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It is no secret that the modernisation process in Russia via state-owned companies has run into a dead end. A full understanding of this stagnation requires an investigation of the governance syste...

Panpsychism has received much attention in the philosophy of mind in recent years. So-called constitutive Russellian panpsychism, in particular, is considered by many the most promising panpsychist approach to the hard problem of consciousness. In this paper, however, I develop a new challenge to this approach. I argue that the three elements of constitutive Russellian panpsychism—that is, the constitutive element, the Russellian element and the panpsychist element—jointly entail a ‘cognitive dead end’. That is, even if constitutive Russellian panpsychism is true, we cannot ascertain how it might solve the hard problem of consciousness.

On 11 December 2012, as part of the ‘EU patent package’ and the EU's efforts towards a unified patent system, the European Parliament approved the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). The entry into force of the UPCA, which was signed on 19 February 2013 by all Member States participating in enhanced cooperation (except Bulgaria and Poland), requires ‘the deposit of the thirteenth instrument of ratification or accession […], including the three Member States in which the highest number of European patents had effect in the year preceding the year in which the signature of the Agreement takes place’. At the time, the clause was taken to mean that the entry into force of the Agreement was subject to its ratification by Germany, UK and France, and 10 other Member States. France deposited its instrument of ratification on 14 March 2014, while the United Kingdom did so on 26 April 2018 as the 16th signatory state in total. In Germany, however, approval of the agreement faced obstacles on the national level, delaying the UPCA's entry into force. As Germany finally seemed to have settled internal debates on ratification, on 20 July 2020, the United Kingdom declared that it was withdrawing its ratification of the UPCA. This article discusses whether the UPCA may, in the current form, enter into force without the UK's ratification against the background of principles of international treaty law.

Disengaging from unattainable goals and reengaging in alternative goals is essential for effective goal pursuit; yet, surprisingly little is known about associated personality factors. Here, we focused on individual differences in self-control (domain-general self-control, if–then planning) and boredom (boredom proneness, boredom avoidance and escape tendencies). Concerning goal adjustment in everyday life (Study 1; N = 323 crowdworkers), if–then planning was associated with worse disengagement and better reengagement. While boredom proneness was associated with poorer reengagement, boredom avoidance and escape tendencies were associated with better reengagement. When goal striving was thwarted during the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 2; N = 97 students), similar associations emerged along with links to anxiety and depression. However, disengagement was no longer associated with if–then planning but instead with better self-control and higher boredom proneness. These results show differential relationships of goal disengagement and reengagement with self-control and boredom, paving the way to a better understanding of who struggles or shines when effective goal adjustment is required.

A finales de los años ochenta, María Zambrano, después de haber reflexionado ampliamente sobre la crisis de Occidente, califica la situación del hombre contemporáneo de orfandad. La crisis tiene un elemento positivo, el de propiciar algo nuevo, la orfandad es un callejón sin salida. En este artículo pretendemos demostrar que la acogida en España y fuera de nuestras fronteras del pensamiento de Zambrano puede ser debida a que habla directamente al corazón y al alma del hombre contemporáneo, realidades profundas que han sido desechadas por el pensamiento triunfante en Occidente, por un error en el enfoque de nuestra interioridad. Para ello, recurrirá a un lenguaje simbólico, en la convicción de que el símbolo reconoce a la vida humana su carácter poético y que el pensamiento es mucho más que el uso del concepto, del juicio, del razonar y aún de la intuición.

We propose a communication-free control protocol for the coordination of multi-agent systems of autonomous vehicles. We consider a maze solving problem in which two agents must search an unknown maze as fast and as securely as possible. We formulate this problem using a discrete-event systems framework and present a coordination strategy for two agents to search a simple maze that involves no communication, thereby eliminating any cyber-security threats. Our strategy involves two agents having reverse priority decision-making policies, while searching the maze with a depth-first search control policy. Under our definition of inefficiency, which is a function of the number of dead end states that are searched by both agents, we show that our method achieves the minimum inefficiency cost, and thus performs as well as any communication-based solution.

Our story takes place in a cyberpunk universe. We follow a character named Esis, who one day come across a robot in an alley. The latter being inert, she decides to conduct an experiment.

