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Cardinal Mario Grech presented the book "Walking Together: Words and Reflections on Synodality," which compiles Pope Francis' reflections on synodality from his election to the present day. The Pope emphasizes the importance of the spiritual and pneumatological dimension of synodality, as well as topics such as discernment, the ministry of pastors, and the gradualness of the synodal journey. The text highlights the importance of the Holy Spirit in the Synod of the Church and the need for a Church that listens and is obedient to the Holy Spirit. Additionally, the importance of prayer in this synodal process is emphasized. [Extracted from the article]

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the development of research and publications on national psychology in Indonesia. Research material was taken from various scientific publications that discusses the topic. The results of the study show that publications on national psychology began to appear in the early 1990s, increased at the beginning of the second millennium, and grew rapidly during the last decade. Some of the dominant topics studied include nationalism, national identity, multiculturalism, Pancasila, and the development of psychological measurement tools. Several researchers consistently research specific topics on national psychology, but so far, not many researchers have collaborated with researchers from other disciplines. To further develop this research, efforts are needed to broaden the scope of the topics studied and use more innovative research methods. In addition, it is important to conduct research across scientific disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aramaic was the lingua franca in the Levant in the millennium prior to the Muslim conquests. The exact nature of the spread of Arabic and the specifics of language shift in the Middle East are not yet well understood. Many scholars assume that Arabic primarily spread in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim conquest. The common opinion is that in the new empire, Arabic was learnt imperfectly by speakers of other languages, and the resulting dialects bear the marks of those underlying languages (Versteegh 2012). Specifically, in the Levant and parts of Mesopotamia that language was Aramaic. Several features of the colloquial dialects of the Levant and Mesopotamia were argued to be a result of an Aramaic substrate. In this paper we concentrate on the alleged Aramaic substrate in the modern Arabic dialects of the Levant, where information about the Arabic dialects is more complete, and draw attention to a number of methodological flaws in the scholarly work supporting this hypothesis. We show that some core 'Aramaic' features in Levantine Arabic are unlikely to originate from Aramaic. We further argue that the evidence is not consistent with a rapid and imperfect language shift, which resulted in substrate influence, but rather with a prolonged period of contact between bilingual populations, which resulted in the expected transference of specialized lexical items, but almost no grammatical features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The murder rate in Port of Spain, Trinidad, rose dramatically around the turn of the millennium, driven overwhelmingly by young men in gangs in the city's poor neighborhoods. The literature frequently suggests a causal relationship between gang violence and rising transnational drug flows through Trinidad during this period. However, this is only part of a complex picture and misses the crucial mediating effect of evolving male identities in contexts of pronounced exclusion. Using original data, this article argues that historically marginalized "social terrains" are particularly vulnerable to violence epidemics when exposed to the influence of transnational drug and gun trafficking. When combined with easily available weapons, contextually constructed male hegemonic orders that resonate with the past act as catalysts for contemporary gang violence within those milieus. The study contributes a new empirical body of work on urban violence in Trinidad and the first masculinities-specific analysis of this phenomenon. We argue that contemporary gang culture is a historically rooted, contextually legitimated, male hegemonic street project in the urban margins of Port of Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Argentina had a "golden age" for its science fiction during the last half of the twenty century, little is known about the state of the craft in the new millennium. While some critics even argue that the genre is no longer being written or published in the country, reality shows a different scenario. This paper will argue that an ever-increasing dystopic branch of science fiction is being written and published, usually by small presses in the country. This kind of science fiction also needs to be read in concordance with the economic, political, and social crisis Argentina suffered during the last days of the year 2001 and whose consequences still resonate to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this special issue is to take stock of graphic narrative creation in English, produced and distributed from within India over the last 20 years. With this focus, the Special Issue engages with theoretical as well as aesthetic considerations, thinking through what 'the 21st century canon of Indian graphic narratives' looks like, what its predominant themes and preoccupations have been to date, as well as the forms in which Indian graphic narratives in English have appeared post millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author tells about her use of the module called Island Civilization as a form of exposure therapy for upcoming college students to understand environmental changes. She shares the vision of Professor Emeritus Roderick Nash of the University of California on human occupancy of Earth in the fourth millennium and the concepts of wilderness and civilization. Four possible scenarios that students are proposed to examine are the wasteland, garden, future primitive and Island Civilization.

