Positive Symbols Research Articles

Models of Structuring Peace and Gandhi in Modern Democratic System

The concept of world peace has been fascinating indeed. Gandhi realised that if the embodied human spirit was to progress, muffled as it was by selfish desire, man must be free, full of dignity and earnest about his own advance. “There has been no greater advocate of one humanity, one world and no stronger opponent of violence and war than Gandhi, for, his faith in no-violence was absolute and he believed that peaceful means alone could lead to peaceful ends [1]” ‘While world peace is undoubtedly one of the most universal and significant of human ideals, Gandhi has described is as ‘one of the few positive symbols having meaning for the whole of humanity’ The present world is beset with problems like international terrorism, arms race, civil wars and ethnic and religious problems. Though cold war is over, there are smaller conflicts between and among nations. These regional conflicts have disturbed international peace, attempts for disarmaments, confidence building measure etc. The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest and most destructive century in the history of the human race. According to UN statistics, there were only twenty eight days in this entire century of genocide and destruction without a war of some kind, in some part of the globe.

Facilitating Children’s Ability to Distinguish Symbols for Emotions: The Effects of Background Color Cues and Spatial Arrangement of Symbols on Accuracy and Speed of Search

Communication about feelings is a core element of human interaction. Aided augmentative and alternative communication systems must therefore include symbols representing these concepts. The symbols must be readily distinguishable in order for users to communicate effectively. However, emotions are represented within most systems by schematic faces in which subtle distinctions are difficult to represent. We examined whether background color cuing and spatial arrangement might help children identify symbols for different emotions. Thirty nondisabled children searched for symbols representing emotions within an 8-choice array. On some trials, a color cue signaled the valence of the emotion (positive vs. negative). Additionally, the symbols were either (a) organized with the negatively valenced symbols at the top and the positive symbols on the bottom of the display or (b) distributed randomly throughout. Dependent variables were accuracy and speed of responses. The speed with which children could locate a target was significantly faster for displays in which symbols were clustered by valence, but only when the symbols had white backgrounds. Addition of a background color cue did not facilitate responses. Rapid search was facilitated by a spatial organization cue, but not by the addition of background color. Further examination of the situations in which color cues may be useful is warranted.

Rethinking the role of film in German history: The Jewish comedies of the Weimar Republic

This article provides an alternative interpretation for the roles of film in the ideological struggle that tore apart the Weimar Republic. Emphasizing the overlooked contribution of Jewish film-makers and critics to the development of the German ‘national film’ after World War I, I examine popular comedies that were associated with the ‘Jewish milieu’ by contemporaneous reviewers. My analysis suggests that ‘Jewish’ characteristics were frequently envisioned as a positive symbol for the new urban environment. Such an environment was depicted as an exciting, fascinating sphere, in which middle-class liberalism thrives. Noting the social functions of humour, I argue that these popular comedies transformed the Jew from a threatening outsider to the iconic hero of the urban middle-class. Thus, Jewish comedies went beyond the discussion of both (anti-Semitic) stereotypes and the (Jewish) desire to assimilate into the German nation. Their protagonists struggled for social equality, disdained prejudices and segregation and were indifferent to the nationalist sentiment (of both German and Jewish nationalism). The ideological biases of the popular comedies demonstrate the need to re-consider the roles and influences of film in the political discourse of pre-Nazi Germany. It suggests that Weimar film-industry should be studied as a source for a progressive, liberal propaganda, no less than as a manifestation of nationalistic zeal, right-wing conservatism or careless escapism.

