Who's the pest? Imagining human–insect futures beyond antagonism

Joining the effort to reimagine our relationships with insects, the Wellcome Collection's ‘Who's the Pest?’ programme attempts to challenge the stigma of insects as ill-disposed ‘bugs’. The article reviews two events in the series, the workshop ‘Insects au gratin’ and the debate ‘Insects vs. humans’, and places them in the context of recent engagements with ‘pests’ in the public realm

We are the world? Anthropocene cultural production between geopoetics and geopolitics

The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness

Perturbation analysis of Poisson processes

We consider a Poisson process $\Phi$ on a general phase space. The expectation of a function of $\Phi$ can be considered as a functional of the intensity measure $\lambda$ of $\Phi$. Extending earlier results of Molchanov and Zuyev [Math. Oper. Res. 25 (2010) 485-508] on finite Poisson processes, we study the behaviour of this functional under signed (possibly infinite) perturbations of $\lambda$. In particular, we obtain general Margulis-Russo type formulas for the derivative with respect to non-linear transformations of the intensity measure depending on some parameter. As an application, we study the behaviour of expectations of functions of multivariate L\'evy processes under perturbations of the L\'evy measure. A key ingredient of our approach is the explicit Fock space representation obtained in Last and Penrose [Probab. Theory Related Fields 150 (2011) 663-690].Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/12-BEJ494 the Bernoulli (http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm

Stochastic analysis for Poisson processes

This survey is a preliminary version of a chapter of the forthcoming book "Stochastic Analysis for Poisson Point Processes: Malliavin Calculus, Wiener-It\^o Chaos Expansions and Stochastic Geometry" edited by Giovanni Peccati and Matthias Reitzner. The paper develops some basic theory for the stochastic analysis of Poisson process on a general $\sigma$-finite measure space. After giving some fundamental definitions and properties (as the multivariate Mecke equation) the paper presents the Fock space representation of square-integrable functions of a Poisson process in terms of iterated difference operators. This is followed by the introduction of multivariate stochastic Wiener-It\^o integrals and the discussion of their basic properties. The paper then proceeds with proving the chaos expansion of square-integrable Poisson functionals, and defining and discussing Malliavin operators. Further topics are products of Wiener-It\^o integrals and Mehler's formula for the inverse of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck generator based on a dynamic thinning procedure. The survey concludes with covariance identities, the Poincar\'e inequality and the FKG-inequality

Children and the experience of violence: contrasting cultures of punishment in northern Nigeria

Arising out of debates over ‘children at risk’ and the ‘rights of the child’, the article compares two contrasting childhoods within a single large society—the Hausa‐speaking peoples of northern Nigeria. One segment of this society—the non‐Muslim Maguzawa—refuse to allow their children to be beaten; the other segment, the Muslim Hausa, tolerate corporal punishment both at home and especially in Qur'anic schools. Why the difference? Economic as well as political reasons are offered as reasons for the rejection of corporal punishment while it is argued that, in the eyes of Muslim society in the cities, the threat of punishment is essential for both educating and ‘civilising’ the young by imposing the necessary degree of discipline and self‐control that are considered the hallmark of a good Muslim. In short, ‘cultures of punishment’ arise out of specific historical conditions, with wide variations in the degree and frequency with which children actually suffer punishment, and at whose hands. Finally the question is raised whether the violence experienced in schooling has sanctioned in the community at large a greater tolerance of violence‐as‐‘punishment’

Stability of Spectral Types for Jacobi Matrices Under Decaying Random Perturbations

We study stability of spectral types for semi-infinite self-adjoint tridiagonal matrices under random decaying perturbations. We show that absolutely continuous spectrum associated with bounded eigenfunctions is stable under Hilbert-Schmidt random perturbations. We also obtain some results for singular spectral types

Zero Hausdorff dimension spectrum for the almost Mathieu operator

We study the almost Mathieu operator at critical coupling. We prove that there exists a dense $G_\delta$ set of frequencies for which the spectrum is of zero Hausdorff dimension.Comment: v1: 24 pp. v2: 25 pp, corrected the statement of Theorem 3 and added explanations in the proof of Theorem