Archaeology, Indigenous erasure, and the creation of white public space at the California missions

This paper explores how the materiality of the past has been mobilized to simultaneously erase Indigenous presence and create white public space at Spanish mission sites in California. As the site of present-day Santa Clara University, Mission Santa Clara de Asís presents an important case study. The documentary record associated with more than a century of archaeology at the mission reveals its intersections with heritage-making, particularly the maintenance of public memory that privileges and valorizes whiteness. These same records further detail how the university and local residents effectively erased the heritage of the thousands of Ohlone people and members of neighboring Indigenous groups who lived, worked, and died at Mission Santa Clara. Recognizing how archaeology has contributed to the current heritage landscape at Santa Clara and other California mission sites is a necessary first step in the creation of new archaeological and heritage practices that center the experiences and persistence of Native Californian communities.

Moscow Conceptualism through Collective and Private Memory. The Archive as an Artistic Self-historicising Practice in Vadim Zakharov

"In an era characterised by the growing tension between local and global, the multiple activities acted by the artist Vadim Zakharov offer an important case study to investigate critically the relationship between artists and the art institutions at the time of the Global Art History. Artist, archivist, collector and editor in the frame of Moscow Conceptualism, since the end of the 1970s up to today, Zakharov embodies the figure of the “artist as institution” in the attempt to reach his artistic autonomy. This text introduces to his expansion of the archival attitude typical of Moscow conceptualism, a Soviet unofficial art movement developed in the marginal, underground, and self-referential context in the capital of USSR since the 1970s. Due to its transnationality, Zakharov’s story gives the opportunity to trace parallels, comparisons and differences to what happened next, when he moved in Germany in 1989, after the fall of USSR, and with the appearance of the new labels of “post-Soviet” and “Russian contemporary art”. Within this socio-historical framework, he joined a more cosmopolitan artistic scene, enlarging his archival practices with the aim to self-institutionalize and self-historicize his own artistic practices and the circle of Moscow Conceptualism in an international scene. Keywords: Vadim Zakharov, Moscow Conceptualism, Russian Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art, Global Art History, Archival fever. "

Metric Spaces

This chapter introduces and illustrates the concept of a metric (distance measure), and the definition of a metric space. Open, closed, and compact sets are discussed in a general context, and the concepts of separability and completeness introduced. It goes on to look at mappings on metric spaces, examines the important case of function spaces, and treats the Arzelà–Ascoli theorem.

Australian Information Commission v Facebook Inc - Substituting the Hague Service Convention during the Pandemic

Recently, in Australian Information Commission v Facebook Inc ([2020] FCA 531), the Federal Court of Australia (‘FCA’) addresses substituted service and the Hague Service Convention in the contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article seeks to discuss this important case in relation to whether defendants located outside of Australia in a Hague Convention state can be served by substituted service instead of following the Convention.

Weighted stochastic block model

We propose a weighted stochastic block model (WSBM) which extends the stochastic block model to the important case in which edges are weighted. We address the parameter estimation of the WSBM by use of maximum likelihood and variational approaches, and establish the consistency of these estimators. The problem of choosing the number of classes in a WSBM is addressed. The proposed model is applied to simulated data and an illustrative data set.

Synthesizing Best-effort Strategies under Multiple Environment Specifications

We formally introduce and solve the synthesis problem for LTL goals in the case of multiple, even contradicting, assumptions about the environment. Our solution concept is based on ``best-effort strategies'' which are agent plans that, for each of the environment specifications individually, achieve the agent goal against a maximal set of environments satisfying that specification. By means of a novel automata theoretic characterization we demonstrate that this best-effort synthesis for multiple environments is 2ExpTime-complete, i.e., no harder than plain LTL synthesis. We study an important case in which the environment specifications are increasingly indeterminate, and show that as in the case of a single environment, best-effort strategies always exist for this setting. Moreover, we show that in this setting the set of solutions are exactly the strategies formed as follows: amongst the best-effort agent strategies for ɸ under the environment specification E1, find those that do a best-effort for ɸ under (the more indeterminate) environment specification E2, and amongst those find those that do a best-effort for ɸ under the environment specification E3, etc.

Analyzing the PMIP4-CMIP6 ensemble: a workflow and tool (pmip_p2fvar_analyzer v1)

Experiment outputs are now available from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project’s 6th phase (CMIP6) and the past climate experiments defined in the Model Intercomparison Project’s 4th phase (PMIP4). All of this output is freely available from the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). Yet there are overheads in analysing this resource that may prove complicated or prohibitive. Here we document the steps taken by ourselves to produce ensemble analyses covering past and future simulations. We outline the strategy used to curate, adjust the monthly calendar aggregation and process the information downloaded from the ESGF. The results of these steps were used to perform analysis for several of the initial publications arising from PMIP4. We provide post-processed fields for each simulation, such as climatologies and common measures of variability. Example scripts used to visualise and analyse these fields is provided for several important case studies.

Ireland’s Deliberative Mini-Publics

Democratic crisis is a hot topic in political science at present, and for understandable reasons. But what is often missed in much of the commentary about democracies in peril is the fact that democracies can and do innovate. This chapter deals with one important case of such democratic innovation—the Irish deliberative mini-publics. We start with a discussion of the origins and design of the Irish cases. We then employ the Suiter and Reuchamps (2016) framework to analyse their democratic legitimacy in terms of input (the recruitment process), throughput, (the quality of the deliberative process), and output (the mini-public’s impact in terms of the uptake of its recommendations and acceptance of the process). The Irish processes are powerful real-world examples of the potential systemization of deliberation, showing how deliberative mini-publics can successfully supplement representative and direct forms of democracy.

The duties of impartiality, disclosure, and confidentiality: lessons from a London-seated arbitration

Halliburton Company v Chubb Bermuda Insurance Ltd (formerly known as Ace Bermuda Insurance Ltd [2020] UKSC 48 is an important case not only to the UK but also to the international arbitration community for several reasons: first, it examines indispensable duties in international arbitration and for the first time recognises and explicates upon the duty of disclosure at the highest court of the United Kingdom; secondly, it addresses and clarifies key concepts in international arbitration; thirdly, it confirms the objective nature of the test of justifiable doubts which has wider implications for other arbitral forums; fourthly, it illustrates how the duties of impartiality, disclosure, and confidentiality interact with and affect each other and how the key concepts should be applied to this interaction; and finally, it lays down useful guidance for arbitrators. For these reasons, this case deserves close and careful examination. This article aims to explain the significance of the aforesaid and suggests that, in addition to what has been addressed, further judicial explanations are warranted in what other aspects.

Ethnicity, Exclusion, and Exams: Education Policy and Politics in Burundi from the Independent Republics to the Civil War (1966–1993)

Education policy can embed ethnic inequalities in a country. Education in Burundi, with its historically exclusive political institutions and education, represents an important case for understanding these interactions. In this article, I interview twelve Burundians about how they experienced and perceived ethnicity and politics in their schooling from 1966 to 1993. I argue that education contributed to tangible and perceived social hierarchies based on ethnic inequalities. I show that this exclusion reflected both overt and covert policy goals, through proxies used to identify ethnicity in schools and through the exclusive nature of national exams at the time, which promoted members of the Tutsi minority at the expense of the majority Hutus. This study has implications for understanding how perceptions of inequality in education manifest as grievances against the state. It sheds light on the importance of understanding covert education policy as a potential mechanism for generating exclusion and contributing to conflict.