Introduction

Author(s):  
Charles Fefferman ◽  
C. Robin Graham

This introductory chapter begins with a brief definition of conformal geometry. Conformal geometry is the study of spaces in which one knows how to measure infinitesimal angles but not lengths. A conformal structure on a manifold is an equivalence class of Riemannian metrics, in which two metrics are identified if one is a positive smooth multiple of the other. In [FG], the authors outlined a construction of a nondegenerate Lorentz metric in n+2 dimensions associated to an n-dimensional conformal manifold, which they called the ambient metric. This association enables one to construct conformal invariants in n dimensions from pseudo-Riemannian invariants in n+2 dimensions, and in particular shows that conformal invariants are plentiful. The formal theory outlined in [FG] did not provide details. This book provides these details. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Author(s):  
Juan de Lara ◽  
Esther Guerra

AbstractModelling is an essential activity in software engineering. It typically involves two meta-levels: one includes meta-models that describe modelling languages, and the other contains models built by instantiating those meta-models. Multi-level modelling generalizes this approach by allowing models to span an arbitrary number of meta-levels. A scenario that profits from multi-level modelling is the definition of language families that can be specialized (e.g., for different domains) by successive refinements at subsequent meta-levels, hence promoting language reuse. This enables an open set of variability options given by all possible specializations of the language family. However, multi-level modelling lacks the ability to express closed variability regarding the availability of language primitives or the possibility to opt between alternative primitive realizations. This limits the reuse opportunities of a language family. To improve this situation, we propose a novel combination of product lines with multi-level modelling to cover both open and closed variability. Our proposal is backed by a formal theory that guarantees correctness, enables top-down and bottom-up language variability design, and is implemented atop the MetaDepth multi-level modelling tool.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Gracia Liu-Farrer

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Japan as an immigrant country. Japan has become an immigrant country de facto. Starting in the 1980s, to stave off economic decline caused by labor shortage and in the name of internationalization, Japan has tried different programs to bring in foreign workers. In 2012, Japan became one of the most liberal states in its policies for granting permanent residency to highly skilled migrants. As a result, the population of foreigners has been rising for the past three decades and is likely to increase significantly in the near future. Why, then, do both the Japanese government and people inside and outside Japan hesitate to accept the discourse of immigration and the reality of its transformation into an immigrant society? This hesitation has to do with Japan's ethno-nationalist self-identity and the widespread myth surrounding its monoethnic nationhood, on the one hand, and the conventional, albeit anachronistic, definition of “immigrant country” and the difficulty for people to associate an immigrant country with an ethno-nationalist one, on the other hand.


Author(s):  
Webb Keane

This introductory chapter provides a definition of some key terms: ethics, morality, reflexive awareness, and affordance. Studies that focus on virtues, values, and ways of life tend to fall under the rubric of ethics. Those that focus on obligations, prohibitions, general principles, systematicity, and momentary decisions are treated as morality. There is a great deal of overlap and interaction between these. Cutting across the distinction between ethics and morality is another one, that between the tacit and the explicit—those background assumptions, values, and motives that go without saying or are difficult to put into words, on the other hand, and those that easily lend themselves to conscious reflection, on the other. Meanwhile, ethical affordance is any aspects of people's experiences and perceptions that they might draw on in the process of making ethical evaluations and decisions, whether consciously or not.


Author(s):  
Joel Fine ◽  
Yannick Herfray

Conformal geodesics are distinguished curves on a conformal manifold, loosely analogous to geodesics of Riemannian geometry. One definition of them is as solutions to a third-order differential equation determined by the conformal structure. There is an alternative description via the tractor calculus. In this article, we give a third description using ideas from holography. A conformal [Formula: see text]-manifold [Formula: see text] can be seen (formally at least) as the asymptotic boundary of a Poincaré–Einstein [Formula: see text]-manifold [Formula: see text]. We show that any curve [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text] has a uniquely determined extension to a surface [Formula: see text] in [Formula: see text], which we call the ambient surface of [Formula: see text]. This surface meets the boundary [Formula: see text] in right angles along [Formula: see text] and is singled out by the requirement that it be a critical point of renormalized area. The conformal geometry of [Formula: see text] is encoded in the Riemannian geometry of [Formula: see text]. In particular, [Formula: see text] is a conformal geodesic precisely when [Formula: see text] is asymptotically totally geodesic, i.e. its second fundamental form vanishes to one order higher than expected. We also relate this construction to tractors and the ambient metric construction of Fefferman and Graham. In the [Formula: see text]-dimensional ambient manifold, the ambient surface is a graph over the bundle of scales. The tractor calculus then identifies with the usual tensor calculus along this surface. This gives an alternative compact proof of our holographic characterization of conformal geodesics.


Author(s):  
Wayne Glausser

This introductory chapter offers a brief definition of entanglement and contrasts it with four other versions of the relationship between religion and secularity. Unlike these other four models, in which religion and secularity sit apart from each other as separate domains, entanglement presents a contentious but oddly intimate relationship. Neither side simply wins by displacing the other. Two examples flesh out this definition of entangled religious and secular interests. The first example comes from the so-called War on Christmas; the second comes from controversies surrounding stem cell research. In both of these cases, religious and secular elements entangle and complicate each other, even as they engage in adversarial conversation. The introduction then examines recent scholarly re-evaluations of the term “secularity” and connects it with the concept of entanglement.


Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).


