Creative Destruction and Cultural Lag in the Digital Age

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the two ideas of \u201ccreative destruction\u201d and \u201ccultural lag\u201d both brought together in this article to analyze cutting-edge changes in the digital world, especially as they relate to consumption. Several studies have documented that we are increasingly living in a hybridized environment of swiftly evolving devices and technologies. Within this context, cultural lag refers both to the conflict between digital versus material consumerist developments, as well as to the subsequent delays in social understanding. Creative destruction describes the introduction of new forms of consumption that eliminate existing ones. However while all destruction tends to lead to cultural lag, this is especially true in the case of creative destruction. The article will also suggest at the end that not all destruction, especially, but not exclusively, as it relates to the environment, is necessarily creative. It can also be mainly, if not exclusively and totally, destructive

What do we know about the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK)?

Since the summer of 2015, Turkey has been the victim of a wave of violent attacks perpetrated by both Islamists and separatist Kurdish groups. The beginning of this period of violence coincided with the collapse of the peace process between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the resumption of their 30-year-old conflict. Within this context of violence and creeping civil war, another Kurdish faction, the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons (TAK), has made its comeback. The TAK claimed responsibility for a series of major attacks against Turkish civilians and security forces throughout 2016, attracting the attention of the media and generating a great deal of confusion on the nature of its relationship with the PKK. International media outlets have been so far unable to distinguish between the two groups, which reinforces Ankara’s position that the TAK is a mere extension of the PKK

Perché la pace, perché la guerra. Pacifismo e interventismo a Modena durante la Grande Guerra

Il saggio ripercorre, analizzando il contesto della città e provincia di Modena, il dibattito fra neutralisti ed interventisti nel periodo fra l'agosto 1914 ed il maggio 1915. Analizza inoltre, sulla scorta di documentazione giornalistica e d'archivio, l'evoluzione del contesto politico modenese, l'atteggiamento delle masse popolari nei confronti della guerra e l'azione degli apparati dello Stato nel controllo dell'ordine pubblico in questo contesto delicato, caratterizzato dal ruolo di primo piano del partito socialista e delle sue organizzazioni, orientate in prevalenza contro la prosecuzione del conflitto

War Finance (Italy)

Setting out from the fundamental variables of the Italian economy and finances on the eve of the war and during the years of conflict, this article highlights the country\u2019s dependence on international markets and its choice in favour of the Entente. Italy\u2019s war was financed to a small extent by fiscal pressure but to a great extent by going into debt. Until 1916, the notion of a short war prevailed, without excessive strains on the public finances and with scant recourse to allied loans. With the passage to total economic and financial mobilisation, Italy became ever more dependent on allied loans (initially English, and then American), and on domestic public indebtedness. Five national loans were launched, the issue of ordinary government securities was boosted and the circulation of paper currency markedly increased

War as social regeneration: Sombart from The Quintessence of Capitalism to Merchants and Heroes

The essay examines a particular stage of life and scientific production of Werner Sombart, the years of the First World War. Most biographers of Sombart showed that the German scholar, during these years, remained essentially on the fringe of the debate that took place in Germany, as well in other countries taking part in the war, on the economic and social transformations induced by the conflict, and in particular, on the new role assumed by the State in directing the life of the economy and society. Published in 1915, Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes) should be primarily considered a work of propaganda. It is a vicious attack on Britain, seen as the country that had produced a petty and materialistic conception of existence. The topics chosen by Sombart for his polemic, however, resume many aspects of his previous works on the origins and development of modern economics, and even anticipate some of his reflections – later developed in the second edition of Modern Capitalism or in works such as German socialism – on the future and the fate of capitalism

Quantum Variance and Ergodicity for the baker's map

We prove a Egorov theorem, or quantum-classical correspondence, for the quantised baker's map, valid up to the Ehrenfest time. This yields a logarithmic upper bound for the decay of the quantum variance, and, as a corollary, a quantum ergodic theorem for this map

Energy Landscape Statistics of the Random Orthogonal Model

The Random Orthogonal Model (ROM) of Marinari-Parisi-Ritort [MPR1,MPR2] is a model of statistical mechanics where the couplings among the spins are defined by a matrix chosen randomly within the orthogonal ensemble. It reproduces the most relevant properties of the Parisi solution of the Sherrington-Kirckpatrick model. Here we compute the energy distribution, and work out an extimate for the two-point correlation function. Moreover, we show exponential increase of the number of metastable states also for non zero magnetic field.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, submitted to J. Phys.