Local Symbols Research Articles

Local Symbols, Global Networks: Rereading the Murals of Belfast

Traditionally, the political murals of Belfast have been understood as expressions of either loyalist or republican communities, a reading that reduces the complex struggles of Northern Ireland into a simple conflict between two groups. This article rereads the murals through the specific context of the peace process, in which the “two communities” thesis is losing its relevance. It suggests that when the murals are understood through three, wider networks—production, signification, and reception—it is possible to see how they disrupt ongoing debates about public art, make explicit gestures to other international conflicts (such as the hunger strikers in Turkey), and encourage a new form of political tourism. Rereading the murals in this way reveals the multiple global networks that the city of Belfast is linked into, networks that are silenced by a traditional “two communities” framework.

Unpacking Adaptation: The Female Inheritance Movement in Hong Kong

In 1994, after a year of intense activism by indigenous women and their urban supporters, indigenous women in the New Territories of Hong Kong were legally allowed to inherit land for the first time. In pushing for legislative change, the female inheritance movement adopted key ideas—gender equality, human rights and a critique of patriarchy—from a global vocabulary of feminism and human rights. This article examines this rights frame to understand how, if at all, activists modified international conceptions of discrimination and rights to fit Hong Kong. Overall, the ideology was not fundamentally altered or adapted, but indigenized by local activists through the use of local symbols. More deep-rooted change was not necessary for two reasons: First, in the pre-handover moment, rights arguments derived political currency from their association with an international community. Also, critical movement participants, here termed translators, helped encompass the indigenous women's individual kinship grievances within a broader movement based on rights.

The Index of b-Pseudodifferential Operators on Manifolds with Corners

On compact manifolds with corners of arbitrary codimension, we characterize the ‘multi-cylindrical end’ (or b-type) pseudodifferential operators that are Fredholm on weighted Sobolev spaces and we compute their indices. The index formula contains the usual interior term manufactured from the local symbols of the operator and also contains boundary correction terms corresponding to eta-type invariants of the induced operators on the boundary faces.

An Algebraic-Geometric Method for Constructing Generalized Local Symbols on Curves

The aim of this work is to provide an algebraic-geometric method to construct generalized local symbols on curves as morphisms of group schemes. From a closed point of a complete, irreducible, and nonsingular curve C over a perfect field k as the only data, using theta groups over Picard schemes of curves, we offer a geometric construction that allows us to define generalizations of the tame symbol and the Hilbert norm residue symbol.

Charisma and Possession in Africa and Brazil

The spread of evangelical Christianity across the globe is characterized by both a high degree of similarity in liturgy, symbolism and methods of organization and communication, and at the same time a remarkable ability to plug in to local indigenous rituals, symbols and practices related to possession and magic, to disease and healing. This poses complex questions for understanding ethnicity and also cultural globalization, which are explored using contemporary and historical sources relating to South and West Africa and to Brazil. The ability of those evangelical churches which advertise their ability to transmit healing powers most insistently, to transpose healing from individual to community, to replace mystery with transparency, is set against their opportunistic and clientelistic political involvements and lack of transparency in their organization.

“We Closed Down the Damn School”: The Party Culture and Student Protest at Southern Illinois University During the Vietnam War Era

In May 1970, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (SIUC), was one of hundreds of college campuses that shut down for the rest of the term in the wake of violence that followed the killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University. This article analyzes the makeup of the student movement at SIUC, arguing that it was composed of three strains: student rights, New Left, and what we call the “party culture.” Local issues such as the hours women had to be in their dormitories at night brought such groups together in an attempt to gain control over their own lives. The movement did not turn its full attention to the Vietnam War until it had a local symbol of university complicity with the war, the controversial Vietnamese Studies Center. In detailing the events at SIUC, we challenge the standard narrative of the sixties that treats the later part of the decade as a period of “decline.” We argue that the movement was still going strong, not only in spite of but because of the turn to a more expressive politics.

Human–computer interface design issues for a multi-cultural and multi-lingual English speaking country — Botswana

This paper reports on research carried out to determine whether a localised interface is preferred by users in a multi-cultural and multi-lingual country where a non-local language is nationally used,. We attempted to discover whether local symbols are more acceptable to users as icons and also whether the current phrases used in menus and icon descriptions are clearly understood by the various communities. A survey was conducted nation-wide among computer end-users in Botswana. The results indicate an overwhelming desire from users for a localised interface. However, there appears to be little need for localised icons and no agreement as to which language to use for text-based interfaces.

