H-Diplo Article Review 899 on “Between Business Interests and Ideological Marketing: The USSR and the Cold War in Fiat Corporate Strategy, 1957–1972.”

Valentina Fava. “Between Business Interests and Ideological Marketing: The USSR and the Cold War in Fiat Corporate Strategy, 1957–1972.” Journal of Cold War Studies 20:4 (Fall 2018): 26-64. DOI: https://doi.org10.1162/jcws_a_00822

Meanings of Failed Action: A Reassessment of the 1946 Royal Indian Navy Uprising

The exhibition Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946 opened in Mumbai on 17 March 2017 and in New Delhi on 8 February 2018. The second part of Vivan Sundaram’s The History Project,1 this new installation was intended to mark seventy years of Indian independence and partition by exploring an often forgotten moment of Indian history: the uprising of the Royal Indian Navy’s ratings in February 1946, when 10,000 naval ratings took charge of 66 ships across the Indian subcontinent in the name of the ‘Quit India’ movement. R.I.A.F. men, Sepoys, Bombay’s industrial workers and the city’s population joined in, marching in solidarity with the ratings irrespective of caste and religious affiliation. But the Congress and the Muslim League condemned the action and consented to British military intervention, which resulted in the deaths of over two hundred people and the ratings’ imprisonment. The event has since been erased from Indian national history, perhaps because, had the insurrection succeeded, India’s struggle for freedom might have taken a different turn. I worked on the exhibition as a researcher for the artist, with Ashish Rajadhyaksha and David Chapman, for over a year. The question we sought to answer during those months was: what is the significance of that uprising for India today? With this question in mind, in what follows I focus on the documents we unearthed in the process – pamphlets, slogans, the ratings’ statements to the police and Inquiry, their memories and prison letters – and examine the motivations and hopes that defined the strikers’ action. What kind of freedom did the ratings stand for

Contribution to the knowledge of the family Otoplanidae Hallez, 1892 (Rhabditophora, Proseriata) in the Mediterranean

A growing awareness is rising that present perception of marine biodiversity is inadequate, and based upon unrepresentative data. The inadequacy of knowledge on taxonomy and distribution of marine organisms is particularly acute for interstitial meiofauna, especially for "soft bodied" taxa, which necessitate of observations on both living and fixed specimens. Among these groups, information on Platyhelminthes, a species-rich, ubiquitous and diverse taxon, is at present far from adequate, and is entirely absent for entire biogeographical regions. In this scenario, my research aimed to gather data in the composition and distribution of a family of Platyhelminthes Proseriata, the Otoplanidae Hallez, 1892, in biogeographically significant sectors along the coasts of Mediterranean. The most striking results of a series of sampling campaigns is the great number of new Otoplanidae species found. In this work fifteen new species, belonging to the genus Parotoplana Meixner, 1938 are formally described: P. pythagorae Delogu & Curini-Galletti, 2007; P. spathifera Delogu & Curini-Galletti, 2007; P. terpsichore Delogu & Curini-Galletti, 2007; P. jondelii Delogu & Curini-Galletti, 2007; P. cucullata Delogu et al., 2008; P. fretigaditani Delogu et al., 2008; P. varispinosa Delogu et al., 2008; P. mastigophora Delogu et al., 2008; P. geminispina sp. n., P. crassispina sp. n., P. carthagoensis sp. n., P. ichnusae sp. n., P. pulchrispina sp. n., P. obtusispina sp. n. and P. axii sp. n

Curve diffusion and straightening flows on parallel lines

In this paper, we study families of immersed curves $\gamma:(-1,1)\times[0,T)\rightarrow\mathbb{R}^2$ with free boundary supported on parallel lines $\{\eta_1, \eta_2\}:\mathbb{R}\rightarrow\mathbb{R}^2$ evolving by the curve diffusion flow and the curve straightening flow. The evolving curves are orthogonal to the boundary and satisfy a no-flux condition. We give estimates and monotonicity on the normalised oscillation of curvature, yielding global results for the flows.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figure

