Forum: ‘Utopian Confluences’

Toward a Politics of Possibility: Charting Shifts in Utopian Imagination through the World Social Forum Process

In a workshop entitled "Utopia and politics" at the fifth World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Nobel Laureate José Saramago squared off with famed Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. While Galeano celebrated the "utopian impulse", Saramago said: I consider the concept of utopia worse than useless....What has transformed the world is not utopia, but need....The only time and place where our w...

The utopian Darcy Ribeiro archive.

The project in memory of anthropologist, writer and politician Darcy Ribeiro is analyzed, with emphasis on the relationship he had with his personal archives and the creation of the Darcy Ribeiro Foundation, established to give continuity to his 'legacy.' It highlights the influences present in the formation of his archive and presents an ethnography that seeks to restore the historicity of the...

Mythos, Memory, and Utopian Visions

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE A Qualitative Physics Confluences

A qualitative physics predicts and explains the behavior of mechanisms in qualitative terms. The goals for the qualitative physics are (1 ) to be far simpler than the classical physics and yet retain all the important distinctions (e.g., state, oscillation, gain, momentum) without invoking the mathematics of continuously varying quantities and differential equations, (2) to produce causal accou...

On Confluences of General Hypergeometric Systems

We extend the well-known results about the process of confluence for the Gauss hypergeometric differential equation to the case of general hypergeometric systems. We see that the process of confluence comes from the geometry of the set of regular elements of the Lie algebra of complex general linear group. As a consequence, we give a geometric and group-theoretic view on the process of confluen...