Unity in Multiplicity: Shared Cultural Understandings on Marital Life in a Damascus Catholic and Muslim Court

__Abstract__ Family relations in Syria are governed by a plurality of personal status laws and courts. This plurality manifests itself on a variety of levels, including statutory, communal and individual. In this article, the author argues that, albeit this plurality, Syrian personal status law is also characterised by the prevalence of shared, gendered norms and views on marital life. Based on fieldwork conducted in a Catholic and a shar’iyya personal status courts in Damascus in 2009, the author examines the shared cultural understandings on marital relationships that were found in these courts, and as laid down – most importantly – in the respective Catholic and Muslim family laws. The article maintains that the patriarchal family model is preserved and reinforced by the various personal status laws and by the various actors which operated in the field of personal status law. Finally, two Catholic case studies are presented and analysed to demonstrate the importance and attachment to patriarchal gender norms in the Catholic first instance court of Damascus

Counting loop diagrams: computational complexity of higher-order amplitude evaluation

We discuss the computational complexity of the perturbative evaluation of scattering amplitudes, both by the Caravaglios-Moretti algorithm and by direct evaluation of the individual diagrams. For a self-interacting scalar theory, we determine the complexity as a function of the number of external legs. We describe a method for obtaining the number of topologically inequivalent Feynman graphs containing closed loops, and apply this to one- and two-loop amplitudes. We also compute the number of graphs weighted by their symmetry factors, thus arriving at exact and asymptotic estimates for the average symmetry factor of diagrams. We present results for the asymptotic number of diagrams up to 10 loops, and prove that the average symmetry factor approaches unity as the number of external legs becomes large.Comment: 27 pages, 17 table

Coproduceren in een complex belangenspeelveld: dilemma’s voor de gemeentelijke overheidsprofessional

The politics and administration of institutional chang

Neutron resonance capture applied to some prehistoric bronze axes

The elemental analysis of materials and objects on the basis of neutron resonance capture by nuclei as a function of neutron energy is briefly explained. The feasibility of neutron resonance capture analysis (NRCA) is demonstrated with five prehistoric “bronze” axes of different kinds and complex elemental compositions. Attention is paid to the occurrence of indium as a trace element in these artefacts

Color-Octet Fragmentation and the psi' Surplus at the Tevatron

The production rate of prompt $\psi'$'s at large transverse momentum at the Tevatron is larger than theoretical expectations by about a factor of 30. As a solution to this puzzle, we suggest that the dominant $\psi'$ production mechanism is the fragmentation of a gluon into a $c \bar c$ pair in a pointlike color-octet S-wave state, which subsequently evolves nonperturbatively into a $\psi'$ plus light hadrons. The contribution to the fragmentation function from this process is enhanced by a short-distance factor of $1/\alpha_s^2$ relative to the conventional color-singlet contribution. This may compensate for the suppression by $v^4$, where $v$ is the relative momentum of the charm quark in the $\psi'$. If this is indeed the dominant production mechanism at large $p_T$, then the prompt $\psi'$'s that are observed at the Tevatron should almost always be associated with a jet of light hadrons.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe