The articulations of science and politics in the Cold War in the United States are well studied in histories of American political culture. However, these histories are often given focus and coherence via concepts and understandings taken from political realism and sociological institutionalism, thereby underestimating the transformations in the very idea of political reality that helped form the Cold War era in the United States. This paper launches an investigation of the relationship between speculative fiction and scientific and political discourse during that era to explore how the political culture of the United States came to be structured not only by a certain imagination but also by a particular set of fantasies. Building on the history of war-gaming at the RAND Corporation, the author conducts a close reading of a RAND Corporation report turned popular science publication. This suggests that, during the Cold War, a new standpoint from which to view the political world – the view from outer space – began to organize how the American political project for the globe represented its own modernity to itself. This view, drawn from science fiction but made real in its ethos and its political consequences, projected an understanding of “mankind” as but an infant in the early stages of what would become its interstellar destiny. A baleful consequence of this view was its tendency to free political actors and intellectuals from the urgent problem, identified acutely by Hannah Arendt in her essay “Man’s Conquest of Space,” of creating a world in common on earth.

Let $\eta $ be [-11pc] [-7pc]a closed real 1-form on a closed Riemannian n-manifold $(M,g)$. Let $d_z$, $\delta _z$ and $\Delta _z$ be the induced Witten’s type perturbations of the de Rham derivative and coderivative and the Laplacian, parametrized by $z=\mu +i\nu \in \mathbb C$ ($\mu ,\nu \in \mathbb {R}$, $i=\sqrt {-1}$). Let $\zeta (s,z)$ be the zeta function of $s\in \mathbb {C}$, defined as the meromorphic extension of the function $\zeta (s,z)=\operatorname {Str}({\eta \wedge }\,\delta _z\Delta _z^{-s})$ for $\Re s\gg 0$. We prove that $\zeta (s,z)$ is smooth at $s=1$ and establish a formula for $\zeta (1,z)$ in terms of the associated heat semigroup. For a class of Morse forms, $\zeta (1,z)$ converges to some $\mathbf {z}\in \mathbb {R}$ as $\mu \to +\infty $, uniformly on $\nu $. We describe $\mathbf {z}$ in terms of the instantons of an auxiliary Smale gradient-like vector field X and the Mathai–Quillen current on $TM$ defined by g. Any real 1-cohomology class has a representative $\eta $ satisfying the hypothesis. If n is even, we can prescribe any real value for $\mathbf {z}$ by perturbing g, $\eta $ and X and achieve the same limit as $\mu \to -\infty $. This is used to define and describe certain tempered distributions induced by g and $\eta $. These distributions appear in another publication as contributions from the preserved leaves in a trace formula for simple foliated flows, giving a solution to a problem stated by C. Deninger.

This paper discusses the complexities of teaching Hebrew to Israel's largest minority group, the Arabs, who must be fluent in the language if they are to succeed. While policy-making institutions in Israel today are aware of the importance of Hebrew for Arab students, the teaching of Hebrew faces serious challenges involving the status of Hebrew in Arab society, the inner-Arab state of diglossia, and the training and placement of Arab teachers of Hebrew. The distribution of the Arab population (in mixed Jewish–Arab towns, and in Arab towns and villages), as well as differing levels of exposure to Hebrew, also pose considerable challenges. The paper combines a historical-theoretical with a philosophical-theoretical approach. It analyzes findings of previous studies that examined Hebrew writings of Arabs studying to be teachers of Hebrew, and policy documents dealing with teacher training and placement in the schools. Our study found a profound gap between Arab Hebrew teachers' academic-pedagogical training and its implementation. Our main recommendations for reducing the gap are: (1) the curriculum should take Israeli Arabs' sociolinguistic situation into account; (2) the teacher placement system needs an overhaul; and (3) the teaching of Hebrew should begin in third grade.

Soft robotics is rapidly advancing, particularly in medical device applications. A particular miniaturized manipulator design that offers high dexterity, multiple degrees-of-freedom, and better lateral force rendering than competing designs, has great potential for minimally invasive surgery. However, it faces challenges such as the tendency to suddenly and unpredictably deviate in bending plane orientation at higher pressures. In this work, we identified the cause of this deviation as the buckling of the partition wall and proposed design alternatives along with their manufacturing process to address the problem without compromising the original design features. In both simulation and experiment, the novel design managed to achieve a better bending performance in terms of stiffness and reduced deviation of the bending plane. We also developed an artificial neural network-based inverse kinematics model to further improve the performance of the prototype during vectorization. This approach yielded mean absolute errors in orientation of the bending plane below $5^{\circ }$.

The Ediacaran Subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy is diligently working toward the goal of subdividing the Ediacaran Period into precise and useful chronostratigraphic units. As emphasized by Xiao and colleagues in 2016, one of the most effective tools in this endeavor will be the use of index fossils. Our special issue serves as a presentation of ongoing research efforts aimed at advancing this task and contains explorations into taxonomy, taphonomy, and the diversity of life during the Ediacaran Period.

We show that if one of various cycle types occurs in the permutation action of a finite group on the cosets of a given subgroup, then every almost conjugate subgroup is conjugate. As a number theoretic application, corresponding decomposition types of primes effect that a number field is determined by the Dedekind zeta function. As a geometric application, coverings of Riemannian manifolds with certain geodesic lifting behaviours must be isometric.

