A New Sociology of Civic Action

This chapter discusses how advocates for social change act. Advocates spend much of their time writing position papers, raising money, enduring meetings, or running educational workshops. All these activities fit within the usual definition of a social movement: collective action that challenges institutional authorities to redistribute resources, remake policy, or bestow social recognition. In the last several decades, studies of both the showier and more backstage kinds of movement activity share something else that may seem simply like common sense, but should not. Researchers often assume that social advocates are goal-oriented operatives. In this view, social advocates are like savvy business entrepreneurs. Style has a powerful effect on social problem-solving efforts. This study looks in depth at the workings of two scene styles, both of which are common in US advocacy circles. Acting as a community of interest, participants treat each other as loyal partners pursuing a specific goal limited to an issue for which they share concern. In a setting styled as a community of identity, in contrast, participants assume they should coordinate themselves as fellow members of a community resisting ongoing threats from the powers that be.

The Functional Schrödinger Equation in the Semiclassical Limit of Quantum Gravity with a Gaussian Clock Field

We derive the functional Schrödinger equation for quantum fields in curved spacetime in the semiclassical limit of quantum geometrodynamics with a Gaussian incoherent dust acting as a clock field. We perform the semiclassical limit using a WKB-type expansion of the wave functional in powers of the squared Planck mass. The functional Schrödinger equation that we obtain exhibits a functional time derivative that completes the usual definition of WKB time for curved spacetime, and the usual Schrödinger-type evolution is recovered in Minkowski spacetime.

Conclusion

Although best known for his contributions to mathematical psychology, Anatol Rapoport became an outspoken military abolitionist during the Vietnam War era. In the foreword to Understanding War he writes: [T]he identification of national security with military potential, the belief in the effectiveness of ‘deterrence’, the belief that dismantling military institutions must lead to economic slump and unemployment, the belief that military establishments perform a useful social function by ‘defending’ the societies on which they feed, and so on. All these beliefs qualify as superstitions by the usual definition of a superstition as a stubbornly held belief for which no evidence exists....

The Usual Definition of Just Wars

There is a school of thought which supposes that victory does not fit easily within the just war rubric because, despite what its name suggests, just war is not actually a form of warfare at all. On this view, just war is not so much a military contest between rival sovereigns as an extension into the international sphere of the punitive function that the judiciary discharges in the domestic realm. This conception of just war precludes any consideration of victory: in the same way a judge does not win when she sends a criminal to the gallows, nobody wins a just war. This chapter will draw upon David Rodin’s modern classic, War and Self-Defence, and the scholastic texts of Aquinas, Vitoria, and Suarez to investigate this way of thinking about just war. It will conclude that it discloses a tendency at the heart of just war thinking to sanitize war.

On the Taylor Differentiability in Spaces Lp, 0 < p ≤ ∞

The function \(f\in L_p[I], \;p>0,\) is called \((k,p)\)-differentiable at a point \(x_0\in I\) if there exists an algebraic polynomial of \(\pi\) of degree no more than \(k\) for which holds \( \Vert f-\pi \Vert_{L_p[J_h]} = o(h^{k+\frac{1}{p}}), \) where \(\;J_h=[x_0-h; x_0+h]\cap I.\) At an internal point for \(k=1\) and \(p=\infty\) this is equivalent to the usual definition of the function differentiability. At an interior point for \(k=1\) and \(p=\infty\), the definition is equivalent to the usual differentiability of the function. There is a standard "hierarchy" for the existence of differentials(if \(p_1<p_2,\) then \((k,p_2)\)-differentiability should be \((k,p_1)\)-differentiability. In the works of S.N. Bernstein, A.P. Calderon and A. Zygmund were given applications of such a construction to build a description of functional spaces (\(p=\infty\)) and the study of local properties of solutions of differential equations \((1\le p\le\infty)\), respectively. This article is related to the first mentioned work. The article introduces the concept of uniform differentiability. We say that a function \(f\), \((k,p)\)-differentiable at all points of the segment \(I\), is uniformly \((k,p)\)-differentiable on \(I\) if for any number \(\varepsilon>0\) there is a number \(\delta>0\) such that for each point \(x\in I\) runs \( \Vert f-\pi\Vert_{L_p[J_h]}<\varepsilon\cdot h^{k+\frac{1}{p}} \; \) for \(0<h<\delta, \; J_h = [x\!-\!H; x\!+\!h]\cap I,\) where \(\pi\) is the polynomial of the terms of the \((k, p)\)-differentiability at the point \(x\). Based on the methods of local approximations of functions by algebraic polynomials it is shown that a uniform \((k,p)\)-differentiability of the function \(f\) at some \(1\le p\le\infty\) implies \(f\in C^k[I].\) Therefore, in this case the differentials are "equivalent". Since every function from \(C^k[I]\) is uniformly \((k,p)\)-differentiable on the interval \(I\) at \(1\le p\le\infty,\) we obtain a certain criterion of belonging to this space. The range \(0<p<1,\) obviously, can be included into the necessary condition the membership of the function \(C^k[I]\), but the sufficiency of Taylor differentiability in this range has not yet been fully proven.