Based on Ours Are the Streets (Sunjeev Sahota, 2011), this article examines how the UK’s homeless, jobless, disenfranchised second-generation Muslims struggle to align their ethnic/cultural identities with their British identity. This is one of the first British novels that address the issue of integration in relation to radicalization. The Umma – the worldwide community of Muslims – provides some of these hyphenated Britons with a space for dissent through which they explore new modes of self-identification and commitment, through self-imposed exile and idealized trajectories in Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria, the inverted mirror image of their parents’ westward journey.

Today, we not only have decades of neoliberalism behind us, but the neoliberal regime itself has reached a dead end. Contemporary imperialism has to be discussed within this setting. There are two main reasons why the regime of neoliberal globalization has run into a dead end. The first is an ex antetendency toward global overproduction; the second is that the only possible counter to this tendency within the regime is the formation of asset-price bubbles, which cannot be conjured up at will and whose collapse, if they do appear, plunges the economy back into a crisis. In short, there are no "markets on tap," to use the words of British economic historian Samuel Berrick Saul, for contemporary metropolitan capitalism, such as had been provided by colonialism prior to the First World War and by state expenditure in the post-Second World War period of dirigisme.

Using data from Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey, this article explores the relationship between working part-time and progression out of low pay for male and female employees using a discrete-time event history model. The results show that working part-time relative to full-time decreases the likelihood of progression out of low pay, defined as earning below two-thirds of the median hourly wage. However, part-time workers who transition to full-time employment experience similar rates of progression to full-time workers. This casts doubt on the idea that part-time workers have lower progression rates because they have lower abilities or work motivation and reinforces the need to address the quality of part-time jobs in the UK labour market. The negative effect of working part-time is greater for men than for women, although women are more at risk of becoming trapped in low pay in the sense that they tend to work part-time for longer periods of time, particularly if they have children. Factors such as childcare policy and Universal Credit (UC) incentivise part-time employment for certain groups, although in the right labour market conditions UC may encourage some part-time workers to increase their working hours.

Since February 1st, 2020, the UK is no longer a member of the European Union (EU). On the same day, the negotiated Withdrawal Agreement (WA) entered into force. It contains a complex transitional regime involving the continued application of large parts of EU law to and in the UK during a short transition period. Yet, some provisions of the WA alter the application of EU law to and in the UK and/or introduce new legal rights and obligations regarding, inter alia, civil rights and dispute settlement. Whether and how the long-term EU-UK relations will be regulated cannot yet be foreseen and various options are available - the WA could still yield a no-deal Brexit or an ambitious free trade agreement. It may as well lead into an impasse as it might become a pathway to new, solid relations between the EU and the UK.

Este artículo responde al debate que se produce en el campo de la teoría literaria en torno a la naturaleza de la novela estadounidense postmoderna. Mientras que algunos autores afirmaron a principios del milenio que la novela estaba muerta, una nueva generación de jóvenes escritores estadounidenses fueron responsables de un nuevo compromiso con el género por parte del público. Con esto en mente, este estudio busca arrojar luz sobre la naturaleza de la literatura escrita por estos novelistas que buscan distanciarse del callejón sin salida del posmodernismo. Nuestra premisa es que durante la crisis de principios del siglo veinte, que provoca un replanteamiento del concepto de posmodernidad, los jóvenes autores estadounidenses volvieron su mirada hacia las ideas del trascendentalismo estadounidense como una herramienta para recuperar el proyecto inacabado de la modernidad interrumpido por el postmodernismo. This article responds to the debate in the field of literary theory around the nature of post-postmodern American novels. While some authors claimed at the turn of the millennium that the novel was dead, a new generation of American writers were responsible for a new engagement with the genre on the part of the public. With this in mind, this study seeks to shed light on the nature of the literature written by young novelists seeking to distance themselves from the dead end of postmodernism. Our premise is that during the crisis that brings about a rethinking of the concept of postmodernity, the young American authors turned their gaze towards ideas from American transcendentalism as a tool to recover the unfinished Project of modernity.