Concentration-compactness and finite-time singularities for Chen's flow

Chen's flow is a fourth-order curvature flow motivated by the spectral decomposition of immersions, a program classically pushed by B.-Y. Chen since the 1970s. In curvature flow terms the flow sits at the critical level of scaling together with the most popular extrinsic fourth-order curvature flow, the Willmore and surface diffusion flows. Unlike them however the famous Chen conjecture indicates that there should be no stationary nonminimal data, and so in particular the flow should drive all closed submanifolds to singularities. We investigate this idea, proving that (1) closed data becomes extinct in finite time in all dimensions and for any codimension; (2) singularities are characterised by concentration of curvature in $L^n$ for intrinsic dimension $n \in \{2,4\}$ and any codimension (a Lifespan Theorem); and (3) for $n = 2$ and in one codimension only, there exists an explicit small constant $\varepsilon_2$ such that if the $L^2$ norm of the tracefree curvature is initially smaller than $\varepsilon_2$, the flow remains smooth until it shrinks to a point, and that the blowup of that point is an embedded smooth round sphere.Comment: 48 page

Rationally cubic connected manifolds I: manifolds covered by lines

In this paper we study smooth complex projective polarized varieties (X,H) of dimension n \ge 2 which admit a dominating family V of rational curves of H-degree 3, such that two general points of X may be joined by a curve parametrized by V, and such that there is a covering family of rational curves of H-degree one. Our main result is that the Picard number of these manifolds is at most three, and that, if equality holds, (X,H) has an adjuction theoretic scroll structure over a smooth variety

On a curvature flow model for embryonic epidermal wound healing

The paper studies a curvature flow linked to the physical phenomenon of wound closure. Under the flow we show that a closed, initially convex or close-to-convex curve shrinks to a round point in finite time. We also study the singularity, showing that the singularity profile after continuous rescaling is that of a circle. We additionally give a maximal time estimate, with an application to the classification of blowups.Comment: 43 page

Rawls’s inclusivism and the case of ‘religious militants for peace’: A reply to Weithman’s restrictive inclusivism

Across almost a decade, Desmond Tutu, Anglican cleric and chairman of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, supported a model of civil resistance against the apartheid regime based solely on religious argument. Tutu is one of what Appleby (2000) calls the “religious militants for peace”: people of faith who use religious arguments to buttress resistance against unjust regimes and to support vital political change with regard to rights and justice. Yet the employment of religious arguments to justify political action seems to contradict the liberal democratic requirements of public reason, particularly the duty of liberal citizens to provide reasons that others could reasonably endorse. If “religious militants” violate their duty of civility by appealing to their comprehensive doctrines, should liberal democracy exclude this form of religiously founded dissent as being unreasonable? Or, rather, should liberal democracy embrace and support the efforts of “religious militants” to enhance and/or restore political justice

Ossian and James Macpherson

Discussion of the Ossianic poetry translated by James Macpherson

Conformal Field Theories, Graphs and Quantum Algebras

This article reviews some recent progress in our understanding of the structure of Rational Conformal Field Theories, based on ideas that originate for a large part in the work of A. Ocneanu. The consistency conditions that generalize modular invariance for a given RCFT in the presence of various types of boundary conditions --open, twisted-- are encoded in a system of integer multiplicities that form matrix representations of fusion-like algebras. These multiplicities are also the combinatorial data that enable one to construct an abstract ``quantum'' algebra, whose $6j$- and $3j$-symbols contain essential information on the Operator Product Algebra of the RCFT and are part of a cell system, subject to pentagonal identities. It looks quite plausible that the classification of a wide class of RCFT amounts to a classification of ``Weak $C^*$- Hopf algebras''.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, LateX. To appear in MATHPHYS ODYSSEY 2001 --Integrable Models and Beyond, ed. M. Kashiwara and T. Miwa, Progress in Math., Birkhauser. References and comments adde