House to Palace, Village to State: Scaling up Architecture and Ideology

It would seem desirable for any state to gum an ideological foothold in local knowledge and symbols to facilitate the assimilation of its order by average citizens and to argue for its legitimacy. However, given the "lived reality" of local knowledge and Us practical and symbolic "efficacy," as guaranteed in part through the skills of ritual specialise not in the service of the skiie. the introduction and maintenance of state ideology is neither an issue of facile appropriation o/local symbols nor a straightforward imposition on local knowledge. The complexity of the architectural and ideological scaling up from traditional house to "palace" and polity are discussed lor nineteenth‐century Imerina, Madagascar, using ethnohistorical. archaeological, and ethnographic information. We attempt to present this argument through the use of evocative concrete imagery, one stylistic aspect of local knowledge, rather than through an exclusive use of analytical, abstract declarations. [Madagascar, symbolic organization of space, state origins, ideology, local knowledge]

On the Orthogonal of Cyclotomic Units in Positive Characteristic

(P). In order to do this, we find anexplicit reciprocity law for this local symbol (Theorem 3.6) which uses theCarlitzKummer morphisms (see Section 2 and [OK]). In the last sectionwe study the case of quadratic fields, in particular, we prove an analogueof the AnkenyArtinChowla Theorem.NotationsLet p be a prime number and let F

Fascist Italy’s 'Mare Nostrum' Policy and Turkey

Following his seizure of power in 1922, Mussolini began to pursue the policy of 'mare nostrum' of the ancient Romans. He had an eye on the Anatolian lands bordering the Mediterranean. Local symbol of the Italian menace was the Dodecanese Islands which were started to be fortified in 1934. Mussolini's speech of that year showed that Italy did not renounce its earlier designs on Turkish territory. Atatürk did not take Mussolini's claims seriously, but the danger Italy represented could not be ignored. During the Ethiopian crisis, Turkey supported the League of Nations' sanctions against Italy and advocated the principle of collective security. Facing Italian expansionism, Turkey requested the holding of an international conference in Montreux and succeeded to obtain the right of bringing back the Straits to full Turkish sovereignty. Turkey's distrust of Italy deepened in 1937 and 1938. Ankara disliked the policy of Rome-Berlin axis. It did not acquit Italy of designs in the eastern Mediterranean. Italian occupation of Albania in 1939 soon led to Turkey's signing of mutual assistance agreements with Britain and France. Italy sharply denounced the Turco-Anglo-French rapprochement. For Turkey, as an ally in the eastern Mediterranean, had the strength to tip the balance against Italy.

On Explicit Reciprocity Laws for the Local Carlitz–Kummer Symbols

In this article, we prove Wiles and Coates–Wiles explicit reciprocity laws for the local symbols attached to cyclotomic functions fields.

Huffman coding of DCT coefficients using dynamic codeword assignment and adaptive codebook selection

In many image sequence compression applications, Huffman coding is used to eliminate statistical redundancy resident in given data. The Huffman table is often pre-defined to reduce coding delay and table transmission overhead. Local symbol statistics, however, may be much different from the global ones manifested in the pre-defined table. In this paper, we propose three Huffman coding methods in which pre-defined codebooks are effectively manipulated according to local symbol statistics. The first proposed method dynamically modifies the symbol-codeword association without rebuilding the Huffman tree itself. The encoder and decoder maintain identical symbol-codeword association by performing the same modifications to the Huffman table, thus eliminating extra transmission overhead. The second method adaptively selects a codebook from a set of given ones, which produces the minimum number of bits. The transmission overhead in this method is the codebook selection information, which is observed to be negligible compared with the bit saving attained. Finally, we combine the two aforementioned methods to further improve compression efficiency. Experiments are carried out using five test image sequences to demonstrate the compression performance of the proposed methods.

