Changes within the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Society: Involvement of the Non–Governmental Actors

The monograph provides knowledge on the complex nature of both external and internal determinants influencing foreign policies of East Asian countries. Through a range of case studies on Japan, China, Taiwan and North Korea, the authors analyze international relations in East Asia as a mosaic of intertwining processes of globalization and regionalization, interests of global and regional powers, local social and economic conditions, national institutional arrangements, and even personal factors. They argue that sometimes a sudden change of one small element in this mosaic suffices to influence the whole system. Instead of providing a simplified interpretation of the analyzed processes, the monograph tries to illustrate them in their entire complexity.Non–Governmental Organizations (NGO) activities in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are specified by missing mutual diplomatic representation between the two Koreas, and also between the DPRK and the US. This fact helps to increase the importance and prestige of NGOs, the role of individuals and groups in cultural, sport and civic exchanges when participating in mediation of humanitarian and development aid to the DPRK. The entrepreneurs, who are willing to invest in DPRK (despite the adverse conditions) and employ North Korean workers, play an irreplaceable role as well. A summary of these activities provides an overall picture of the presence and impact of non–governmental actors.This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies (Korean Studies Promotion Service) Grant funded by the Government of the Republic of Korea (Ministry of Education) (AKS-2013-INC-2230003)

Szlenk indices of convex hulls

We study the general measures of non-compactness defined on subsets of a dual Banach space, their associated derivations and their $\omega$-iterates. We introduce the notions of convexifiable and sublinear measure of non-compactness and investigate the properties of its associated fragment and slice derivations. We apply our results to the Kuratowski measure of non-compactness and to the study of the Szlenk index of a Banach space. As a consequence, we obtain that the Szlenk index and the convex Szlenk index of a separable Banach space are always equal. We also give, for any countable ordinal $\alpha$, a characterization of the Banach spaces with Szlenk index bounded by $\omega^{\alpha+1}$ in terms of the existence of an equivalent renorming. This extends a result by Knaust, Odell and Schlumprecht on Banach spaces with Szlenk index equal to $\omega$.Comment: This is the final revised version of this pape

New Observations of Balmer Continuum Flux in Solar Flares, Instrument Description and First Results

Increase in the Balmer continuum radiation during solar flares was predicted by various authors but never firmly confirmed observationally using ground-based slit spectrographs. Here we describe a new post-focal instrument - Image Selector - enabling to measure the Balmer continuum flux from the whole flare area, in analogy of successful detections of flaring dMe stars. The system was developed and put into operation at the horizontal solar telescope HSFA-2 of the Ond\v{r}ejov Observatory. We measure the total flux by a fast spectrometer from a limited but well defined region on the solar disk. Using a system of diaphragms, the disturbing contribution of a bright solar disk can be eliminated as much as possible. Light curves of the measured flux in the spectral range 350 - 440 nm are processed, together with the H{\alpha} images of the flaring area delimited by the appropriate diaphragm. The spectral flux data are flat-fielded, calibrated and processed to be compared with model predictions. Our analysis of the data proves that the described device is sufficiently sensitive to detect variations in the Balmer continuum during solar flares. Assuming that the Balmer-continuum kernels have at least a similar size as those visible in H\alpha, we find the flux increase in the Balmer continuum to reach 230 % - 550 % of the quiet continuum during the observed X-class flare. We also found temporal changes in the Balmer continuum flux starting well before the onset of the flare in H{\alpha}.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Characterization of metric spaces whose free space is isometric to ℓ1\ell_1

We characterize metric spaces whose Lipschitz free space is isometric to $\ell_1$. In particular, the Lipschitz free space over an ultrametric space is not isometric to $\ell_1(\Gamma)$ for any set $\Gamma$. We give a lower bound for the Banach-Mazur distance in the finite case