Fragmented States Research Articles

The dichotomy of electoral choice in fragmented societies: Prospects of 2023 Nigerian general elections

Elections in fragmented states are usually contested along the divisive lines present within the geo polity, and this plays an important role in the emergence of political leaders. Nigeria, one of the most heterogeneous countries in the world, has exhibited predominantly ethnic voting since the consolidation of its fourth republic, and this has contributed to mixed socioeconomic and political fortunes. Using a qualitative approach based on secondary sources such as, books, journals, articles, this study highlights that mature democracies exhibit retrospective voting, through which objective scrutiny of government performance in the economy and other aspects of the state is done to determine whether to reward or punish political leaders at the polls. The limitations of primal and ethnic voting considerations in Nigeria, visible in development outcomes, call for a new guardrail to electoral choice. This paper argues the need for economic voting to predominate the ethnic considerations that determine electoral choice, as this can guarantee developmental outputs, and ensure political accountability that benefit the state. This study concludes that, if Nigeria is to experience significant changes in its fortunes going forward, the 2023 elections must change the narrative from non-evaluative considerations to evaluative voting considerations, for positive socioeconomic dividends.

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Framework for Evaluating Historic Sites in Huai’an Ancient Cities

The preservation and restoration of historic sites is of great significance to the continuation of a city’s historical heritage and high-quality development. However, the conservation management of historic sites is still in the stage of exploration and improvement. The current states of development and preservation have been facing many problems, such as fragmented and poor states of preservation. It is crucial to retain and revitalize the authenticity of historic sites. A multi-criteria decision-making approach to an innovative evaluation model is proposed. Based on the cultural, social, and economic characteristics of the historical sites, an evaluation index system is constructed and weighted to judge its importance. The results suggest that the statuses of the historic relics at the facet layer have the most significant effect on the preservation of the authenticity of historic sites. The completeness of historic relics ranks first in weight among the evaluation indexes, which suggests that emphasis should be not only on their protection, but also on the preservation of their overall styles. The results will enable urban decision makers to effectively set the priorities of preservation and restoration by regions and stages. Huai’an, a major ancient city along the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal in China, was taken as an empirical case study to validate the feasibility of the evaluation index system and its ability to provide references for the preservation and restoration of historic sites.

Dynamical formation of two-fold fragmented many-body state induced by an impurity in a double-well

We unravel the correlated quantum quench dynamics of a single impurity immersed in a bosonic environment confined in an one-dimensional double-well potential. A particular emphasis is placed on the structure of the time-evolved many-body (MB) wave function by relying on a Schmidt decomposition whose coefficients directly quantify the number of configurations that are macroscopically populated. For a non-interacting bosonic bath and weak postquench impurity-bath interactions, we observe the dynamical formation of a two-fold fragmented MB state which is related to intra-band excitation processes of the impurity and manifests as a two-body phase separation (clustering) between the two species for repulsive (attractive) interactions. Increasing the postquench impurity-bath coupling strength leads to the destruction of the two-fold fragmentation since the impurity undergoes additional inter-band excitation dynamics. By contrast, a weakly interacting bath suppresses excitations of the bath particles and consequently the system attains a weakly fragmented MB state. Our results explicate the interplay of intra- and inter-band impurity excitations for the dynamical generation of fragmented MB states in multi-well traps and for designing specific entangled impurity states.

Improved Fragmentation Looped-Functional for Synchronization of Chaotic Lur’e Systems

This brief investigates the synchronization problem of chaotic Lur’e systems by employing sampled-data control. First of all, a new fragmentation approach is provided based on two partition coefficients, which can divide the sampling interval into four parts. Next, taking the fragmented states into account, a novel fragmentation looped-functional is constructed. Then, not only the fragmented states, but also the fragmented state system equations are utilized in the sufficient synchronization conditions. Moreover, according to the transformed free-matrix-based integral inequality (TFMBII) and Schur complement, the synchronization criterion is presented in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Eventually, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed criterion are illustrated through a benchmark numerical example.

