Cioran’s ‘grain of ataraxy’ : boredom, nothingness, and quietism

In reading E.M. Cioran’s œuvre, one is faced with an immediate and unremitting abrasiveness that has its roots with our being born into time. Indeed, the author of The Fall into Time and The Trouble with Being Born thought that it is precisely this accidental and unredeemable temporality, an original sin that results in a life forever situated in cycles of striving and becoming, which is to be exhuastingly apprehended in the experience of boredom: ‘Life is more and less than boredom, though it is in boredom and by boredom that we discern what life is worth.’ Cioran’s pessimism never relents; even his lugubrious friend Samuel Beckett had to keep a distance after finding him ‘too pessimistic’—who else but Cioran could write that ‘leukemia is the garden where God blooms’? Despite this, in Cioran’s often autobiographical, aphoristic and essayistic writings, we find a richly-timbred boredom (ironically so) which gives us incisive observations into a multitude of related concepts and realities. Nothingness, God, silence, mysticism, suffering, and quietism (among others) all feature in Cioran’s writings on boredom, as well as in this paper’s attempt to better situate Cioran’s work with respect to his more famous pessimistic and existentialist relations’s take on the subject, namely Arthur Schopenhauer and Martin Heidegger. In exploring his work on boredom vis-à-vis his specific interest in mysticism, Taoism, nothingness, time and insomnia, this paper aims to show how the failure to attain what Cioran called ‘a grain of ataraxy’, necessarily presupposes a limited set of ‘possibilities’ and ‘prospects’ when faced with the experience of ‘the sensation of the emptiness of existence’ that is boredom (Schopenhauer).peer-reviewe

Insularity : representations and constructions of small worlds, 2013 : conference review

In November 2013, the Department of German at the University of Malta held its first international interdisciplinary conference, titled ‘Insularity: Representations and Constructions of Small Worlds’. The three-day conference took place at Europe House and the Old University Building, both in Valletta, Malta. Except for the second day, which featured several parallel sessions, the conference panels were grouped on an alternating thematic basis making the panel system as dynamic as possible. Despite the relatively tight schedule, the conference moved along smoothly and showed all the signs of an extremely well-organised, efficient and professional event. This review will attend to some of the main recurring strands of thought that featured throughout the conference accordingly.peer-reviewe

Encountering Malta II : British writers and the Mediterranean 1760 - 1840 : literature, landscapes, politics : conference review

In January 2014, the Department of English at the University of Malta held the second in a series of conferences, entitled ‘Encountering Malta II – British Writers and the Mediterranean 1760-1840: Literature, Landscapes, Politics’. The first, held in 2011 in conjunction with the School of English at the University of St Andrew’s, Scotland, grounded itself within the same eighty year span, and had featured keynote speakers Professor Peter Vassallo and Professor Michael O’Neill. This series was inspired, in part, by the book Encounters with Malta—a work that details the interaction of various artistic figures with the Maltese archipelago over the centuries, as Dr Petra Caruana Dingli, one of the co-editors of the work, pointed out in the roundtable discussion on the first day of the event. This second two-day conference took place at the Old University Building in Valletta, Malta. It was a moderately paced event with a comfortable schedule that allowed for two keynote speakers and an intriguing variety of papers which attested to the tumultuous richness of the late 18th and early 19th century period in question.peer-reviewe

Games and literary theory conference, 2013 : conference review

The Department of English of the University of Malta collaborated with the Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta) to hold the First International Conference on Games and Literary Theory. It ran from the 31st of October to the 1st of November 2013, and was held at the Old University Building, Valletta, Malta. The event proved to be an overwhelmingly smooth and positive experience for all involved. One of the event’s particularly positive aspects was its structure – only one panel at a time with two or three papers each – which admitted fewer papers than is usual for such conferences. In doing so, it gave space for, and indeed generated, a healthy debate after each paper was delivered, allowing both speaker and audience to immerse themselves in the topics at hand.peer-reviewe

Lupus Vulgaris in a Maltese patient

Introduction The incidence of cutaneous tuberculosis (TB) in the developed world has fallen, in parallel with the decline of other forms of TB. Nevertheless cases still occur and their diagnosis may be difficult. We report a case of lupus vulgaris in a Maltese patient who went on to have an excellent response to antituberculous chemotherapy.peer-reviewe

