A BEAUTY THAT SAVES: DOSTOEVSKY’S THEOLOGY OF BEAUTY THE IDIOT

This paper examines Dostoevsky’s understanding of beauty and its place in The Idiot. Examining the historical and immediate environment in which Dostoevsky wrote the novel provides crucial insights into his conception of beauty. It is argued that the beauty Dostoevsky encountered in Florence colored his use of beauty in The Idiot. The use recent popes have made of Dostoevsky’s works also underscore the Christian theology of his ideal. From the post-Vatican II pontiffs and from Dostoevsky’s own writing it becomes clear that Dostoevsky’s view of beauty flows from the Christian belief that Christ is the Supreme Beauty. The beauty of Prince Myshkin and other characters all flow from this Beauty by reflecting Him in different ways. Ultimately, however, Myshkin fails to bring about salvation. He lacks the perfect beauty and goodness of Christ, the only one who can save. This salvific beauty is noticeably missing from the novel. The Hans Holbein painting of “Christ in the Tomb,” it is argued, lacks beauty because it fails to show forth the Incarnation. Instead, it depicts Christ without any hint of his divinity and without any hope of resurrection. Through this examination of Dostoevsky’s context and theology, it is concluded that the lack of a beauty that saves in The Idiot is meant to underscore mankind’s inability to save itself

Beautiful Politicians

Are beautiful politicians more likely to be elected? To test this, we use evidence from Australia, a country in which voting is compulsory, and in which voters are given ‘How to Vote’ cards depicting photos of the major party candidates as they arrive to vote. Using raters chosen to be representative of the electorate, we assess the beauty of political candidates from major political parties, and then estimate the effect of beauty on voteshare for candidates in the 2004 federal election. Beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1½ – 2 percentage point increase in voteshare. Our results are robust to several specification checks: adding party fixed effects, dropping well-known politicians, using non-Australian beauty raters, omitting candidates of non-Anglo Saxon appearance, controlling for age, and analyzing the ‘beauty gap’ between candidates running in the same electorate. The marginal effect of beauty is larger for male candidates than for female candidates, and appears to be approximately linear. Consistent with the theory that returns to beauty reflect discrimination, we find suggestive evidence that beauty matters more in electorates with a higher share of apathetic voters.economics of beauty, elections, voter rationality, information shortcuts, thin slices

Open Beauty Production at HERA

Recent results on open beauty production in positron-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 300 GeV are presented. The beauty photoproduction cross section is measured by ZEUS and H1 via the semileptonic decay. Both experiments use the transverse lepton momentum with respect to a jet as an observable. The H1 central silicon vertex detector makes it possible to analyse, in addition, the lepton impact parameter spectrum, thus exploiting lifetime information for the first time at HERA. The combined lifetime and transverse momentum signature is further used to observe beauty production for the first time in deep inelastic scattering. All results are compared with NLO QCD calculations.Comment: Proceedings, DIS 2001, Bologna, Italy. 4 pages, 4 figure

The analysis of facial beauty: an emerging area of research in pattern analysis

Much research presented recently supports the idea that the human perception of attractiveness is data-driven and largely irrespective of the perceiver. This suggests using pattern analysis techniques for beauty analysis. Several scientific papers on this subject are appearing in image processing, computer vision and pattern analysis contexts, or use techniques of these areas. In this paper, we will survey the recent studies on automatic analysis of facial beauty, and discuss research lines and practical application

Separation of the Charm and Beauty Production in p--Pb and Pb--Pb Collisions with ALICE

Measurements of heavy (charm and beauty) quarks provide useful insights into the properties of the quark--gluon plasma. The good particle identification capabilities of ALICE make a measurement based on the electrons from semi-leptonic decays of heavy-flavour hadrons feasible. This approach makes use of the large branching ratios ($\approx 10-20\%$) of heavy--flavour hadrons into electrons. Separation of the contribution from beauty-hadron decay electrons was achieved by utilizing the large decay length of the associated hadrons, making the investigation of beauty quarks in the medium possible. By comparing measurements in p--Pb and Pb--Pb collisions, it is possible to disentangle effects of cold nuclear matter from those of the hot and dense medium. The results show a strong change in the transverse momentum distribution of electrons from beauty-hadron decays in central Pb--Pb collisions with respect to the proton--proton case. No significant change from proton--proton collisions can be seen in the p--Pb case, suggesting that the modification is a final state effect

ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty

I argued in 2000 that the French artist ORLAN may have moved away from her Reincarnation performances toward her Self-Hybridizations because she thought that in the latter she would be more transparently obvious in meaning and less frequently misunderstood. I may have overstated the ability of audiences to comprehend, however. In this essay I argue that the virtual beauty that ORLAN unfolds in her ongoing series Self-Hybridizations is not a real or actual beauty but rather a fake beauty, causally disembodied, based on the effects she intends to create from an imaginative use of combined hybrid imagery. Subverting the familiar philosophical notions of aesthetic distance and aesthetic appreciation, hers is not a monstrous beauty (as some feminist art theorists contend) but rather a fake beauty that still has aesthetic features worth assessing. I suggest the possibility of generational differences in understandings of the term 'feminist', i.e., shifts in meaning from early feminist theory of the 1970s to ever-evolving, twenty-first century notions of the term, all of which add to the confusion. As I negotiate this terrain, I hope to steer both critics and viewers more directly to the words of the artist herself, "I have tried to make my Self-Hybridations as 'human' as possible, like mutant beings, but I still did not think that the confusion could be possible.

Cognitive effort in the Beauty Contest Game

This paper analyzes cognitive effort in 6 different one-shot p-beauty games. We use both Raven and Cognitive Reflection tests to identify subjects' abilities. We find that the Raven test does not provide any insight on beauty contest game playing but CRT does: subjects with higher scores on this test are more prone to play dominant strategies.Beauty Contest Game, Raven, Cognitive Reflection Test

Ethical Use of Beauty in Advertising

The use of beauty images in advertising has been generally deemed to be unethical in society, based on the general negative presupposition in modern western culture. The ethicalness of the display of high standards of beauty in advertisements is especially controversial and questionable in the advertising industry. Advertising watchdogs, social groups, and individuals have investigated the possibility of banning the display of high standards of beauty to be displayed in advertisings and publications. This paper argues that image advertising of high beauty standards may not be necessarily unethical in all situations. And under certain conditions, by considering and combining image(s) of high beauty standards with other factors, more ethical usage of beauty in advertising is possible. It is concluded that the usage of very high standards of beauty image in advertising could be unethical or ethical, depending on how the advertiser utilizes the images of high beauty standards. Several recommendations or ideas for future study are given on how to maximize the benefit of using images of high beauty standards in advertising, and at the same time minimizing its potential negative impacts

Bounding effective parameters in the chiral Lagrangian for excited heavy mesons

We use recent experimental data on charmed mesons to constrain three coupling constants in the effective lagrangian describing the interactions of excited heavy-light mesons with light pseudoscalar mesons at order $m_Q^{-1}$. Predictions in the beauty sector are also derived.Comment: LaTex, 11 pages, 1 eps figur