Heterotopic Proliferation in E. S. Thomson’s Jem Flockhart Series

This article explores the convergence, inversion, and collapse of heterotopic spaces in E. S. Thomson’s neo-Victorian Jem Flockhart series about a cross-dressing female apothecary in mid-nineteenth-century London. The eponymous first-person narrator becomes embroiled in the detection of horrific murder cases, with the action traversing a wide range of Michel Foucault’s exemplary Other spaces, including hospitals, graveyards, brothels, prisons, asylums, and colonies, with the series substituting the garden for Foucault’s ship as the paradigmatic heterotopia. These myriad juxtaposed sites, which facilitate divergence from societal norms while seemingly sequestering forms of alterity and resistance, repeatedly merge into one another in Thomson’s novels, destabilising distinct kinds of heterotopias and heterotopic functions. Jem’s doubled queerness as a cross-dressing lesbian beloved by their Watsonean side-kick, the junior architect William Quartermain, complicates the protagonist’s role in helping readers negotiate the re-imagined Victorian metropolis and its unequal power structures. Simultaneously defending/reaffirming and contesting/subverting the status quo, Jem’s body itself becomes a microcosmic heterotopia, problematising the elision of agency in Foucault’s conceptualisation of the term. The proliferation of heterotopias in Thomson’s series suggests that neo-Victorian fiction reconfigures the nineteenth century into a vast network of confining, contested, and liberating Other spaces.

Fluid-Flow Approximation in the Analysis of Vast Energy-Aware Networks

The paper addresses two issues: (i) modeling dynamic flows transmitted in vast TCP/IP networks and (ii) modeling the impact of energy-saving algorithms. The approach is based on the fluid-flow approximation, which applies first-order differential equations to analyze the evolution of queues and flows. We demonstrate that the effective implementation of this method overcomes the constraints of storing large data in numerical solutions of transient problems in vast network topologies. The model is implemented and executed directly in a database system. It can analyze transient states in topologies of more than 100,000 nodes, i.e., the size which was not considered until now. We use it to investigate the impact of an energy-saving algorithm on the performance of a vast network. We find that it reduces network congestion and save energy costs but significantly lower network throughput.

Justice-making institutions and the ancestral logic of conflict

Justice-making institutions rest on a vast network of rules, people, and artifacts. The federal criminal code of the United States, for example, has hundreds of sections with provisions for robbery and burglary, counterfeit bonds, chemical weapons, riots, expenditures to influence voting, and many others. This complexity can be traced to a handful of small-n-person games played by our foraging ancestors in their stateless societies. The overarching theme is conflict. Justice is predicated on actual or possible conflicts of interest. Individual brains include an array of adaptations that were selected because they regulated conflict-relevant behavior in fitness-promoting fashion: concepts (e.g., WRONGFUL ACT, UNJUST DISTRIBUTION), intuitions (e.g., a wrong deserves a punishment), and emotion systems (e.g., anger), among others. These ancient adaptations appear to form the core of justice-making institutions in modern societies—a core that is augmented by deliberation and writing systems. This theory of justice-making institutions can generate distinctive predictions. For example, the logic of justice-making institutions will echo the logic of their source adaptations, and thus will be apparent in laypeople’s naturalistic interactions. Further, laypeople will be able to intuitively recreate basic features of justice-making institutions near and far, past and present—because they have a common human nature with domestic and foreign lawmakers. Here, we review evidence relevant to (i) the criminal justice system and (ii) state-enacted redistribution in light of this adaptationist theory. We conclude that adaptationism is a productive framework to elucidate human institutions.

Strengthening Communication and Information Capacities in Malawi: Case of the Malawi National Commission for UNESCO

UNESCO is the only United Nations (UN) agency to have a global network of national cooperating bodies known as National Commissions. The National Commissions are part of the overall constitutional architecture of the organization as it was conceived by its founders. Presently, National Commissions operate in all Member States of UNESCO. They constitute a truly global family which includes a vast network of stakeholders, partners and experts. They offer a comparative advantage to the organisation within the United Nations system. Article VII (1) of the UNESCO Constitution stipulates that “Each Member State shall make such arrangements as suit its particular conditions for the purpose of associating its principal bodies interested in educational, scientific and cultural matters with the work of the organisation, preferably by the formation of a National Commission broadly representative of the government and such bodies” (UNESCO 2020:15). Thus, it is the constitutional obligation of each Member State to set up a National cooperating body (National Commission) or make such institutional arrangements whose principal objective is facilitating involvement of various government Ministries, Organisations and Agencies (MOAs), institutions, universities, NGOs and individuals in the work of the Organisation. While the realisation of UNESCO’s goals is primarily entrusted in governments, the National Commissions are expected to function as an indispensable platform where national interests, ideas and cultures are represented and interact. This review describes the contribution of the Malawi National Commission for UNESCO to strengthening communication and information capacities in Malawi to fill a perceived gap in information among some stakeholders both within and outside Malawi.

