The ‘walking’ megalithic statues (moai) of Easter Island

Explaining how the monumental statues (moai) of Easter Island were transported has remained open to debate and speculation, including their resource expenditures and role in deforestation. Archaeological evidence including analysis of moai variability, particularly those abandoned along ancient roads, indicates transport was achieved in a vertical position. To test this proposition we constructed a precise three-dimensional 4.35 metric ton replica of an actual statue and demonstrate how positioning the center of mass allowed it to fall forward and rock from side to side causing it to ‘walk.’ Our experiments reveal how the statue form was engineered for efficient transport by a small number of individuals.     

Late Ordovician and Early Silurian conodonts from the “Uralba Beds”, northern New South Wales

Limestone outcrops that form a north-south belt approximately 1.4 km long, 15 km east of Manilla and previously referred to as the Uralba Beds, and associated rocks, are shown to be an olistostromal component of the Wisemans Arm Formation. Elongate olistoliths up to 100 m in length are flanked by limestone conglomerate with clasts set in a volcaniclastic matrix derived from a range of volcanic rock types. Volcanic olistoliths, including a mass of ankaramitic basalt, are also present. Conodont faunas of differing ages were obtained from various outcrops. A Late Ordovician (Eastonian, Ea3) fauna of over 400 elements from some outcrops is identical to one recently documented from elsewhere in the Wisemans Arm Formation. A small Early Silurian (late Llandovery-early Wenlock) fauna from four outcrops (including two formerly thought to be Ordovician) comprises the first documented conodont fauna of this age from the New England Fold Belt.     

Aboriginal reconciliation as religious politics: Secularisation in Australia

The characterisation of the Australian polity as a strikingly ‘secular’ polity is in certain respects misleading. Australian political debate continues to be marked by a religious element. For example, the language of Aboriginal ‘reconciliation’ had several distinctly Christian resonances and ambiguities, including the difficult relation of justice and forgiveness. This paper considers the Aboriginal reconciliation process in the light of three different ideas of secularism: secularism as a doctrine of the two ends of humanity; secularisation as disenchantment or rationalisation; and secularisation as the transposition of theology into a mundane or earthly idiom.     

Bridging East and West: Muslim-identified activists and organisations in the UK anti-war movements

Divisive Orientalist discourses and practices, mobilised in the 'war on terror', have been resisted through collaborative political projects designed to contest and close gaps between East and West, Muslim and non-Muslim. Through interviews with Muslim-identified and other British anti-war activists, this paper traces the making of a 'new bridge between the East and the West'. It then goes on to examine the limitations of this political model and describe the search for political relationships that would mobilise Muslim identities in more subtle ways and speak past rather than against contemporary Orientalism.     

STACKELBERG GAMES ON A NETWORK WITH COURNOT-NASH OLIGOPOLISTIC COMPETITORS

ABSTRACT. We formulate the spatial Stackelberg-Nash-Cournot competitive network equilibrium problem as a variational inequality constrained mathematical program. Our model differs from previous models of Stackelberg oligopolistic competition in that it employs explicit shipping decision variables and a general network topology. That is, the production and distribution decisions of the Stackelberg firm are determined simultaneously over a discrete network. We explore the existence of solutions to the proposed model, and we also numerically test a sensitivity analysis based algorithm. In particular, we illustrate how sensitivity analysis results can be used to generate the Cournot reaction necessary to solve the Stackelberg problem.