Through the Tunnel of Time: Significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for Judaism Christianity

A lecture by Dr. Adolfo Roitman, Curator, The Shrine of the Book, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/bennettcenter-posters/1212/thumbnail.jp

The book of Judith: history, literature and theology

El libro de Judit es un libro apócrifo judío, escrito probablemente para finales del siglo II a.e.c. en la tierra de Israel, y existente solamente en versión griega o en versiones hechas a partir de ésta. La obra de carácter novelesco cuenta sobre la proeza de Judith, una mujer piadosa, bella, viuda y rica, que con arrojo y picardía decapitó al general Holofernes, salvando así a los judíos de Betulia de caer en manos de los asirios. La obra presenta un plan estructural muy complejo (una pirámide quiástica piramidal), el cual sirve como soporte literario para comunicar una doctrina religiosa original, a saber: una revisión de la tradicional doctrina de la retribución. El objetivo de esta composición habría sido presentar de una manera novelada una reflexión en retrospectiva acerca del significado religioso de la revuelta macabea.The Book of Judith is a Jewish apocryphal book, probably written by the late second century BCE in the land of Israel, and existing only in Greek version or in versions made from it. The work of fictional character tells of the prowess of Judith, a pious, beautiful, rich widow woman, who with courage and mischief beheaded general Holofernes, saving the Jews of Bethulia  fell into the hands of the Assyrians. The work presents a very complex structure plan (a pyramid chiastic pyramid), which serves as a literary support for communicating an original religious doctrine, namely: a review of the traditional doctrine of retribution. The objective of this composition might have been to present in a fictionalized way a reflection in hindsight about the religious significance of the Maccabean revolt

Prólogo

Fil: Roitman, Roberto D.. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Institutos Multidisciplinarios. Instituto de Trabajo y Producción

Representation of numerosity in posterior parietal cortex

Humans and animals appear to share a similar representation of number as an analog magnitude on an internal, subjective scale. Neurological and neurophysiological data suggest that posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is a critical component of the circuits that form the basis of numerical abilities in humans. Patients with parietal lesions are impaired in their ability to access the deep meaning of numbers. Acalculiac patients with inferior parietal damage often have difficulty performing arithmetic (2 + 4?) or number bisection (what is between 3 and 5?) tasks, but are able to recite multiplication tables and read or write numerals. Functional imaging studies of neurologically intact humans performing subtraction, number comparison, and non-verbal magnitude comparison tasks show activity in areas within the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). Taken together, clinical cases and imaging studies support a critical role for parietal cortex in the mental manipulation of numerical quantities. Further, responses of single PPC neurons in non-human primates are sensitive to the numerosity of visual stimuli independent of low-level stimulus qualities. When monkeys are trained to make explicit judgments about the numerical value of such stimuli, PPC neurons encode their cardinal numerical value; without such training PPC neurons appear to encode numerical magnitude in an analog fashion. Here we suggest that the spatial and integrative properties of PPC neurons contribute to their critical role in numerical cognition

¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de economía social?

El objetivo de este texto es el de transmitir las experiencias que en el mundo, en América Latina, en la Argentina y en Mendoza; se vienen realizando por personas, agrupadas o no, que han respondido a esta consigna del ministro francés, aún sin conocerla pero viviéndola. Integrado en un todo coherente, este texto recoge investigaciones que se han llevado a cabo en el seno de la UNCuyo tanto por el autor en forma individual como por grupos interdisciplinarios a los cuales tuvo el honor de conducir. Se intenta hacer algo útil, que sirva y que se traduzca en realizacione

Oscillation of linear ordinary differential equations: on a theorem by A. Grigoriev

We give a simplified proof and an improvement of a recent theorem by A. Grigoriev, placing an upper bound for the number of roots of linear combinations of solutions to systems of linear equations with polynomial or rational coefficients.Comment: 16 page