Informal Gold Miners, State Fragmentation, and Resource Governance in Bolivia and Peru

ABSTRACTHigh commodity prices have led to the proliferation of informal gold mining in the Andes. Despite their limited financial capacity, informal gold miners have proved capable of influencing national-level policy outcomes. Why are they able to do so? This study puts forward a comparative study of Bolivia, where informal miners have been politically incorporated, and Peru, where they have been traditionally excluded. It shows how, despite the very different institutional contexts, informal miners are similarly capable of leveraging their contribution to the local economy and the fracture between the central state and its peripheral branches to form pressure groups with local authorities. Based on 120 interviews with politicians and leaders from the largest gold-mining communities in Bolivia and Peru, this study contributes to the scholarship on state-society relations, resource politics, and decentralization by outlining the conditions and mechanism through which informal groups contest exclusionary resource governance in fragmented states.

Computational modeling reveals that Abl signaling tunes actin networks between connected and fragmented states primarily through changes to the level of dendricity

Abl signaling, a crucial pathway for neural patterning, steers growth cones primarily by altering actin dynamics. Biochemical and genetic evidence shows that Abl modifies cytoskeletal organization by promoting the actin brancher, Arp2/3, and by inhibiting the processive linear polymerase, Enabled. Despite knowledge of both the multi-micron changes to the actin network and the molecular perturbations downstream of Abl, an emergent mechanism that explains how the downstream effectors alter network architecture is incomplete.

Trans- Atlantic Slave Trade and Its Impacts for Modern African

Africa experienced two major crisis in its history; slave trade and colonialism. At a time of both events Africa was integrated into global market in unequal and exploitative ways. But, slave trade in general and trans- Atlantic slave trade in particular lasts for long time and holds the lion share in underdevelopment of Africa. As such, this paper analysis the long term effect of trans-Atlantic slave trade for modern African political economy. To do so, the work employs qualitative research methods and secondary source of data.Before trans-Atlantic slave trade, African peoples were egalitarian, have their own values and civilizations. They were self sufficient and autonomous and there was no huge gap between Africa and Europe. However, Trans -Atlantic slave trade lead to intensification of the gap between Africa and Europe as result of its exploitative nature and deterioration of African values and norms. Hence, large numbers of African were shipped crossing Atlantic Ocean and works on large scale plantation in the new world and these numbers reaches its climax at 18 th c.Trans-Atlantic slave trade brought untold causalities on African political economy at time of its occurrence and even at modern time. Thereby, limitation of African economy to monoculture, perverted institution, and creation of fertile ground for colonialism because of weak and fragmented states, decline in population, disturbing family and reducing fertility rates were the major short term impacts of trans-Atlantic slave trade. Moreover, Trans- Atlantic slave trade also serves as important variable to analysis the modern political economy of Africa because of its long term effect.Accordingly, trans-Atlantic slave trade discourages state formation and this in turn obstructs creation of modern economy, laws and public goods. The current absolutist and patrimonial state existing in Africa also trace their origin to the era of trans-Atlantic slave trade. Trans-Atlantic slave trade also responsible for ethnic stratification existing in Africa today as result of mistrust and break down of social bond between peoples so that it lays the basis for intensification of ethnic conflict in modern Africa. Furthermore, it serves as pre-colonial source of modern corruption and modern racism from which Africa is still suffering.Therefore, lingering problems in modern African political economy embedded within trans-Atlantic slave trade so that it plays crucial role for current underdevelopment of the continent . DOI: 10.7176/IAGS/92-01 Publication date: December 31 st 2021

Investigation of multistep effects for proton inelastic scattering to the 21+ state in He6

Multistep effects among bound, resonant, and nonresonant states have been investigated by the continuum-discretized coupled-channels method (CDCC). In the CDCC, a resonant state is treated as multiple states fragmented in a resonance energy region, although it is described as a single state in usual coupled-channels calculations. For such the fragmented resonant states, one-step, and multistep contributions to the cross sections should be carefully discussed because the cross sections obtained by the one-step calculation depend on the number of those states, which corresponds to the size of the model space. To clarify the role of the multistep effects, we propose the one-step calculation without model-space dependence for the fragmented resonant states. Furthermore, we also discuss the multistep effects among the ground, ${2}_{1}^{+}$ resonant, and nonresonant states in $^{6}\mathrm{He}$ for proton inelastic scattering.

