Contesting Conceptual Boundaries: Byzantine Literature and Its History

The paper presents the problems of writing a history of Byzantine literature in the context of postmodern anxieties about canonization, authority and narrative histories of literature. An essential difficulty for such a project is the fact that Byzantine literature has been viewed as a continuation of or appendix to Ancient Greek literature, while, on the other, it has been divided into 'learned' and 'vernacular,' the latter category having been defined as Modern Greek since the middle of the nineteenth century. The paper offers two sets of criteria for establishing new concepts of periodization and taxonomy. A series of examples are indicatively adduced in order to explain the scientific and ideological impasse in which Byzantine Studies have found themselves at the end of the previous century, while delineating a proposal for a different approach to content and structure of a wider synthesis. Writing a 'new' history of Byzantine literature is an experiment in proposing a radical paradigm shift by means of which this particular literary production in Medieval Greek can be studied within the broader context of Medieval European literatures as an integrated entity rather than as a separate and peripheral phase in the histories of Ancient or Modern Greek literature

Of Masters and Servants: Hybrid Power in Theodore Laskaris’ 'Response to Mouzalon' and in the 'Tale of Livistros and Rodamne'

The present paper examines two Byzantine texts from the middle of the thirteenth century, ostensibly unrelated to each other: a political essay written by a young emperor and an anonymous love romance. The analysis is conducted through the concept of hybrid power, a notion initially developed by postcolonial criticism. It is shown that in the two texts authority (that of the Byzantine emperor and that of Eros as emperor) is constructed as hybrid and thus as an impossibility, though in the case of the political essay this impossibility remains unresolved, while in the romance it is actually resolved. The pronounced similarities between the two texts on the level of political ideology (e.g. the notion of friendship between master and servant, the performance of power relations, shared key concepts) informing the hybrid form of authority and its relation to its servants is a clear indication that they belong to the same socio-cultural and intellectual environment, namely the Laskarid imperial court in Nicaea around 1250

'Interfaces' 6

Issue No. 6 is the second open issue of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures. It contains contributions by Shazia Jagot (Averroes, Islam, and Heterodoxy in the Spanish Chapel 'Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas'), Julia Verkholantsev ('Et nata ex etymo fabula:' Cosmas of Prague, the Medieval Practice of 'Etymologia,' and the Writing of History), Jan Rüdiger (Orchards of Power: The Importance of Words Well Spoken in Twelfth-Century Occitania), Andria Andreou and Panagiotis A. Agapitos (Of Masters and Servants: Hybrid Power in Theodore Laskaris’ 'Response to Mouzalon' and in the 'Tale of Livistros and Rodamne'), and Francis Ingledew (Whose Troy? Whose Rome? Whose Europe? Three Medieval Londons and the London of Derek Walcott’s 'Omeros')

Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation

Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures is invested in bringing together the linguistic, literary, and historical expertise to take a European approach to medieval literature. The journal aims to establish a forum both for articles which move across literatures (plural) and also, more ambitiously, to foster reflections on a more elusive, but no longer entirely absent, object, European medieval literature (singular).In line with the journal’s scope and vision to promote integrated approaches to European medieval literatures, we begin by facing head-on the multiple challenges of devising new types of narratives about medieval textual cultures. We have invited papers which take a wider regional perspective and move across medieval Europe as well as papers which bring an explicitly European perspective to more specific topics (with a tighter thematic, chronological, geographic, or linguistic focus)

Impacts of the Tropical Pacific/Indian Oceans on the Seasonal Cycle of the West African Monsoon

The current consensus is that drought has developed in the Sahel during the second half of the twentieth century as a result of remote effects of oceanic anomalies amplified by local land–atmosphere interactions. This paper focuses on the impacts of oceanic anomalies upon West African climate and specifically aims to identify those from SST anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Oceans during spring and summer seasons, when they were significant. Idealized sensitivity experiments are performed with four atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). The prescribed SST patterns used in the AGCMs are based on the leading mode of covariability between SST anomalies over the Pacific/Indian Oceans and summer rainfall over West Africa. The results show that such oceanic anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Ocean lead to a northward shift of an anomalous dry belt from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel as the season advances. In the Sahel, the magnitude of rainfall anomalies is comparable to that obtained by other authors using SST anomalies confined to the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean. The mechanism connecting the Pacific/Indian SST anomalies with West African rainfall has a strong seasonal cycle. In spring (May and June), anomalous subsidence develops over both the Maritime Continent and the equatorial Atlantic in response to the enhanced equatorial heating. Precipitation increases over continental West Africa in association with stronger zonal convergence of moisture. In addition, precipitation decreases over the Gulf of Guinea. During the monsoon peak (July and August), the SST anomalies move westward over the equatorial Pacific and the two regions where subsidence occurred earlier in the seasons merge over West Africa. The monsoon weakens and rainfall decreases over the Sahel, especially in August.Peer reviewe

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV

Development and validation of HERWIG 7 tunes from CMS underlying-event measurements

This paper presents new sets of parameters (“tunes”) for the underlying-event model of the HERWIG7 event generator. These parameters control the description of multiple-parton interactions (MPI) and colour reconnection in HERWIG7, and are obtained from a fit to minimum-bias data collected by the CMS experiment at s=0.9, 7, and 13Te. The tunes are based on the NNPDF 3.1 next-to-next-to-leading-order parton distribution function (PDF) set for the parton shower, and either a leading-order or next-to-next-to-leading-order PDF set for the simulation of MPI and the beam remnants. Predictions utilizing the tunes are produced for event shape observables in electron-positron collisions, and for minimum-bias, inclusive jet, top quark pair, and Z and W boson events in proton-proton collisions, and are compared with data. Each of the new tunes describes the data at a reasonable level, and the tunes using a leading-order PDF for the simulation of MPI provide the best description of the dat

Search for new particles in events with energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A search is presented for new particles produced at the LHC in proton-proton collisions at root s = 13 TeV, using events with energetic jets and large missing transverse momentum. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 101 fb(-1), collected in 2017-2018 with the CMS detector. Machine learning techniques are used to define separate categories for events with narrow jets from initial-state radiation and events with large-radius jets consistent with a hadronic decay of a W or Z boson. A statistical combination is made with an earlier search based on a data sample of 36 fb(-1), collected in 2016. No significant excess of events is observed with respect to the standard model background expectation determined from control samples in data. The results are interpreted in terms of limits on the branching fraction of an invisible decay of the Higgs boson, as well as constraints on simplified models of dark matter, on first-generation scalar leptoquarks decaying to quarks and neutrinos, and on models with large extra dimensions. Several of the new limits, specifically for spin-1 dark matter mediators, pseudoscalar mediators, colored mediators, and leptoquarks, are the most restrictive to date.Peer reviewe

Measurement of t(t)over-bar normalised multi-differential cross sections in pp collisions at root s=13 TeV, and simultaneous determination of the strong coupling strength, top quark pole mass, and parton distribution functions

Peer reviewe