Semantic Interoperability of Geospatial Ontologies: A Model-theoretic Analysis

People sometimes misunderstand each other, even when they use the same language to communicate. Often these misunderstandings happen when people use the same words to mean different things, in effect disagreeing about meanings. This thesis investigates such disagreements about meaning, considering them to be issues of semantic interoperability. This thesis explores semantic interoperability via a particular formal framework used to specify people’s conceptualizations of a given domain. This framework is called an ‘ontology,’ which is a collection of data and axioms written in a logical language equipped with a modeltheoretic semantics. The domain under consideration is the geospatial domain. Specifically, this thesis investigates to what extent two geospatial ontologies are semantically interoperable when they ‘agree’ on the meanings of certain basic terms and statements, but ‘disagree’ on others. This thesis defines five levels of semantic interoperability that can exist between two ontologies. Each of these levels is, in turn, defined in terms of six ‘compatibility conditions,’ which precisely describe how the results of queries to one ontology are compatible with the results of queries to another ontology. Using certain assumptions of finiteness, the semantics of each ontology is captured by a finite number of models, each of which is also finite. The set of all models of a given ontology is called its model class. The five levels of semantic interoperability are proven to correspond exactly to five particular relationships between the model classes of the ontologies. The exact level of semantic interoperability between ontologies can in some cases be computed; in other cases a heuristic can be used to narrow the possible levels of semantic interoperability. The main results are: (1) definitions of five levels of semantic interoperability based on six compatibility conditions; (2) proofs of the correspondence between levels of semantic interoperability and the model-class relation between two ontologies; and (3) a method for computing, given certain assumptions of finiteness, the exact level of semantic interoperability between two ontologies. These results define precisely, in terms of models and queries, the often poorly defined notion of semantic interoperability, thus providing a touchstone for clear definitions of semantic interoperability elsewhere

Brun\u27s 1920 Theorem on Goldbach\u27s Conjecture

One form of Goldbach’s Conjecture asserts that every even integer greater than 4is the sum of two odd primes. In 1920 Viggo Brun proved that every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of two numbers, each having at most nine prime factors. This thesis explains the overarching principles governing the intricate arguments Brun used to prove his result. Though there do exist accounts of Brun’s methods, those accounts seem to miss the forest for the trees. In contrast, this thesis explains the relatively simple structure underlying Brun’s arguments, deliberately avoiding most of his elaborate machinery and idiosyncratic notation. For further details, the curious reader is referred to Brun’s original paper (in French)

Hepatitis B infection in Malta : a retrospective cross sectional study

Chronic Hepatitis B infection can lead to significant morbidity and mortality. Case notes of patients who tested positive for HBsAg between 1st Dec 2007 and 29th October 2009 were reviewed (n=197) . The results show that 2/3 (65%) of the study population were male and that HBV infection was detected across all age groups. About ¼ (25.4%) of the study group were foreigners. 79% of Maltese patients testing postive did not have any identifiable risk factors documented in their case notes for acquiring HBV. In more than 60% of patients who tested positive further assessment to determine suitability for treatment was not performed and only 6.6 % of the study population received treatment for HBV.peer-reviewe

A support vector machine approach for detection and localization of transmission errors within standard H.263++ decoders

Wireless multimedia services are increasingly becoming popular boosting the need for better quality-of-experience (QoE) with minimal costs. The standard codecs employed by these systems remove spatio-temporal redundancies to minimize the bandwidth required. However, this increases the exposure of the system to transmission errors, thus presenting a significant degradation in perceptual quality of the reconstructed video sequences. A number of mechanisms were investigated in the past to make these codecs more robust against transmission errors. Nevertheless, these techniques achieved little success, forcing the transmission to be held at lower bit-error rates (BERs) to guarantee acceptable quality. This paper presents a novel solution to this problem based on the error detection capabilities of the transport protocols to identify potentially corrupted group-of-blocks (GOBs). The algorithm uses a support vector machine (SVM) at its core to localize visually impaired macroblocks (MBs) that require concealment within these GOBs. Hence, this method drastically reduces the region to be concealed compared to state-of-the-art error resilient strategies which assume a packet loss scenario. Testing on a standard H.263++ codec confirms that a significant gain in quality is achieved with error detection rates of 97.8% and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) gains of up to 5.33 dB. Moreover, most of the undetected errors provide minimal visual artifacts and are thus of little influence to the perceived quality of the reconstructed sequences.peer-reviewe

Accurate modelling of Ka-band videoconferencing systems based on the quality of experience

This work formed part of the project TWISTER, which was financially supported under the European Union 6th Framework Programme (FP6). The authors are solely responsible for the contents of the paper, which does not represent the opinion of the European Commission.Ka-band satellite multimedia communication networks play important roles because of their capability to provide the required bandwidth in remote places of the globe. However, because of design complexity, in practice they suffer from poor design and performance degradation because of being practically forced to guarantee acceptable end-user satisfaction in conditions of extremely low bit error rates, which is emphasised with the vulnerability of compressed video content to transmission errors, often impossible to be applied during the service development phase. A novel discrete event simulation model is presented, which provides performance estimation for such systems based on subjective measurement and a better quality of experience. The authors show that the proposed model reduces implementation cost and is flexible to be used for different network topologies around the globe.peer-reviewe