Chinese diasporic literature is alert to China's rise as a major political and economic power in the 21st century. In the novel Five Star Billionaire (2013), Chinese Malaysian author Tash Aw focuses on the megacity of Shanghai to capture China's economic and cultural vibrancy in the new millennium. Aw's novel shows that he is not only excited but also trepidatious about the implications of 21st-century China's emergence as a superpower. In his non-fiction essay The Face: Strangers on a Pier (2016), Aw represents the diasporic Chinese subject as a world traveller and cosmopolite, someone who embraces the exhilaration of transnational mobility. Unconstrained by the demands and imperatives of the nation state, Aw's huáqiáo (overseas Chinese) readily travels abroad to tap global opportunities as well as to meditate on the delineations of Chinese diasporic identity in the new millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Il n'est pas de passé sans futur: Les Annales à l'heure du nouveau millénaire Au cours des dernières décennies, le comité de rédaction des Annales a transformé la plus importante revue historique de l'après-guerre pour en faire aujourd'hui une entreprise académique innovante du xxie siècle qui reste néanmoins ancrée dans la mission, l'ambition et le mode de fonctionnement de ses fondateurs et des générations qui leur ont succédé. Au cœur de sa réinvention se trouve un tournant post-structurel, en réponse aux changements géopolitiques, à la révolution numérique et aux développements de l'économie comportementale. Celui-ci a permis à la revue de renouer avec son engagement pluridisciplinaire originel en faveur d'une recherche historique empirique, mais en l'inscrivant dans un nouveau registre épistémique, qualifié par le comité de « constructiviste ». Les Annales ont ainsi élargi leur engagement aux sciences sociales classiques pour inclure de nouvelles approches de la littérature, de la pensée politique et d'autres disciplines des « humanités », tout en étendant leurs modes de diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research argues for an internal multidecadal (40- to 60-year) oscillation distinct from climate noise. Recent studies have claimed that this so-termed Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is instead a manifestation of competing time-varying effects of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols. That conclusion is bolstered by the absence of robust multidecadal climate oscillations in control simulations of current-generation models. Paleoclimate data, however, do demonstrate multidecadal oscillatory behavior during the preindustrial era. By comparing control and forced “Last Millennium” simulations, we show that these apparent multidecadal oscillations are an artifact of pulses of volcanic activity during the preindustrial era that project markedly onto the multidecadal (50- to 70-year) frequency band. We conclude that there is no compelling evidence for internal multidecadal oscillations in the climate system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the millennium, debates in postcolonial studies and world literature have repeatedly shown the realities of empire to be continuing, immediate and visceral. What has been overlooked thus far are the ways in which the bodily has re-emerged in postcolonial cultural production as a receptor to, and vocabulary for, these immanent violences. Fictions from across the global south are drawing with apparently increasing frequency on corporeal lexica in their imaginings of on-going imperial circumstances. At the same time, the new millennium has witnessed the rise, in multiple postcolonial contexts, of speculative genres – science fiction and horror pre-eminent among them – to which the body is central. Together, all of this suggests the need for renewed reflection on the poetics and functions of the bodily in contemporary fictional engagements with empire. This special issue takes up this imperative. Our interest lies with the grammars and technologies offered by the corporeal in postcolonial cultural production since the millennium, and in the possibilities and limitations of these bodily registers. Over the course of this introduction, we outline the material, narrative and theoretical contexts within which we see the body re-emerging as a site of renewed critical and literary or cinematic potential. We return to established analytical categories for the corporeal in postcolonial literary studies, and show that current fictional handlings of the body and embodiment appear resistant to interpretation via these rubrics. Taking our cue both from a materialist theoretical (re)turn that corresponds to the turn of the millennium and from aesthetic developments in literature and film of the same period, we go on to lay the groundwork for an approach to the body as this is currently emerging in contemporary postcolonial and peripheral imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The climate varies due to human activity, natural climate cycles, and natural events external to the climate system. Understanding the different roles played by these drivers of variability is fundamental to