Headed South Research Articles

Rethinking the ?Islamic City? from the Perspective of Jewish Space

In December 1863, Moses Montefiore, the prominent British philanthropist and self-styled defender of world Jewry, came to Morocco. As had been the case with several of his previous visits to the Muslim world, his trip was motivated by reports of the mistreatment of his coreligionists: three Jews from the coastal town of Saffi had been falsely accused of conspiring to murder a Spanish tax collector. By the time Sir Moses arrived on the scene, one of the men had already been publicly executed in the main marketplace of Tangier, and the remaining two awaited judgment under disastrous conditions in the city's Kasbah (the symbolic if not always actual residence of the sultan).' Thanks no doubt to his great diplomatic skills, Montefiore secured the prisoners' freedom after just one brief meeting with the Spanish minister. He then headed south to Marrakesh to plead the case of Moroccan Jews more generally at the royal court. His efforts once again met with success: Sultan Muhammad IV was persuaded to enact a royal edict (dahir) promising that his Jewish subjects would henceforth be protected from oppression in accordance with Islamic law. A satisfied Sir Moses returned home to England. The Montefiore visit is often seen as a watershed in Moroccan Jewish history, insofar as it set into motion a pattern of foreign diplomatic

American Politics Heads South

American Politics Heads South

A novel 1,2-migration of acyloxy, phosphatyloxy, and sulfonyloxy groups in allenes: efficient synthesis of tri- and tetrasubstituted furans.

Heading south: The 1,2-migration of the acyloxy, phosphatyloxy, and sulfonyloxy groups in allenyl systems has been discovered. This migration, combined with the transition-metal-catalyzed cycloisomerization reaction, leads to the efficient synthesis of tri- and tetrasubstituted acyl-, phosphatyl-, and sulfonyloxy-substituted furans as single regioisomers. Supporting information for this article is available on the WWW under http://www.wiley-vch.de/contents/jc_2002/2004/z53535_s.pdf or from the author. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.

BRAWNY BEES ARE FEEBLE

Most bees have struck a pretty rich deal with the plants they frequent. Lured by the promise of a nectar feast, the insects, in turn, pollinate their flowers. But the pact between male orchid bees and their preferred blooms looks much more onesided. In return for their nuptial role, the male's only reward is a dab of the orchid's scent. But it wasn't the bee's fragranceharvesting habits that attracted Michael Dillon and Robert Dudley to the insects. It was their remarkable size range. Some orchid bees weigh in at 50 mg, while others tip the scales at 1 g. And they're all champion hoverers. Which made Dillon and Dudley suspect that the insects were ideal for studying the way that creatures scale up the mechanical forces that keep them aloft. Dillon headed south to the insect's homes in Panama, where he spent three months collecting bees and testing their weightlifting prowess to get to grips with allometric scaling in insect flight(p. 417).Dillon explains that trapping the bees was easy, all he had to do was soak blotting paper in each species' favourite scent; the bees came flocking. The next trick was to attach a tiny beaded string to the insect's body, without getting stung. But this wasn't as tricky as it might sound. Only males are attracted to the orchid's scent, and they aren't armed with painful stings,although the odd female did turn up from time to time, making the encounters more lively.Ready for their weightlifting task, Dillon filmed the insects as they lifted the beaded string until it became too heavy, and then began descending gently back to earth. Dillon was most intrigued by the moments before the weight became too great; he knew that was the point when the insects were exerting their maximum force. All Dillon had to do was measure the length of the string to measure the insect's maximum force.Back in the lab in Texas, Dillon was faced with hours of hovering flight footage that needed painstaking analysis before he could begin to understand how the insect's aeronautic abilities scaled with size. But eventually his patience was rewarded. He realised that the larger insects were generating larger forces as they hovered, but when he looked at the force per unit mass,he realised that the larger insects were generating much less force per mg of muscle than their tinier cousins. So even though the larger insects had scaledup their muscle size pro rata, the power generated per unit mass by the flight muscles had declined. And when Dillon compared the insect's wing sizes, the larger bees' wings were much bigger than if they were in the same proportion to their bodies, probably to compensate for the larger bees'relatively feeble muscles.`It was neat to see the mass-specific force dropping with the increase in muscle mass' says Dillon, and adds that `these data sit well' with the insect's antics in their forest homes. `The little ones hover on a dime' he remembers `while the big ones lumber along. You can hear them coming.'