Author(s):  
Alison Forrestal

This introductory chapter examines the early career of Vincent de Paul between 1581 and 1611, moving from his birth and education to his arrival in Paris in 1608, and his immersion in the dévot environment there. It begins with a summary of his birth in south-west France and his years of education to university level. It then outlines his appointment as an almoner in the royal household of Marguerite de Valois in early 1610, after he had taken up residence in Paris two years earlier. It concludes with an analysis of the other aspects of his material livelihood during these years, including his acquisition of the abbey of Saint-Léonard-de-Chaumes in western France.


Author(s):  
Peter Cheyne

This introductory chapter commences with a definition of contemplation as the sustained attention to the ideas of reason, which are not merely concepts in the mind, but real, external powers that constitute and order being and value, and therefore excite reverence or admiration. A contemplative, Coleridgean position is outlined as a defence in the crisis of the humanities, arguing that if Coleridge is right in asserting that ideas ‘in fact constitute … humanity’, then they must be the proper or ultimate studies of the disciplines that comprise the humanities. This focus on contemplation as the access to essential ideas explains why Coleridge progressed from, without ever abandoning, imagination to reason as his thought evolved during his lifetime. A section on ‘Contemplation: How to Get There from Here’, is followed by a descriptive bibliography of Coleridge as discussed by philosophers, intellectual historians, theologians, and philosophically minded literary scholars.


Author(s):  
Shahriar Aslani ◽  
Patrick Bernard

Abstract In the study of Hamiltonian systems on cotangent bundles, it is natural to perturb Hamiltonians by adding potentials (functions depending only on the base point). This led to the definition of Mañé genericity [ 8]: a property is generic if, given a Hamiltonian $H$, the set of potentials $g$ such that $H+g$ satisfies the property is generic. This notion is mostly used in the context of Hamiltonians that are convex in $p$, in the sense that $\partial ^2_{pp} H$ is positive definite at each point. We will also restrict our study to this situation. There is a close relation between perturbations of Hamiltonians by a small additive potential and perturbations by a positive factor close to one. Indeed, the Hamiltonians $H+g$ and $H/(1-g)$ have the same level one energy surface, hence their dynamics on this energy surface are reparametrisation of each other, this is the Maupertuis principle. This remark is particularly relevant when $H$ is homogeneous in the fibers (which corresponds to Finsler metrics) or even fiberwise quadratic (which corresponds to Riemannian metrics). In these cases, perturbations by potentials of the Hamiltonian correspond, up to parametrisation, to conformal perturbations of the metric. One of the widely studied aspects is to understand to what extent the return map associated to a periodic orbit can be modified by a small perturbation. This kind of question depends strongly on the context in which they are posed. Some of the most studied contexts are, in increasing order of difficulty, perturbations of general vector fields, perturbations of Hamiltonian systems inside the class of Hamiltonian systems, perturbations of Riemannian metrics inside the class of Riemannian metrics, and Mañé perturbations of convex Hamiltonians. It is for example well known that each vector field can be perturbed to a vector field with only hyperbolic periodic orbits, this is part of the Kupka–Smale Theorem, see [ 5, 13] (the other part of the Kupka–Smale Theorem states that the stable and unstable manifolds intersect transversally; it has also been studied in the various settings mentioned above but will not be discussed here). In the context of Hamiltonian vector fields, the statement has to be weakened, but it remains true that each Hamiltonian can be perturbed to a Hamiltonian with only non-degenerate periodic orbits (including the iterated ones), see [ 11, 12]. The same result is true in the context of Riemannian metrics: every Riemannian metric can be perturbed to a Riemannian metric with only non-degenerate closed geodesics, this is the bumpy metric theorem, see [ 1, 2, 4]. The question was investigated only much more recently in the context of Mañé perturbations of convex Hamiltonians, see [ 9, 10]. It is proved in [ 10] that the same result holds: if $H$ is a convex Hamiltonian and $a$ is a regular value of $H$, then there exist arbitrarily small potentials $g$ such that all periodic orbits (including iterated ones) of $H+g$ at energy $a$ are non-degenerate. The proof given in [ 10] is actually rather similar to the ones given in papers on the perturbations of Riemannian metrics. In all these proofs, it is very useful to work in appropriate coordinates around an orbit segment. In the Riemannian case, one can use the so-called Fermi coordinates. In the Hamiltonian case, appropriate coordinates are considered in [ 10,Lemma 3.1] itself taken from [ 3, Lemma C.1]. However, as we shall detail below, the proof of this Lemma in [ 3], Appendix C, is incomplete, and the statement itself is actually wrong. Our goal in the present paper is to state and prove a corrected version of this normal form Lemma. Our proof is different from the one outlined in [ 3], Appendix C. In particular, it is purely Hamiltonian and does not rest on the results of [ 7] on Finsler metrics, as [ 3] did. Although our normal form is weaker than the one claimed in [ 10], it is actually sufficient to prove the main results of [ 6, 10], as we shall explain after the statement of Theorem 1, and probably also of the other works using [ 3, Lemma C.1].


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-428
Author(s):  
Miriam R. Lowi

Studies of identity and belonging in Gulf monarchies tend to privilege tribal or religious affiliation, if not the protective role of the ruler as paterfamilias. I focus instead on the ubiquitous foreigner and explore ways in which s/he contributes to the definition of national community in contemporary gcc states. Building upon and moving beyond the scholarly literature on imported labor in the Gulf, I suggest that the different ‘categories’ of foreigners impact identity and the consolidation of a community of privilege, in keeping with the national project of ruling families. Furthermore, I argue that the ‘European,’ the non-gcc Arab, and the predominantly Asian (and increasingly African) laborer play similar, but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: while they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the ‘nation’ and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and ‘the other(s).’


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