Academic literature on the topic 'Self-bound systems'

The minimal implementation of a self-replicating system in the Lambda calculus is given with a goal of establishing a lower bound for the probabilities of the spontaneous generation of self-replication systems.

This paper proposes a hybrid aperiodic sampled-data mechanism for the control of interconnected subsystems with time-delay. The proposed aperiodic sampled-data mechanism comprises of two stages. In the first stage, the next sampling instant for each subsystem is computed using self-triggering strategy. Thereafter, in the second stage, an event-triggering condition is checked at these sampling instants for each subsystem and signal is transmitted to the controller only if the event-triggering condition is violated. Further, to reduce the computational complexity involved in the proposed triggering mechanism, another triggering mechanism with integrated event-triggering and self-triggering is developed. Also, an upper bound on delay for each subsystem is computed to ensure the stability of distributed networked control system. The results proposed are validated using a simulation example. A comparison of the proposed technique with other triggering mechanisms in terms of sampling instants, number of transmissions to the controller, maximum delay bound and other performance measures is drawn through simulation example.

Self-bound quantum systems appear in different physical scenarios. They result from the balance between attractive and repulsive forces. Recently the existence of a new object belonging to this class has been discovered. Using a bosonic mixture of ultracold atoms, it is possible to generate a self-bound state resulting from the interplay between an attractive mean-field energy and the repulsive first-order perturbative correction, the so-called Lee- Huang-Yang term. This system is known as quantum droplet. During my PhD we have experimentally observed and characterized this novel quantum state. Thanks to an innovative technique, based on a time-averaged potential, we were able to levitate the mixture and study for the first time the self-bound nature of quantum droplets in 3D free space. We characterized their equilibrium properties, i.e. the size, the critical atom number for their formation and the spin imbalance, finding a very good agreement with the theoretical predictions. Despite being extremely dilute, for large atom numbers quantum droplets enter a liquidlike incompressible regime, highlighted by the formation of a bulk with uniform density. We investigate the occurrence of this incompressible regime by studying collisions between two droplets. This is indeed a powerful tool to gain information about the energy scales characterizing the system. To this aim, we implemented an experimental sequence able to create two separate quantum droplets and to imprint them a tunable relative velocity. By characterizing the outcomes of the collisions for different values of velocities and atom numbers in the droplets and comparing them with the results of energetic considerations and numerical simulations, we obtained the first evidence of a crossover between compressible and incompressible regimes.

This chapter analyzes the neo-noir Bound (1996). It shows how the splitting of sex from gender liberates generic conventions in the service of protagonists who, enacting a lesbian romance in film noir, avail themselves of generic formulas to double-cross the villains. Analyzing the creative capacity of noir gender “to turn cartwheels on both male and female characters within a system of sexual difference,” the chapter shows how Bound—self-consciously playing on the debated identities of butch, femme, and feminine—generates different-sex erotics through same-gender protagonists. Through such playful manipulations, the film opens up flexible reimaginings of sex and gender across the spectrum of gay and straight as alternatives to rigidifying heterosexual and homosexual binaries.

Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad is an expansive two-volume examination of social imaginaries concerning Obeah and Yoruba-Orisa from colonialism to the present. Analyzing their entangled histories and systems of devotion, Tracey E. Hucks and Dianne M. Stewart articulate how these religions were criminalized during slavery and colonialism yet still demonstrated autonomous modes of expression and self-defense. In Volume I, Obeah, Hucks traces the history of African religious repression in colonial Trinidad through the late nineteenth century. Drawing on sources ranging from colonial records, laws, and legal transcripts to travel diaries, literary fiction, and written correspondence, she documents the persecution and violent penalization of African religious practices encoded under the legal classification of “obeah.” A cult of antiblack fixation emerged as white settlers defined themselves in opposition to Obeah, which they imagined as terrifying African witchcraft. These preoccupations revealed the fears that bound whites to one another. At the same time, persons accused of obeah sought legal vindication and marshaled their own spiritual and medicinal technologies to fortify the cultural heritages, religious identities, and life systems of African-diasporic communities in Trinidad.

Demonization has increasingly become central to the global religious and political landscape. Passing Orders interrogates this centrality through an analysis of evangelical “spiritual warfare” demonologies in contemporary America, which envision the world as built on a clash of divine and demonic forces in which humanity is enmeshed. Situating spiritual warfare in the context of American exceptionalism, ethnonationalism, and empire-management, it exposes the theological foundations that justify the dehumanizing practices of the current US political order—queer- and transphobia, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and settler colonialism. The book argues that demonologies are not merely tools of dehumanization but ontological and biopolitical systems that create and maintain structures of sovereign power, or orthotaxies: models of the “right ordering” of reality that create uneven geographies of space and stratify humanity into hierarchies of being and nonbeing. Demonologies constitute and consolidate these geographies and stratifications by enabling the framing of other orders as passing orders—as counterfeit, transgressive, and transient. But these orders are unwilling to pass on, instead giving structure to deviant desires that resist sovereign power. Demonstrating these structures of resistance in demonologies of three figures—the Jezebel spirit, the Islamic Antichrist, and Leviathan—Passing Orders explores how demons exceed their designated role as self-consolidating others to embody alternative possibilities that unsettle orthotaxic claims over territory, time, and truth. Ultimately, it reimagines demons as a surprising source of political and social resistance, reflecting fragile and fractious communities bound by mutual passing and precarity into strategic coalitions of solidarity, subversion, and survival.

Starting with the equation of motion for the field operator ψ(x,t) of an interacting many-particle system, the n-particle Green’s function (Gn) equation of motion is developed, with interparticle interactions generating an infinite chain of equations coupling it to (n+1)- and (n−1)-particle Green’s functions (Gn+1 and Gn−1, respectively). Particularly important are the one-particle Green’s function equation with its coupling to the two-particle Green’s function and the two-particle Green’s function equation with its coupling to the three-particle Green’s function. To develop solutions, it is necessary to introduce non-correlation decoupling procedures involving the Hartree and Hartree-Fock approximations for G2 in the G1 equation; and a similar factorization “ansatz” for G3 in the G2 equation, resulting in the Sum of Ladder Diagrams integral equation for G2, with multiple Born iterates and finite collisional lifetimes. Similar treatment of the G11-equation for the joint propagation of one-electron and one-hole subject to mutual Coulomb attraction leads to bound electron-hole exciton states having a discrete hydrogen like spectrum of energy eigenstates. Its role in single-particle propagation is also discussed in terms of one-electron self-energy Σ‎ and the T-matrix

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

AbstractBehavioural change with societal transformation has been the key processes whereby hand and respiratory hygiene, social distancing and self-isolation that citizens across the world have been asked to implement to respond to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Is it possible to use such societal transformation approaches to change our behaviour for climate change adaptation? The European Commission (EC) funded research and innovation programmes that will be launched from 2021 will mobilise investment and EC’s wide efforts to achieve measurable and time-bound goals on issues that affect citizens’ daily lives. These programmes are based around five missions, one of which is the Mission on Adaptation to climate change including societal transformation. This will provide an opportunity to build evidence-informed assessment and design of interventions and should use a systems approach to determine and deploy the most cost-effective mix of public health behaviour change policy options according to the Nuffield Intervention Ladder and the Behaviour Change Wheel. This will maximise the likelihood of delivering societal transformation actions through ambitious but realistic research and innovation activities to help deliver planetary health programmes for Europe more widely.