Hedge fund performance and persistence in bull and bear markets

This paper tests the performance of 2894 hedge funds in a time period that encompasses unambiguously bullish and bearish trends whose pivot is commonly set at March 2000. The database proves to be fairly trustable with respect to the most important biases in hedge funds studies, despite the high attrition rate of funds observed in the down market. An original ten-factor composite performance model is applied that achieves very high significance levels. The analysis of performance indicates that most hedge funds significantly outperformed the market during the whole test period, mostly thanks to the bullish subperiod. In contrast, no significant underperformance of individual hedge funds strategies is observed when markets headed south. The analysis of persistence yields very similar results, with most of the predictability being found among middle performers during the bullish period. However, the ‘Market Neutral’ strategy represents a remarkable exception, as abnormal performance is sustained throughout and significant persistence can be found between the 20% and 69% best performers in this category, probably thanks to an extreme adaptability and a very active investment behaviour.

Rethinking the "Islamic City" from the Perspective of Jewish Space

In December 1863, Moses Montefiore, the prominent British philanthropist and self-styled defender of world Jewry, came to Morocco. As had been the case with several of his previous visits to the Muslim world, his trip was motivated by reports of the mistreatment of his coreligionists: three Jews from the coastal town of Saffi had been falsely accused of conspiring to murder a Spanish tax collector. By the time Sir Moses arrived on the scene, one of the men had already been publicly executed in the main marketplace of Tangier, and the remaining two awaited judgment under disastrous conditions in the city's Kasbah (the symbolic if not always actual residence of the sultan).1 Thanks no doubt to his great diplomatic skills, Montefiore secured the prisoners' freedom after just one brief meeting with the Spanish minister. He then headed south to Marrakesh to plead the case of Moroccan Jews more generally at the royal court. His efforts once again met with success: Sultan Muhammad IV was persuaded to enact a royal edict (dahir) promising that his Jewish subjects would henceforth be protected from oppression in accordance with Islamic law. A satisfied Sir Moses returned home to England. The Montefiore visit is often seen as a watershed in Moroccan Jewish history, insofar as it set into motion a pattern of foreign diplomatic [End Page 118] pressure intertwined with European Jewish involvement that would serve as a backdrop to Jewish-Muslim relations in Morocco from that point onward. Aside from its broader ramifications, however, Montefiore's visit also left its mark—to some extent quite literally—on an altogether more local level. While in Marrakesh, Montefiore, despite being Jewish (not to mention of probable Moroccan descent),2 chose not to reside in the house in the city's Jewish quarter that had been prepared for him and the (Christian) physician accompanying him, as would have been customary for foreigners, especially a foreign Jew. Instead, the two men stayed in a much finer house in the medina, the Muslim residential and commercial area. And in so doing, they transgressed a fundamental rule of the so-called "Islamic city": the segregation of non-Muslims from the living spaces of the Muslim population. It is not surprising, then, that upon Montefiore's departure the house in question was immediately sealed up and "regarded as unclean and unfit for the dwelling of a true believer" thereafter.3 The "Islamic city," it may be recalled, is the model developed by colonial (mainly French) urbanists to describe the defining characteristics of cities in the Middle East and North Africa, implicitly if not explicitly in contrast to those of Europe.4 Among its central tenets is that Islam, which is understood as a fundamentally urban religion, gave rise to cities whose morphologies were determined primarily if not exclusively by the fulfillment of the religious obligations of Islam. Thus a "real" city is identified as such by the presence of institutions like a Friday mosque (jƒmi') for conducting prayers, a market complex or bazaar (s¡q), where the various "guilds" organized according to religious strictures were found, and communal baths (¬ammƒm) for maintaining ritual purity. No less critical to the model's coherence than the presence of the above institutions is the corresponding absence of any significant non-Muslim influence on the life, and hence topography, of the city. When it comes to Morocco, however, such an explanation for how the city looks and functions falters when confronted with the long and multi-valenced history of Moroccan Jewry. The only surviving indigenous religious minority in Morocco, Jews historically constituted up to 50 percent of the urban population and were by all accounts highly assimilated into Moroccan economic, social, and even political life. Nonetheless, in Morocco one institution existed to which the model's adherents could point in order to restore a degree of analytic integrity to the "Islamic city" and particularly its insistence on the...

American Politics Heads South

American Politics Heads South

ANCIENT ALTERNATIVE FOR ADHESION

It's one of the oldest scenes in the `Horror' repertoire; a spider's web brushing a passing face! But spiders and their webs have been around longer than humans have been afraid of them. Today, most spiders' webs are coated in a sticky glue to ensnare flies and other victims. But a few ancient species stuck to an older, drier alternative. They produce cribellar threads;thousands of minute filaments coating a supporting thread that snag insects by their setae, like Velcro hoops over loops. Remarkably, the silk also sticks to glass and metal sheer surfaces through van der Waals molecular forces. But not all dry webbed spiders produce the same types of microscopic fibril. Some species produce lumpy fibrils, while the most ancient member of the cribellar family, the rare Hypochilidae, produce smooth fibrils. Intrigued by the differences between both types of silk, Brent Opell and his student Anya Hawthorn noticed that the lumpy fibre's adhesive properties improved under damp conditions, while the smooth fibres didn't. Wondering whether the knobbly fibres picked up water and adhered through hygroscopic forces, the team modelled the fibre's adhesive qualities under dry and damp conditions(p. 3905).First they needed fresh spider silk, but Hypochilus refused to spin its smooth fibred webs in the lab, even though Hawthorn and Opell built them cosy cliffs to make their homes on. So the team headed south to the spider's home in North Carolina to gather the unusual silk. Fortunately, Hyptiotes was more cooperative, contented to construct their knobbly silk webs in plastics boxes in the lab.With a steady supply of web silk, the team began measuring both fibres'stickiness as the humidity rose. Although the `sticky-o-meter' was straightforward to use in the field, operating it inside a humidity-controlled chamber was tedious, but Hawthorn persevered. As the humidity rose, the knobbly silk became stickier, while Hypochilus' remained the same.But was the increased stickiness due to humidity, or some other physical property? Hawthorn and Opell modelled the effects of van der Waals and hygroscopic forces on the smooth and lumpy silks. After measuring the area of both fibres that pealed away from the sticky-o-meter's plate, and calculating the resulting van der Waals and hygroscopic forces, the team realised that the increased humidity was giving Hyptiotes the sticky edge.Which probably gives Hyptiotes the mechanical edge too. When the conditions are right, their silk becomes stickier by freeloading on the moist fibre's hygroscopic attachment. But if Hypochilus want to increase their threads' stickability, they have to coat their threads with more smooth fibrils, at a significant metabolic cost. Which probably explains why most dry webbed spiders have upgraded to hygroscopic knobbly fibres as a low-cost alternative adhesive, leaving the Hypochilidae as the sole surviving link to the spiders' silky past.

Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of DixieDemocracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie. By Augustus B. CochranIII. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Pp. 307. $29.95.)

Previous articleNext article No AccessDemocracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie. By Augustus B. CochranIII. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Pp. 307. $29.95.)Paige SchneiderPaige SchneiderUniversity of the South Search for more articles by this author University of the SouthPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 65, Number 4November 2003 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381600002395 Views: 9Total views on this site Copyright © 2003, Southern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Hola Valencia!

It's that time of year again. The first leaves of autumn are falling and migratory birds are beginning to head south to warmer climes. This year they are joined by are rather different flock, delegates and exhibitors heading for the European Powder Metallurgy Association's PM 2003 Congress and Exhibition in Valencia.

Head south for the sun and fun at Valencia's PM2003

PM2003 has been billed as the 'hottest powder metallurgy event this year'. It will be staged at the spectacular Palacio de Congresos in Valencia this month and the three-day event is expected to draw PM specialists from all over the world…