On the Theory of Fractional Calculus in the Pettis-Function Spaces

Throughout this paper, we outline some aspects of fractional calculus in Banach spaces. Some examples are demonstrated. In our investigations, the integrals and the derivatives are understood as Pettis integrals and the corresponding derivatives. Our results here extended all previous contributions in this context and therefore are new. To encompass the full scope of our paper, we show that a weakly continuous solution of a fractional order integral equation, which is modeled off some fractional order boundary value problem (where the derivatives are taken in the usual definition of the Caputo fractional weak derivative), may not solve the problem.

Introduction

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to make a case for expanding our usual definition of form in literary studies to include patterns of sociopolitical experience like those of Lowood School. Broadening our definition of form to include social arrangements has immediate methodological consequences. The traditionally troubling gap between the form of the literary text and its content and context dissolves. Formalist analysis turns out to be as valuable to understanding sociopolitical institutions as it is to reading literature. Forms are at work everywhere. Chaotic though it seems, this brief conceptual history does make two things quite clear. First, form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics. Second, all of the historical uses of the term, despite their richness and variety, do share a common definition: “form” always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping.

Specification of dynamic structure discrete event systems using single point encapsulated control functions

In Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS), the dynamics of a network is constituted only by the dynamics of its basic components. The state of each component is fully encapsulated. Control in the network is fully decentralized to each component. At dynamic structure level, DEVS should permit the same level of decentralization. However, it is hard to ensure structure consistency while letting all components achieve structure changes. Besides, this solution can be complex to implement. To avoid these difficulties, usual dynamic structure approaches ensure structure consistency allowing structure changes to be done only by the network having newly added dynamics change capabilities. This is a safe and simple way to achieve dynamic structure. However, it should be possible to simply allow components of a network to modify the structure of their network, other components and/or their own structure — without having to modify the usual definition a DEVS network. In this manuscript, it is shown that a simple fully decentralized approach is possible while ensuring full modularity and structure consistency.

The complexity of ascendant sequences in locally nilpotent groups

We analyze the complexity of ascendant sequences in locally nilpotent groups, showing that if G is a computable locally nilpotent group and x0, x1, …, xN ∈ G, N ∈ ℕ, then one can always find a uniformly computably enumerable (i.e. uniformly [Formula: see text]) ascendant sequence of order type ω + 1 of subgroups in G beginning with 〈x0, x1, …, xN〉G, the subgroup generated by x0, x1, …, xN in G. This complexity is surprisingly low in light of the fact that the usual definition of ascendant sequence involves arbitrarily large ordinals that index sequences of subgroups defined via a transfinite recursion in which each step is incomputable. We produce this surprisingly low complexity sequence via the effective algebraic commutator collection process of P. Hall, and a related purely algebraic Normal Form Theorem of M. Hall for nilpotent groups.