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The European Union’s Politics of Identity and the Legacy of 1989

The European Union loves anniversaries. To the extent that the European Union seeks to foster European identity, it is not surprising that it is increasingly deploying tools and methods that states use to create nations: commemoration of key moments in the nation's history serve as rallying points for national attachments, creating, or strengthening, a sense of national identity. Europe is different to nations. The European Union is not a state and Europe struggles to turn its history, or, to be more precise, its many histories, into one unifying narrative. From the outset, the European project was based on a somewhat paradoxical relationship with the past. Europeans were initially united more by that which they rejected than that to which they aspired. In 1945, the great French poet Paul Valery described the European predicament: 'We hope vaguely, we dread precisely.'1 What people vaguely hoped for was peace; what they dreaded was the devastation of past wars. To find more positive sources of identification in their past, Europeans had to reach back further, to the Enlightenment period and its cosmopolitan ideals,2 which found expression in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Schiller's Ode to Joy. It is thus fitting that the European Union adopted the tune of the symphony's finale as its anthem in 1986.3 As successful as the project of Europe's unity has been in securing peace and prosperity underpinned by a strong commitment to liberal democracy, the European project was initially limited to Western Europe. The collapse of communism enabled Europe to reach beyond these limitations. For the first time in their turbulent histories, the nations of Europe in the West and in the East could pursue unity together. The peaceful revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe gave the European Union a new set of images and a date to remember: 9 November 1989 - the day on which the Berlin Wall lost its purpose. One of the first public celebrations of this event was the performance in the Schauspielhaus Berlin (East Germany) of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by a multinational orchestra with musicians from Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and France, and conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Responding to the spirit of the time - the concert took place only a few weeks after the demise of the wall - Bernstein felt justified in making a small but significant change to Schiller's lyric, substituting the word 'Freiheit' (freedom) for 'Freude' (joy). Ever since, the liberation of 1989 and Beethoven's famous finale seem to have gone hand in hand as two positive symbols of European unity. The same music accompanied celebrations of the 'big-bang' enlargement in May 2004, which brought eight countries from the former Eastern Bloc into the European Union, followed by the admission of Bulgaria and Romania in January 2007.4 Twenty years after the demise of communism, the European Union has succeeded in revamping its institutional architecture through the adoption of the Lisbon Treaty. The new Europe of 27 member states needs more, however, than new institutions; it requires a new self-understanding. Judging from a number of recent attempts by key EU actors, achieving a basic agreement about the 'meaning' of decisive events in Europe's recent past, including 9 November 1989, might prove at least as troublesome as the protracted process of institutional reform. The main aim of this chapter is to show the limits of EU identity politics, with a particular focus on the legacy of 1989 in Poland, Germany and Europe at large. The first section of the chapter presents the traditional Western narrative of European unification from the Schuman declaration of 9 May 1950, which is celebrated officially as Europe's birthday, to the Treaty of Maastricht of 1993, which strengthened Europe's unity practically and symbolically through the creation of the European Union. The second section focuses on one recent EU attempt to assimilate 1989 into this preconceived narrative. …

Interwar fascism and the post-1989 radical right: Ideology, opportunism and historical legacy in Bulgaria and Romania

Do contemporary Bulgarian and Romanian radical right movements represent a legacy of interwar fascism? We argue that the key element is not that interwar movements provided legacies (of structures, ideologies, or organizations) but rather a symbolic “heritage” that contemporary movements can draw upon. The crucial legacy is, rather, the Socialist era, which in asserting its own definitions of interwar fascism created a “useable past” for populist movements. The Peoples’ Republics created a flawed historical consciousness whereby demonized interwar rightist movements could be mobilized after 1989 as historical expressions of “anti-Communist” — and, ergo, positive symbols among those of anti-Communist sentiment. Although radical right parties in both countries may cast themselves as “heirs” to interwar fascism, they share little in common in terms of ideology. Their claims to a fascist legacy is, rather, a factor of how their respective Socialist states characterized the past.

Full rank interpolatory subdivision schemes: Kronecker, filters and multiresolution

In this extension of earlier work, we point out several ways how a multiresolution analysis can be derived from a finitely supported interpolatory matrix mask which has a positive definite symbol on the unit circle except at −1. A major tool in this investigation will be subdivision schemes that are obtained by using convolution or correlation operations based on replacing the usual matrix multiplications by Kronecker products.

