Dynamical Heterogeneities in Glasses, Colloids, and Granular Media


Book Description

Most of the solid materials we use in everyday life, from plastics to cosmetic gels exist under a non-crystalline, amorphous form: they are glasses. Yet, we are still seeking a fundamental explanation as to what glasses really are and to why they form. In this book, we survey the most recent theoretical and experimental research dealing with glassy physics, from molecular to colloidal glasses and granular media. Leading experts in this field present broad and original perspectives on one of the deepest mysteries of condensed matter physics, with an emphasis on the key role played by heterogeneities in the dynamics of glassiness.




Heterogeneities


Book Description

Taking the instability of all identities as its point of departure, this collection of essays probes the enigmas of identity politics. How does 'identitarian' politics, trying to homogenize identities around some cultural or ethnic name, deal with unstable and diverse identities? And what are the kinds of identity formations that resist identity-based projects? Drawing from theoretical perspectives on communal polarization and its relation to early nationalism, the author examines a range of seemingly dissimilar subjects, such as the teaching of Keats in a Delhi college, the Indian novel in the English language, nineteenth-century Banglasahitya, inter-community love, communalism, Tagore and globalization, and inter-disciplinarity. Some of the essays in this book are especially concerned with the recent decades that have witnessed the rise of Hindutva, and which have also marked the author's own growth from a student of English Literature at Delhi University to his later interest and scholarship in history and politics. Pradip Datta begins with his reading of Keats, the quintessential Romantic poet, under the tutelage of a teacher of English with a vernacular background, at a time that witnessed the capitalist expansion of the middle class as well as the spread of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement across the cities and towns of India. His interest in plotting the coordinates of heterogeneity and interrogating identity formations led him to travel to Ayodhya in the early 1990s and interact with kar sevaks there.This book is therefore a part of the author's ongoing attempt at examining how literary and politico-cultural representations of identities can reinforce rigid boundaries. Juxtaposing these with knowledge systems and their respective methods, Pradip Datta argues in favor of practices and spaces that facilitate exchange and reciprocity among a range of disciplines. By proposing the idea of a disciplinary 'commons', he offers the pedagogic as a model for recognizing and validating the heterogeneous elements in the formation of our identities.




Local Commons and Global Interdependence


Book Description

This volume offers a synthesis of what is known about very large and very small common-pool resources. Individuals using commons at the global or local level may find themselves in a similar situation. At an international level, states cannot appeal to authoritative hierarchies to enforce agreements they make to cooperate with one another. In some small-scale settings, participants may be just as helpless in calling on distant public officials to monitor and enforce their agreements. Scholars have independently discovered self-organizing regimes which rely on implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules and procedures rather than the command and control of a central authority. The contributors discuss the possibilities and dangers of scaling up and scaling down. They explore the impact of the number of actors and the degree of heterogeneity among actors on the likelihood of cooperative behaviour.




Heterogeneity in the Crust and Upper Mantle


Book Description

Most of our knowledge about the physical structure and the chemical composition of the Earth's deep interior is inferred from seismic data. The interpretation of seismic waves generally follows the assumption that the Earth's physical structure is grossly layered and that fluctuations of the physical parameters within individual layers are smooth in structure and small in magnitude. While this view greatly facilitates the analytic and interpretative procedure, it is clearly at odds with evidence from outcrops and boreholes, which indicates that compositional, structural and petrophysical heterogeneity in the Earth prevails over a wide range of scales. This book is the first to unify three different views of crustal and upper mantle heterogeneity. It brings together the geological view, which is derived from the analysis of crustal exposures and deep boreholes; the stochastic view, which attempts to find order and structure in these seemingly chaotic data; and the seismological view, which considers the end product of the complex interaction of seismic energy with the heterogeneous structure at depth. John Goff and Klaus Holliger have compiled chapters that explore and quantify the relationship between geological and petrophysical heterogeneity and its seismic response, and use seismic data to probe the fabric of the Earth's interior. Geologists, geostaticians, and geophysicists alike will benefit from the integrative perspective presented in Heterogeneity in the Crust and Upper Mantle: Nature, Scaling, and Seismic Properties, making this text an unparalleled reference for professionals and students in Earth science fields.




Carving Blocs


Book Description

This book looks at the key features of modern communalism that developed in Bengal in the 1920s.




