BERNHARD – författare

While the fall of the Berlin Wall is positively commemorated in the West, the intervening years have shown that the former Soviet Bloc has a more complicated view of its legacy. In post-communist Eastern Europe, the way people remember state socialism is closely intertwined with the manner in which they envision historical justice. Twenty Years After Communism is concerned with the explosion of a politics of memory triggered by the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe, and it takes a comparative look at the ways that communism and its demise have been commemorated (or not commemorated) by major political actors across the region. The book is built on three premises. The first is that political actors always strive to come to terms with the history of their communities in order to generate a sense of order in their personal and collective lives. Second, new leaders sometimes find it advantageous to mete out justice on the politicians of abolished regimes, and whether and how they do so depends heavily on their interpretation and assessment of the collective past. Finally, remembering the past, particularly collectively, is always a political process, thus the politics of memory and commemoration needs to be studied as an integral part of the establishment of new collective identities and new principles of political legitimacy. Each chapter takes a detailed look at the commemorative ceremony of a different country of the former Soviet Bloc. Collectively the book looks at patterns of extrication from state socialism, patterns of ethnic and class conflict, the strategies of communist successor parties, and the cultural traditions of a given country that influence the way official collective memory is constructed.Twenty Years After Communism develops a new analytical and explanatory framework that helps readers to understand the utility of historical memory as an important and understudied part of democratization.

One of the major concentrated activities of the past decade in control theory has been the development of the so-called "HOO-optimal control theory," which addresses the issue of worst-case controller design for linear plants subject to unknown additive disturbances, including problems of disturbance attenuation, model matching, and tracking. The mathematical OO symbol "H " stands for the Hardy space of all complex-valued functions of a complex variable, which are analytic and bounded in the open right­ half complex plane. For a linear (continuous-time, time-invariant) plant, oo the H norm of the transfer matrix is the maximum of its largest singular value over all frequencies. OO Controller design problems where the H norm plays an important role were initially formulated by George Zames in the early 1980''s, in the context of sensitivity reduction in linear plants, with the design problem posed as a mathematical optimization problem using an (HOO) operator norm. Thus formulated originally in the frequency domain, the main tools used during the early phases of research on this class of problems have been operator and approximation theory, spectral factorization, and (Youla) parametrization, leading initially to rather complicated (high-dimensional) OO optimal or near-optimal (under the H norm) controllers.

The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was at the beginning of the long struggle for women's rights in the United States. The documents collected in this anthology bring to life the anger and the excitement of a moment when a small but determined group of women dared to challenge the laws and customs of a society dominated by men.