Local Identity in Palestine in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries--- Challenging Dominant Methodologies

By using top-down methods, periodizing exclusively along the Arab-Zionist conflict and basing on either Hebrew or Arab primary sources, leading scholars tend to ignore the existence of popular local identity shared by Jews and Arabs in center Palestine during late 19th-early 20th century. To explore this identity this paper suggests using history from below methods i.e. history of average citizens that looks into many individual＇s multi-dimensional life-experiences, particularly in Palestine mix areas, and based it on both Hebrew and Arabic sources. Through history from below this paper shows that joint Jewish-Arab local identity prevailed prior to the establishment of Jewish or Palestinian national movement and afterwards existed along with them till it was defeated by the escalating national conflict.

Localization and the Chinese Overseas： Acculturation, Assimilation, Hybridization, Creolization, and Identification

Based on materials on the localized Chinese overseas, including the Melaka Babas, who are mostly Malay-speaking Chinese, this article reflects on the use of such terms as acculturation and assimilation, as well as hybridization and creolization, in relation to highly localized Chinese. All these concepts are seen as different ways of describing cultural formation in transcultural context. In particular, the relevance of using creolization to refer to the kind of creative process of cultural formation beyond its original usage in the Caribbean is discussed. This results in the identification of fragmented creolization as in the case of the Caribbean and a rooted creolization as in the case of the Babas. The author shall first discuss the issues of assimilation and integration, followed by hybridization and creolization. This is followed by the discussion on localization of Chinese overseas and identity. The concluding section provides some remarks on the concepts reviewed, and three main categories of acculturated Chinese are identified, namely, Chinese who are linguistically assimilated but still observe major Chinese traditions, Chinese who are so acculturated to the mainstream society that they hardly practice Chinese traditions, and Chinese who are both highly localized and highly mixed “racially”.

Bioclimatic Urbanism and Regional Design in Portugal： The Atlantic and the Mediterranean Contexts

The subject of the present work is the study of the relationship between the city shape and its geographical and climatic context. This is a very important feature of the Portuguese city. The Iberian Peninsula comprised by Spain and Portugal belongs to very different environments： the Atlantic and Mediterranean sea. This position is responsible for a series of highly contrasted regions. The external forces presented in each region, influence the shape, location and orientation, not only of individual buildings but of whole villages in such a way that we can identify pattems of construction in different natural regions. There is in fact, a remarkable correspondence between climate and urban type which is useful to identify for planning the different regions. The legacy of industrial city, as in other parts of the world, has changed this close connection between geography and architecture, with consequences not only in environment but especially for the identity of urban spaces. Bioclimatic urbanism is not just a question of sustainability or survival. It is also a question of local identity and variety. There is in fact a relationship between cultural process and environment responsive which we can learn from the structures of the past -- the pre-industrial city. We believe that the reinterpretation of the traditional city pattems forms a language which can be used as a design process for recovering urban landscape.

District Policy---Social Practice Through Internal and External Discourses： How the Implementation of a Single Regional Political Instrument Is Perceived, Understood and Communicated

This paper focuses on how the implementation of a single regional political instrument is perceived, understood and communicated. Designed as a regional political instrument, the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications started a pilot project： ＂Driver education as a part of upper secondary school in district Norway＂. The focal point in this paper is to explore how the professional participants understand and interpret the project as a regional political instrument in order to maintain the local community, identity and local belonging. The theoretical approach is based on Giddens＇s actor/structure theory, while the analysis based on discourse analysis, in the analysis we separated the arguments used in the professional discourse. We detected different categories of argument in the discourses among the professionals. In addition to the professional discourse, we became aware of a personal discourse. In both discourses the political instrument was perceived to be important in order to maintain the local community, create equality and maintain local identity and a sense of belonging.

Discrete Littlewood–Paley–Stein Characterization and L^2 Atomic Decomposition of Local Hardy Spaces

Usually, the condition that T is bounded on L^2(R^n) is assumed to prove the boundedness of an operator T on a Hardy space. With this assumption, one only needs to prove the uniformly boundness of T on atoms, since T(f)=∑iλi T(ai), provided that f =∑iλiai in L^2(R^n), where ai is an L^2 atom of this Hardy space. So far, the L^2 atomic decomposition of local Hardy spaces h^p(R^n), 0 < p ≤ 1, hasn't been established. In this paper, we will solve this problem, and also show that h^p(R^n) can also be characterized by discrete Littlewood-Paley functions.

On the Prescribed Boundary Mean Curvature Problem via Local Pohozaev Identities

This paper deals with the following prescribed boundary mean curvature problem in B^(N){−Δu=0,u>0,∂_(u)∂_(ν)+N−2/2 u=N−2/2 K˜(y)u^(2−1),y∈B^(N)y∈S^(N−1),where K˜(y)=K˜(|y|,y˜)is a bounded nonnegative function with y=(y,y˜)∈R^(2)×R^(N−3),2=2(N−1)/N−2.Combining the finite-dimensional reduction method and local Pohozaev type of identities,we prove that if N≥5 and K˜(r,y˜)has a stable critical point(r_(0),y˜_(0))with r0>0 and K˜(r0,y˜0)>0,then the above problem has infinitely many solutions,whose energy can be made arbitrarily large.Here our result fill the gap that the above critical points may include the saddle points of K˜(r,y˜).

Well-posedness in the Energy Space for Non-linear System of Wave Equations with Critical Growth

The authors consider the well-posedness in energy space of the critical non-linear system of wave equations with Hamiltonian structure{utt-△u=-F1（｜u｜^2,｜v｜^2）u,utt-△u=-F2（｜u｜^2,｜v｜^2）u where there exists a function F（λ,μ） such that δF（λ,μ）/δλ=F1（λ,μ）.δF（λ,μ）/δμ=F2（λ,μ） By showing that the energy and dilation identities hold for weak solution under some assumptions on the non-linearities, we prove the global well-posedness in energy space by a similar argument to that for global regularity as shown in ＂Shatah and Struwe＇s paper, Ann. of Math. 138, 503-518 （1993）＂.