The Earth's Heterogeneous Mantle


Book Description

This book highlights and discusses recent developments that have contributed to an improved understanding of observed mantle heterogeneities and their relation to the thermo-chemical state of Earth's mantle, which ultimately holds the key to unlocking the secrets of the evolution of our planet. This series of topical reviews and original contributions address 4 themes. Theme 1 covers topics in geophysics, including global and regional seismic tomography, electrical conductivity and seismic imaging of mantle discontinuities and heterogeneities in the upper mantle, transition zone and lower mantle. Theme 2 addresses geochemical views of the mantle including lithospheric evolution from analysis of mantle xenoliths, composition of the deep Earth and the effect of water on subduction-zone processes. Theme 3 discusses geodynamical perspectives on the global thermo-chemical structure of the deep mantle. Theme 4 covers application of mineral physics data and phase equilibrium computations to infer the regional-scale thermo-chemical structure of the mantle.




Emerging Risks in a World of Heterogeneity


Book Description

This uniquely interdisciplinary volume analyzes the challenges posed by the heterogeneity of the world where radically different players are crammed into increasingly limited political, commercial, social, and ecological space. The rapid rise of Communist Party-ruled China is posing serious challenges to the postwar politico-economic architecture dominated by the United States. Russia, once expected to become a partner of the liberal Western international order, has started behaving in an increasingly unilateral fashion. The developing world is more characterized by failed governance rather than convergence to liberal democracies as was hoped by many Western authors. Given links provided by low-cost carriers, the Internet, and trade and investment, we simply cannot shield ourselves from influences, whether benign or malign, from neighbors on this planet.The authors, including political scientists, economists, social physicists, and experts on complexity theory and informatics, examine how interactions among actors with different properties can cause problems, and they analyze risks resulting from the interactions. While employing a variety of approaches to address topics such as economic interdependence among democracies and authoritarian states, the development assistance regimes, internal conflicts in developing countries, and cyber security, the whole volume presents a clear overview of challenges and risks the world is facing. This work makes a valuable contribution to students of social sciences as well as to practitioners interested in the emerging global order.




Sediment-Body Geometry and Heterogeneity


Book Description

Over the past 20 years there has been a major growth in efforts to quantify the geometry and dimensions of sediment bodies from analogues to provide quantitative input to geological models. The aim of this volume is to examine the current state of the art, from both an industry and an academic perspective. Contributions discuss the challenges of extracting relevant data from different types of sedimentary analogue (outcrop, process models, seismic) and the application and significance of such information for improving predictions from subsurface static and dynamic models. Special attention is given to modelling reservoir properties and gridding issues for predicting subsurface fluid flow. As such, the volume is expected to be of interest to both the geoscience community concerned with the fundamentals of sedimentary architecture as well as geological modellers and engineers interested in how these characteristics are modelled and influence subsurface predictions.




Web Services - ICWS-Europe 2003


Book Description

After some time of early experience Web Services are moving themselves from a new highly fragmented technology to a piece of nowadays infrastructures which promise to address various current challenges. These include especially classical issues of integration and data in a heterogeneous environment. The Web Service technology provides an open and technology-agnostic interface, and furthermore propels new usage paradigms in distributed computing infrastructures like Grid Services. Successful adoption of Web Service technology relies on the de?nition of interoperable architectural building blocks which can be integrated in existing softwarearchitectures,likeJ2EEorCORBAheritage. Interoperabilitywillsurely proveitselfasthecriticalsuccessfactoroftheWebServiceproliferation. Inorder to accomplish these interoperability various standardization bodies such as the W3C, UN or OASIS founded activities to create speci?cations and products implementing these building blocks. As the sister event of the First International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2003), which was held in Las Vegas, June 23 - 26, USA, has proven to be an excellent catalyst for research and collaboration, the 2003 International C- ference on Web Services - Europe (ICWS-Europe 2003) is expected to continue this trend. The topics of papers collected in this proceedings volume ranges from issues like modeling, development, deployment, publishing, as well as discovery, composition and collaboration, plus monitoring and analytical control. Addit- nal contributions summarize some research and development challenges of bu- ding Web Service solutions. Especially, some contributions present an emerging research direction, namely, Web Services collaboration. Moreover, some major research activities associated with facilitating extended business collaboration using Web services and semantic annotation are also covered.




The Transnationalized Social Question


Book Description

The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized not only because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states, staying in touch with family and friends, receiving or sending financial remittances in transnational social spaces. Also of importance are cross--border recruitment schemes for workers and the cross-border diffusion of norms appealed to in the case of migration--for example, the social right to decent work as a human right. Moreover, migration can become an issue of inclusion or exclusion in fields important to life chances in the emigration, transit, or immigration states--a transnationalization of national states. And, as in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social question as a public concern. In earlier periods class differences dominated conflicts. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of immigration and emigration over the past decades. Casting a wide net in terms of conceptual and empirical scope, this book tackles both the social structure and the politics of social inequalities. It sets a comprehensive agenda for research which also includes the public role of social scientists in dealing with the transnationalized social question.