Book review: The politics of humanity: the reality of relief aid

As UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs from 2007 until 2010, John Holmes visited some of the most troubled areas of the world and was exposed to the harsh realities of humanitarian aid. Frequently he found that the UN’s humanitarian programmes were consistently undermined and mistrusted by both sides in any conflict. Refreshingly free of the obfuscating jargon favoured by many in the humanitarian sector, the essence of The Politics of Humanity is a reaffirmation of humanitarian principles and a warning about the consequences of their betrayal, writes Chris Harmer

Mind and Body

This chapter discusses Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophical reflections on mind and body. It first considers Leibniz’s distinction between substance and aggregate, referring to the former as a being that must have true unity (what he calls unum per se) and to the latter as simply a collection of other beings. It then describes Leibniz’s extension of the term “substance” to monads and other things such as animals and living beings. It also examines Leibniz’s views about the union of mind and body, whether mind and body interact, and how interaction is related to union. More specifically, it asks whether mind and body together constitute an unum per se and analyzes Leibniz’s account of the per se unity of mind-body composites. In addition, the chapter explores the problem of soul-body union as opposed to mind-body union and concludes by discussing Leibniz’s explanation of soul-body interaction using a system of pre-established harmony

Two particles on a star graph II

We consider a two particle system on a star graph with delta-function interaction. A complete description of the eigensolutions with real momenta is given; specifically it is shown that all eigensolutions can be written as integrals in the momentum plane of sums of products of appropriate one particle solutions.Comment: typos corrected, minor changes, journal ref adde

An optical model for an analogy of Parrondo game and designing Brownian ratchets

An optical model of classical photons propagating through array of many beam splitters is developed to give a physical analogy of Parrondo's game and Parrondo-Harmer-Abbott game. We showed both the two games are reasonable game without so-called game paradox and they are essentially the same. We designed the games with long-term memory on loop lattice and history-entangled game. The strong correlation between nearest two rounds of game can make the combination of two losing game win, lose or oscillate between win and loss. The periodic potential in Brownian ratchet is analogous to a long chain of beam splitters. The coupling between two neighboring potential wells is equivalent to two coupled beam splitters. This correspondence may help us to understand the anomalous motion of exceptional Brownian particles moving in the opposite direction to the majority. We designed the capital wave for a game by introducing correlations into independent capitals instead of sub-games. Playing entangled quantum states in many coupled classical games obey the same rules for manipulating quantum states in many body physics.Comment: 18 pages in two colum