Transnational intellectual cooperation, the League of Nations, and the problem of order

This article examines the political and cultural contexts of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation. These two League of Nations bodies were charged with fostering international understanding through the promotion of educational, scientific, and cultural exchange. Whereas previous studies have revealed the institutional and diplomatic processes that shaped these bodies, the present article considers their intellectual genealogies and trajectories. Adopting a transnational perspective, it argues that the multi-layered quest for order is central to understanding intellectual cooperation in the interwar years. This concern was reflected in the role of cultural relations within the post-war order, and in the aim of strengthening intellectuals’ position in the social order (both through legal instruments and through new tools for ‘intellectual labour’)

Analytical Solution of the O-X Mode Conversion Problem

The excitation of a slow extraordinary wave in a overdense plasma from an ordinary wave impinging on the critical layer in the plane spanned by the density gradient and magnetic field is solved analytically by formulating the problem in terms of a parabolic cylinder equation. A formula for the angular dependence of the transmission coefficient is derived.Comment: Final version as accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Internationalisme ou affirmation de la nation? La coopération intellectuelle transnationale dans l'entre-deux-guerres

How did intellectuals and politicians confirm or reinforce national categories, even when they ostensibly promoted visions of an international community? The article addresses this question through a case study of the League of Nations' mechanisms for intellectual cooperation. After a brief discussion of institutional aspects, namely the establishment of League-affiliated committees and institutes in the 1920s, the article focuses on the interplay of transnational and national practices. National actors – for instance intellectuals and organisations from Central and Eastern Europe – targeted the League bodies, evoking both cultural internationalism and national interests. Furthermore, nationhood was projected at international congresses – sometimes openly, sometimes in more subtle terms – with the pronouncements of delegates from Fascist Italy providing an interesting case in point. Finally, the article discusses how individuals sought to reconcile the multilayered nature of their activities; to this end, it considers several figures who were involved in the League’s efforts to foster a 'société des esprits'

Contextualizing the blogosphere: A comparison of traditional and novel user interfaces for the web

In this paper, we investigate how contextual user interfaces affect blog reading experience. Based on a review of previous research, we argue why and how contextualization may result in (H1) enhanced blog reading experiences. In an eyetracking experiment, we tested 3 different web-based user interfaces for information spaces. The StarTree interface (by Inxight) and the Focus-Metaphor interface are compared with a standard blog interface. Information tasks have been used to evaluate and compare task performance and user satisfaction between these three interfaces. We found that both contextual user interfaces clearly outperformed the traditional blog interface, both in terms of task performance as well as user satisfaction. © 2007 Laqua, S., Ogbechie, N. and Sasse, M. A

Rencontres intellectuelles et changement social: Henri La Fontaine et la Belle Époque

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Activism in the 'Students' League of Nations': International Student Politics and the Confédération Internationale des Étudiants, 1919–1939

The aftermath of the First World War saw manifold efforts to (re-)construct an international community. One striking development of this development was the foundation of various international student organisations. This article analyses the largest of these bodies – namely the International Confederation of Students (Confédération internationale des Étudiants, CIE). The CIE forms the prism through which the article investigates four major aspects of interwar internationalism: nationalism, intellectual cooperation, mobility and radicalism. The CIE brought together the representatives of different national unions of students and thus involved activists that could cast themselves as future leaders. It portrayed its activities as 'apolitical', embracing an internationalism that sought to consolidate, rather than overthrow, the international order. To this end, the organisation cooperated with the League of Nations, particularly in the realm of student travel. Yet, despite its discourse of peace and non-partisanship, the CIE suffered from manifold national divisions and maintained an uneasy relationship with the political developments of the period. In this context, the article shows how, rather than being the domain of impractical idealists, internationalism provided an arena for the pursuit of competing national and political agendas

Rocking Against the Right: Political Activism and Popular Music in West Germany, 1979–1980