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great inspired a body of literature that grew throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages by accumulating various episodes and local contributions across a host of languages, cultures, and appropriations. This extraordinary transmission of texts resulted in an ever evolving and often contradictory figure. In some accounts, Alexander’s ambition was a defining characteristic, in others benevolence; some writers idealized while others condemned Alexander; and in texts classified as histories from a modern perspective Alexander built an empire as the son of Philip of Macedon, while in texts classified as romance or legend Alexander was the illegitimate son of an Egyptian sorcerer and traveled to exotic lands populated by the creative lens of storytelling. Medieval writers engaged with a core set of plotlines inherited from their predecessors in Antiquity. These provided the narrative framework of Alexander’s childhood in Macedon, expansion of an empire stretching to India, and death in Babylon. However, countless adaptations and interpolations ensured the vibrancy of this narrative and created a version of Alexander dependent on availability of texts and authorial agenda. For example, writers and scribes in southern Italy had access to episodes that emphasized the limitations of Alexander’s ambition—how the intrepid explorer constructed a flying machine that the gods turned back to land and received prophecies of mortality in the far reaches of an earthly paradise. Under the influence of such accounts, they emphasized the temporality of Alexander’s career in allegorical terms that were, at least until these accounts traveled westward, quite different from the idealized warrior portrayed in French romances. The textual corpus that accounted for Alexander’s reception thus comprised a vast network founded on Greek and Latin but shaped by the vernacular. Navigating this network is a formidable task, and this article is written with a guiding principle in mind: to assist readers in finding their starting points for engaging with the medieval Alexander. It includes texts that were largely or exclusively devoted to Alexander’s exploits, and it identifies scholarly works intended for readers in the early stages of their navigation; more specialized research can be found in the scholarship cited. Finally, it organizes the medieval reception of Alexander the Great into two broad categories: Greek and Latin texts (both foundational accounts of Late Antiquity and medieval Latin literature) and the vernacular texts based on them.

Internet of Things Security: Challenges and Key Issues

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a vast network that provides an interconnection between various objects and intelligent devices. The three important components of IoT are sensing, processing, and transmission of data. Nowadays, the new IoT technology is used in many different sectors, including the domestic, healthcare, telecommunications, environment, industry, construction, water management, and energy. IoT technology, involving the usage of embedded devices, differs from computers, laptops, and mobile devices. Due to exchanging personal data generated by sensors and the possibility of combining both real and virtual worlds, security is becoming crucial for IoT systems. Furthermore, IoT requires lightweight encryption techniques. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to identify the security challenges and key issues that are likely to arise in the IoT environment in order to guide authentication techniques to achieve a secure IoT service.

‘The grand strategy of an observatory’: George Airy's vision for the division of astronomical labour among observatories during the nineteenth century

The downfall of the Parramatta Observatory during the 1840s led the British Government to reconsider the funding it provided to observatories. George Biddell Airy—the Astronomer Royal at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich—recommended the establishment of a central Colonial Board of Visitors (based in London) to oversee the management of observatories within the British Empire. The recommendation ultimately never materialized, but it showcased the support of the astronomical community and the British Government for centralizing the management of the vast network of observatories. This centralized vision continued to influence the founding of new observatories and the organization of their work. The article examines Airy's vision of a centralized organization of division of labour among observatories through his involvement in the discussions about the Colonial Board of Visitors. It also examines how he continued supporting the same vision through articles about the work of observatories, and through written advice about establishing observatories. The article demonstrates how he envisioned the grand strategy of an observatory to encompass public utility while also fitting it within the general policy of observatories in relation to the division of astronomical labour.

Archaeometry of a Roman Millstone from Santa Maria Arabona, Manoppello (Abruzzo, Central Italy)

A well-preserved Pompeiian-type millstone fragment was retrieved from the chance discovery of Roman ovens dating to the V-VI century BCE in the area of Santa Arabona Manoppello in Italy. This is the first evidence of an hourglass millstone in Abruzzo. This fragment was analyzed through petrography, geochemistry, statistical analyses, and radiogenic isotopes at the University G. d’Annunzio. The source location of the stones was narrowed down to the areas of Etna, Roccamonfina, and Vulsini due to the petrography, geochemistry, and statistical data elaboration of leuicititic and basaltic rocks from Central Italy and Sicily. The accurate identification of the provenance of the stone used to produce the millstone results in a better understanding of commercial trade routes and Roman entrepreneurship throughout Italy. The correlation between the production site and its stones’ dispersion throughout the Roman Empire is of great interest for understanding the vast network of Roman roads, their manageability of commerce, and the organization of their products to the outlying areas of their Empire and in the case of this discovery, specifically to the area of Abruzzo Italy.

Influencers, Amplifiers, and Icons: A Systematic Approach to Understanding the Roles of Islamophobic Actors on Twitter

In the 2018 U.S. midterm elections, an unprecedented number of American Muslims ran for public office, including the first two Muslim women elected to Congress. This study analyzes the anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant Twitter discourse surrounding Ilhan Omar, one of these two successful candidates. The results identify three categories of accounts that linked Omar to clusters of accounts that shaped the Islamophobia/xenophobic narrative: Influencers, Amplifiers, and Icons. This cadre of accounts played a synergistic and disproportionate role in raising the level of hate speech as a vast network containing a high proportion of apparently inauthentic accounts magnified the messages generated by a handful of provocateurs.

Becoming an Antwerp Humanist: The Culture of Friendship and Patronage in the Circles of Benito Arias Montano (1568–1598)

When the Spanish humanist Benito Arias Montano (c.1525-1598) arrived in Antwerp in1568 to work as editor of the new Polyglot Bible printed by Christophe Plantin, he was introduced to some of the leading members of the Republic of Letters of his time (such as Abraham Ortelius and Carolus Clusius), with whom he exchanged letters, books, portraits, and other tangible tokens of friendship until his dying day. From this hub of intellectual and typographical activity, Montano circulated devotional emblem books across a vast network of Catholic and Protestant scholars, politicians and ecclesiastics. These “instruments of friendship” established his reputation as a man of letters while serving the interests of both king Philip II and Plantin that ranged from cultural diplomacy to editorial and commercial strategy. This study highlights how, in addition to correspondence, the circulation of books, images and objects were essential tools of early modern scholarly practices and learned sociability.