This chapter considers the contemporary problem of bad leadership. It opens with a consideration of why, in recent times, leadership has declined in quality. Several reasons are presented: forgetting the lessons of the World Wars, the Internet, social media, surveillance, and discouragement of good candidates for entering positions of leadership. The chapter then presents the WICS theory—wisdom–intelligence–creativity synthesized—and how it applies to bad leadership. Finally, it draws some conclusions, including that the forces of tribalism today are very strong and it may take disasters for people to realize that tribalism is a dead end.

Standard Neoclassical models leave out financial markets and debt and, consequently, are not likely to forecast financial crises. The fault lies with an unquestioning acceptance of general equilibrium modeling and the assumption that the economy self-corrects. The policy implications of this economic approach can be disastrous. Post-Keynesian research, on the other hand, is more pluralist and focuses on the financial sector. It is thus more able to make predictions about forthcoming financial crises and is (arguably) better placed to inform government policy.

This chapter intends to make the forces visible to a wider group than just the participants and in that way to democratise protest so that all of society is to an extent involved in the issues that relatively few bring to the streets. The new media platforms that seemed to offer so much by way of broadening the audience and democratising access have proved to be hollow. Indymedia and Demotix were two very different examples of such platforms that promised democratic access, but neither had much of an audience, and both recently ceased to exist. The consolidation of publishers, suppliers and finance has driven a market for homogenous, focus group-approved products. The photographer's ability to use public events to build images that act as catalysts for social change requires a foundation, chiefly an economic underpinning.

Mary Ross writes about Jungian influences in Nabokov’s PALE FIRE. This paper traces the steps of Charles Kinbote, aka King Charles Xavier II of Zembla, along literature's well-worn path, the Hero's Journey. The mythologist and Jungian scholar Joseph Campbell popularized the idea of the universal monomyth in his 1949 work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Following the steps outlined by Campbell, she cites the chapter headings and their opening sentences from his book, commenting on each to demonstrate how Kinbote's journey from Zembla to "Arcady" is parodied in Pale Fire, but leads in the end to a Nabokovian ambiguous conclusion.

To what extent can the 2018 Italian general election be considered as critical? This article examines how the contributors of six volumes published in the aftermath of the election answer this question by focusing on three major dimensions of change in comparison with the 2013 election: changes in the patterns of party competition; changing patterns of voting behaviour in terms of socio-economic characteristics of the electorate; changes in the salience of issue cleavages and in the way new issues affected the electoral outcomes. The picture originating from the volumes under review is not so sharp as that emerging from the literature that flourished after the 2013 election, whereas several contributions stressed the revolutionary traits of that electoral contest. Despite the important changes observed in comparison to 2013, defining the 2018 general election as critical is adequate only to a certain extent.

Having discussed all of the elements of calculating a sprinkler system, we will put this all together and make some actual calculations. For simplicity, we will ignore velocity pressure the first time around.

This chapter changes focus from Part I, moving on from looking at the Church as a shaper of the medium to how the Church was shaped by it. Fictional programmes about the Church cross genres and formats. But in the early to mid-1960s, comedy marks an important point of transition in the Church’s interactions with television. The 1960s comedies Our Man at St Mark’s and All Gas and Gaiters are the focus, the former considered as a forerunner of later socially alert, inner city comedy leading up to Rev, the latter as a dead end in terms of influence. Both though are treated as important extended moments, when actors began to essay clerical roles in long-standing series, audiences began to laugh at the Church, and soon after the comedy about the Church became sharper and cruder.

For most people on our planet, the beginning of the current COVID-19 pandemic was a complete surprise and looks like a sudden disaster. However, experts do not have the right to argue in this way, since the cause of this disaster has long been known to medicine.

International conflicts of interests existed within the IMPACT established under the initiative of WHO. In addition, the emerging and developing world had an emotional dissatisfaction with the developed world. Important roles in the Secretariat of IMPACT were all allocated to developed countries. Emerging and developing countries were excluded from the management of IMPACT although they were also involved in counterfeit-related problems. The quality issue was an extremely emotional issue. The IMPACT led by WHO reached deadlock within only a few years of its establishment. This fact is essential for understanding the problems with poor quality medicines. How the IMPACT reached deadlock should enable us to identify factors that complicated the problems. As far as the authors know, no reports have so far discussed the problems associated with poor quality medicines from the viewpoint of the failure of IMPACT. In this chapter, the authors discuss the relationship between the deadlock of IMPACT and the globally rising events and tides that occurred in conjunction with WHO/IMPACT and pharmaceutical products, as discussed in the previous chapter.

