A re-visionist Her-story of De cierta manera ([1974] 1977): Reading Yoruba myth in Sara Gómez’s revolutionary classic1

Recent scholarship on Sara Gómez has expanded upon existing discourse on her work beyond her singular feature film, De cierta manera/One Way or Another ([1974] 1977) to examine not only her earlier documentary shorts of the 1960s, but to demonstrate the impact that her body of work has had on a subsequent generation of Cuban filmmakers who continue her mission to critique the Revolution through an antiracist and feminist lens – contemporary filmmakers such as Gloria Rolando, Sandra Gómez and Susana Barriga. This article seeks to push this conversation forward by arguing several interrelated points: (1) that De cierta manera contains symbolic, visually embedded references to a specific patakí (myth) about the Afro-Cuban orishas Ogun and Ochún; (2) that De cierta manera holds this in common with Gloria Rolando’s Oggun: An Eternal Presence (1991), which tells the patakí in a more explicit manner, and therefore the two films warrant comparison and (3) lastly, that this interpretation of De cierta manera offers a novel take on a ‘classic’ Cuban revolutionary film, offering additional interpretive layers that do not change the message of the film, per se, but complicate it by adding an additional filter through which to view and interpret it: that of Yoruba moral philosophy. The Afro-Cuban word patakí in Cuban Lucumí liturgical speech refers to a parable with a moral lesson, and is derived from the word pàtàkì, which means ‘[something] important’ in the Yorùbá language of West Africa. This article will attempt to answer how and why this particular myth is ‘important’ (pàtàkì) to the reading of De cierta manera and argue for a broader re-centring and privileging of African-derived philosophical frameworks within Cuban intellectual history and popular culture.

Identification of Potential Biomarkers using Improved Ranked Guided Iterative Feature Elimination

In healthcare, biomarkers serve an important role in disease classification. Many existing works are focusing in identifying potential biomarkers from gene expression. Moreover, the large number of redundant features in a high dimensional dataset such as gene expression would introduce bias in the classifier and reduce the classifier’s performance. Embedded feature selection methods such as ranked guided iterative feature elimination have been widely adopted owing to the good performance in identification of informative features. However, method like ranked guided iterative feature elimination does not consider the redundancy of the features. Thus, this paper proposes an improved ranked guided iterative feature elimination method by introducing an additional filter selection based on minimum redundancy maximum relevance to filter out redundant features and maintain the relevant feature subset to be ranked and used for classification. Experiments are done using two gene expression datasets for prostate cancer and central nervous system. The performance of the classification is measured in terms of accuracy and compared with existing methods. Meanwhile, biological context verification of the identified features is done through available knowledge databases. Our method shows improved classification accuracy, and the selected genes were found to have relationship with the diseases.

Overinterpretation or appropriation?

The article discusses various approaches to interpretation, which understand it as a universal method of the humanities. Particular attention we paid to the interpretations in U. Eco and E. Batti, who, although do not agree with each other, however, are opposed both to the philosophic or analytic understanding of interpretation, which we call the appropriationist approach. The way of interpreting the past inherent in appropriationism often threatens with overinterpretation, for which it is criticized by adepts of contextualism. We analyze the interpretation through the prism of three skeptical arguments we offered, “conceptual relativism”, “Gorgians’ minds”, “the part and the whole”. Skeptical arguments are often used in philosophy as an additional filter for testing the consistency of the concepts, and it is clearly seen that the contextualist concept of interpretation does not pass this filter. The thesis that appropriation is indeed a overinterpretation can be accepted under reserve that for a strictly philosophical way of reasoning and from within appropriationism, another version of interpretation is inconsistent.

A Different Path to the Same Old Question: Why Should Cartels be Criminalised?

Regardless of the extreme negative qualifications usually attributed to cartels and bid rigging, EU and Portuguese competition laws do not set them apart from other anticompetitive practices regarding the possible applicable sanctions. EU and Portuguese competition laws establish the same potential sanctions for all competition infringements. Despite that, there are clear indications that EU and Portuguese legislators intend to treat cartels differently from all other competition infringements. Despite that, there are clear indications that EU and Portuguese legislators intend to treat cartels differently from all other competition infringements, but those differences have essentially to do with rules or procedures designed to facilitate their detection, production of evidence and decision-making. Notwithstanding the relevance of the “traditional” arguments regarding cartel criminalization, we consider that the discussion is still incomplete and would benefit from the inclusion of an additional “filter”. As it is a discussion about a criminalization process, the use of common instruments in criminology can shed more light into the question, and one of those instruments – or the most important one – is the analysis of the legal interests protected by the norm. We deem it essential to think about what legal interests are harmed in each of the different types of competition infringements, so as to conclude if indeed and to what extent cartels and bid rigging are capable of impairing more or different legal interests, or in a different intensity, than those potentially violated by other types of competition infringements. The conclusion is that cartel and bid rigging conducts always infringe the entire set of legal interests that is or may be defended by competition laws and always do so with high intensity.