Between Earth and Sky There Are Only a Few Large Boulders: Sovereignty and Monumentality in Central Madagascar

Stone is not only good to build with but to think with as well. Rural populations in the area of Imerina in central Madagascar continue to recognize certain boulders and large stones as associated with supernatural/chthonic forces and they continue to use stone in the construction of tombs and standing stones. The royal oral traditions of Merina monarchs recorded in the 19th century associated early as well as latter ruling sovereigns with stone constructions and the mounting of sacred boulders during various rituals. Such royal use of stone was not a simple and straightforward appropriation of local symbols and world view. It was distinct from but articulated with local practices and beliefs. This may be revealed in aspects of late 18th century royal construction with stone which, while making use of the “muscle” of local populations, may also have made use of the “mind” of full-time ritual specialists from the east coast of the island. Archaeological data, royal oral traditions and ethnographic work with contemporary ritual specialists involved in constructions using large cut stones serve as sources of information for this discussion.

Local and Global Residue Symbols for Algebraic Functions Fields

If q is a power of prime p, we let Fq be a finite field with q elements, R = Fq[x] the polynomial ring over Fq, and k = Fq(x) the rational function field. For any polynomial M ∈ R, Carlitz [1] defined a "cyclotomic" extension kM of k. Let K be any finite, separable extension of kM. For certain z, w ∈ K with w and M relatively prime, we define an Mth power residue symbol (the global symbol) (z/w)K,M. For any local field E that contains kM we define a local norm residue symbol (α, β; E, M) p where p is the prime of E and α and β are any elements of E with β ≠ 0. Since these symbols are based on the additive theory of Carlitz′s cyclotomic function fields, these symbols are additive. We prove this result along with other basic properties of these symbols, including the equation that connects the two symbols (Theorem 16) and the continuity of the local symbol (Theorem 20).

A graph grammar programming style for recognition of music notation

Graph grammars are a promising tool for solving picture processing problems. However, the application of graph grammars to diagram recognition has been limited to rather simple analysis of local symbol configurations. This paper introduces the Build-Weed-Incorporate programming style for graph grammars and shows its application in determining the meaning of complex diagrams, where the interaction among physically distant symbols is semantically important. Diagram recognition can be divided into two stages: symbol recognition and high-level recognition. Symbol recognition has been studied extensively in the literature. In this work we assume the existence of a symbol recognizer and use a graph grammar to assemble the diagram's information content from the symbols and their spatial relationships. The Build-Weed-Incorporate approach is demonstrated by a detailed discussion of a graph grammar for high-level recognition of music notation.

Enhancing Sensitivity to Organizational Symbols and Culture: An Experiential Approach for the Classroom

Competency in understanding and managing cultural aspects of the corporation has been identified by many scholars as an increasingly important management skill. This article identifies an important component of that skill as a sensitivity to how local organizational symbols shape one's cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. This article sketches a master's of business administration course designed to enhance sensitivity of practicing managers to the symbols that surround and shape them.

Dam Technology: Reflections on its Transfer

Abstract Dams to raise the water level higher than the surrounding ground are as old as human civilisation and, irrespective of size, depend on certain basic principles, whatever their materials of construction. In developing countries dams are often considered as local symbols of power and prestige, although frequently built there by modern high technology from abroad. Such various techniques of construction as stone masonry, reinforced embankments and prefabrication, for example bricks, are reviewed and illustrated. A combination of traditional materials and labour intensive construction should, where appropriate, be associated with the latest technology, sophisticated laboratories and computers, concludes the author.

A functional calculus of pseudodifferential operators on unimodular Lie groups

An algebra of pseudodifferential operators on a unimodular Lie group is constructed. It is defined by uniform estimates of the local symbols and by conditions on the decrease of the kernel outside the diagonal, formulated in terms of the weight function, having an intermediate growth between the volume function and a standard exponential. The decrease of the Green function is described, complex powers of elliptic operators of the considered classes are constructed, a meromorphic continuation of the kernels of complex powers is described, from where, in particular, the asymptotic behavior of the spectral function of operators of the considered class is obtained.

Local symbols and place identity: Tucson and Albuquerque

Urban landscapes abound with symbols of place identity. The names, signs, and logos of commercial and noncommercial establishments provide a lode for systematic analysis. Analysis of Tucson, Arizona, gives ten categories reflecting key physiographic, socioeconomic, historic, and cultural place attributes such as Spanish-Mexican, desert, mountain, sun, and cowboy-western. Having examined names in the present, the study next looks at names for the past century using old telephone and commercial directories. Finally it examines Albuquerque, New Mexico, using the same method.

Local Symbols and Sense of Place

(1986). Local Symbols and Sense of Place. Journal of Geography: Vol. 85, No. 4, pp. 164-168.