Not too many years ago, the possibility of cognitive enhancement through genetic engineering interventions seemed to be not only very distant, but also a dead end. In few years the situation has changed: today we have available new generation of genetic editing techniques—in particular CRISPR-Cas9—which allows to cut and paste with precision into the coding sequence of bases of a single gene, yielding results that were previously unthinkable in terms of simplicity and applicative accuracy (science fiction excluded). On the other hand, recent studies have identified some genes that can play a very important role in controlling specific cognitive functions. In this article, in addition to accounting for these advances in research, I examine, from a neuroethical perspective, some emerging critical issues related to enhancement via genetic editing. First of all, I consider the safety of the practice. Secondly, I address other ethical issues, some of which seem to suggest that we need extreme caution before embarking on the path of genetic editing. Finally, I discuss the parents’ will to give their children better cognitive skills. In general, faced with the prospect of a radical and sudden change in cognitive endowments, the most pertinent course of action seems to be to identify the individual and social factors of human well-being that are most shared, and assess whether cognitive enhancement through genetic editing goes in that direction.

Highway traffic control signs are commonly used to regulate, warn, and guide road users. It is widely believed that traffic signs comprehension has a tremendous effect on traffic safety. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the relationship between drivers’ personal characteristics and their familiarity/comprehensibility with a thirty nine posted traffic signs. To this end, 400 surveys were distributed among Jordanian drivers. The results showed that the familiarity level of traffic signs is higher than comprehensibility level. On average 79%, 77%, and 83% of the drivers were familiar with regulatory, warning, and guidance traffic signs, respectively. On the other hand, only 61%, 66%, and 75% of the drivers comprehended regulatory, warning, and guidance traffic signs, respectively. “Narrow Bridge”, “Divided Roadway a Head”, “Dead End” and “Highway” received the lowest comprehensibility scores among drivers. Participants with commercial driving license had higher familiarity and comprehensibility levels than those with regular license. Drivers with a driving experience more than 11years show more familiarity and comprehensibility for traffic signs than those with less than 2 years driving experience. The number of traffic violations did not have a significant effect on traffic signs familiarity and comprehensibility.

“Between Seasons,” ‘Northern Tracks,” and “Notes on a Dead End” are from my full-length manuscript A Window in New England, a collection of poems that attempts to limn and elucidate place, the imme...

Three years of a degree in fine art, two years of continuing to develop his practice and another two years of an MA in fine art. What happened when artist Phil Tyler realized that his work has come to nothing, that he was at a dead end? In 2016, Joe Graham stated, ‘As an artist who draws, I develop serial drawing as a means to draw out my ideas from the process as it unfolds’ (2016: 60).

This paper is on the justification of (PC), the epistemic principle defended by M. Huemer in his Phenomenal Conservatism theory. Put in a straightforward way, we can (and should) ask: what reasons are there for thinking that (PC) is true, that is, for thinking that appearances justify beliefs? This question corresponds - to use L. BonJour’s vocabulary - to the demand for a “metajustification”. The pursuit of this metajustification can take different directions, depending on the general conception or nature of epistemic justification we are working with and on who is supposed to satisfy the demand. Unfortunately, all of these directions seem to lead (PC) to a dead end. In other words, the apparently fair and even essential demand for a metajustification of (PC) cannot be met by the theory, at least in a satisfactory way. If we are right about that, it will remain the difficult question whether Phenomenal Conservatism is the only one (or even the right one!) to be blamed for this failure. We will briefly talk about that in the conclusion.

This article argues that despite the genre status of the Mad Max films as post-apocalyptic sf, the driving force behind many of the images and concerns of the films derives from aspects of Australian history since colonisation. The article compares the way these themes appear in the Mad Max films to the way they are explored in ‘Crabs’, a 1972 short story by Australian writer Peter Carey. This story was later filmed as Dead End Drive-In, a film which itself draws on the aesthetic already developed through the Mad Max films. I use Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion to explore ways in which history is both remembered and deliberately forgotten through imagery that is dislocated from the past to the ‘future’ and thus in effect to a timeless, ever-present or ever-recurring time. The article also argues that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia (a space that is populated by a selected, heterogenerous group such inmates in a prison), describes the reality of the penal colonies forming the origins of settler A...

