Culture Takeaway

This keynote is mainly based on Wallace's research for Volume X of La Cultura Italiana published by UTET in 2010. The volume is in Italian and, by translating it, it can now be shared with colleagues, students and friends. The relationship that each citizen has with his/her own country and culture is mediated by personal experiences and matured during a lifetime. It is a delicate task to identify what motivates the consciousness of “insiders” of a culture whilst, at the same time, stimulating the interest of outsiders. To be able to observe the prodigious artistic production of one’s own country from the point of view of another culture and another genetic material offers fresh cues. Curiosity, prodded by geographical and physical distance, helps to identify in a schematic way those characteristics that define a country’s visual culture in a decisively distinctive way

Nomadism as a way of being of the immigrants and internally displaced persons

The article presents the innovatory understanding of the nomadic strategy of human being in the transitional condition. The aim of the article is to determine the role of the nomadic being way in the social group of internal migrants. It is substantiated, that aims and actions of a nomad are directed on creating new ways of realization and conceptualization of variants of nomadic being. It is explained, that a nomad doesn’t go by the way, offered by traditional types of activity, but searches innovatory ways of realization, doesn’t stop on deciphering of traditionally existing being senses, but produces them him/herself. A subject, living in a space of “boundaries” is deprived of the settled comfort, he/she searches for a possibility of balance and harmony, social recognition and improvement of own life conditions in the movement and change. The culture of choice, formed by the logic of the modern market, gives a nomad resources for regulating the own freedom degree. Nomadic instruments correspond to the migrants’ way of life. Digital nomadism creates stimuli for the active life and adaptation to new conditions of different groups of migrants

Milnor numbers for 2-surfaces in 4-manifolds

In this paper (S_n) is a sequence of surfaces immersed in a 4-manifold which converges to a branched surface S_0. Up to sign, \mu^T_p (resp. \mu^N_p) will denote the amount of curvature of the tangent bundles TS_n (resp. the normal bundles NS_n) which concentrates around a singular point p of S_0 when n goes to infinity. By a slight abuse of notation, we call \mu_p^T (resp. \mu_p^N) the tangent (resp. normal) Milnor number of S_n at p. These numbers are not always well-defined; we discuss assumptions under which, if \mu^T exists, then \mu^N also exists and is smaller than -\mu^T . When the second fundamental forms of the S_n's have a common L^2 bound, we relate \mu^T and \mu^N to a bubbling-off in the Grassmannian G_2^+(M)

Recent QCD results from OPAL

Some recent QCD results from the OPAL Collaboration are summarized. In particular: a test of color reconnection models and a search for glueballs using gluon jets with a rapidity gap; a study of unbiased gluon jet properties using a new technique called jet boost algorithm; a measurement of the strong coupling constant from radiative events.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Invited talk at the XIIth International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic Scattering DIS2004, 14-18 April 2004, Strbske Pleso, Slovakia; OPAL-CR52

An economic history of Hundi, 1858-1978

A centuries-old artery of credit for Indian merchant networks, the indigenous credit system hundi has received no systematic attention in histories of the Indian subcontinent. Poorly understood and ill-defined, hundi was a highly negotiable instrument, and source of liquid capital. Hundi knitted together the properties of goods, capital, credit, information and agency, all of which served as the backbone of the Indian merchant network. Drawing on government proceedings, reports, and legal cases, this study provides an insight into the legal encounter between Indian indigenous institutions and the British colonial government. It simultaneously reveals the customs, contracts and individual functions of hundi determining its usage. In particular, this study addresses the important issue of how legal change in colonies affected the so-called ‘informal’ institutions which made trade possible. Between 1858-1947, hundi caught the eye of the British Indian government initially as an important taxable revenue stream. This resulted in hundi being integrated with statutes and regulations during the colonial period. However, this process of formalization was not without its own share of classificatory and interpretive problems, nor did hundi remain unchanged. Material from the 1930s reveals an appreciable change in how the government perceived hundi. The instrument distinguishes itself as a source of liquidity capable of promoting trade and modern banking developments. Moreover, hundi’s importance to the indigenous banking community underscores hundi’s function within the wider Indian economy. Nevertheless, the system’s integration with modern banking continued to present problems. The penultimate chapter explores why problems persisted, examining how a legal solution was proposed in 1978. Finally, the conclusion ties all the threads together and discusses the implications for hundi’s survival