Balance and fragmentation in societies with homophily and social balance

Recent attempts to understand the origin of social fragmentation on the basis of spin models include terms accounting for two social phenomena: homophily—the tendency for people with similar opinions to establish positive relations—and social balance—the tendency for people to establish balanced triadic relations. Spins represent attribute vectors that encode G different opinions of individuals whose social interactions can be positive or negative. Here we present a co-evolutionary Hamiltonian model of societies where people minimise their individual social stresses. We show that societies always reach stationary, balanced, and fragmented states, if—in addition to homophily—individuals take into account a significant fraction, q, of their triadic relations. Above a critical value, q_c, balanced and fragmented states exist for any number of opinions.

Fragmentation in trader preferences among multiple markets: market coexistence versus single market dominance.

Technological advancement has led to an increase in the number and type of trading venues and a diversification of goods traded. These changes have re-emphasized the importance of understanding the effects of market competition: does proliferation of trading venues and increased competition lead to dominance of a single market or coexistence of multiple markets? In this paper, we address these questions in a stylized model of zero-intelligence traders who make repeated decisions at which of three available markets to trade. We analyse the model numerically and analytically and find that the traders’ decision parameters—memory length and how strongly decisions are based on past success—make the key difference between consolidated and fragmented steady states of the population of traders. All three markets coexist with equal shares of traders only when either learning is too weak and traders choose randomly, or when markets are identical. In the latter case, the population of traders fragments across the markets. With different markets, we note that market dominance is the more typical scenario. Overall we show that, contrary to previous research emphasizing the role of traders’ heterogeneity, market coexistence can emerge simply as a consequence of co-adaptation of an initially homogeneous population of traders.

Spectral Gaps and Incompressibility in a {varvec{nu }}\xa0=\xa01/3 Fractional Quantum Hall System

We study an effective Hamiltonian for the standard nu =1/3 fractional quantum Hall system in the thin cylinder regime. We give a complete description of its ground state space in terms of what we call Fragmented Matrix Product States, which are labeled by a certain family of tilings of the one-dimensional lattice. We then prove that the model has a spectral gap above the ground states for a range of coupling constants that includes physical values. As a consequence of the gap we establish the incompressibility of the fractional quantum Hall states. We also show that all the ground states labeled by a tiling have a finite correlation length, for which we give an upper bound. We demonstrate by example, however, that not all superpositions of tiling states have exponential decay of correlations.

Foramen Magnum as Determinant of Sexual Dimorphism in Sri Ganganagar Population

Background: In explosions, mass disasters, and warfare, human remains are got in fragmented states. Only strong bones that resist fracture can be used for personal identification in forensics. The foramen magnum (FM) dimension at the base of the skull is one such region that can be used for sex discrimination using radiographs. Aim and Objectives: To test evaluate sexual dimorphism in FM morphometric measurements and shape using digital submentovertex (SMV) radiograph among the Sri Ganganagar population. Materials and Methods: 100 digital SMV radiographs (50 males and 50 females) were randomly selected from the daily radiographic record of the patients with an age range of 25 to 65 years who visited the OPD and require SMV radiographs for diagnosis. The selected SMV radiographs were assessed for FM dimensions (longitudinal and transverse diameters, circumference, area, and FM index). Also, one particular shape was assigned to FM based on the radiographic image according to Chethan et al. classification. All the measurements were performed by two maxillofacial radiologists independently, and the data thus obtained were subjected to discriminant analysis for the evaluation of sexual dimorphism. Results: Values of four parameters out of five (transverse diameter, circumference, area, and foramen index) were found statistically significantly higher in males. The most common morphology of FM was an egg shape (50%), whereas round (3%) was the least common morphology. Circumference FM was the best indicator of gender determination followed by area, transverse diameter. and foramen index. The SMV radiographs for FM showed an overall accuracy of 69.73% in sex determination. Conclusion: The study showed that SMV radiographic FM morphometric measurements can be used for sex determination among the Sri Ganganagar population.

