Modernization Forces in Maria Theresa's Peasant Policies, 1740-1780

The article explores much neglected aspects of the antecedents of peasant emancipation in Austria and Bohemia on the eve of the French Revolution. The Bohemian peasant uprising of 1775 and the unrest of the 1770s in Silesia and Austria are described according to recent trends of interpretation. The main emphasis is on Maria Theresa's peasant policies in the era 1760-80. It is argued that the Theresian reforms aimed to modernize rural society by encouraging the conversion of the tenant farmers into private property owners. This was to be achieved by encouraging private contracts and by restructuring the exploitation of the lower orders of the peasantry, by enacting laws which limited the Robota (labour obligations) exacted by the feudal landlords. The conflicts at court and the difficulties faced in achieving this legislation are described. Joseph II is depicted as on the whole more sympathetic to the landlords despite his sometime popularity with the peasantry. À bien des égards, on avait jusqu’ici laissé dans l’ombre les antécédents de l’émancipation paysanne en Autriche et en Bohême à la veille de la Révolution française. Nous situons ici le soulèvement de 1775 en Bohême et les troubles des années 1770 en Silésie dans l’historiographie récente, tout en mettant l’accent sur les politiques pratiquées par Marie-Thérèse entre 1760 et 1780. Les réformes mises en oeuvre pour moderniser la société rurale encouragèrent la conversion des tenanciers en propriétaires et visèrent à transformer l’exploitation des couches inférieures de la paysannerie, par le biais d’une limitation des Robota (corvées) exigés par les seigneurs féodaux. Ces efforts législatifs suscitèrent des conflits à la cour, qui se prolongèrent sous Joseph II pourtant mieux disposé envers les grands propriétaires fonciers

Evolution of shear zones in granular materials

The evolution of wide shear zones (or shear bands) was investigated experimentally and numerically for quasistatic dry granular flows in split bottom shear cells. We compare the behavior of materials consisting of beads, irregular grains (e.g. sand) and elongated particles. Shearing an initially random sample, the zone width was found to significantly decrease in the first stage of the process. The characteristic shear strain associated with this decrease is about unity and it is systematically increasing with shape anisotropy, i.e. when the grain shape changes from spherical to irregular (e.g. sand) and becomes elongated (pegs). The strongly decreasing tendency of the zone width is followed by a slight increase which is more pronounced for rod like particles than for grains with smaller shape anisotropy (beads or irregular particles). The evolution of the zone width is connected to shear induced density change and for nonspherical particles it also involves grain reorientation effects. The final zone width is significantly smaller for irregular grains than for spherical beads.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Sex and Respectability in Ireland: A Chronology of Cultural Change

This thesis is concerned with the changing cultural attitudes towards sexuality in contemporary Ireland. Adopting both a conceptual and a chronological approach, this project explores the interconnected themes of respectability, sexuality, and biopolitics through an investigation of, or making visible, a series of ‘figures’ and ‘sites’ that demarcate historical and contemporary understandings of sexual respectability in Irish culture. This study occurs at a time when Ireland is experiencing a belated modernity, yet grappling with a traumatic history of institutionalisation of persons deemed to have deviated from normative sexual values, that continues to re-emerge into the national consciousness. While recent plebiscites have been interpreted as a rejection of Ireland’s abjection of ‘unrespectable’ bodies, this dissertation argues that Ireland’s contemporary sexual politics are still undergirded by ideas of respectability. Chapter One serves to locate this research within a distinguished body of literature on the anthropology of Ireland, particularly in relation to questions of sexuality and kinship. Chapter Two analyses the emergence of the Irish state, and the biopolitical operationalisation of Catholic social and moral teaching, in the twentieth century, and how the legacy of that period continues to mould contemporary social thought and political action. Chapter Three considers the contested role of the institution of marriage within Irish culture: once iconic of a prescriptive, exclusive, and traditional form of kinship, it now is a marker of Ireland’s reputation as a socially progressive liberal democracy. Chapter Four analyses the figure of Panti Bliss, the drag queen whose comments on homophobia in Irish culture set the stage for the same-sex marriage referendum. Much like the marriage movement, Panti Bliss represents the sanitisation, desexualisation, and the rendering respectable of the gay man in Western culture. Chapter Five studies the role of HIV/AIDS in Irish culture. Retaining a partial focus upon Panti Bliss’s role as one of the few publicly known HIV positive individuals in Ireland, it considers the impact of the respectability politics of the Marriage Equality movement upon the prolonged silence around sex, gay men, and the escalating HIV crisis in contemporary Dublin

