a guardian angel. So, in the studied texts, the fight against the coronavirus is metaphorically represented as a war, medical personnel – as soldiers fighting with weapons in their hands against a terrible enemy – the virus, the walls of a medical institution – as a battlefield. As a result of the study, it is revealed that there is a tendency to local heroization and concretization of the heroic on the examples of real people

Robert Wartenberg and the American Academy of Neurology

Robert Wartenberg (1887-1956) was born in Grodno (in present-day Belarus), and received his medical degree in Germany in 1919. He enjoyed a productive career at the University of Freiburg until 1935, when he fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Bernard Sachs, with whom he had worked during a Rockefeller fellowship in 1926, helped him secure a position at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco in 1936. He was popular with students there as his sizeable personality translated into an engaging classroom style, but that same personality could create friction with colleagues. Following World War II, neurology as a specialty was looking to grow and establish its place in the medical landscape. With this goal in mind, A.B. Baker and other young neurologic leaders formed the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) in 1948 as an inclusive professional society. Baker recruited Wartenberg to join, and he enthusiastically agreed – and immediately provided his own critiques on the organization. Wartenberg’s standing in the academic community combined with his strong personality would serve Baker well as Wartenberg shielded the young AAN leadership from potential retribution as their “guardian angel.” He was especially invested in ensuring the Academy had a journal as a means of development, and the journal Neurology was born of his “prophecy.” Wartenberg died on November 16, 1956 and was quickly honored for his service to the Academy with the Robert Wartenberg Memorial Lecture, which stands today as one of the principal events at the annual meeting.

The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29

The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by his guardian angel, finds himself surrounded by larks whose cruciform shapes in flying match their singing of the name “Jhesu.” Having fallen for the second time when fighting the dragon, Spenser’s Red Cross Knight rises on the third morning to find himself victorious. In his rising he is compared with the lark at dawn. The Edenic setting (which underlines the theme of the redemption of “fallen” man by the risen Christ) is also illuminated by Deguileville’s Ame; Spenser’s two trees are reminiscent of the “green and the dry” in the French allegory, according to which Christ appears as the apple pinned to the dry tree in reparation for the apple stolen by Adam. When one examines Shakespeare’s reference to the lark in Sonnet 29 in the light of the tradition represented by Deguileville (whose work not only Spenser but also Shakespeare might have read in English translation) the question arises as to whether the beloved addressed in line 10 (“thee”) could be Christ, and the speaker a Christian worshipper moving from self reproach to Christian gratitude. Such an interpretation is challenged by the standard assumption that the sonnets reflect a narrative produced by a love triangle. But from Petrarch’s Canzoniere on, sequences of love sonnets had contained poems of religious adoration.

The Discrepancy of Meaning: A Study of a Guardian Angel’s Existence in “Deus Ex Machina”

<p class="AbstractText">The theme of a guardian angel has always become cryptic discussion among scholars, for as God, she is beyond our empirical grasp. Hari Kunzru is one of the writers who broach this subject in his work entitled “Deus Ex Machina”. In the short story, the guardian angel acts as the I-character of the story as well as the I-narrator of the story. By using theories on textual deconstruction and existentialism, we discuss and analyze the guardian angel’s <em>raison d’etre</em> (reason to be) and significance through her functions as the narrator and also the I-character in the narration of “Deus Ex Machina” story. From the analysis, we could draw three conclusions which relate <em>raison d’etre</em> (reason to be) and the significance of the guardian angel with the other characters within the story and with her readers outside the story.</p>

Food Crisis-How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Are Solving Humanity’s Greatest Challenge—A Review

Humanity is heading towards a crisis. The mammoth task of providing food for 2 billion more people by 2050 is being deliberated by governments, scientists and agriculturists alike. The consequence of climate change has led to erratic and non-uniform crop growth. Floods are inundating agriculture land, drought is making crop cultivation impossible and pests and insects are wiping out entire crop fields. Just as the situation seems to be going out of hand, technology is proving itself to be the guardian angel yet again. With the power of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, scientists are able to understand and predict intolerable growing conditions, identify various weather and pest infestation patterns and provide sustainable solutions, which helps accomplish our ultimate goal—increasing crop production by two-folds in the next thirty years. This paper gives an insight about ways in which artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping humanity overcome one of its biggest challenge.

Autonomous Toy Drone via Coresets for Pose Estimation

A coreset of a dataset is a small weighted set, such that querying the coreset provably yields a ( 1 + ε )-factor approximation to the original (full) dataset, for a given family of queries. This paper suggests accurate coresets ( ε = 0 ) that are subsets of the input for fundamental optimization problems. These coresets enabled us to implement a “Guardian Angel” system that computes pose-estimation in a rate > 20 frames per second. It tracks a toy quadcopter which guides guests in a supermarket, hospital, mall, airport, and so on. We prove that any set of n matrices in R d × d whose sum is a matrix S of rank r, has a coreset whose sum has the same left and right singular vectors as S, and consists of O ( d r ) = O ( d 2 ) matrices, independent of n. This implies the first (exact, weighted subset) coreset of O ( d 2 ) points to problems such as linear regression, PCA/SVD, and Wahba’s problem, with corresponding streaming, dynamic, and distributed versions. Our main tool is a novel usage of the Caratheodory Theorem for coresets, an algorithm that computes its set in time that is linear in its cardinality. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real data, companion video of our system, and open code are provided.

Juana of Castile’s Book of Hours: An Archduchess at Prayer

This article examines one of Juana of Castile’s books of hours (London, BL Add. MS 18852) comparing it with those written for members of Juana’s family and seeking to discern how it was used, in order to reassess her peers’ evaluation of her spiritual affinities. It considers how Juana customized her book of hours with a miniature of the Virgin and Child, comparing it with a gifted panel painted by Rogier van der Weyden that Juana treasured to show how she placed herself under the protection of the Virgin. Numbered precepts would be intended for her to instruct any future children and are replicated in Isabel, her daughter’s, book. The office of the Guardian Angel is compared with similar ones in Spain and Burgundy and, like devotion to St Veronica, such prayer is another means of protection. The striking mirror of conscience with its reflected skull, like other similar objects decorated with a skull that Juana possessed, sought to lift her from the decay and sinfulness of the world to the spiritual realm.