AbstractSentenza 238/2014 once more highlights the important role domestic courts play in international law. More than prior examples, it illustrates the ever more autonomous and self-confident stance of domestic courts on the international plane. But the ruling of the Italian Constitutional Court (ItCC) also shows that more engagement with international law does not necessarily mean that domestic courts enhance the effectiveness of international law and become ‘compliance partners’ of international courts. Sentenza 238/2014 suggests that domestic courts, in times of global governance and increased activity of international courts, see the role they play at the intersection of legal orders also as ‘gate-keepers’, ready to cushion the domestic impact of international law if deemed necessary. The judgment of the ItCC thus offers a new opportunity to examine the multifaceted and complex role of these important actors that apply and shape international law, while always remaining bound by domestic (constitutional) law. This chapter does so by exploring how domestic courts deal with rulings of the World Court. It shows that despite the fact that in numerous situations domestic courts could act as compliance partners of the International Court of Justice, in reality, more often than not, they have refused to do so, arguing that its judgments are not self-executing and thus deferring the implementation to the political branches. Assessing this practice, the chapter argues that domestic courts should take a more active stance and overcome the purely interstate view that seems at odds with present-day international law. While it seems too far-reaching to expect domestic courts to follow international courts unconditionally, the chapter cautions that there is a considerable risk of setting dangerous precedents by openly defying international judgments. Domestic courts should carefully balance the different interests at stake, namely an effective system of international adjudication on the one hand and the protection of fundamental domestic principles on the other hand. The chapter finds that the ItCC’s attempt to reintroduce clear boundaries between legal orders lacks the openness and flexibility needed to effectively cope with today’s complex and plural legal reality.

Multimedia authentication distinguishes itself from other data integrity security issues because of its unique property of content integrity in several different levels — from signal syntax levels to semantic levels. In this section, we describe several image authentication issues, including the mathematical forms of optimal multimedia authentication systems, a description of robust digital signature, the theoretical bound of information hiding capacity of images, an introduction of the self-authentication-and-recovery image (SARI) system, and a novel technique for image/video authentication in the semantic level. This chapter provides an overview of these image authentication issues.

Multimedia authentication distinguishes itself from other data integrity security issues because of its unique property of content integrity in several different levels — from signal syntax levels to semantic levels. In this section, we describe several image authentication issues, including the mathematical forms of optimal multimedia authentication systems, a description of robust digital signature, the theoretical bound of information hiding capacity of images, an introduction of the self-authentication-and-recovery image (SARI) system, and a novel technique for image/video authentication in the semantic level. This chapter provides an overview of these image authentication issues.

Abstract Eudaimonia—a keyword in the field of positive psychology—is also a central concept for disability activists and scholars working in the field of disability studies, though for rather different reasons. For disabled people, the prospect of flourishing is both a desideratum and a corrective to centuries of disqualification, stigmatization, and abuse. Thus, the conditions of possibility for flourishing are dialectically bound up with critiques of ableism, eugenics, proscriptive ideologies of embodiment and mindedness, and economic systems that generate debility and disability in tandem. If humanities literary scholars—especially those working in disability studies—are to consider the eudaimonic focus on affirmation and self-improvement promoted by positive psychology, two questions must be asked. First, can the methods associated with the eudemonic turn fully accommodate critique? And second, can those methods refrain from conflating “well-being” with normative models of health and embodiment? Literary analysis offers an interesting test case for these questions. To that end, this chapter offers an introduction to disability poetics via three different readings of the role of intellectual disability in literary texts by William Carlos Williams, Susan Nussbaum, and Jesse Ball. The aim is twofold: first, to demonstrate the stakes involved when critique and affirmation are held in different degrees of balance around the hermeneutical forces of disability; second, to insert disability into the current literary debates around surface/deep reading and critique/postcritique.

This chapter looks back at the time of national anxiety and self-doubt in the US, in the wake of the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the subsequent economic turmoil. During that time, the Military Reform movement was popularized by James Fallows, the Washington editor for The Atlantic magazine. Fallows met extensively with John Boyd and the other Reformers and published “The Muscle-Bound Superpower” in 1979. This was the first full public presentation of the Reformers' views — that military technology had gotten too complex, and the system was too full of corrupt insiders. The chapter explores how the Reformers' efforts soon drew allies from within the military and in Congress.