predicting near-term climate change and changing extremes, and to attributing observed change to anthropogenic or natural factors. Natural drivers such as large explosive volcanic eruptions or multidecadal cycles in ocean circulation occur infrequently and are therefore poorly represented within the observational record. Here we turn to the first high-latitude annually-resolved and absolutely dated marine record spanning the last millennium, and the Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) Phase 3 Last Millennium climate model ensemble spanning the same time period, to examine the influence of natural climate drivers on Arctic sea ice. We show that bivalve oxygen isotope data are recording multidecadal Arctic sea ice variability and through the climate model ensemble demonstrate that external natural drivers explain up to third of this variability. Natural external forcing causes changes in sea-ice mediated export of freshwater into areas of active deep convection, affecting the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and thereby northward heat transport to the Arctic. This in turn leads to sustained anomalies in sea ice extent. The models capture these positive feedbacks, giving us improved confidence in their ability to simulate future sea ice in in a rapidly evolving Arctic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assyriologists who have studied Mesopotamian commentary formation have drawn upon ideas from scholars of religion in treating the creation of a static canon at the end of the second millennium bce as a necessary precondition for the emergence of cuneiform commentaries. The present contribution argues against the idea that Mesopotamian commentaries emerged in response to a closed canon by marshaling evidence from Mesopotamian divinatory compositions, including the celestial-divinatory series Enūma Anu Enlil and its associated aû, or "extraneous" tradition, as well as the extispical treatise Bārûtu. These compositions illustrate that commentaries could be written about texts that were still fluid and malleable in ancient Mesopotamia. Moreover, a brief look at the phenomenon of inner biblical exegesis in the Hebrew Bible supports the idea that texts need not be unchanging to be the subject of interpretation, whether in ancient Mesopotamia or elsewhere. In response to these conclusions, I outline an alternate theory for Mesopotamian commentary formation that eschews the importance of a closed canon and stresses instead ideas of scholarly bilingualism, divination, authority, and textual decorum in ancient Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: We examine and reinterpret the phenomenon of containers used for the secondary burial of human remains – ossuaries – in the Chalcolithic period of the southern Levant, c.4500–3700 BCE. Ossuary form and decoration, both plastic and painted, is evocative and symbol‐laden. Since their first discovery in the 1930s, several hypotheses have sought to explain ossuary iconography, but none provides an integrated, holistic interpretation. Chalcolithic iconography, mortuary contexts, and archetypal mythologies suggest that ossuaries, mainly of clay, but also of stone, served as vehicles of reincarnation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010–11 a pedestrian survey of the western end of Wadi al‐Hijr in northern Oman identified 1507 archaeological features in a 124 km2 area. Data were collected on each feature's architectural characteristics, associated artefact assemblages, topographic and environmental locations, condition of remains, and relations to other archaeological features. The majority of datable features belong to the third millennium BC and divide unequally between the Hafit and Umm an‐Nar periods. While the majority of these third‐millennium BC features were tombs, other feature types were identified, including towers, settlements, quarries, dams, enclosures, and possible platforms. Third‐millennium BC features were organised into clusters and ranged considerably in size, from a few features to several hundred. All of the clusters established during the Hafit period were maintained in the Umm an‐Nar period, suggesting a continuity throughout the third millennium. Some preliminary hypotheses regarding settlement patterns are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This talk was given at Tel Aviv University and published in Hebrew in the collection Essays to the End of the Millennium (Masot ʿ ad tom ha ʾ elef), edited by Ziva Shamir and Aviva Doron (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1999), which was entirely devoted to the novel Journey to the End of the Millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the issues related to movement and mobility, important for understanding historical development in both Egypt and the southern Levant. Topics discussed include information on the archaeological record provides a wealth of material for reconstructing expressions of cultures, identities, status and economic ways of life; and the information on the International Congresses on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East meetings in Munich in spring 2018.