Low-complexity eigenstates of a ν = 1/3 fractional quantum Hall system

We identify the ground-state of a truncated version of Haldane’s pseudo-potential Hamiltonian in the thin cylinder geometry as being composed of exponentially many fragmented matrix product states. These states are constructed by lattice tilings and their properties are discussed. We also report on a proof of a spectral gap, which implies the incompressibility of the underlying fractional quantum Hall liquid at maximal filling ν = 1/3. Low-energy excitations and an extensive number of many-body scars at positive energy density, but nevertheless low complexity, are also identified using the concept of tilings.

Interrogating the Centralization-Decentralization Tension in the Philippines in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has managed to expose the longstanding inadequacies and the fragmented states of government and socio-economic institutions worldwide. COVID-19 is an indiscriminating threat. Thus, for both developed and developing countries, the pandemic, and the challenges it surfaced, meant a protracted test of resilience for governments and the existing world order. For the Philippines, the COVID-19 health crisis has managed to exacerbate the deep-rooted societal issues of inequality, corruption, and injustice. Yet, it also seems that the pandemic has somehow managed to trigger both public officials and Filipino citizens to question and to think more deeply about the capabilities and the readiness of a highly centralized bureaucracy to shift to a federal or more decentralized form of government.This unease is heightened even further in the face of the current administration operating within an almost absolutely centralized and uniform policy and governance framework during this pandemic as prescribed by the “Bayanihan to Heal as One Act of 2020.” This law essentially enabled the President to have almost absolute control over all government machinery and more. More importantly though, the handling of the crisis also uncovered signs of disconnect across the different levels of the Philippine government, especially as tensions between local government units and the national government unfold.As such, this paper will attempt to describe these centralization-decentralization tensions and provide an explanation of its sources to understand and assess the current decentralization context of the Philippines using the government’s COVID-19 crisis response as the frame of reference. Overall, using the case of the Philippines, the analysis will explore possible policy recommendations that can assist the government in navigating or finding a balance between the policy intricacies and implications presented by centralization and decentralization in government. More importantly, the analysis also hopes to contribute to the ongoing discourse on decentralization and federalism especially in the case of the Philippines.

Who Is an Indian Child? Institutional Context, Tribal Sovereignty, and Race-Making in Fragmented States

Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA’s protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child’s Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize “Indian” as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization.

Searching for the rate determining step of the H2S reaction on Fe (110) surface

AbstractThe adsorption and dissociation of H2S on Fe surface play a key role in carburization condition and a detailed understanding of the kinetics and rate-determining step of this process from an atomistic modeling perspective will help in understanding better ways of mitigating metal dusting. Hence, we employed first-principles density functional theory with a correction for the long-range interactions to investigate H2 reaction on Fe (110) surface. We probed the role of orientation of H2S on adsorption energetics, elementary pathways and dissociation barriers on Fe(110) surface. We report the geometries and energetics of an exhaustive set of molecular and fragmented states induced by the different orientations of H2S on Fe (110) surface. Our investigation further revealed that H2S can be either adsorbed as a molecule, as HS + H, or even as H/S/H atoms depending on the orientation of the molecule and the site of adsorption. In addition, we calculated the rate of adsorption and dissociation to resolve the competition between adsorption sites, and found that the complete decomposition can commence from either the long bridge or short bridge sites.