Canonical coordinates for moduli spaces of rank two irregular connections on curves

In this paper, we study a geometric counterpart of the cyclic vector which allow us to put a rank 2 meromorphic connection on a curve into a ``companion'' normal form. This allow us to naturally identify an open set of the moduli space of $\mathrm{GL}_2$-connections (with fixed generic spectral data, i.e. unramified, non resonant) with some Hilbert scheme of points on the twisted cotangent bundle of the curve. We prove that this map is symplectic, therefore providing Darboux (or canonical) coordinates on the moduli space, i.e. separation of variables. On the other hand, for $\mathrm{SL}_2$-connections, we give an explicit formula for the symplectic structure for a birational model given by Matsumoto. We finally detail the case of an elliptic curve with a divisor of degree $2$.Comment: a sign fixed and a reference adde

DeepQMC: An open-source software suite for variational optimization of deep-learning molecular wave functions

Computing accurate yet efficient approximations to the solutions of the electronic Schrödinger equation has been a paramount challenge of computational chemistry for decades. Quantum Monte Carlo methods are a promising avenue of development as their core algorithm exhibits a number of favorable properties: it is highly parallel and scales favorably with the considered system size, with an accuracy that is limited only by the choice of the wave function Ansatz. The recently introduced machine-learned parametrizations of quantum Monte Carlo Ansätze rely on the efficiency of neural networks as universal function approximators to achieve state of the art accuracy on a variety of molecular systems. With interest in the field growing rapidly, there is a clear need for easy to use, modular, and extendable software libraries facilitating the development and adoption of this new class of methods. In this contribution, the DeepQMC program package is introduced, in an attempt to provide a common framework for future investigations by unifying many of the currently available deep-learning quantum Monte Carlo architectures. Furthermore, the manuscript provides a brief introduction to the methodology of variational quantum Monte Carlo in real space, highlights some technical challenges of optimizing neural network wave functions, and presents example black-box applications of the program package. We thereby intend to make this novel field accessible to a broader class of practitioners from both the quantum chemistry and the machine learning communities

Analyzing hierarchical multi-view MRI data with StaPLR: An application to Alzheimer's disease classification

Multi-view data refers to a setting where features are divided into feature sets, for example because they correspond to different sources. Stacked penalized logistic regression (StaPLR) is a recently introduced method that can be used for classification and automatically selecting the views that are most important for prediction. We introduce an extension of this method to a setting where the data has a hierarchical multi-view structure. We also introduce a new view importance measure for StaPLR, which allows us to compare the importance of views at any level of the hierarchy. We apply our extended StaPLR algorithm to Alzheimer's disease classification where different MRI measures have been calculated from three scan types: structural MRI, diffusion-weighted MRI, and resting-state fMRI. StaPLR can identify which scan types and which derived MRI measures are most important for classification, and it outperforms elastic net regression in classification performance.Comment: 36 pages, 9 figures. Accepted manuscrip

Generation of diffraction-free beams for applications in optical microlithography

A new concept based on a Fabry–Perot interferometer for the generation of nondiffracting Bessel beams is described and proposed for potential applications in microlithography such as the fabrication of small isolated patterns. It was experimentally demonstrated that the depth of focus can be increased by a factor of about 2, and simultaneously the transverse resolution improved by a factor of 1.6, when using this technique to image contact holes. The properties of simultaneous imaging of two contact holes were also investigated. It was shown experimentally that, even in the most critical case ~when the first diffraction rings overlap!, undesirable interference effects between the adjacent contact holes can be eliminated by means of a phase shifting technique.Texas InstrumentsNational Science FoundationOTKA Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Science

A New Phase Shifting Technique for Deep UV Excimer Laser Based Lithography

This paper reports simulation and experimental details of a novel phase shifting technique based o laser interferometry. Phase shifting is one of the most promising techniques for the fabrication of high density DRAM's. In recent years many kinds of phase shifting methods have been proposed to extend the resolution limit and contrast of image patterns. These techniques however, have several problems that result from the phase shift elements on the mask, especially when applied to UV excimer laser illumination. A new technique will be described that is based on a one-layered reticle which is used as both a reflective and transmissive mask, irradiated from both the front and the back sides. A combination of both off-axis illumination, as well as phase shift are used in this method. Both the relative path length of the two beams as well as their amplitude can be manipulated in such a way that near 100% contrast can be achieved in the final image. Experimental as well as simulation data are used to demonstrate this new method.National Science Foundatio

Review: Vascular effects of PPARs in the context of NASH.

