The image of the Other, particularly in the Western World, expresses itself through a continuous flow of representations of fabulous peoples with strange physical appearance living in far-away places. In our day, the successors to the sirens, Cyclops, unípedes and cynecephala of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the Sirians, Saturnians, Selenites and Martians of the 17th through the 20th centuries.

At first approach the use of the word “superstition” is such that it is impossible to apply the term strictly in the human sciences. Its connotation, that is its content, is particularly subjective and negative. And its extension, that is its area of application, is indefinite and makes of it a concept that can refer to just about anything.

We can construct a typology of rumours - defined broadly as unverified news - according to their relation to reality after their degree of veracity has been established, at least in the current state of knowledge, by experts (historians, scientists, police officers, journalists, and so on). If a rumour turns out to be correct it becomes an item of information. If a rumour is untrue it comes into the categories of affirming or denying rumours. Affirming rumours, which are the most common type, state the reality of imaginary facts, for instance the rumour claiming that bananas from Costa Rica pass on to people flesh-eating bacteria that cause general necrosis. Denying rumours, which are rarer, deny the reality of established facts, for example rumours claiming that Elvis Presley is not dead or that Americans have never walked on the moon.

It seems useful to distinguish various terms indicating negation. Rumours will be termed negative when they state facts associated with fear or hostility, whereas positive rumours evoke happy, welcome events. French researchers, who assign colours to rumours, talk about ‘black’ rumours or ‘rose-tinted’ ones. Specialists agree that there are around nine black rumours for every rose-tinted one. Rouquette (1975, 1990) has thoroughly studied this ‘bias towards negativity’, which is one of the main features of rumours. I shall talk about denying rumours and ideas when they deny commonly accepted events. These rumours are not necessarily negative: for instance survival legends often express the wish that a loved person were not dead. Finally, among denying rumours and ideas, we shall reserve the word negationist for revisionist claims that the gas chambers did not exist, or that a Nazi did not plan to exterminate the Jews during the Second World War.

Rebels regularly provide public services, especially legal services, but the consequences of such programs are unclear. We argue that rebel courts can boost civilian support for insurgency and augment attack capacity by increasing the legitimacy of the rebellion, creating a vested interest in rebel rule, or enabling rebel coercion of the civilian population. We study the impact of the Taliban's judiciary by leveraging cross-district and over-time variation in exposure to Taliban courts using a trajectory-balancing design. We find that rebel courts reduced civilian support for the government and increased it for the Taliban, and were associated with more attacks and more coalition casualties. Exploring mechanisms, we find that courts resolved major interpersonal disputes between civilians but also facilitated more insurgent intimidation of civilians, and that changes in public opinion are unlikely to have been driven solely by social desirability bias. Our findings help explain the logic of rebel courts and highlight the complex interactions between warfare and institutional development in weak states.

The outer layer dynamics of a high-Reynolds-number boundary layer recovering from non-equilibrium is studied utilising the multi-resolution approach of zonal detached eddy simulation mode 3. The non-equilibrium conditions are obtained from a boundary layer separation over a rounded step enhancing the turbulent production, and recovery happens during redevelopment after reattachment at high Reynolds numbers ($Re_{\theta,max}\approx 24{,}000$). Most of the outer layer turbulence is resolved by the simulation, which reproduces accurately the experimental boundary layer relaxation. The spectral analysis of streamwise velocity fluctuations and turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) production evidences the different turbulent content distribution at separation and within the redevelopment region, at which very large-scale motions are identified with streamwise wavelengths up to $\lambda _x = 9\delta$, where $\delta$ is the boundary layer thickness. The redevelopment of the boundary layer is analysed in terms of the persistence of a secondary peak in the TKE production and the evolution of the wall-shear stress statistics. The skewness and probability density function of the skin friction show a slower relaxation than the downstream flow fraction. This confirms the long-lasting impact of perturbations of the outer layer in high-Reynolds-number wall-bounded flows. This persistent non-equilibrium state is suggested to be the reason for the reported lack of accuracy of the considered Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes models in the relaxation region.

Community information sharing is crucial to a government’s ability to respond to a disaster or a health emergency, such as a pandemic. In conflict zones, however, citizens and local leaders often lack trust in state institutions and are unwilling to cooperate, risking costly delays and information gaps. We report results from a randomized experiment in the Philippines regarding government efforts to provide services and build trust with rural communities in a conflict-affected region. We find that the outreach program increased the probability that village leaders provide time-sensitive pandemic risk information critical to the regional Covid-19 Task Force by 20%. The effect is largest for leaders who, at baseline, were skeptical about government capacity and fairness and had neutral or positive attitudes towards rebels. A test of mechanisms suggests that treated leaders updated their beliefs about government competence and shows that neither security improvement nor project capture by the rebels are primary drivers. These findings highlight the important role that government efforts to build connections with conflict-affected communities can play in determining public health outcomes during times of national emergencies.

