General Relativity and Gravitation: A Centennial Perspective

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of general relativity, the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation (ISGRG) commissioned a Centennial Volume, edited by the authors of this article. We jointly wrote introductions to the four Parts of the Volume which are collected here. Our goal is to provide a bird's eye view of the advances that have been made especially during the last 35 years, i.e., since the publication of volumes commemorating Einstein's 100th birthday. The article also serves as a brief preview of the 12 invited chapters that contain in-depth reviews of these advances. The volume will be published by Cambridge University Press and released in June 2015 at a Centennial conference sponsored by ISGRG and the Topical Group of Gravitation of the American Physical Society.Comment: 37 page

The Deep Space Network

Progress in flight project support, tracking and data acquisition (TDA) research and technology, network engineering, hardware and software implementation, and operations are reported

Cosmopolitan culture and counterculture among Chinese youth: face-to-face communities in the smartphone era

Young Chinese people have come of age in a communicative environment that is radically new, involving near-pervasive mobile broadband internet access and unprecedented exposure to global media. I employ a mix of ethnographic and computational methods to compare two groups of cosmopolitan Chinese youth – elite university students and subcultural bohemians – to explore the political implications of their cosmopolitan communications. The cosmopolitanism of Chinese youth, understood as both communicative diversity and globalized cultural engagement, is shaped in divergent ways by the influence of China’s orthodox Confucian and heterodox cultural traditions, with marked implications for patterns of online and offline communication. Constraints imposed by the university environment and Confucian social norms embed elite students in homogeneous networks that their extensive online communications do little to diversify. Exposure to the competing perspectives of global and domestic news and academic content generates both a normative relativism and a sophisticated grasp of practical political possibilities and constraints. This supports a hierarchical and pragmatic politics in which both national interests and those of their own social echelon, including progressive identity claims, are seen as being furthered by meritocratic authoritarianism. By contrast, bohemian proclivities for free-wheeling face-to-face interaction embed them in heterogeneous, cross-cutting networks, within which they synthesize discontents from diverse areas of Chinese society; combined with the influence of the heterodox tradition and the oppositional symbolic repertoires of global subcultures, this results in an egalitarian and reductively idealistic politics that supports opposition to the Party-State and its authoritarian system. The dominance of elite students’ orthodox cosmopolitanism suggests that the internet-mediated, globalized communications of Chinese youth constitute little immediate threat to the authoritarian system. However, the increasing scale and influence of bohemian heterodox cosmopolitanism and its idealistic politics, driven by factors beyond the control of Party-State, may ultimately undermine the manageability of Chinese youth

Qualification and acoustical improvement of Germany’s first municipal theatre

L’acustica è un elemento spesso trascurato ma profondamente influente sulla qualità degli ambienti. La sua presenza in ogni ambiente è tra i fattori che più condizionano l’esperienza umana. Questa tesi si concentra sulla riqualificazione acustica del Teatro di Freiberg, il più antico teatro municipale della Germania. Il progetto, avviato nel settembre 2022, si è avvalso dell’esperienza della Hochschule di Mittweida e dell’Università di Bologna che attraverso un fruttuoso progetto di tesi all’estero, hanno guidato l’Autore verso il completamento dei suoi studi. Il lavoro inizia con l’esplorazione dei principi fondamentali dell’acustica architettonica, seguito da un’analisi del contesto storico e architettonico del Teatro di Freiberg. Una fase cruciale coinvolge la campagna di misurazioni all’interno del teatro al fine di ottenere i parametri necessari ad una valutazione oggettiva delle carattteristiche acustiche dello spazio. Successivamente il processo di virtualizzazione del teatro, ossia la creazione di un modello virtuale calibrato, costituisce la base per proporre una strategia di intervento rispettosa del pregio storico dell’edificio e in linea con i risultati della ricerca. La tesi si conclude con un’analisi comparativa dei risultati ottenuti da alcuni tra i principali software nell’ambito della previsione acustica

Undergraduate Course Catalog [1969/70]

Undergraduate Course Catalog, 1969/70https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/undergencat/1091/thumbnail.jp

Ahlfors circle maps and total reality: from Riemann to Rohlin

This is a prejudiced survey on the Ahlfors (extremal) function and the weaker {\it circle maps} (Garabedian-Schiffer's translation of "Kreisabbildung"), i.e. those (branched) maps effecting the conformal representation upon the disc of a {\it compact bordered Riemann surface}. The theory in question has some well-known intersection with real algebraic geometry, especially Klein's ortho-symmetric curves via the paradigm of {\it total reality}. This leads to a gallery of pictures quite pleasant to visit of which we have attempted to trace the simplest representatives. This drifted us toward some electrodynamic motions along real circuits of dividing curves perhaps reminiscent of Kepler's planetary motions along ellipses. The ultimate origin of circle maps is of course to be traced back to Riemann's Thesis 1851 as well as his 1857 Nachlass. Apart from an abrupt claim by Teichm\"uller 1941 that everything is to be found in Klein (what we failed to assess on printed evidence), the pivotal contribution belongs to Ahlfors 1950 supplying an existence-proof of circle maps, as well as an analysis of an allied function-theoretic extremal problem. Works by Yamada 1978--2001, Gouma 1998 and Coppens 2011 suggest sharper degree controls than available in Ahlfors' era. Accordingly, our partisan belief is that much remains to be clarified regarding the foundation and optimal control of Ahlfors circle maps. The game of sharp estimation may look narrow-minded "Absch\"atzungsmathematik" alike, yet the philosophical outcome is as usual to contemplate how conformal and algebraic geometry are fighting together for the soul of Riemann surfaces. A second part explores the connection with Hilbert's 16th as envisioned by Rohlin 1978.Comment: 675 pages, 199 figures; extended version of the former text (v.1) by including now Rohlin's theory (v.2

19th Brazilian Logic Conference: Book of Abstracts

This is the book of abstracts of the 19th Brazilian Logic Conferences. The Brazilian Logic Conferences (EBL) is one of the most traditional logic conferences in South America. Organized by the Brazilian Logic Society (SBL), its main goal is to promote the dissemination of research in logic in a broad sense. It has been occurring since 1979, congregating logicians of different fields — mostly philosophy, mathematics and computer science — and with different backgrounds — from undergraduate students to senior researchers. The meeting is an important moment for the Brazilian and South American logical community to join together and discuss recent developments of the field. The areas of logic covered in the conference spread over foundations and philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, philosophy and history of logic, mathematics, computer science, informatics, linguistics and artificial intelligence. Previous editions of the EBL have been a great success, attracting researchers from all over Latin America and elsewhere. The 19th edition of EBL takes place from May 6-10, 2019, in the beautiful city of João Pessoa, at the northeast coast of Brazil. It is conjointly organized by Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), whose main campus is located in João Pessoa, Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), whose main campus is located in the nearby city of Campina Grande (the second-largest city in Paraíba state) and SBL. It is sponsored by UFPB, UFCG, the Brazilian Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the State Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of Paraíba. It takes place at Hotel Luxxor Nord Tambaú, privileged located right in front Tambaú beach, one of João Pessoa’s most famous beaches

Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems

This open access two-volume set constitutes the proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems, TACAS 2020, which took place in Dublin, Ireland, in April 2020, and was held as Part of the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS 2020. The total of 60 regular papers presented in these volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 155 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Program verification; SAT and SMT; Timed and Dynamical Systems; Verifying Concurrent Systems; Probabilistic Systems; Model Checking and Reachability; and Timed and Probabilistic Systems. Part II: Bisimulation; Verification and Efficiency; Logic and Proof; Tools and Case Studies; Games and Automata; and SV-COMP 2020