In this volume, the authors, from European, Canadian and American universities, focus on a very topical issue, the relations between nation states and national minorities which emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries. Dealing with various original case studies, such as Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Israel, or Malaysia, these relationships are studied from the perspective of the authorities of the new nation states and from the perspective of the minorities. The theoretical approach is inspired by Rogers Brubaker's work on 'nationalising states' (Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2011) and this leading author in the field provides a new discussion on the concept. The authors pay particular attention to the historical contexts in which the dynamics between nation-states and minorities developed and provide an innovative way of thinking about nationalism today.Given its position at the crossroad of different fields and broad geographical spectrum this book is relevant to a wide audience of scholars in the fields of nationalism, minority studies, citizenship studies, and multiculturalism.

In this paper we pay our particular attention to the error term in the prime geodesic theorem for compact symmetric spaces represented as double coset spaces of the special linear group of order four over real numbers. It is known that in the case of compact locally symmetric Riemannian manifolds of strictly negative sectional curvature, the corresponding error term depends on classification of Riemannian symmetric spaces of real rank one. In particular, the error term is a function depending on the dimension of the underlying locally symmetric space. In this research we prove that the error term in the case at hand is a function depending on the degree of the polynomial that appears in the functional equation of the corresponding Selberg zeta function.

Primary bilateral iliopsoas abscesses in the elderly are very rare in Europe. We report a case of an elderly male misdiagnosed with rheumatic low back pain. The delay in accurate diagnosis and therapy led to severe worsening of his general condition and septic shock. The diagnosis was established by multi-slice computed tomography (MSCT) and the patient was successfully treated by MSCT-guided percutaneous drainage of both psoas muscles. Septic shock and miscellaneous complications required continuous intensive care. The patient was discharged after 42 days of hospital treatment. Antibiotic therapy continued for the next six weeks until his complete recovery. Pain remains the most frequent and predominant symptom of spinal pathology regardless of the etiology. Immunocompromised patients or signs suggestive of bacterial infection require caution and a more comprehensive diagnostic work-up.

Head movements can greatly affect swallowing accelerometry signals. In this paper, we implement a spline-based approach to remove low frequency components associated with these motions. Our approach was tested using both synthetic and real data. Synthetic signals were used to perform a comparative analysis of the spline-based approach with other similar techniques. Real data, obtained data from 408 healthy participants during various swallowing tasks, was used to analyze the processing accuracy with and without the spline-based head motions removal scheme. Specifically, we analyzed the segmentation accuracy and the effects of the scheme on statistical properties of these signals, as measured by the scaling analysis. The results of the numerical analysis showed that the spline-based technique achieves a superior performance in comparison to other existing techniques. Additionally, when applied to real data, we improved the accuracy of the segmentation process by achieving a 27% drop in the number of false negatives and a 30% drop in the number of false positives. Furthermore, the anthropometric trends in the statistical properties of these signals remained unaltered as shown by the scaling analysis, but the strength of statistical persistence was significantly reduced. These results clearly indicate that any future medical devices based on swallowing accelerometry signals should remove head motions from these signals in order to increase segmentation accuracy.

The FV method was originally developed for fluid flow, heat and mass transfer calculations (Patankar, 1980), and later generalized for stress analysis in isotropic linear and non-linear bodies (Demirdžic & Muzaferija, 1994; Demirdžic et al., 1997; Demirdžic & Martinovic, 1993). For the purpose of the stress analysis in the wood, the method is modified to take into account the anisotropic nature of the wood and influence of the moisture content and the temperature on the deformation and stresses (Horman, 1999). Also, performance of the wood is found to be very sensitive to the moisture content and the temperature. Thus, it is of a great importance to be able to predict behavior of such materials under different hygrothermo-mechanical loads. In order to demonstrate the methods capabilities, a transient analysis of fields of temperature, moisture, and stresses and displacement in the wood subjected to hygro-thermal or mechanical loads is performed.