The Eternal Nile: Aquatic Imagery in Egyptian Christian Art

Aquatic life is frequently used as a symbol in Biblical and early Christian symbolism, from the plague of frogs in Exodus to the fish in early Christianity. Aquatic life has its most enduring and vibrant expressions in Coptic art, where baptismal scenes of Jesus have rivers rich with aquatic life. Many of these symbols are not necessarily Christian and have their roots in pre-Christian art. For example, the frog, potentially a negative symbol in Christian art on account of the plague of frogs in Exodus, is a positive symbol of regeneration in Egyptian pre-Christian and Christian art. The prevalence of aquatic life in Coptic art may explain the unique and vibrant river scene in the twelfth-century Annunciation icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Sinai (fig. 1). Aquatic life in Coptic art represents an interesting intersection of pre-Christian and Christian symbolism. The key to understanding these symbols is a reading of the images that draws from the Christian theology of baptism and pre-Christian descriptions of the Nile. These symbols may be interpreted not just as mere decoration but as having a significant theological role in the artistic programs in which they appear.

Toeplitz operators on the space of analytic functions with logarithmic growth

Continuous and compact Toeplitz operators for positive symbols are characterized on the space H V ∞ of analytic functions with logarithmic growth on the open unit disc of the complex plane. The characterizations are in terms of the behaviour of the Berezin transform of the symbol. The space H V ∞ was introduced and studied by Taskinen. The Bergman projection is continuous on this space in a natural way, which permits to define Toeplitz operators. Sufficient conditions for general symbols are also presented.

The Marble Beaches of Tuscany*

ABSTRACT. Beach‐nourishment operations designed to replace sediment lost through erosion change the identity and meaning of coastal landscapes. Seven beaches in Tuscany, nourished with marble‐quarry waste, reveal how an industrial byproduct is naturalized by particle rounding and sorting and can become a positive symbol of human‐altered nature. The marble was placed on formerly sandy beaches, resulting in different grain size and color of sediments, beach morphology, and value for human use. The abrasion rate of marble makes the nourished beaches unsatisfactory when viewed solely as protection structures, but the rapid particle rounding and aesthetic appeal of marble increase the acceptability of the beaches for recreation.

Positive Toeplitz operators between the pluriharmonic Bergman spaces

We study Toeplitz operators between the pluriharmonic Bergman spaces for positive symbols on the ball. We give characterizations of bounded and compact Toeplitz operators taking a pluriharmonic Bergman space bp into another bq for 1 < p, q < ∞ in terms of certain Carleson and vanishing Carleson measures.

Full rank positive matrix symbols: interpolation and orthogonality

We investigate full rank interpolatory vector subdivision schemes whose masks are positive definite on the unit circle except the point z=1. Such masks are known to give rise to convergent schemes with a cardinal limit function in the scalar case. In the full rank vector case, we show that there also exists a cardinal refinable function based on this mask, however, with respect to a different notion of refinability which nevertheless also leads to an iterative scheme for the computation of vector fields. Moreover, we show the existence of orthogonal scaling functions for multichannel wavelets and give a constructive method to obtain these scaling functions.

Toeplitz Operators on Arveson and Dirichlet Spaces

We define Toeplitz operators on all Dirichlet spaces on the unit ball of \(\mathbb{C}^{N}\) and develop their basic properties. We characterize bounded, compact, and Schatten-class Toeplitz operators with positive symbols in terms of Carleson measures and Berezin transforms. Our results naturally extend those known for weighted Bergman spaces, a special case applies to the Arveson space, and we recover the classical Hardy-space Toeplitz operators in a limiting case; thus we unify the theory of Toeplitz operators on all these spaces. We apply our operators to a characterization of bounded, compact, and Schatten-class weighted composition operators on weighted Bergman spaces of the ball. We lastly investigate some connections between Toeplitz and shift operators.

Symbolic Significance of Initials on Longevity

The longevities of deceased major league baseball players who died prior to 1950 (N=3835) and whose initials formed acronyms, words, or names with "positive" or "negative" affect, as rated a priori by two judges, were compared with those for a group of neutral controls matched for birth year and career length, using the Berkeley standardized mortality tables. Players (n=11) with positive initials, e.g., A.C.E., lived a mean of 13 years longer than players (n=30) with negative initials, e.g., D.E.D., or players with neutral initials (n=864). These results corroborated a previous study and suggest positive name symbols are associated with increased longevity in this sample.