The article examines radical cultural politics by focusing on the West German initiative of Rock gegen Rechts (‘Rock Against the Right’). This campaign involved concerts, publications and demonstrations, most notably the staging of two large-scale festivals in Frankfurt/Main in 1979 and 1980. Rock Against Racism – launched in Britain in 1976 – served as a model for the activists. Yet Rock gegen Rechts differed from its British counterpart in significant ways, both in terms of the political and musical currents that sustained the campaign and with regard to the object of protest. Through the prism of Rock gegen Rechts, the article shows how campaigners debated the nature of ‘the right’ – an important subject in a country whose fascist past figured prominently in public debate. The campaign occurred at a critical juncture of the German left, as the latter underwent seemingly contradictory processes of fragmentation and coalition-building during the late 1970s. The article explores a left-wing milieu that was associated with music and alternative lifestyles, but also with a nascent green movement. Moreover, the example of Rock gegen Rechts sheds fresh light on the interaction between music and politics on the one side, and between music, commerce and consumption on the other

Political Contestation and Internal Strife: Socialist and Anarchist German Newspapers in London, 1878–1910

Daniel Laqua In 1910, Theodore Rothstein – a socialist émigré from Tsarist Russia – traced the ‘long and glorious history’ of the German political press in London. Fittingly, his survey appeared in the Londoner Volks-Zeitung – a weekly founded in 1909 ‘to form a connecting link between the working-class movements of both sides of the North Sea’. Summarizing nearly a century of publishing ventures, Rothstein portrayed the Londoner Volks-Zeitung as the ‘heiress of a beautiful bequest’. Like many of its forerunners, the paper itself was short-lived, lasting for only nine months. Nonetheless, the existence of such publications illustrates the political dynamism of London’s German community. Britain’s role as a site for activists from different countries was linked to its openness towards refugees: the country’s liberal asylum policy only changed with the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. As Bernard Porter has noted, ‘between 1823 and 1906 no refugee who..

Development of highly efficient and accurate real-space integration methods for Hartree-Fock and hybrid density functional calculations

The central focus of molecular electronic structure theory is to find approximate solutions to the electronic Schrödinger equation for molecules, and as such represents an essential part of any theoretical (in silico) study of chemical processes. However, a steep increase of the computational cost with increasing system size often prevents the application of accurate approximations to the molecules of interest. The main focus of the present work is the efficient evaluation of Fock-exchange contributions, which typically represents the computational bottleneck in Hartree-Fock (HF) and hybrid density functional theory (DFT) calculations. This bottleneck is addressed by means of seminumerical integration, i.e., one electronic coordinate within the 4-center-2-electron integral tensor is represented analytically and one numerically. In this way, an asymptotically linear scaling method for computing the exchange matrix (denoted as sn-LinK) is developed, enabling fast and accurate ab-initio calculations on large molecules, comprising hundreds or even thousands of atoms, even in combination with large atomic orbital basis sets. The novel sn-LinK method comprises improvements to the numerical integration grids, a rigorous, batch-wise integral screening scheme, the optimal utilization of modern, highly parallel compute architectures (e.g., graphics processing units; GPUs), and an efficient combination of single- and double-precision arithmetic. In total, these optimizations enable over two orders of magnitude faster evaluation of Fock-exchange contributions. Consequently, this greatly improved performance allows to perform previously unfeasible computations, which is also demonstrated at the example of an ab initio molecular dynamics simulation (AIMD) study on the hydrogen bond strengths within double-stranded DNA. In addition to Fock-exchange, the other two computational bottlenecks in hybrid-DFT applications – the evaluation of the Coulomb potential and the numerical integration of the semilocal exchange-correlation functional – are also addressed. Finally, more efficient methods to evaluate more accurate post-HF/DFT methods, namely the random-phase approximation (RPA) and the second-order approximate coupled cluster (CC2) method, are also put forward. In this way, the highly efficient methods introduced in this thesis cover some of the most substantial computational bottlenecks in electronic-structure theory – the evaluation of the Coulomb- and the exchange-interactions, the integration of the semilocal exchange-correlation functional, and the computation of post-Hartree-Fock correlation energies. Consequently, computational chemistry studies on large molecules (>100 atoms) are accelerated by multiple orders of magnitude, allowing for much more accurate and thorough in-silico studies than ever before