In this chapter technology is viewed as a tool and an enterprise that can be used to educate, change and empower people in schools and society. However, we need to remember that teaching is still a personal human journey that is influenced by many forces related to technologic change which are infused with human relations. We are duty-bound to become self-aware through the clarification of values, reflection and action research. We need to remind ourselves to look at the messages we send, and most importantly, become aware of the behaviors, modeling and leadership we provide at all levels to ensure that we drive the vision for technology and not let technology mute nor drive the humanness from either the classroom or the education system.

A self-tuning fuzzy-sliding mode controller is presented in the current work. It aims at combining the advantages of the variable structure systems (VSS) theory with the self-tuning fuzzy logic controller. Neither the development of an accurate dynamic model of the plant nor the construction of a rule-based expert system is required for designing the controller. The only requirement is that the upper bound of the modeling uncertainties has to be known. The stability of the controlled system is ensured by forcing the tuning parameter to satisfy the sliding condition. The controller is implemented to control the heading of an under-actuated ship. The simulation results demonstrate the robust performance of the controller in accurately tracking the desired yaw angle specified by the guidance system in the presence of considerable modeling imprecision and environmental disturbances.

Above the controller level a lot of components are needed in mechatronic systems for the development towards self-optimizing systems. One of these components is a hybrid planning architecture. This architecture integrating discrete and continuous domains is of major importance to support the permanent determination of system objectives and their implementation during the course of action. Through this the principle of self-optimizing mechatronic systems is defined as well. Such a novel hybrid planning architecture is outlined in this paper. In order to plan efficiently and safely, environment models are needed for predicting future system behaviors. In this paper we propose a fuzzy logic based approach to environment modeling and apply it in a railway-bound domain within the context of an air gap adjustment system for a dual-fed linear motor powering a wheeled train.

Integrating dependability in self-optimizing systems is a challenging task. Self-optimizing systems incorporate on the one hand the opportunity to apply novel solutions to complex mechatronic systems, but on the other hand constitute a possible risk because of non-determined behavior. The dependability concept in this paper covers both aspects: Increasing safety with self-optimization and minimizing the risk of self-optimization. This dependability concept is combined with the self-optimization process of the active guidance module which is currently under development at the Collaborative Research Center 614 at the University of Paderborn.

Risk of having hypoglycemia is one of the biggest barriers preventing Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) patients from performing exercise. In addition, management of diet and exercise levels needs to be personalized for each patient to avoid hypoglycemia and to achieve a good glycemic control. In this paper, we developed a model-based diet and exercise recommender system that could be used to provide an (optimal) personalized intervention on diet and exercise for T1D patients. The recommender system makes prediction of blood glucose at each intervention time based on a patient-specific model of glucose dynamics, and then provides the optimal meal sizes, target heart rates during exercise, pre-exercise carbohydrate and bedtime snack by minimizing a clinical risk function under constraints. Patient-specific models of glucose dynamics were identified for 30 virtual subjects generated from a modified UVa/Padova simulator with an added exercise-glucose subsystem. The performance of the recommender system was then compared to two self-management schemes (the Starter and the Skilled). The latter represents an off-line optimal solution providing a lower bound on the risk index. The average clinical risk under the recommender system was reduced by 49% compared to that under the Starter, and it was comparable to the risk of the Skilled. In addition, the recommender system had less number of post-exercise/nocturnal hypoglycemia events occurred than that under the Starter or the Skilled. Such recommender system can be implemented as an “App” patient advisor to improve T1D patients’ self-management of glucose control.

