Religion and the Cold War in Europe

This chapter examines the religious Cold War, spawned by the West, and its impact throughout Europe. The religious Cold War was a diverse, multidimensional, complex global phenomenon whose salience varied according to the stage of the conflict, geographical location, cultural underpinnings, as well as national and local dynamics. Europe, where the Cold War began and ended, was a multiconfessional continent wherein Christianity, with its intimate historical, cultural, and indeed national links, was the dominant religion. The chapter focuses on the impact of the East–West power struggle on the churches and how they met its various challenges, especially fear of nuclear obliteration. During the Cold War religious organizations negotiated the arms race, détente, decolonization, globalization, secularization, and the growing importance of the developing world. The chapter examines their religio-political evolution as they encountered the Cold War, their contribution to ending it, and their position in the post-Cold War global order.

Future pain as present concern

Pain is multidimensional, complex; it affects the ontological structures of the human being and exceeds spatio-temporal boundaries. Therefore, it is universally felt with an impact in the past, moving to the present, and projecting to the future. There are efforts to ease or completely eliminate the impact of pain, however, a good understanding of its biological and anthropological dimensions is necessary for proper orientation of such undertakings. This article identifies some social, cultural, medical-scientific, and individual factors that account for the changes in modes of experiencing and managing pain. It posits that there is a general unpreparedness on the physical, psychological, and spiritual levels for continued pain in the future. It thus analyses factors that need to be learnt in order to promote favourable alterations in mental attitudes, pain sensitivity, and tolerance to pain. Preparing for a future of pain requires interdisciplinary reflection on the bodily, emotional, and spiritual components that constitute the pain experience so as to re-direct its trajectory.

Contextual Modulation of Binary Decisions in Dyadic Social Interactions

The present experimental design allowed binary decisions (i.e., to choose between proactive approaching or withdrawing behavior). These decisions were made on complex social interaction scenarios displayed on videos. The videos were taken from a first-person perspective. They were preceded by one sentence each that provided additional information about the context of the displayed scenario. The sentence preceding the video and the video jointly provided a context of emotional valence. That context varied from trial to trial. We observed that provocative and threatening videos produced predominantly fear and anger responses. Fear was associated with withdrawal decisions, while anger led to approach decisions. Negative contextual information increased the probability of approach decisions in aggressive provocative videos; positive contextual information enhanced the chance of approach decisions in socially positive videos. In neutral situations, displayed in videos, the probability of the approach behavior was reduced in case of negative contextual information. Yet, the probability for approach behavior was increased if positive contextual information preceded neutral videos. Our experimental setup provided a paradigm that can be adapted and accommodated for the examination of future research questions on social decisions in multidimensional, complex social situations.

Child Labour In India: A Stigma On The Face Of Society

When there is no confidence in the future of a child in a nation, then surely that nation also has no future. As in Indian society children have always been the subjects of discussion due to less vocal or country’s past or socio–cultural background. Speculation among children is the outlay in the future of a nation, which forms ideas. Childhood is important because their personality is formed in the process of socialization. The origin of child labour lies in a multidimensional complex process of self–sustaining socio–economic retardation. “Child labour” is defined as the employment of children in any physical work. Whether or not work done by children is defined as child labour depends on the child’s age, hours and type of work, and working conditions. But many millions of children work in abusive and unequal conditions that are clearly dangerous to them. India is no exception. According to the report, India ranks among the top countries where the percentage of labour force making up “child labour” is very high. Like others, India too, from its inception as an independent nation, has enacted laws to reform and eliminate all forms of child labour, but the ground reality is still very depressing in nature. Child labour in India is addressed by the Child Labour Act 1986 and the National Child Labour Project. Today there are more than 11.24 million children in India who are spending their childhood in learning, carpet–weaving, beedi–rolling, family labour, agriculture and countless other occupations instead of going to school. Finally, as planning and strategies identify, the research paper identifies policies and attempts have been made to actually address and determine the problem as needed.

Study of Gender Conceptual Sphere: Historiography of the Question

The article attempts to analyze the concept of gender, study philosophical preconditions of its emergence and trace the main postmodern aspects of the gender category. It proves that gender research in the postmodern era is not identical to the theories of feminism. It deals with social life of both sexes, their behavior, roles, characteristics, common and different between them, the social relationships of the sexes, considering the world from the standpoint of both socio-gender groups. The article shows that an urgent need for more purposeful development of independent women's research in the developing countries. Such research should holistically reflect and study the lives of women on the basis of the so-called women's rather than universalized man experience. The main idea of this scientific research was to emphasize that the world can be explored not only from a man perspective, but also from the standpoint of woman experience. The level of scientific study of the gender conceptual sphere is clarified, in particular, the gender concept is a multidimensional complex represented in the language, which has a certain ethnocultural specificity. The concept has an unstable structure, which is reflected in the model of the concept developed by us, in which we highlight the root and applications of the concept, the possible movement of features in the relevant semantic directions from and to the root. The unstable (mobile) structure of the concept is also characteristic of its root: during historical development, the root may change, but the semantic meaning is not lost, but only replaced by synonyms or verbal innovations relevant to today.

Residue Sum Formula for Pricing Options under the Variance Gamma Model

We present and prove a triple sum series formula for the European call option price in a market model where the underlying asset price is driven by a Variance Gamma process. In order to obtain this formula, we present some concepts and properties of multidimensional complex analysis, with particular emphasis on the multidimensional Jordan Lemma and the application of residue calculus to a Mellin–Barnes integral representation in C3, for the call option price. Moreover, we derive triple sum series formulas for some of the Greeks associated to the call option and we discuss the numerical accuracy and convergence of the main pricing formula.

Regência arquetípica feminina: Método de construção de personagem

This paper discusses the construction of one of the parameters of the method of female psyche creation for characters of the The Rotfather transmedia narrative universe, developed by students of the research group G2E [Education and Entertainment Group] of the Federal University of Santa Catarina. The creation method is based on the archetypal reasoning of Jungian theory and aims to direct the creative process of multidimensional, complex and narratively coherent characters through a composition tool combining female archetypes of Greek goddesses. In addition to the purpose of psychological construction, this research aims to improve the representation of women for social validation with their target audience.

Financing innovations in the contemporary world

As a practical application of new ideas, innovation is a multidimensional, complex, dynamic, long-term, and cumulative process based on organizational decision-making, from the stage of a new idea's emergence to its final implementation. There is a strong positive correlation between innovation and economic growth. Access to finance is a key driver of new innovative ventures' creation, survival, and growth. On the other hand, the lack of financial resources prevents and inhibits the growth and development of new innovative companies. This paper considers bootstrapping, crowdfunding, and mezzanine financing as widely accepted, specific innovation funding sources worldwide.

Multidimensional, complex and contingent: Exploring international PhD students’ social mobility

This paper is a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) by three international PhD students from Bangladesh, Japan and Nepal who pursued (or who are currently pursuing) their studies in New Zealand. In contrast to previous research which largely advanced a simplistic, downward social mobility experience of international PhD students or highly skilled migrants in general, we argue that this experience is dynamic, complex and multidimensional in nature. In doing so, we turn to Bourdieu’s theory of capital. By focusing on less-direct economic resources (e.g. ethnicity, nationality, language and social networks), we explore the multidimensionality and convolution of our social mobility which stems from migration. Setting aside a narrative of adversity and downward social mobility among international PhD students, this paper emphasizes how we actively negotiated and dealt with shifting class identity and social mobility in the host countries.