The Power Paradox in Muslim Women’s Majales: North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals as Sites of Contestation over Religious Politics, Ethnicity, and Gender

During revolutions, rebellions, and movements, women are often called on to serve contradictory roles. They are asked to perform workpolitical, communicative, networking, recruiting, military, manual - that generally goes beyond the society\u27s usual gender restrictions. At the same time, women serve as symbols of movement identity, unity, commitment, and righteous entitlement. To fit into this idealized symbolic image, individual women must fulfill often traditional or even exaggerated feminine behavioral and attitudinal requirements, such as loyalty, obedience, selflessness, sacrifice, and proper deportment: all in all, they are to put aside any personal aspirations and wishes for self-fulfillment and give their all to promoting the values and interests of their nation, revolutionary movement, or social group

Iran

Iran lies between Iraq and, further north, Turkey to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and the Caspian Sea border Iran to the north, and thee Persian Gulf to the south. Iran covers 636,293 square miles. In the early decades of the twentieth century, many people lived by herding animals. Some of the Kurds and the Shahsevan in the northwest, Qashqai, Bakhtiary, Lurs, and Kamseh in the southwest, Baluch in the southeast, and Turkmen in the northeast lived in nomadic camps, traveling with their animals in search of water and pastures. Beginning in the 1920s, the two Pahlavi shahs, Reza Shah and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, worked to pacify tribespeople and bring them under the control of the central government. Now, nomads have largely been settled and live in villages or migrate to urban areas

Sparse grid quadrature on products of spheres

We examine sparse grid quadrature on weighted tensor products (WTP) of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces on products of the unit sphere, in the case of worst case quadrature error for rules with arbitrary quadrature weights. We describe a dimension adaptive quadrature algorithm based on an algorithm of Hegland (2003), and also formulate a version of Wasilkowski and Wozniakowski's WTP algorithm (1999), here called the WW algorithm. We prove that the dimension adaptive algorithm is optimal in the sense of Dantzig (1957) and therefore no greater in cost than the WW algorithm. Both algorithms therefore have the optimal asymptotic rate of convergence given by Theorem 3 of Wasilkowski and Wozniakowski (1999). A numerical example shows that, even though the asymptotic convergence rate is optimal, if the dimension weights decay slowly enough, and the dimensionality of the problem is large enough, the initial convergence of the dimension adaptive algorithm can be slow.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures. Accepted 7 January 2015 for publication in Numerical Algorithms. Revised at page proof stage to (1) update email address; (2) correct the accent on "Wozniakowski" on p. 7; (3) update reference 2; (4) correct references 3, 18 and 2

Rubber-coated bellows improves vibration damping in vacuum lines

Compact-vibration damping systems, consisting of rubber-coated metal bellows with a sliding O-ring connector, are used in vacuum lines. The device presents a metallic surface to the vacuum system and combines flexibility with the necessary stiffness. It protects against physical damage, reduces fatigue failure, and provides easy mating of nonparallel lines

System measures unidirectional forces, excludes extraneous forces

System measures unidirectional force without interference from other directional forces. The measuring apparatus is mounted so that it only moves vertically and is constrained from horizontal and rotational movement. This system can be used to accurately measure small forces in one direction, or as an analytic balance

Numerics and Fractals

Local iterated function systems are an important generalisation of the standard (global) iterated function systems (IFSs). For a particular class of mappings, their fixed points are the graphs of local fractal functions and these functions themselves are known to be the fixed points of an associated Read-Bajactarevi\'c operator. This paper establishes existence and properties of local fractal functions and discusses how they are computed. In particular, it is shown that piecewise polynomials are a special case of local fractal functions. Finally, we develop a method to compute the components of a local IFS from data or (partial differential) equations.Comment: version 2: minor updates and section 6.1 rewritten, arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1309.0243. text overlap with arXiv:1309.024