From stigma to self-assertion

This article examines the process by which the Paraiyars, one of the Dalit communities of Tamil Nadu, South India, attempt to reconstruct their identity by revalorising the symbols of pollution that defined them as low and defiled into positive symbols of their culture. It argues that conflict, confrontation and radical rupture from the dominant community were essential for the formation of a new collective consciousness. Conflictual social relations between the Paraiyars and the Vanniyars, the dominant high-caste group in the village, became a resource and impetus that made the Paraiyars conscious of their stigmatised identity and persuaded them to form a new and positive self-identity that expressed aspirations for the future even as it memorialised past suffering. This article focuses on the resignification of the parai drum and the related symbols and myths that were used by the higher castes to define the Paraiyars as polluted and segregated.

Positive Toeplitz operators on pluriharmonic Bergman spaces

We study Toeplitz operators on the pluriharmonic Bergman spaces $b^{p}$ for $1<p<\infty$. We give characterizations of Toeplitz operators with positive symbols to be bounded, compact and in the Schatten classes. Also, we describe the essential spectra of Toeplitz operators with uniformly continuous symbols.

Posing with the flag: Trait-specific effects of symbols on person perception

People often become associated, either intentionally or coincidentally, with emotionally laden symbols. This work examines whether such associations lead to the ascription of specific symbol-implied traits. Experiment 1 demonstrates that symbols that logically have implications regarding a target individual influence spontaneous trait impressions, and do so even more strongly when the symbol–target pairing is memorable. Moreover, consistent with work on cue diagnosticity in trait attribution, these effects were more pronounced for negative than positive symbols related to sociability and for positive than negative symbols related to ability. Experiment 2 demonstrates that symbols that are only coincidentally associated with an individual also influence spontaneous impressions, but that this effect is not moderated by either symbol–target memorability or by symbol valence. Both experiments indicate that symbol effects are specific to the traits implied to symbols, and not simply a reflection of global evaluative influences such as conditioning. The findings are explained in terms of attributional (Experiment 1) and associative (Experiment 2) processes.

The Nonconscious Influence of Religious Symbols in Motivated Performance Situations

Anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories suggest that religious symbols should influence motivational processes during performance of goal-relevant tasks. In two experiments, positive and negative religious (Christian) symbols were presented outside of participants' conscious awareness. These symbols influenced cardiovascular responses consistent with challenge and threat states during a subsequent speech task, particularly when the speech topic concerned participants' mortality, and only for Christian participants; similar images lacking Christian meaning were not influential. Results suggested that these effects were due to the learned meaning of the symbols and point to the importance of religion as a coping resource.

Mezentius the Epicurean

This paper argues that Mezentius, the contemptor divum ("scorner of the gods") in Virgil's Aeneid, can be read as an allegorical Epicurean. His Epicurean element helps to explain his dramatic transformation from a symbol of impietas to one of pietas in Books 7–10, as well as pius Aeneas' reverse transformation into an impious Giant figure. These transformations parallel the inversion of the traditional meanings of pietas and impietas in Lucretius and other Epicurean writers; in addition, the Giant-like Mezentius evokes the subversive Gigantomachy of Lucretius, which celebrates the archetypal scorners of the gods as positive symbols of Epicureanism. The "redeemed" Mezentius allows for an Epicurean reading of the Aeneid, in which impietas is redefined as true piety.

Toeplitz operators on harmonic Bergman spaces

AbstractWe study Toeplitz operators on the harmonic Bergman spaces on bounded smooth domains. Two classes of symbols are considered; one is the class of positive symbols and the other is the class of uniformly continuous symbols. For positive symbols, boundedness, compactness, and membership in the Schatten classes are characterized. For uniformly continuous symbols, the essential spectra are described.