CHICKS SNOOZE TO SNIFF

By the time a 45-day-old blue petrel chick emerges from its burrow to embark on its maiden foraging flight, both parents have taken off, leaving the youngster to fend for itself. So how does the youngster know what to look for when hunting krill? Gabrielle Nevitt is fascinated by the way procellariiform seabirds, such as blue petrels and thin billed prions, track down food with their sense of smell, and wondered whether the youngsters recognise their prey's smell even before they have left their burrow. Working with Henri Weimerskirch and Francesco Bonadonna in France, Nevitt and her lab decided to test the chick's responses to a range of smells, some of which they'd encounter in their natural surroundings(p. 1615).However, Nevitt suddenly had to cry off on the eve of departing for the sub-Antarctic, so Greg Cunningham stepped into the breach and headed south to join Weimerskirch's team, where they intended to record the chick's reactions using a noninvasive electrophysiological test. And when they finally arrived at the shack that would be their laboratory for the next month, the electricity supply was too unreliable to use for the sensitive tests; `it was a frustrating time' remembers Nevitt. But Cunningham had a backup plan. Just before leaving California, he had read a paper describing how sleeping chicken chicks responded to puffs of odours by `peeping' gently in their sleep. Could he get the same response from dozing petrel chicks?He headed back out to the nesting site to retrieve chicks from their burrows, before lulling them to sleep with the warmth from a light bulb and testing out their nostrils with dimethyl sulphide (DMS). The simple approach worked spectacularly well! The blue petrels and prions stirred, and sometimes even woke up, whenever Cunningham puffed a whiff of DMS past their nostrils,while the diving petrel's slumber remained undisturbed.Nevitt admits she was surprised by the diving petrel's lack of response to DMS, but it could be related to their hunting strategy. There is evidence that both blue petrels and prions hunt by tracking the plumes of dimethyl sulphide that mark the site of a krill swarm, while diving petrels `fly like bumble bees over the ocean, attacking waves and... diving a considerable distance'and probably rely less on their sense of smell while tracking prey. In fact,Nevitt believes that the diving petrel chicks probably can smell DMS, but`they don't respond to it in this context' she explains.Nevitt is delighted that such a low-tech approach has proved so successful,allowing the team to reliably test large numbers of chicks in Antarctica's inhospitable conditions in the most peaceful way imaginable.

From Togo and Sweden: Kpomassie and Lindqvist

Brought together through a coincidence of publishing, these two books form a remarkable pair when read together: the limpid narrative of a Togolese who heads north to live in Greenland because of a boyhood encounter with a book about Eskimos; and the edgy fragments of a Swede who heads south to lose himself in the Western Sahara after reading too many desert books by nineteenth-century Europeans. At times, An African in Greenland and Desert Divers become so exactly symmetrical—in the manner of a photographic positive and negative—that it is difficult to see one apart from the other.

Hedge Fund Performance and Persistence in Bull and Bear Markets

This paper tests the performance of 2894 hedge funds in a time period that encompasses unambiguously bullish and bearish trends whose pivot is commonly set at March 2000. Our database proves to be fairly trustable with respect to the most important biases in hedge funds studies, despite the high attrition rate of funds observed in the down market. We apply an original ten-factor composite performance model that achieves very high significance levels. The analysis of performance indicates that most hedge funds significantly out-performed the market during the whole test period, mostly thanks to the bullish sub-period. In contrast, no significant under-performance of individual hedge funds strategies is observed when markets headed south. The analysis of persistence yields very similar results, with most of the predictability being found among middle performers during the bullish period. However, the Market Neutral strategy represents a remarkable exception, as abnormal performance is sustained throughout and significant persistence can be found between the 20% and 69% best performers in this category, probably thanks to an extreme adaptability and a very active investment behavior.

Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie (review)

Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie (review)

Want to See Real Chicago? Then Hop on the El!

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article APA InstituteFull AccessWant to See Real Chicago? Then Hop on the El!Mark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:2 Aug 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.37.15.0022APA members visiting Chicago for this year’s Institute on Psychiatric Services can count on plenty of the usual fare—bus tours and boat rides—to see the town.But one of the best and cheapest ways to get an introduction to Chicago (at least its North Side and downtown) is to take a ride on the Ravenswood Elevated train. For three years, when I lived in Chicago, I commuted downtown by catching the Ravenswood El (also known as the Brown Line) at Addison. While it was for me—as for thousands of daily commuters—principally a way to get to work, it was also an inspiring, daily reminder of the vastness and variety of the city.And when visitors who wanted a relaxing way to get a feel for Chicago but who didn’t have time for lengthy tours (or the patience for city traffic), I always told them to hop the Ravenswood line.APA members staying at hotels in or near downtown will find stops at the Merchandise Mart or any of several stations in a circular path around “the Loop.” Traveling north, the Ravenswood intersects with other train lines for easy access to North Side landmarks, restaurants, and parks.As the editors of Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide (Chicago Review Press, 1993) note, a ride on the Ravenswood El is not unlike taking a double-decker tour bus in London—but without the tour fee. For the price of a CTA fare card ($1.50) you can conduct your own tour, with a vista of the city both east and west, riding above the noise and traffic of the city.The Real City Guide, taking the reader on a ride from north to south, captures it well: “Starting out at almost any station on the North Side, you’ll pass blocks of typical Chicago residential streets. Loop-bound between Belmont and Armitage, the buildings get increasingly elegant; the view in both directions at the Armitage stop shows gracious two-flats with ornamentation just about at eye level. Looking forward, you get a good glimpse of the approaching Chicago skyline, with the John Hancock building off to the left and the Sears Tower straight ahead. Between the Armitage and Sedgwick stops, the track takes a few twists and turns, so you get a little roller-coaster action along with the sightseeing experience.”The track straightens and heads south after Sedgwick, with the River North gallery district immediately ahead, Old Town and the high-priced Gold Coast to the left, and the Cabrini-Green housing project to the right. After the Chicago stop, the train heads straight for the mammoth Merchandise Mart.“Above the broad brick expanse of the mart you’ll see a sliver of green glass, the 333 West Wacker Building, and on top of that hovers the Sears Tower. Three generations of Chicago architecture in a single slice.”And then, as the Real City Guide notes, comes the best part of the ride: crossing the Chicago River into the urban canyon that is the Loop. On a bright day, with the sun illuminating the bridges and buildings, the view of the river from the train can be truly impressive. To the left are the twin towers of Marina City (known locally as the corn-cob towers), one of the city’s distinctive landmarks. To the right, 333 Wacker reflects the river’s gentle curve.Once in the Loop, the train makes a turn east at Van Buren and passes the Harold Washington Library. To the left along Van Buren are two venerable old Chicago office buildings, the Fisher and the Monadnock. The train loops back north on Wabash Avenue, where it runs close enough to the buildings to allow visitors a peek inside the windows. (Mystery readers take note: the fictional Chicago private eye V.I. Warshawski, the leading character in dozens of novels by author Sara Paretsky, has her offices somewhere in here.) Heading back west on Lake Street, the train passes the Chicago Theatre on the left and the State of Illinois Building.Then, it’s back over the river heading north again. ▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Democracy Heading South: National Politics in the Shadow of Dixie

