A Preliminary Report on Investigations into (Bon nyid) 'Od gsal and Zhi khro bar do in Earlier Zhang zhung sNyan rgyud and sNyan rgyud Literature

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines Number 17, October 200

A tentative classification of the bya ru can kings of Zhang zhung

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines Number 15, November 200

Garuda 5 (khyung lnga): Ecologies of Potency and the Poison-Medicine Spectrum of Sowa Rigpa’s Renowned ‘Black Aconite’ Formula

This article focuses on ethnographic work conducted at the Men-Tsee-Khang (Dharamsala, India) on Garuda 5 (khyung lnga), a commonly prescribed Tibetan medical formula. This medicine’s efficacy as a painkiller and activity against infection and inflammation is largely due to a particularly powerful plant, known as ‘virulent poison’ (btsan dug) as well as ‘the great medicine’ (sman chen), and identified as a subset of Aconitum species. Its effects, however, are potentially dangerous or even deadly. How can these poisonous plants be used in medicine and, conversely, when does a medicine become a poison? How can ostensibly the same substance be both harmful and helpful? The explanation requires a more nuanced picture than mere dose dependency. Attending to the broader ‘ecologies of potency’ in which these substances are locally enmeshed, in line with Sienna Craig’s Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012), provides fertile ground to better understand the effects of Garuda 5 and how potency is developed and directed in practice. I aim to unpack the spectrum between sman (medicine) and dug (poison) in Sowa Rigpa by elucidating some of the multiple dimensions which determine the activity of Garuda 5 as it is formulated and prescribed in India. I thus embrace the full spectrum of potency— the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ the ‘wanted’ and the ‘unwanted’—without presuming the universal validity of biomedical notions of toxicity and side effects

What attracts vehicle consumers’ buying:A Saaty scale-based VIKOR (SSC-VIKOR) approach from after-sales textual perspective?

Purpose: The increasingly booming e-commerce development has stimulated vehicle consumers to express individual reviews through online forum. The purpose of this paper is to probe into the vehicle consumer consumption behavior and make recommendations for potential consumers from textual comments viewpoint. Design/methodology/approach: A big data analytic-based approach is designed to discover vehicle consumer consumption behavior from online perspective. To reduce subjectivity of expert-based approaches, a parallel Naïve Bayes approach is designed to analyze the sentiment analysis, and the Saaty scale-based (SSC) scoring rule is employed to obtain specific sentimental value of attribute class, contributing to the multi-grade sentiment classification. To achieve the intelligent recommendation for potential vehicle customers, a novel SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to prioritize vehicle brand candidates from a big data analytical viewpoint. Findings: The big data analytics argue that “cost-effectiveness” characteristic is the most important factor that vehicle consumers care, and the data mining results enable automakers to better understand consumer consumption behavior. Research limitations/implications: The case study illustrates the effectiveness of the integrated method, contributing to much more precise operations management on marketing strategy, quality improvement and intelligent recommendation. Originality/value: Researches of consumer consumption behavior are usually based on survey-based methods, and mostly previous studies about comments analysis focus on binary analysis. The hybrid SSC-VIKOR approach is developed to fill the gap from the big data perspective

Cross-lingual part-of-speech tagging using word embedding

As one of semi-supervised learning approach, cross-lingual projection leverages existing resources from a resource-rich language when building tools for resource-poor languages. In this paper we attempt to make use of word embedding with anchor based label propagation to improve the accuracy of a cross-lingual projection task: cross-lingual part-of-speech tagging under the graph-based framework. Our approach uses bilingual parallel corpora and labeled data from the resource-rich side assuming that there is no labeled data or only a few labeled data in resource-poor language. The results suggest the efficacy of our approach over traditional label propagation with lexical feature for projecting part-of-speech information across languages, and show that a few of labeled data help to enhance the effect a lot in cross-lingual task

The Texture of Tongues: Languages and Power in China.

The way speakers and nations use language reflects the power relationships of a society. Mandarin, canonized as the standard language, stands at the pinnacle of a metalinguistic hierarchy which mirrors the vertical basis of power in China today. State language policies establish official minority languages (and Chinese “dialects”) under the arching umbrella of the Chinese state; yet their domain, or horizontal scope, is strictly constrained through prescriptive standardization. The dynamic change and variation of spoken languages is reduced to a single text. This article explores the tension between this codifying imperative of the Chinese state and the dynamic force of speakers. It surveys Chinese language policy in theory and practice, then focuses on the expressions of power through language use.Alexander von Humboldt Foundatio