Is This the End of the Nation-State?

Like the proverbial demise of Mark Twain, rumors of the death of the nation- state may be exaggerated, but in recent years they have become rife. The end of the great-power standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the ensuing surge in global economic relations, gave rise over the past decade to a flood of books and articles postulating a new age in international relations. A general theme has been that the era that began in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia is ending, that we are witnessing a no less dramatic transition in which both transnational and local forces will eclipse the importance of na- tional polities

Perspectives

My paintings are linked to a thirst for exploring new landscapes and perspectives, my interest in the extremes and subtleties of geological phenomenon and a desire to create, chase after, and teeter on a brink. Here I will discuss these topics and work to unpack my interest in avoiding comfort, my relationship to control and the creation and function of my paintings. To extract myself from my tactile and visual world of process and paint and enter the world of written language presents very different challenges than the ones fostered in the studio. The goal in both is to reveal the overlaps and complexities of the issues I am researching and to embrace any contradictions not as ambiguity, but as migrating, nutritious sediment; ever changing particles that can be examined again and again as their intersection with a historical and contemporary discourse evolves

A characterization of the circularity of certain balanced incomplete block designs.

When defining a structure to fulfill a set of axioms that are similar to those prescribed by Euclid, one must select a set of points and then define what is meant by a line and what is meant by a circle. When properly defined these labels will have properties which are similar to their counterparts in the (complex) plane, the lines and circles which Euclid undoubtedly had in mind. In this manner, the geometer may employ his intuition from the complex plane to prove theorems about other systems. Most "finite geometries" have clearly defined notions of points and lines but fail to define circles. The two notable exceptions are the circles in a finite affine plane and the circles in a Mobius plane. Using the geometry of Euclid as motivation, we strive to develop structures with both lines and circles. The only successful example other than the complex plane is the affine plane over a finite field, where all of Euclid's geometry holds except for any assertions involving order or continuity. To complement the prolific work concerning finite geometries and their lines, we provide a general definition of a circle, or more correctly, of a collection of circles and present some preliminary results concerning the construction of such structures. Our definition includes the circles of an affine plane over a finite field and the circles in a Mobius plane as special cases. We develop a necessary and sufficient condition for circularity, present computational techniques for determining circularity and give varying constructions. We devote a chapter to the use of circular designs in coding theory. It is proven that these structures are not useful in the theory of error-correcting codes, since more efficient codes are known, for example the Reed-Muller codes. However, the theory developed in the earlier chapters does have applications to Cryptology. We present five encryption methods utilizing circular structures