The aim of this article is to document and understand how trends in educational variability and the gender gap in education developed jointly over time. Main questions include: Is the education distribution among women becoming more dispersed as their average attainment surpasses that of men? Is education variability among women higher than that of men? Does the reduction–and eventual reversal–of the gender gap in education go hand-in-hand with less educational variability overall? To answer these questions we first show how overall education variability can be decomposed into four clearly interpretable components (variability among women and men, educational advantage favoring women and favoring men). We subsequently document how these components have evolved over time in the world and its regions from 1950 to 2010 (with projections until 2040). Our findings suggest that (i) with education expansion, education variability tends to follow an inverted U-shape trajectory. (ii) The composition of education variability has been shifting dramatically over time; in particular (iii) variability among men was usually higher than variability among women until the turn of the millennium, from then onwards their educational attainment distributions have the same degree of dispersion. And (iv) while in the 1950s the educational advantage of men was by far the main contributor to education variability, nowadays the educational advantage of women has become the most important source of variability in high- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How well do we remember popular music? To investigate how hit songs are recognized over time, we randomly selected number-one Billboard singles from the last 76 years and presented them to a large sample of mostly millennial participants. In response to hearing each song, participants were prompted to indicate whether they recognized it. Plotting the recognition proportion for each song as a function of the year during which it reached peak popularity resulted in three distinct phases in collective memory. The first phase is characterized by a steep linear drop-off in recognition for the music from this millennium; the second phase consists of a stable plateau during the 1960s to the 1990s; and the third phase, a further but more gradual drop-off during the 1940s and 1950s. More than half of recognition variability can be accounted for by self-selected exposure to each song as measured by its play count on Spotify. We conclude that collective memory for popular music is different from that of other historical phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how changes in the information environment affect the informational advantage of geographically proximate agents. The long‐term advantage of local agents disappeared at the turn of the millennium. This is accompanied by the reduction in local bias of institutional investors and equity analysts. However, institutional investors continue to trade local stocks disproportionately more often than non‐local stocks; moreover, their local trades outperform non‐local trades in the short term—even for large and liquid stocks. Our results are consistent with improvements in the information environment shortening the horizon of proximity‐based informational advantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the complexity of dictionaries and encyclopedias for the third millennium. It notes that the words feel bad to comfortable and close immediately on themselves, which makes them read obscure, tortuous and difficult to assimilate. It adds that each word contains valuable meanings that must be treated very carefully and with respect.

In the second half of the 4th millennium BC, we see significant changes in the early Neolithic culture. These take place some centuries after the initial introduction of agriculture and sees striking developments such as the apparent opening‐up of the landscape, involving forest clearance, the introduction of the ard for ploughing and the construction of regular houses. The transition to a settled and sedentary farming lifestyle must also have demanded mental adaptations, whereby the farmers were required to forge new and stable alliances. These alliances appear to be forged by a series of communal works, involving monumental structures, such as the building of dolmens and passage graves as well as the extensive and land‐demanding causewayed enclosures. The causewayed enclosures were essentially used for only a few days but were remembered for centuries. Since the 1970s, excavations have been undertaken in the Sarup area, on the island of Funen, Denmark, to obtain more detailed information about the activities that took place there between c. 3600 and 3000 BC. This paper presents the results of excavations and studies of two well‐preserved causewayed enclosures, the Barkaer‐structures and more than 30 megalithic monuments, as well as investigations of several settlements. This research has provided insight into a complex farming culture, which appears to have been firmly consolidated by major communal construction works, whereby teams and networks were created within an evolving cooperative social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, it will survey all the important volumes of poetry by Malaysian poets writing in English in the new millennium and try to infer the current trends of Malaysian poetic writing in English. Secondly, I will show how the online social media has been wholly responsible in keeping the poetic word alive, especially in terms of the number of young writers who have espoused the form of the Spoken Word sub-genre of poetry. In fact, the spoken word poets