• 16. Peace & justice close

The sexual revolution and fight for gender equality began in the West during the 1960s but did not reach the Soviet Union until the late 1980s. Using survey data from nationally representative samples from Finland in 1971, 1992, and 1999 and from two former Soviet areas, Estonia in 2000 and St. Petersburg in 1996, we investigated the following: (a) differences across decades and countries in acceptance of the sexual double standard (SDS) in attitudes toward marital infidelity and women's initiating sex; and (b) the relationship between the SDS and sexual satisfaction. Results show that Finland in the 1990s was more egalitarian than Finland in 1971, St. Petersburg in 1996, or Estonia in 2000. Egalitarian sexual attitudes were positively related to sexual satisfaction.

This study analyses the linguistic landscape of Wilton Manors, Florida, as it surfaces on its main street, Wilton Drive. Wilton Manors is a community with one of the largest LGBT populations in the US. The study thus makes a contribution to the field of linguistic landscapes and sexuality, using normativity as a central theoretical reference point. The data for the study were collected during a daytime walk on Wilton Drive and consist of photos of store fronts, restaurants, bars, advertisements and other signs, supplemented by printed material collected on the Drive and information provided by the official website of Wilton Drive. In my multimodal analysis, I investigate linguistic and non-linguistic signage, identifying mechanisms that render Wilton Drive a gay space. More specifically, I analyze how signage is used to discursively construct sexual identity, gender, desire and sexual practices. It is shown that homonormativity plays a central role in this context. Same-sex sexualities are discursively constructed as the local norm. At the same time, the signage on Wilton Drive is highly exclusive in the sense that it represents predominantly gay male experiences, whereas heterosexualities, lesbian and other sexualities are discursively marginalized or even silenced. At the same time, particular versions of gay masculinity are privileged, namely ones that can be described as white, middle-class and focused on consumption, gay identity politics and non-romantic forms of sexual activity.

We present a new set of generators for unitary maps over ${\mathbb{C}}^{2}$ which differs from the traditional rotation-based generating set in that it uses a single-parameter family of unitaries $J(\ensuremath{\alpha})$. These generators are implementable in the one-way model [Raussendorf and Briegel, Phys. Rev. Lett. 86, 5188 (2001)] using only two qubits, and lead to both parsimonious and robust implementations of general unitaries. As an illustration, we give an implementation of the controlled-$U$ family which uses only 14 qubits, and has a 2-colorable underlying entanglement graph (known to yield robust entangled states).

We study convex polyhedra in three-space that are inscribed in a quadric surface. Up to projective transformations, there are three such surfaces: the sphere, the hyperboloid, and the cylinder. Our main result is that a planar graph $\Gamma$ is realized as the $1$-skeleton of a polyhedron inscribed in the hyperboloid or cylinder if and only if $\Gamma$ is realized as the $1$-skeleton of a polyhedron inscribed in the sphere and $\Gamma$ admits a Hamiltonian cycle. Rivin characterized convex polyhedra inscribed in the sphere by studying the geometry of ideal polyhedra in hyperbolic space. We study the case of the hyperboloid and the cylinder by parameterizing the space of convex ideal polyhedra in anti-de Sitter geometry and in half-pipe geometry. Just as the cylinder can be seen as a degeneration of the sphere and the hyperboloid, half-pipe geometry is naturally a limit of both hyperbolic and anti-de Sitter geometry. We promote a unified point of view to the study of the three cases throughout. Comment: 42 pages, 7 figures

The stability method is very useful for obtaining exact solutions of many extremal graph problems. Its key step is to establish the stability property which, roughly speaking, states that any two almost optimal graphs of the same order $n$ can be made isomorphic by changing o(n^2) edges. Here we show how the recently developed theory of graph limits can be used to give an analytic approach to stability. As an application, we present a new proof of the Erdos-Simonovits Stability Theorem. Also, we investigate various properties of the edit distance. In particular, we show that the combinatorial and fractional versions are within a constant factor from each other, thus answering a question of Goldreich, Krivelevich, Newman, and Rozenberg. Comment: 27 pages

International audience; We consider the problem of identifying the change formula in a belief revision scenario: given that an unkown annoucement (a formula µ) led a set of agents to revise their beliefs and given the prior beliefs and the revised beliefs of the agents, what can be said about µ? We show that under weak conditions about the rationality of the revision operators used by the agents, the set of candidate formulae has the form of a logical interval. We explain how the bounds of this interval can be tightened when the revision operators used by the agents are known and/or when µ is known to be independent from a given set of variables. We also investigate the completeness issue, i.e., whether µ can be exactly identified. We present some sufficient conditions for it, identify its computational complexity, and report the results of some experiments about it.

We present a formula for the degree of the discriminant of irreducible representations of a Lie group, in terms of the roots of the group and the highest weight of the representation. The proof uses equivariant cohomology techniques, namely, the theory of Thom polynomials, and a new method for their computation. We study the combinatorics of our formulas in various special cases.

We derive rigorous upper bounds on the distance between quantum states in an open system setting, in terms of the operator norm between the Hamiltonians describing their evolution. We illustrate our results with an example taken from protection against decoherence using dynamical decoupling. Comment: 7 pages

Let U be a connected scheme of finite cohomological dimension in which every finite set of points is contained in an affine open subscheme. Suppose that alpha is a class in H^2(U_et,Gm)_{tors}. For each positive integer m, the K-theory of alpha-twisted sheaves is used to identify obstructions to alpha being representable by an Azumaya algebra of rank m^2. The etale index of alpha, denoted eti(alpha), is the least positive integer such that all the obstructions vanish. Let per(alpha) be the order of alpha in H^2(U_{et},Gm)_{tors}. Methods from stable homotopy theory give an upper bound on the etale index that depends on the period of alpha and the etale cohomological dimension of U; this bound is expressed in terms of the exponents of the stable homotopy groups of spheres and the exponents of the stable homotopy groups of B(Z/per(alpha)). As a corollary, if U is the spectrum of a field of finite cohomological dimension d, then eti(alpha) divides per(alpha)^[d/2], where [d/2] is the integer part of d/2, whenever per(alpha) is divided neither by the characteristic of k nor by any primes that are small relative to d. Comment: 15 pages. To appear in J. K-Theory

Fronts propagating in two-dimensional advection-reaction-diffusion (ARD) systems exhibit rich topological structure. When the underlying fluid flow is periodic in space and time, the reaction front can lock to the driving frequency. We explain this mode-locking phenomenon using so-called burning invariant manifolds (BIMs). In fact, the mode-locked profile is delineated by a BIM attached to a relative periodic orbit (RPO) of the front element dynamics. Changes in the type (and loss) of mode-locking can be understood in terms of local and global bifurcations of the RPOs and their BIMs. We illustrate these concepts numerically using a chain of alternating vortices in a channel geometry. 9 pages, 13 figures