© 2017 British Association of Social Workers. This opinion article explores the significance of the Best Interests Assessor role in England and Wales for social workers working with adults. It considers the challenges of the role following the Supreme Court’s Cheshire West (2014) judgement and the implications for BIAs of the Law Commission’s 2017 plans for replacing DoLS with the ‘Liberty Protection Safeguards’. The author explains why they consider the BIA role to be a valuable one for the status of adult social work as well as for people who may lack capacity to uphold their human rights, with some reservations about the risk of diluting the safeguards the current role represents for those vulnerable people.

“Usability” is a construct conceived by the human–computer interaction (HCI) community to denote a desired quality of interactive systems and products. Despite its prominence and intensive use in HCI research, the usefulness of the usability construct to HCI theories and to our understanding of HCI has been meager. In this article I propose and discuss two reasons for this state of affairs. The first is that usability is an umbrella construct. Umbrella constructs are prevalent in scientific fields that are broad, diverse, and lack a unifying research paradigm. Accordingly, umbrella constructs, such as usability, tend to be vague and loose, characteristics that challenge our ability to accumulate and communicate knowledge and to capture real-world phenomena. The second reason involves the nature of the relations between the usability construct and its measures, a topic rarely discussed in HCI research. There appears to be a mismatch between how the HCI community has (implicitly) conceptualized these relati...

When legislative term limits were proposed, one expected impact was an increase in women’s legislative representation. However, researchers have found that this logical solution is not as effective...

The article is devoted to views of V. Veresaev on the outcome of the revolution of 1917. Based on the analysis of the content of the novel “At the dead end”, devoted to the description of the civil war in Crimea, and matching it with the works of important Russian writers of the studied period, an attempt is made to represent the opinion of V. Veresaev about the causes and consequences of the coup. We emphasize the complexity and ambiguity of attitudes of the Russian intelligentsia to the revolution, including V. Veresaev.

Emerging countries are gradually becoming the core of the world's middle class concentration and their demand accounts for a steadily increasing share of European exports, yet studies on determinants of trade with these markets, especially on the sectoral level, are lacking. In this article we use a dynamic nonlinear cointegrating approach to better understand trade factors relevant for European exporters in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) markets across industries. Results show that all trade determinants in our models, i.e. exchange rates, relative prices and foreign demand, are relevant for European exports to the BRICs, although their impact is heterogeneous across countries and industries. We then apply cluster analysis to group exports that respond similarly to changes in major trade determinants in order to identify current bottlenecks and reveal opportunities for European exporters in the BRIC markets. We find that trade patterns are stable over time; there is an asymmetric response to exchange rate movements, and that three clusters, with distinct characteristics, comprise over 90% of European exports to the BRIC’ markets. Results shed some light on the drivers of European-BRICs trade and the way recent geo-political and economic developments in BRICs might affect European exports.

A fierce debate rages on whether abundant natural gas is a bridge to a low-carbon future or a hindrance to long-term decarbonization. This paper uses a detailed energy-economic market equilibrium model to study the effects of an upper bound case of natural gas availability. We show that a market-driven abundant natural gas supply can provide substantial reductions in air pollution but does not considerably reduce CO2 emissions in the longer-term, especially relative to a moderate carbon price. However, we quantify large welfare benefits from abundant natural gas. The spatial disaggregation of our results allows for a clear picture of the distributional impacts of abundant natural gas under different carbon price scenarios, illustrating welfare gains by most regions regardless of whether there is carbon pricing, but substantial heterogeneity in the welfare gains.

Given a traditional intuitionist moral epistemology, it is notoriously difficult for moral realists to explain the reliability of our moral beliefs. This has led some to go looking for an alternative to intuitionism. Perception is an obvious contender. I previously argued that this is a dead end, that all moral perception is dependent on a priori moral knowledge. This suggests that perceptualism merely moves the bump in the rug where the reliability challenge is concerned. Preston Werner responds that my account rests on an overly intellectualized model of perception. In this paper, I argue that though Werner may well be correct, my arguments, properly extended, still suggest that perceptualism leaves realists in no better position than intuitionism when it comes to the reliability challenge.

