"The Martial Islands": Making Marshallese Masculinities between American and Japanese Militarism

For over a century, the Marshall Islands have been entangled between the United States and Japan in their conquest of the Central Pacific; yet because of this, these islands have also been a place where multiple masculinities have converged, competed, and transformed each other. This is especially true around the site of Kwajalein Atoll, where terrain understood in Marshallese terms as female or maternal has been reshaped and masculinized through the semiotics of colonialism and militarization. This article focuses specifically on three local representations of masculinity: the knowledgeable but strategic Marshallese "Etao," symbolized by a creative and resourceful male trickster spirit; the heroic but paternalistic American "Patriot," as enacted via the perpetual battlefield of military and weapons-testing missions; and the adventurous but self-sacrificing "Dankichi," deployed in Japan during the 1930s and echoed nowadays in the long-distance tuna-fishing industry. Cross-reading Judith Butler and R W Connell, this is an exploration of the "theater" of these masculinities in relationship to one another, and the story of how different superpowers strive for domination by emasculating a third colonial site and its subjects

Augustinianisms and Thomisms (Chapter Nine of the Cambridge Companion to Political Theology)

Excerpt: The standard linage of Augustine and Aquinas that emerges in twentieth-century textbooks of political philosophy is that of two fundamentally opposed theological approaches to the political. Augustine, in one corner, is the clear-eyed realist, convinced that political society is fallen, mired in the consequences of original sin and the contingent necessity to restrain evil, vice, and sin. Aquinas, in the other corner, is the more cheerful Aristotelian, who emphasizes the inherent goodness and naturalness of political society and its beneficial purposes for human flourishing.\u27 These contrasting visions continue to animate diverse Christian understandings of the limits and possibilities of politics

Topology and singularities in cosmological spacetimes obeying the null energy condition

We consider globally hyperbolic spacetimes with compact Cauchy surfaces in a setting compatible with the presence of a positive cosmological constant. More specifically, for 3+1 dimensional spacetimes which satisfy the null energy condition and contain a future expanding compact Cauchy surface, we establish a precise connection between the topology of the Cauchy surfaces and the occurrence of past singularities. In addition to (a refinement of) the Penrose singularity theorem, the proof makes use of some recent advances in the topology of 3-manifolds and of certain fundamental existence results for minimal surfaces.Comment: 8 pages; v2: minor changes, version to appear in CM

Cosmological singularities in Bakry-\'Emery spacetimes

We consider spacetimes consisting of a manifold with Lorentzian metric and a weight function or scalar field. These spacetimes admit a Bakry-\'Emery-Ricci tensor which is a natural generalization of the Ricci tensor. We impose an energy condition on the Bakry-\'Emery-Ricci tensor and obtain singularity theorems of a cosmological type, both for zero and for positive cosmological constant. That is, we find conditions under which every timelike geodesic is incomplete. These conditions are given by "open" inequalities, so we examine the borderline (equality) cases and show that certain singularities are avoided in these cases only if the geometry is rigid; i.e., if it splits as a Lorentzian product or, for a positive cosmological constant, a warped product, and the weight function is constant along the time direction. Then the product case is future timelike geodesically complete while, in the warped product case, worldlines of certain conformally static observers are complete. Our results answer a question posed by J Case. We then apply our results to the cosmology of scalar-tensor gravitation theories. We focus on the Brans-Dicke family of theories in 4 spacetime dimensions, where we obtain "Jordan frame" singularity theorems for big bang singularities.Comment: 15 pages; The wording of Theorem 1.5 is slightly clarified over the wording in the published version, with no change in the resul

Exploiting Structural Complexity for Robust and Rapid Hyperspectral Imaging

This paper presents several strategies for spectral de-noising of hyperspectral images and hypercube reconstruction from a limited number of tomographic measurements. In particular we show that the non-noisy spectral data, when stacked across the spectral dimension, exhibits low-rank. On the other hand, under the same representation, the spectral noise exhibits a banded structure. Motivated by this we show that the de-noised spectral data and the unknown spectral noise and the respective bands can be simultaneously estimated through the use of a low-rank and simultaneous sparse minimization operation without prior knowledge of the noisy bands. This result is novel for for hyperspectral imaging applications. In addition, we show that imaging for the Computed Tomography Imaging Systems (CTIS) can be improved under limited angle tomography by using low-rank penalization. For both of these cases we exploit the recent results in the theory of low-rank matrix completion using nuclear norm minimization

The Random Walk of High Frequency Trading

This paper builds a model of high-frequency equity returns by separately modeling the dynamics of trade-time returns and trade arrivals. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we characterize the distributional behavior of high-frequency asset returns both in ordinary clock time and in trade time. We show that when controlling for pre-scheduled market news events, trade-time returns of the highly liquid near-month E-mini S&P 500 futures contract are well characterized by a Gaussian distribution at very fine time scales. Second, we develop a structured and parsimonious model of clock-time returns by subordinating a trade-time Gaussian distribution with a trade arrival process that is associated with a modified Markov-Switching Multifractal Duration (MSMD) model. This model provides an excellent characterization of high-frequency inter-trade durations. Over-dispersion in this distribution of inter-trade durations leads to leptokurtosis and volatility clustering in clock-time returns, even when trade-time returns are Gaussian. Finally, we use our model to extrapolate the empirical relationship between trade rate and volatility in an effort to understand conditions of market failure. Our model suggests that the 1,200 km physical separation of financial markets in Chicago and New York/New Jersey provides a natural ceiling on systemic volatility and may contribute to market stability during periods of extremely heavy trading