The strategy & goals of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Syrian Revolution

Issue title: Preludes to the Islamic State: contextualizing the rise of extremism in the Syrian UprisingSince the Hama events of 1982 that led to the Muslim Brotherhood’s forced exile from Syria, the group’s aim has been the return to Syria. To achieve their goals, they have made use of different negotiation channels with the Assad regime during the past three decades. However, at one point, those channels were cut, and, being ostracized not only by the Syrian authorities, but also by many in the political opposition to the regime, the Brotherhood has crossed the threshold of relative and discontinuous passivity to full-blown oppositional activity. This paper examines the different strategies they have followed, such as political activity, provision of humanitarian aid, the exertion of influence on armed groups combating the regime, and the benefitting from the ideological similarities they bear with the newly elected regimes as well as the Turkish ruling party. Building on the information we examine, it is our hypothesis that the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood seemed to be the best-organized and coherent oppositional group might not necessarily lead them to power, especially when more radical groups with a jihadist strategy have taken the lead of the Islamist field and the situation remains extremely complex.Publisher PD

Empowerment of Indigenous Women and Social Exclusion in Combating Poverty in the State of Veracruz Mexico

In Mexico, the Productive Organization Program for Indigenous Women (POPMI) seeks the empowerment of productive capacities in indigenous women. Our study analyzes POPMI outreach, focusing our attention on women beneficiaries who present a high degree of social exclusion and multidimensional poverty in the State of Veracruz. In the study area, the 542 indigenous women benefited in POPMI, presented a condition of multidimensional poverty and a degree of social exclusion: very high, high and medium, they represent only 22.19% of the total beneficiaries of this program In 2010, since at the state level a total of 2,243 indigenous women were cared for. The results show that the localities where the condition of multidimensional poverty and very high, medium and high levels of social exclusion have been excluded in the coverage of POPMI

Quantum Entanglement In Inhomogeneous 1D Systems

The entanglement entropy of the ground state of a quantum lattice model with local interactions usually satisfies an area law. However, in 1D systems some violations may appear in inhomogeneous systems or in random systems. In our inhomogeneous system, the inhomogeneity parameter, $h$, allows us to tune different regimes where a volumetric violation of the area law appears. We apply the strong disorder renormalization group to describe the maximally entangled state of the system in a strong inhomogeneity regime. Moreover, in a weak inhomogeneity regime, we use a continuum approximation to describe the state as a thermo-field double in a conformal field theory with an effective temperature which is proportional to the inhomogeneity parameter of the system. The latter description also shows that the universal scaling features of this model are captured by a massless Dirac fermion in a curved space-time with constant negative curvature $R=-h^2$, providing another example of the relation between quantum entanglement and space-time geometry. The results we discuss here were already published before, but here we present a more didactic exposure of basic concepts of the rainbow system for the students attending the Latin American School of Physics Marcos Moshinsky 2017.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the Proccedings of the Latin American School of Physics Marcos Moshinsky 201

Abelian fibrations and SYZ mirror conjecture

SYZ mirror conjecture predicts that a Calabi-Yau manifold $X$ consists of a family of tori which are dual to a family of special lagrangian tori on the mirror dual manifold $\hat{X}$. Here we consider a fibration of polarized abelian varieties and we construct a dual one. Moreover we prove that they are equivalent at the level of derived categories.Comment: C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris. Ser. I (2012), to appea

On Convolved Generalized Fibonacci and Lucas Polynomials

We define the convolved h(x)-Fibonacci polynomials as an extension of the classical convolved Fibonacci numbers. Then we give some combinatorial formulas involving the h(x)-Fibonacci and h(x)-Lucas polynomials. Moreover we obtain the convolved h(x)-Fibonacci polynomials form a family of Hessenberg matrices

Towards general super Casimir equations for 4D4D N=1{\mathcal N}=1 SCFTs

Applying the Casimir operator to four-point functions in CFTs allows us to find the conformal blocks for any external operators. In this work, we initiate the program to find the superconformal blocks, using the super Casimir operator, for $4D$ ${\mathcal N}=1$ SCFTs. We begin by finding the most general four-point function with zero $U(1)_R$-charge, including all the possible nilpotent structures allowed by the superconformal algebra. We then study particular cases where some of the operators satisfy shortening conditions. Finally, we obtain the super Casimir equations for four point-functions which contain a chiral and an anti-chiral field. We solve the super Casimir equations by writing the superconformal blocks as a sum of several conformal blocks.Comment: Added a missing term in eqs. (3.31) and (3.39). Section 4.3 corrected. Abstract fixe