Monotonic Coding of Numerosity in Macaque Lateral Intraparietal Area

As any child knows, the first step in counting is summing up individual elements, yet the brain mechanisms responsible for this process remain obscure. Here we show, for the first time, that a population of neurons in the lateral intraparietal area of monkeys encodes the total number of elements within their classical receptive fields in a graded fashion, across a wide range of numerical values (2–32). Moreover, modulation of neuronal activity by visual quantity developed rapidly, within 100 ms of stimulus onset, and was independent of attention, reward expectations, or stimulus attributes such as size, density, or color. The responses of these neurons resemble the outputs of “accumulator neurons” postulated in computational models of number processing. Numerical accumulator neurons may provide inputs to neurons encoding specific cardinal values, such as “4,” that have been described in previous work. Our findings may explain the frequent association of visuospatial and numerical deficits following damage to parietal cortex in humans

Redundant Picard-Fuchs system for Abelian integrals

We derive an explicit system of Picard-Fuchs differential equations satisfied by Abelian integrals of monomial forms and majorize its coefficients. A peculiar feature of this construction is that the system admitting such explicit majorants, appears only in dimension approximately two times greater than the standard Picard-Fuchs system. The result is used to obtain a partial solution to the tangential Hilbert 16th problem. We establish upper bounds for the number of zeros of arbitrary Abelian integrals on a positive distance from the critical locus. Under the additional assumption that the critical values of the Hamiltonian are distant from each other (after a proper normalization), we were able to majorize the number of all (real and complex) zeros. In the second part of the paper an equivariant formulation of the above problem is discussed and relationships between spread of critical values and non-homogeneity of uni- and bivariate complex polynomials are studied.Comment: 31 page, LaTeX2e (amsart

A Physiologically-Inspired Model of Numerical Classification Based on Graded Stimulus Coding

In most natural decision contexts, the process of selecting among competing actions takes place in the presence of informative, but potentially ambiguous, stimuli. Decisions about magnitudes – quantities like time, length, and brightness that are linearly ordered – constitute an important subclass of such decisions. It has long been known that perceptual judgments about such quantities obey Weber's Law, wherein the just-noticeable difference in a magnitude is proportional to the magnitude itself. Current physiologically inspired models of numerical classification assume discriminations are made via a labeled line code of neurons selectively tuned for numerosity, a pattern observed in the firing rates of neurons in the ventral intraparietal area (VIP) of the macaque. By contrast, neurons in the contiguous lateral intraparietal area (LIP) signal numerosity in a graded fashion, suggesting the possibility that numerical classification could be achieved in the absence of neurons tuned for number. Here, we consider the performance of a decision model based on this analog coding scheme in a paradigmatic discrimination task – numerosity bisection. We demonstrate that a basic two-neuron classifier model, derived from experimentally measured monotonic responses of LIP neurons, is sufficient to reproduce the numerosity bisection behavior of monkeys, and that the threshold of the classifier can be set by reward maximization via a simple learning rule. In addition, our model predicts deviations from Weber Law scaling of choice behavior at high numerosity. Together, these results suggest both a generic neuronal framework for magnitude-based decisions and a role for reward contingency in the classification of such stimuli

Speed and Accuracy of Static Image Discrimination by Rats

When discriminating dynamic noisy sensory signals, human and primate subjects achieve higher accuracy when they take more time to decide, an effect attributed to accumulation of evidence over time to overcome neural noise. We measured the speed and accuracy of twelve freely behaving rats discriminating static, high contrast photographs of real-world objects for water reward in a self-paced task. Response latency was longer in correct trials compared to error trials. Discrimination accuracy increased with response latency over the range of 500-1200ms. We used morphs between previously learned images to vary the image similarity parametrically, and thereby modulate task difficulty from ceiling to chance. Over this range we find that rats take more time before responding in trials with more similar stimuli. We conclude that rats' perceptual decisions improve with time even in the absence of temporal information in the stimulus, and that rats modulate speed in response to discrimination difficulty to balance speed and accuracy