Despite the extensive body of psychological findings suggesting that cognition influences perception, the debate between defenders and detractors of the cognitive penetrability of perception persists. While detractors demand more strictness in psychological experiments, proponents consider that empirical studies show that cognitive penetrability occurs. These considerations have led some theorists to propose that the debate has reached a dead end. The issue about where perception ends and cognition begins is, I argue, one of the reasons why the debate is cornered. Another reason is the inability of psychological studies to present uncontroversial interpretations of the results obtained. To dive into other kinds of empirical sources is, therefore, required to clarify the debate. In this paper, I explain where the debate is blocked, and suggest that neuroscientific evidence together with the predictive coding account, might decant the discussion on the side of the penetrability thesis.

Despite rapid economic growth in recent decades, informality remains a persistent phenomenon in the labour markets of many low- and middle-income countries. A key issue in this regard concerns the extent to which informality itself is a persistent state. Using panel data from Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda, this paper presents one of the very few analyses providing evidence on this question in the context of sub-Saharan Africa. Our results reveal an important extent of heterogeneity in the transition patterns observed for workers in upper-tier versus lower-tier informality.

The main finding of this report is that Bulgaria has replaced a system of large, old orphanages with newer, smaller buildings that are still operating as institutions. While the new facilities are officially referred to as “family-like” residences or “small group homes,” DRI’s investigation finds that they are neither small nor are they family homes. In fact, they are mostly 14 bed facilities.1 Many group homes are run by one local authority, leaving a few administrators responsible for dozens of children. In one case, DRI investigators observed three houses grouped together to create what was effectively a congregate living arrangement for 42 children. Some “group homes” are placed in the deserted corridors of the same old orphanage buildings that were supposed to have been closed. These institutions separate children with disabilities from society and contribute to their continued social isolation – leading to a lifetime of segregation for a new generation of people with disabilities. As this report shows, placement in Bulgaria’s group homes exposes children to emotional neglect, inappropriate and potentially damaging models of behavior, and, in some cases, violence, bullying, and other forms of abuse that are common in institutions.

This chapter describes the plight of Georgian Azeris. This ethnic minority stands out in the three countries not only by its sheer size but also due to the dead end that the breakup of the USSR pushed them into exacerbated by the contradictions between jus soli policies in Azerbaijan and Georgia, both intra lege and de facto. Their plight describes how the politics of territorial citizenship dramatically affect the lives of large groups of people. Moreover, the strengthening of jus soli in both countries remains this minority’s major hope in the task of the normalization of their situation.

In order to get out of present day discussions between (for example) determinism and free will, creationism and evolution, bios and zoē, human existence and biological life – those dead end binaries of our present day thinking into which we have manoeuvred ourselves – we need to revisit the Ancient discussions relating to the care of the soul and human existence. I will draw together these two themes from Jan Patočka’s writings by anchor-ing them in his account of Socrates who was the first to emphasise the idea of human re-sponsibility not only for thinking but also for human acting in the world. I will argue that the significant common feature – the care for our own being, our existence – brings Patočka’s reflections on the care for the soul and care for our human existence together. While, according to Patočka, the notion of the care for the soul was displaced from the philosophical reflection by the modern scientific venture, the idea of human existence is, although problematic from the scientific point of view, still a part of our experience.Para librarnos de discusiones contemporáneas entre (por ejemplo) determinismo y libre albedrío, creacionismo y evolución, bios y zoē, existencia humana y vida biológica, estos binomios, callejones de salida del pensamiento de hoy en los que nos hemos metido, tenemos que volver a escuchar las discusiones de la Antigüedad sobre el cuidado del alma y la existencia humana. Voy a recuperar estos dos temas de escritos de Jan Patočka, anclándolos en su interpretación de Sócrates, el primero en poner énfasis en la idea de responsabilidad humana no solo de su pensamiento sino también de su actuar en el mundo. Argumentaré que el significativo rasgo común, esto es, el cuidado por nuestro propio ser, nuestra existencia, es lo que une las reflexiones de Patočka sobre el cuidado del alma y el cuidado de la exitencia humana. Mientras que, según Patočka, la noción del cuidado del alma ha sido desplazada de la reflexión filosófica por la empresa científica moderna, la idea de la existencia humana, a pesar de lo problemático que puede resultar desde un punto de vista científi-co, todavía forma parte de nuestra experiencia.