BACKGROUND Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) are ligand-activated transcription factors known to regulate glucose and fatty acid metabolism, inflammation, endothelial function and fibrosis. PPAR isoforms have been extensively studied in metabolic diseases, including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Recent data extend the key role of PPARs to liver diseases coursing with vascular dysfunction, including nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). AIM This review summarises and discusses the pathobiological role of PPARs in cardiovascular diseases with a special focus on their impact and therapeutic potential in NAFLD and NASH. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS PPARs may be attractive for the treatment of NASH due to their liver-specific effects but also because of their efficacy in improving cardiovascular outcomes, which may later impact liver disease. Assessment of cardiovascular disease in the context of NASH trials is, therefore, of the utmost importance, both from a safety and efficacy perspective

Climate and Air Quality Impacts of Combined Climate Change and Air Pollution Policy Scenarios

This report describes an assessment of the co-benefits for air pollution of recently developed climate mitigation scenarios that inform the European Union policy making. The climate mitigation scenarios were obtained with the POLES equilibrium model for a business-as-usual and greenhouse gas reduction case. In the present work, these scenarios were expanded to air pollution emissions. The resulting set of global -spatially and sector disaggregated- air pollution emissions were evaluated with the global chemistry transport model TM5, to calculate levels of particulate matter and ozone. Subsequently, air pollution impacts on human health, ecosystems and climate were evaluated. The resulting set of four scenarios thus reflect various combinations of worldwide air pollution and climate policies: BAU (¿no further climate and air pollution policies since the 2000 base-year¿); CARB (¿climate policy only¿), BAP (¿no further climate policy, but progressive air pollution policies, to address worldwide increasing levels of air pollution) and CAP (¿combination of ambitious climate and air pollution policies¿). The implementation of a global climate policy (CARB) has substantial co-benefits for reducing air pollutant emissions. Compared to BAU, in 2050 global emissions of SO2 are reduced by ca. 75 %, NOx by 55 %, CO (40 %) and other pollutants VOC, OC and BC) about 25% %. These emission reductions result from cleaner technologies and decreased fuel demand, and correspond to a CO2 emission reduction of more than 60 %. Advanced air pollution abatement technologies can obtain similar air pollutant reductions ranging between 35 % (NOx), 45 % (OC, BC), 60 % (SO2) and 70% (CO), however in this case the CO2 emissions reach unabated levels of 55 Pg CO2/yr. The combined air pollution and climate policy case (CAP) further reduces BAP air pollution emissions by 10-30 %. Noticeable are the decreases of methane emissions by ca. 60 %, which have important impacts on ozone air quality and climate. The environmental benefits of the emission reductions are substantial. In 2050, average global life expectancy increases by 3.2 months/person for BAP (compared to BAU) and further increases by 3.7 to 6.9 months/person if additionally climate policies are introduced (CAP). Compared to 2000, only the CAP scenario leads to global improvement of life-expectancy (by about 3 months/person), while all other scenarios lead to higher particulate concentration and lower life expectancies, mainly driven by pollution developments in South and East Asia. These improvements in CAP are due to decreasing concentrations of primary (OC, BC) and secondary (SO4, NO3) aerosol. This work shows that combining air pollution and climate policies is in some regions the only way to stabilize or decrease the levels of air pollution and reducing impacts on human health. The global average life expectancy, however, masks large regional differences: e.g. current and future levels of air pollution in Asia are much larger than in Europe or the United States. Crop losses due to ozone are reduced by 4.7 % by implementing progressive air pollution policies, and could be reduced by another 2 %, by introducing additional climate policies. Climate policies target at limiting long-term (2100) climate change. On the intermediate time-scales (2030-2050), however, there might be important trade-offs to be considered in climate and air pollution policies, since reducing particulate matter and precursor (especially sulfur) emissions, are likely to lead to a net positive radiative forcing and a warming of climate. Since reductions of particulate matter and ozone are necessary to protect human health and vegetation, combined air pollution and climate policies are more beneficial for both climate and air pollution than stand-alone policies. There is scope to preferentially mitigate emissions of Black Carbon and methane, which is beneficial for climate and human health.JRC.DDG.H.2-Climate chang