What is Othello’s Secret?

Explicitly written from the perspective of a second-generation British Cypriot, this article examines the relevance of Shakespeare’s Othello to the modern troubles of Cyprus. Drawing on the recurrent imperialist and nationalist struggles to control Cyprus, in Shakespeare’s day and our own, the article explains how the author’s upcoming book, Othello’s Secret: The Cyprus Problem, radically reinterprets the domestic and military tensions of Othello as precursors to the island’s more recent wars and divisions. Insight into the way an English writer in the early modern period understood Cyprus can contribute to the way scholars in the British academy understand the bard both in his context and in ours. Consequently, the article challenges the conventional Anglophone scholarly focus on Venice, highlighting a surprising academic blindspot given Britain’s historical and ongoing colonial presence on Cyprus. In so doing, it reframes Othello as a play about Cyprus, offering a more personal account of how research on Shakespeare can purposefully contribute to geopolitical debates

Influences of monotone Boolean functions

Recently, Keller and Pilpel conjectured that the influence of a monotone Boolean function does not decrease if we apply to it an invertible linear transformation. Our aim in this short note is to prove this conjecture.Comment: 3 page

The range of thresholds for diameter 2 in random Cayley graphs

Given a group G, the model G(G,p) denotes the probability space of all Cayley graphs of G where each element of the generating set is chosen independently at random with probability p. Given a family of groups (G_k) and a $c \in \mathbb{R}_+$ we say that c is the threshold for diameter 2 for (G_k) if for any ε > 0 with high probability $\Gamma \in \mathcal{G}(G_k,p)$ has diameter greater than 2 if p \leqslant \sqrt{(c - \eps)\frac{\log{n}}{n}} and diameter at most 2 if p \geqslant \sqrt{(c + \eps)\frac{\log{n}}{n}}. In [5] we proved that if c is a threshold for diameter 2 for a family of groups (G_k) then $c \in [1/4,2]$ and provided two families of groups with thresholds 1/4 and 2 respectively. In this paper we study the question of whether every $c \in [1/4,2]$ is the threshold for diameter 2 for some family of groups. Rather surprisingly it turns out that the answer to this question is negative. We show that every $c \in [1/4,4/3]$ is a threshold but a $c \in (4/3,2]$ is a threshold if and only if it is of the form 4n/(3n-1) for some positive integer n

Nominal Wage Rigidity: Non-Parametric Tests Based on Union Data for Canada

We study the wage-change distributions in union contractsreached in Canada between 1976-1999. We use non-parametric tests to check for nominal wage rigidity and find that it is present during low inflation periods.Nominal wage rigidity, non-parametric tests

Edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in graphs

In this paper we give an approximate answer to a question of Nash-Williams from 1970: we show that for every \alpha > 0, every sufficiently large graph on n vertices with minimum degree at least (1/2 + \alpha)n contains at least n/8 edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. More generally, we give an asymptotically best possible answer for the number of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles that a graph G with minimum degree \delta must have. We also prove an approximate version of another long-standing conjecture of Nash-Williams: we show that for every \alpha > 0, every (almost) regular and sufficiently large graph on n vertices with minimum degree at least $(1/2 + \alpha)n$ can be almost decomposed into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles.Comment: Minor Revisio