A nonlinear adaptive sliding mode control for simultaneous vehicle handling and path tracking improvement through the Steer-By-Wire system is presented in this paper. The proposed adaptive sliding mode controller, which is insensitive to system uncertainties, offers an adaptive sliding gain to eliminate the precise determination of the bound of uncertainties. The sliding gain value is calculated using a simple adaptation algorithm which does not require extensive computational load. A driver control model is also presented according to the preview or look-ahead strategy to generate the appropriate steering angles using the vehicle states feedback and the future information about the path to be followed. Moreover, because of the inertia and viscous damping in the steering mechanism and the effects of coulomb friction and self-aligning moment of the front tires, the steering system controller based on the proposed adaptive sliding mode scheme, is designed to control the front steering angle. A complete stability analysis based on the Lyapunov theory is presented in order to guarantee the closed loop stability. Eventually, the simulation results confirm that the proposed adaptive robust controller not only improves the vehicle handling and path tracking performance but also reduces the chattering problem in presence of uncertainties in the tire cornering stiffness and the external disturbance.

We demonstrate a high speed method to analyze the impact of self-quenching on fluorescence lifetimes in individual cells by phase-sensitive flow cytometry, using a model system consisting of FITC (fluorescein isothiocyanate) labeled antimouse Thy 1.2 antibodies bound to murine thymus cells.

Mitochondria are the site of respiration and numerous other metabolic processes required for plant growth and development. Increased demands for metabolic energy are observed during different stages in the plants life cycle, but are particularly ample during germination and reproductive organ development. These activities are dependent upon the tight regulation of the expression and accumulation of various organellar proteins. Plant mitochondria contain their own genomes (mtDNA), which encode for a small number of genes required in organellar genome expression and respiration. Yet, the vast majority of the organellar proteins are encoded by nuclear genes, thus necessitating complex mechanisms to coordinate the expression and accumulation of proteins encoded by the two remote genomes. Many organellar genes are interrupted by intervening sequences (introns), which are removed from the primary presequences via splicing. According to conserved features of their sequences these introns are all classified as “group-II”. Their splicing is necessary for organellar activity and is dependent upon nuclear-encoded RNA-binding cofactors. However, to-date, only a tiny fraction of the proteins expected to be involved in these activities have been identified. Accordingly, this project aimed to identify nuclear-encoded proteins required for mitochondrial RNA splicing in plants, and to analyze their specific roles in the splicing of group-II intron RNAs. In non-plant systems, group-II intron splicing is mediated by proteins encoded within the introns themselves, known as maturases, which act specifically in the splicing of the introns in which they are encoded. Only one mitochondrial intron in plants has retained its maturaseORF (matR), but its roles in organellar intron splicing are unknown. Clues to other proteins required for organellar intron splicing are scarce, but these are likely encoded in the nucleus as there are no other obvious candidates among the remaining ORFs within the mtDNA. Through genetic screens in maize, the Barkan lab identified numerous nuclear genes that are required for the splicing of many of the introns within the plastid genome. Several of these genes are related to one another (i.e. crs1, caf1, caf2, and cfm2) in that they share a previously uncharacterized domain of archaeal origin, the CRM domain. The Arabidopsis genome contains 16 CRM-related genes, which contain between one and four repeats of the domain. Several of these are predicted to the mitochondria and are thus postulated to act in the splicing of group-II introns in the organelle(s) to which they are localized. In addition, plant genomes also harbor several genes that are closely related to group-II intron-encoded maturases (nMats), which exist in the nucleus as 'self-standing' ORFs, out of the context of their cognate "host" group-II introns and are predicted to reside within the mitochondria. The similarity with known group-II intron splicing factors identified in other systems and their predicted localization to mitochondria in plants suggest that nuclear-encoded CRM and nMat related proteins may function in the splicing of mitochondrial-encoded introns. In this proposal we proposed to (i) establish the intracellular locations of several CRM and nMat proteins; (ii) to test whether mutations in their genes impairs the splicing of mitochondrial introns; and to (iii) determine whether these proteins are bound to the mitochondrial introns in vivo.