Intense ocean freshening from melting glacier around the Antarctica during early twenty-first century

With the accelerating mass loss of Antarctic ice sheets, the freshening of the Southern Ocean coastal oceans (SOc, seas around Antarctica) is gradually intensifying, which will reduce the formation of bottom water and weaken the meridional overturning circulation, thus having a significant negative impact on the ocean’s role in regulating global climate. Due to the extreme environment of the Southern Ocean and the limitations of observational techniques, our understanding of the glacier-derived freshening of SOc is still vague. We developed a method that first provided us with an expansive understanding of glacier-derived freshening progress over the SOc. Applying this method to the observational data in the SOc from 1926 to 2016, revealed that the rate of glacier-derived freshwater input reached a maximum of 268 ± 134 Gt year−1 during the early twenty-first century. Our results indicate that during the same period, glacier melting accounted for 63%, 28%, and 92% of the total freshening occurred in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific sectors of the SOc, respectively. This suggests that the ice shelf basal melt in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula plays a dominant role in the freshening of the surrounding seas.

DIGITAL SYSTEM BLOCKCHAIN SEBAGAI STRATEGI UNTUK OPTIMALISASI PENGELOLAAN DANA ZAKAT: STUDI KONSEPTUAL

Digitalization is a new phenomenon in the early twenty-first century connecting technology with civilization and benefits mankind in an intelligent and efficient way. The adoption of the blockchain concept in zakat institutions is the time to be a solution in dealing with existing Islamic problems such as the collection and distribution of zakat funds. This study was to provide an overview of the opportunities, potential and capabilities of blockchain system adoption in zakat institutions, especially in Indonesia. The method was a literature study by reviewing various relevant literatures and balanced with related studies on phenomena in various countries. With dynamic technological developments, especially the emergence of blockchain technology, the zakat ecosystem can be further enhanced since blockchain offerred the concept of data decentralization which were permanent, real-time, secure and transparent. Several things to encourage this practice could be done by increasing the capabilities of zakat institutions' human resources, increasing awareness of compulsory zakat and the concept of digitizing zakat, integrated cooperation between OPZs, and collaborating with various digital platforms.

Ephemeral mimetics: memes, an X-ray of Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a crisis with consequences for public health, but also with economic, social and cultural implications that have affected all layers of society to a greater or lesser extent. Communication has been impacted by the immediacy and virality of messages and misinformation has galloped across social platforms. Against that backdrop, memes have emerged as a powerful means to channel citizen sentiment. A study of these digital objects is essential to understanding social network-based communication during the pandemic. The qualitative research reported here analyses the role of memes in communication on Covid-19, studies their development and defends their status as one of this generation’s cultural artefacts that, as such, merits preservation. Meme evolution is studied using Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief, which has been applied in a number of contexts involving psychological change. Studying memes in those terms both brings information on the evolution of citizens’ concerns to light and proves useful to sound out social media communication around the pandemic media. The challenges to be faced in meme preservation are defined, along with the ways in which heritage institutions should ensure the conservation of these cultural objects, which mirror early twenty-first century communication and world views and in this case provide specific insight into one of the most significant historic circumstances of recent decades.

Pop Masculinities

Pop Masculinities investigates the performance and policing of masculinity in pop music as a starting point for grasping the broad complexity of gender and its politics in the early twenty-first century. Drawing together perspectives from critical musicology, gender studies, and adjacent scholarly fields, the book presents extended case studies of five well-known artists: Zayn, Lil Nas X, Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and Take That. By directing particular attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that arise from these artists’ representations of masculinity, author Kai Arne Hansen argues that pop performances tend to operate in ways that simultaneously reinforce and challenge gender norms and social inequalities. Providing a rich exploration of these murky waters, the author merges the interpretation of recorded song and music video with discourse analysis and media ethnography in order to engage with the full range of pop artists’ public identities as they emerge at the intersections between processes of performance, promotion, and reception. In so doing, he advances our understanding of the aesthetic and discursive underpinnings of gender politics in twenty-first century pop culture and encourages readers to contemplate the sociopolitical implications of their own musical engagements as audiences, critics, musicians, and scholars.

Georgian Israelites or Jews of Georgia

The paper explores the evolution of Georgian-Jewish identity in different political, ideological, and cultural contexts from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. It is focused on the beginning of the twentieth century when religious and national dimensions of Georgian-Jewish identity were developed as competing identity models. This paper addresses the impact of these identity models on contemporary Georgian-Jewish identity.

Художня артикуляція проблеми постлюдства у п’єсі Карела Чапека “Р.У.Р. Россумові універсальні роботи”

In the article Karel Čapek’s play “R.U.R. Rossum’s universal robots” is read not only as an anti-utopia devoted to the confrontation between humans and robots, but also as a work of art that defines a number of humanitarian discourses of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The play correlates with modern humanitarian studies of posthumanity, posthumanism and transhumanism, examines various projects of posthumanistic reduplication of man – the archetype of the homunculus, types of humanized robots, cyborgs, iron warriors, predicts the decline of masculine discourse and the origins of feminism. The impact factor of this dramatic text goes beyond fiction and theatre and extends to the whole culture, because the concept of “robot” introduced by Karel Čapek is a stable concept of culture, transformation and technology. At the conceptual level, the article deals with the ability of artistic thinking to forecast, identify promising general scientific issues and structure future humanitarian discourses.

Ireland and the United Kingdom

This chapter examines the role of religion in Ireland and the United Kingdom in four stages, focusing on how divisions between Protestantism and Catholicism have contributed to political tensions and, at times, violence: (a) from the colonization of Ireland by Britain until the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923, when religion was used both to justify colonialism and to oppose it; (b) state-building in the early twentieth century, when religion impacted politics and society in ways that diverged from the wider European Christian democratic movement; (c) a period of secularization in the late twentieth century; and (d) a period of religious change, but at the same time persistence, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It concludes by examining the impact of religion on the 2016 Brexit referendum vote, arguing that Brexit has destabilized political and religious relationships between the islands, with particular reference to Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Henri Dutilleux, haunted by Baudelaire

One of the leading French composers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) set only one text by Baudelaire, though he said that the poet was the artist in any medium who had the strongest impact on him; indeed, he said that ‘Baudelaire continues to haunt me.’ This article explores how this ‘haunting’ affected Dutilleux’s oeuvre, from his cello concerto Tout un monde lointain… [‘A Far Distant World’] (1967-1970) whose five movements are each preceded by a Baudelaire epigraph, through to his final completed work, the song cycle Le Temps l’horloge [‘Time the Clock’] (2006-2009) which concludes with a setting of Baudelaire’s prose poem Enivrez-vous [‘Be Intoxicated’]. Le Temps l’horloge also features settings of poems by Jean Tardieu and Robert Desnos, and Baudelaire’s poetry and art criticism were centrally important to both these writers. The multiple interrelationships between Baudelaire, Tardieu, Desnos, and Dutilleux are traced in this article, and analysis of ‘Enivrez-vous’ shows it to be the summation of Dutilleux’s output.