Spiritual Dimension in Art Therapy

Spiritually-oriented art therapy interventions are based on a holistic, therapeutic approach that aims to enable people who are in fragmented states to achieve integrity, unity, harmony, and balance by taking all the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of human nature into account using the medium of art and its creative processes. Art is considered intrinsically spiritual by many artists and art therapists, and the history of art and its relationship to treatment is as old as human history; however, open consideration of the spiritual dimension in therapeutic settings, particularly in art therapy interventions, is relatively new. Reviewing the emergence of spiritually-oriented art therapy interventions and their mechanisms of change is considered useful for seeing how they enable holistic transformation. These mechanisms have been determined as self-realization and understanding, transcendence, meaning-making and searching for a purpose, and achieving integrity through the holistic wellbeing approach.

Market fragmentation and market consolidation: Multiple steady states in systems of adaptive traders choosing where to trade.

Technological progress is leading to proliferation and diversification of trading venues, thus increasing the relevance of the long-standing question of market fragmentation versus consolidation. To address this issue quantitatively, we analyze systems of adaptive traders that choose where to trade based on their previous experience. We demonstrate that only based on aggregate parameters about trading venues, such as the demand-to-supply ratio, we can assess whether a population of traders will prefer fragmentation or specialization towards a single venue. We investigate what conditions lead to market fragmentation for populations with a long memory and analyze the stability and other properties of both fragmented and consolidated steady states. Finally, we investigate the dynamics of populations with finite memory; when this memory is long the true long-time steady states are consolidated but fragmented states are strongly metastable, dominating the behavior out to long times.

Ab initiothermodynamics study of ambient gases reacting with amorphous carbon

Amorphous carbon (a-C) occurs as a tribologically induced phase in diamond or diamond-like carbon coatings. The interaction of ambient gases (${\mathrm{H}}_{2}$, ${\mathrm{N}}_{2}$, ${\mathrm{O}}_{2}$, ${\mathrm{H}}_{2}\mathrm{O}$, ${\mathrm{CO}}_{2}$) with a-C of varying mass density is studied by means of ab initio thermodynamics simulations. Different scenarios such as moist air or pure gases are investigated under different pressure and temperature conditions. Equilibrium concentrations of chemisorbed and fragmented final states are found to only exhibit a minor dependence on the specific conditions of the gas phase reservoir. The differences in local structure of the a-C samples with varying mass density such as pore size and coordination and dangling bonds, as well as the competition among different gas molecules for a-C atoms as reactants, affect the equilibrium concentrations to a greater degree. The availability and reactivity of a-C atoms are thus found to mainly control the chemical composition of a-C interacting with ambient gases in thermodynamic equilibrium. Trends found in the analysis of chemical groups occurring in equilibrium can possibly be transferred to a more realistic nonequilibrium tribological scenario.

Inflammatory periosteal reaction on ribs associated with lower respiratory tract disease: A method for recording prevalence from sites with differing preservation.

ObjectivesInflammatory periosteal reaction (IPR) on the visceral surfaces of the ribs has been used in bioarchaeology as an indicator of lower respiratory tract disease. This article presents a detailed method for recording IPR on the ribs, even those in severely fragmented states, with the objectives of increasing the consistency of recording and producing true prevalence rates for skeletons so as to improve data comparability between future bioarchaeological studies of lower respiratory tract disease.Materials and methodsThe presence and prevalence of respiratory‐related IPR were recorded from three different Sudanese cemetery sites using a detailed method for identifying and recording IPR. Sites with variable preservation were chosen to test the applicability of the method. A flowchart to aid in identification of bony changes is presented. The method requires the recording of IPR on three separate sections of the rib (neck, angle, and shaft) and the allocation of ribs into rib cage regions of upper, upper‐middle, middle, lower‐middle, and lower.ResultsResults demonstrate differences in the distribution of IPR between sites and verify the method's applicability to archeological sites with various levels of skeletal preservation.DiscussionWhile crude prevalence rates can indicate the number of individuals experiencing lower respiratory tract disease within a site, this method can provide information about the distribution of IPR within the rib cage. This should lead to new ways of distinguishing respiratory diseases within archeological populations. This method also allows for comparability between well‐preserved and lesser‐preserved sites by accommodating for rib fragmentation.