In a time when many citizens feel that American politics has changed in disturbing ways, Gus Cochran believes that democracy itself may be heading South. And that, he argues, spells trouble for us all. In this provocative book, Cochran links regional to national politics to show how our political institutions have come to resemble those of the old Solid South. The regional politics of that earlier era, he reminds us, offered little real political choice, was dominated by one-party politics, answered to well-heeled special interests, stoutly resisted federal power, ignored the region's festering racism, and promoted demagoguery and personality over substance and true accountability. For Cochran, the sense of deja vu is overwhelming - and alarming. Deftly balancing history and political critique, Cochran describes the origins and traits of the Solidly Democratic Southern political system from the turn of the century through the 1960s and its transformation in the wake of that turbulent decade. The South, he shows, eventually modernized and became more integrated, even as the New Deal unraveled and the North became more racially polarized. As the regions' shifting fortunes evolved, national politics witnessed a backlash to the civil rights movement (the original engine of political change) that turned the New South into a presidential power broker and spurred a Republican party renaissance nationwide. Cochran maintains that national politics today offers an array of disturbing parallels with old-style Southern politics. He notes that even the controversial Clinton impeachment - in which many of the major actors were Southern - evokes the down-and-dirty politics of old Dixie. Even so, he doesn't push the analogies between South and nation too far. He recognizes significant differences as well as parallels but argues that recent trends toward convergence deserve a close and critical look. In the end, Cochran's warning shot raises critical questions about the future direction of American democracy, while suggesting potential correctives through campaign finance reform, better inducements to voter participation, and more effective means for informing the electorate. Eloquently argued, his book is also a call to action - before American democracy heads South for good.

A Day That Will Live In … ?

A Day That Will Live In … ?

Positions: Looking East, Heading South

Les iles de l'Ocean Indien offrent un espace a partir duquel la recherche post-coloniale pourrait reviser les meta-discours africains et europeens. Depuis les premieres deportations d'Africains, l'Afrique a porte son regard vers l'Ouest et vers le Nord. Nous proposons de regarder vers l'Est et de nous diriger vers le sud, vers l'Ocean Indien, ses mers et ses terres, site de commerce et de voyages intercontinentaux, de conversions et de conquetes, de migration et de creolisation. Dresser la carte de l'Ocean Indien revele une cartologie de transactions et d'echanges trans-oceaniques passes et presents. L'Afrique y rencontre l'Inde, l'Asie du Sud et de l'Est, le monde de l'Islam, et les iles. C'est une cartologie de flux trans-merid-ionaux: Asie de l'Est/ Afrique, Asie du Sud/ Afrique, iles/ Afrique, et de connections avec les Ameriques et l'Europe.

Scots urged to boost pay or watch staff head south

RCN board's invest in nurses campaign is launched with plea to scottish executive