The coherence and systemic strength of the collaborative process among thematic route stakeholders are key factors to economic success for individual businesses and regional economic development. The objective of this article is to identify the economic action set to rejuvenate the Cider Route and the Wine Route of the Montérégie region (Quebec, Canada). Group concept mapping is used to estimate the conceptualization and perceptions of stakeholders (cideries, wineries, tourism professionals, visitors) regarding the articulation of the action set. The contribution is threefold. Methodologically, the approach taken supports both the estimation of the concept map and associated perception measures. Empirically, eight action clusters are identified to articulate stakeholders’ “organizational” and “selling” dimensions of the routes. Practically, action priorities identified and feasibility constraints are helpful to target the capability development support needed by route stakeholders to collaborate. (JEL Classifications: D02, L23, L26, L66, Q18)

Soit $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$ un module de plus haut poids unitaire du groupe $G=\mathbf{Sp}(2n,\mathbb{R})$. On s’intéresse aux paquets d’Arthur contenant $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$. Lorsque le plus haut poids est scalaire, on détermine les paramètres de ces paquets, on établit la propriété de multiplicité $1$ de $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$ dans le paquet, et l’on calcule le caractère $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70C}_{\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}}$ (du groupe des composantes connexes du centralisateur du paramètre dans le groupe dual) associé à $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70B}$ et qui joue un grand rôle dans la théorie d’Arthur. On fait de même pour certains modules de plus haut poids unitaires unipotents $\unicode[STIX]{x1D70E}_{n,k}$, ou bien lorsque le caractère infinitésimal est régulier.

Democratic transitions are often followed by conflict. This article explores one explanation: the military’s strategic use of violence to retain control of economically valuable regions. The authors uncover this dynamic in Myanmar, a country transitioning from four decades of military rule. Fearing that the new civilian government will assert authority over jade mining, the military initiated violence in mining townships. Using geocoded data on conflict and jade mines, the authors find evidence for this strategic use of violence. As Myanmar started to transition in 2011, conflicts instigated by the military in jademining areas sharply rose. The article also addresses alternative explanations, including a shift in the military’s strategy, colocation of mines and military headquarters, commodity prices, opposition to a controversial dam, and trends specific to Kachin State. With implications beyond Myanmar, the authors argue that outgoing generals can use instability to retain rents where plausible challengers to state authority provide a pretense for violence.

The objective of this article is to estimate the spatial structure of the collective economic conceptualization of strategic actions by cidermakers in Québec. It employs group concept mapping, a mixed methods–based approach. Given the limited research on the economic conceptualization of horizontal coordination for guiding collective strategic action orientations, this contribution is threefold: methodological, empirical, and practical. Methodologically, the results show the perspective of horizontally coordinated cidermakers and use statistical estimates and retroduction as an inference mode to produce and structure the concept map. Empirically, the spatial economic conceptualization consists of a concept map with seven strategic action clusters organized around the notions of product supply and demand and highlights tensions between individual and collective strategic actions. Practically, measures of relative importance and relative feasibility are obtained for each cluster on the map, and implications are discussed. (JEL Classifications: D02, L23, L26, L66, Q18)

This article discusses the role that statistical classifications play in creating gendered boundaries in the world of work. The term ‘family worker’ first became a statistical category in various Western national statistics around 1900. After 1945, it was established as a category of the International Labour Organization (ILO) labour force concept, and since then it has been extended to the wider world by way of the UN System of National Accounts. By investigating the term ‘family worker’ from the perspective of internationally comparable statistical classification, this article offers an empirical insight into how and why particular concepts of work become ‘globalized’. We argue that the statistical term ‘economically active people’ was extended to unpaid family workers, whereas the distinction between family work and housework was increasingly based on scientific evidence. This reclassification of work is an indication of its growing comparability within an economic observation scheme. The ILO generated and authorized that global discourse, and, as such, attested to an increasingly global form of knowledge and communication about the status of gender and work.

This paper deals with runtime enforcement of untimed and timed properties with uncontrollable events. Runtime enforcement consists in defining and using mechanisms that modify the executions of a running system to ensure their correctness with respect to a desired property. We introduce a framework that takes as input any regular (timed) property described by a deterministic automaton over an alphabet of events, with some of these events being uncontrollable. An uncontrollable event cannot be delayed nor intercepted by an enforcement mechanism. Enforcement mechanisms should satisfy important properties, namely soundness, compliance and optimality – meaning that enforcement mechanisms should output as soon as possible correct executions that are as close as possible to the input execution. We define the conditions for a property to be enforceable with uncontrollable events. Moreover, we synthesise sound, compliant and optimal descriptions of runtime enforcement mechanisms at two levels of abstraction to facilitate their design and implementation.