seem to have discovered a new poetic “nerve” of the nation that is both exciting and challenging to read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Proxy-based reconstructions of the Asian Summer Monsoon exhibit variability over multiple scales, from inter-annual to centennial. The relationship between East Asia Summer Monsoon (EASM) variability and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) over the last millennium remains unclear and a focus of current research. This study investigates this relationship using observations, reanalysis data, proxy-based reconstructions, and a control simulation using the Community Earth System Model (CESM). The results derived from both the observation/reanalysis/proxy-based reconstruction and the simulation show consistently that the relationship between EASM strength and Niño3.4 SST is divergent. The observation/reanalysis data illustrate strong negative correlations between Niño3.4 SST and EASM strength at an annual scale in the 1920s-1930s and 1980s-1990s, with weak correlations during other periods. The proxy-based reconstruction demonstrates strong negative correlations at inter-decadal scales from the 1360s to the 1530s, with either weak correlations or positive correlations during other periods. Moreover, the simulations reveal positive correlations in some periods and negative or weak correlations in other periods. The simulations demonstrate that the divergent relationship may be derived from multi-decadal variations in Pacific SST caused by internal variability in the climate system, likely due to the Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). The EASM variation is usually in (out of) phase with Niño3.4 SST during the positive (negative) phase of the IPO. In the positive phase of the IPO, there is a tripolar pattern expressed in a cyclone-anticyclone-cyclone arrangement at pressure level of 850 hPa from the tropics to mid-latitudes over the northwest Pacific. Warming of the Niño3.4 strengthens the tropical cyclone by weakening the trade winds and subsequently strengthening the subtropical anticyclone, leading to a strong Meiyu front, which suggests a strong EASM. However, in the negative phase of the IPO, a huge cyclone occupies the northwest Pacific. Warming of the Niño3.4 strengthens the cyclone by weakening the trade winds, which leads to a weak Meiyu front, which suggests a weak EASM. These results may be helpful in further understanding the mechanisms through which the ENSO and IPO impact the atmospheric circulations in the Asian Pacific, especially regarding the long-term variations in EASM at inter-annual to inter-decadal scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A young physician starting a fresh career in medicine in this millennium would hardly stop to think about the genesis of a particular biological drug that he/she will be prescribing for a patient evaluated in the morning outpatient department. For him/her, this is now routine, and the question of ‘Who’, ‘How’ and ‘When’ about these biologicals would be the last thing on their mind. However, for those who came to the medical profession in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, these targeted drugs are nothing short of ‘miracles’. It would be a fascinating story for the young doctor to learn about the long journey that the dedicated biomedical scientists of yesteryears took to reach the final destination of producing such wonder drugs. The story is much like an interesting novel, full of twists and turns, heart-breaking failures and glorious successes. The biologicals acting as ‘targeted therapy’ have not only changed the natural history of a large number of incurable/uncontrollable diseases but have also transformed the whole approach towards drug development. From the classical empirical process, there is now a complete shift towards understanding the disease pathobiology focusing on the dysregulated molecule(s), targeting them with greater precision and aiming for better results. Seminal advances in understanding the disease mechanism, development of remarkably effective new technologies, greater knowledge of the human genome and genetic medicine have all made it possible to reach the stage where artificially developed ‘targeted’ drugs are now therapeutically used in routine clinical medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This report presents the architecture of the storage rooms found during the 2013 and 2015 excavations within the Middle Bronze Age Canaanite palace at Tel Kabri in present-day Israel, as well as the ceramic finds within them, and the initial results of the petrographic and organic residue analyses. We hope that this detailed preliminary report can supply some insights into a few of the activities conducted within this Canaanite palace during the early second millennium B.C.E.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This multi‐level ethnography of the Zambian health system illustrates the importance of top‐down accountability, and how it has emerged in a historically neglected sector. Maternal healthcare indicators are prioritized when they are benchmarked, at district and national levels. The realization that Zambia was lagging behind African countries in making progress towards Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5 (to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters) appears to have evoked reputational concerns and revealed inspirational possibilities. Growing prioritization also stems from a change in incentives, with some partner funding being conditional on the proportion of deliveries attended by skilled health personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]