A new insect species († Alienopterus brachyelytrus Bai, Beutel, Klass, Wipfler et Zhang gen. et sp. nov. ) of a new order and family is described, based on a single male embedded in Cretaceous Burmese amber (ca. 99 Ma). Unusual characters are shortened forewings combined with fully developed, operational hindwings, similar as in Dermaptera, and specialized attachment pads otherwise only found in mantophasmatodeans (heelwalkers). A cladistic analysis suggests a placement as sister to Mantodea, supported by a profemoral brush and other characters. The male genitalia show the same pattern in both groups. Specialized features are the unusual flight apparatus, attachment structures adapted for locomotion on leaves, and a dense profemoral setation suitable for catching small prey. † Alienopterus was apparently able to fly and likely a predator of small arthropods in bushes or trees. An impressive radiation of Mantodea started in similar habitats at least 35 Ma later in the early Cenozoic. In contrast, † Alienopterus was an evolutionary dead end in the roach–mantis transition zone.

What a word we live in. The existential reality of being ‘suburban’–an unpopular adjective at the best of times – has been subject to some astounding criticisms recently. People who choose to live in a suburban home are still deemed to be contemptible by a self-consciously urbane commentariat who could never live somewhere so vacuous. According to one newspaper journalist, the religious fascists who attacked Paris in November 2015 were at heart suburban, exhibiting contempt for the diversity and heterogeneity of the sophisticated metropolis because it upset their reactionary world view. The transatlantic celebrity-historian Simon Schama, appearing on BBC Television's Question Time in October 2015, denounced a critic of unfettered refugee migration to Europe for turning away his ‘suburban face’ to human tragedy. Can a suburbanite possibly find the wherewithal to bounce back from such criticism? Sadly, there is no great volume of historical literature to give them much inspiration, and more recent scholarship offers little that is truly revisionist.

There is growing consensus among Israelis and Palestinians that the paradigm of pursuing a two-state solution through bilateral talks has reached a dead end. Yet the widely discussed alternatives to this supposedly expired model have not posed a credible challenge to it. Instead they have been confined largely to academic discussions among activists who enjoy little support in their societies; the proposals are more a reflection of widespread desperation than a serious movement to bring change. In the absence of a negotiated settlement to the conflict, one possibility, though currently remote, is that Israel and a future Palestinian state will establish a long-term truce that settles some disputes, such as over territory, while leaving other issues unresolved.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus followed a separate path. Nowhere else in post-socialist Eastern Europe did the state play such an important role in the economy. From 2007 onwards, this model reached the limits of its capacity, not least because Russia increased the price of crude oil and natural gas supplies to Belarus. The government in Minsk took out an increasing number of foreign loans. In 2015, the decision was made to pursue a new monetary and fiscal policy: the exchange rate was deregulated and the deficit in the state budget was reduced. However, all the large enterprises remained under state control. The country is more dependent on the preferential rates for energy imports from Russia, and for this reason, Belarusian economists are becoming increasingly vociferous in their demands for a restructuring or the closure of the large number of loss-making stateowned businesses. In the medium term, the emigration of qualified workers due to the political conflict within the country will curb economic growth.

I am writing from another country, far away; I no longer live in Australia. Meaghan Morris is partly responsible for this. Let me explain. At the end of 2011, I found myself reading the transcript of a long interview with Meaghan conducted by a Melbourne-based researcher, Lauren Bliss. In this discussion, Meaghan comments on the move, in the course of her professional life, to Hong Kong: What I really wanted to do was what lots of students from Asia had been doing for decades, which is go and just live an everyday life in another country, have a job, and not go and study the society there as an academic specialty. Just go and know what it’s like to live as a foreigner working in a Chinese society.1 For many reasons, my life at that time had reached a kind of dead end; I felt that Australia had nothing more to offer me. Yet the thought of relocating elsewhere had never really occurred to me, or perhaps I had merely been successful in keeping that thought at bay.