Poursuite de l’invasion de l’Ukraine, guerre dans la bande de Gaza, crise alimentaire, transition énergétique sans précédent, rééquilibrage géostratégique, montée du populisme, ingérence de toute sorte, explosion du recours à l’intelligence artificielle, inflation à maîtriser, voilà autant de traits caractérisant l’année 2023 et ayant eu le potentiel de redéfinir les relations commerciales mondiales. Dans ce contexte, mu par une nouvelle diplomatie pragmatique,1 le Canada tente d’innover tout en renouant avec son rôle d’antan: préserver ses partenaires usuels tout en développant de nouvelles relations d’opportunité (au risque parfois de piler sur ses valeurs), réinvestir les enceintes internationales avec le dessein de les moderniser, diversifier ses relations en déployant des forces diplomatiques dans de nouveaux territoires et réaffirmer sa souveraineté face à toute sorte de menaces que ce soit en Arctique ou dans le cadre électoral canadien. Ce contexte a nécessairement eu des impacts sur les choix que fait le Canada en matière commerciale.

There has long been debate about the capacity of the US Supreme Court to achieve “progressive” social change. Recent decisions of the court also point to a new worry for American progressives: the court may not only have a limited capacity to drive such change. In some cases, it may actively stand in the way of such change or help reverse it. This invites us to rethink when, or under what conditions, courts are likely to be effective in driving change—whether in a positive, dynamic, or else more obstructionist or regressive direction.

It is a revealing exercise to search for variations of the word “colonial” in the indexes and tables of contents of these recent monographs in Anglophone literary studies. As the subdiscipline begins to chronicle contemporary cultural developments in which the British Empire’s legacies grow ever-less marked, it is perhaps inevitable that the terms and concepts that governed the preceding phase of scholarship—colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism—begin to recede into the background. The sudden and sharp recession of these terms, however, raises fundamental questions regarding the study of English-language texts from the Caribbean, South Asia, West, and East Africa (among other locales). Among the foremost of such questions may be: does the term “postcolonialism” now designate a mere literary period, as opposed to being what scholars over the last several decades seem to have agreed it also is, namely a critical method? What are the effects and implications of this shift, wherein not just literary works newly arrived to a world scene still marked and structured by colonial legacies, but older ones long identified as definitionally “postcolonial,” are increasingly treated without such concepts and terms? Suggestions of answers to such questions arise throughout these three books, all of which seek to reconsider one of the keystone concerns of postcolonial studies, namely the relationship between contemporary Anglophone writing and the authors and texts of the British literary canon.

For given positive integers $r\ge 3$, $n$ and $e\le \binom{n}{2}$, the famous Erdős–Rademacher problem asks for the minimum number of $r$-cliques in a graph with $n$ vertices and $e$ edges. A conjecture of Lovász and Simonovits from the 1970s states that, for every $r\ge 3$, if $n$ is sufficiently large then, for every $e\le \binom{n}{2}$, at least one extremal graph can be obtained from a complete partite graph by adding a triangle-free graph into one part.

In this note, we explicitly write the minimum number of $r$-cliques predicted by the above conjecture. Also, we describe what we believe to be the set of extremal graphs for any $r\ge 4$ and all large $n$, amending the previous conjecture of Pikhurko and Razborov.

The ability and knowledge to manage financial tasks may be compromised in old age, especially when the need to navigate the care and social benefit systems increases. Managing financial tasks may consist of a variety of actions of both the older people themselves and their representatives, often family members. This study explored how financial tasks related to the care and everyday life of older people who need long-term care are managed by using the ideas of modalities of agency and distributed agency. We analysed interviews of 19 older persons and their family members with a qualitative case analysis. All the older persons who participated in the study distributed the agency in financial tasks among their family members, but to different levels and for different reasons. We identified three types of distributed agency – inevitable, assimilated and minimal distributed agency – in which the older persons’ knowledge about financial tasks and their ability to manage financial tasks differed. Within these types, the cases differed in terms of the know-how of the family members and the reasons why the older people’s knowledge about financial tasks or their ability to manage their financial tasks were diminished. We conclude that older persons with long-term care needs require help in regard to financial tasks, and the older people’s and their family members’ ability to manage financial tasks could be enhanced by making the benefit systems and online banking more user-friendly and by improving the help from care staff.

This survey paper is concerned with vortex shedding from bodies in unsteady flow due either to time dependent motion of the body in a still fluid or unsteady motion of the fluid about a fixed body. The fluid is treated as incompressible, and the main emphasis is on starting flows and oscillatory flows. Much of the discussion describes 2D flow around sections of long or slender bodies. The first part of the paper covers the inviscid flow scaling of the forces induced by vortex shedding in time dependent flows which drive the shedding. This is followed by application of Wu’s impulse integral of the moment of vorticity to predict the forces induced by vortex shedding from a body in both inviscid and viscous flows. Vortex shedding phenomena involving small amplitude, high-frequency oscillatory flow such as vortex-induced vibration (VIV) and fluid-structure interaction (FSI) are not included in this discussion as in these cases the unsteady flow controls rather than drives the vortex shedding and they are well covered elsewhere.

The second part of the paper describes a vortex force mapping (VFM) method derived by considering the Lamb–Gromyko formulation for the pressure contribution which allows the integral of the vorticity field to be restricted to regions which are not far from the body. It is applied to both inviscid and viscous flows. The section finishes with discussion of application of the VFM to the calculation of forces induced on bodies from flow field measurements, such as particle image velocimetry (PIV).