Protest is politics at its most primal, its most emotional, its most exciting, and sometimes its most consequential. But, at its core, protest is a learning process, one in which people “at the top” and people “at the bottom” struggle to discover where the real power lies, and then to wield that power once they find it. Protest has been an integral part of the dramatic and often traumatic processes of social and economic transformation that Russia has witnessed over the past forty years, both as a driver of that transformation and as a result of it. Moreover, recent years have seen the Russian state reorganize itself and its relationship with society in order to suppress grassroots mobilization in general and protest in particular. This chapter reviews that history and the contemporary landscape of protest in Russia and asks what is being learned – and who is doing the learning – when Russian citizens take to the streets.

Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has aspired to remain a major power in international relations. The status of “great power” has remained essential to Russia even after end of the period of Soviet grandeur and the post-Soviet transition. Until the mid-2000s, the country’s leaders sought to revive its great power status in partnership with Western nations. Since the mid-2000s, Russia has moved in the direction of challenging Western global priorities by stressing values of national sovereignty and patriotism. More recently, Russia has sought to establish areas of mutual noninterference in relations with the West. In 2022, this approach resulted in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the escalation of tensions and confrontation with the United States and NATO. Outside the West, Moscow has aspired to take advantage of global economic and geopolitical opportunities including in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The chapter reviews the main developments in Russian foreign policy since 1991, giving an overview of the country’s relations with Western and non-Western countries, while focusing on recent years. Studying Russian foreign policy in general, and historical and contemporary goals in particular, is important for both policy-relevant and theoretical reasons. This chapter addresses these goals as well as policy choices following the dissolution of the USSR and discusses both realist and liberal explanations of Russian foreign policy and its limitations. Finally, this analysis will help formulate a framework to assess Russia’s ambition to become a major power in international relations in the future.

An abstract data type is not the only way to hide the representation of data: a representation can also be hidden in an object. An object is a bundle of operations—often called methods—that may share hidden state. An object interacts with other objects by sending messages; each message activates a method on the receiving object. An object’s methods can see the representation of the object’s own state, but not the representations of the states of other objects.

The present chapter deals with the FVM as applied to the diffusion equation in one and two dimensions. In the FVM, the domain Ω is divided into a collection of nonoverlapping subdomains, called control volumes and the collection is called a mesh or grid.

Russia is neither a democracy nor a monolithic, one-party state, but rather an electoral autocracy in which multiparty elections are the primary means of acquiring power. Though these elections are not free and fair, they enable political competition among a variety of political actors. This chapter describes the key parties, movements, social cleavages, and issues that drive electoral behavior in this system. The chapter also highlights the undemocratic features of the system that constrain full and fair competition. These include the role of the hegemonic party, United Russia; the constraints placed on opposition forces; and the use of electoral manipulation by the regime. By examining the many tensions inherent to electoral autocracy, the chapter demonstrates how elections can both stabilize the regime and undermine it.

In this chapter, we will focus on solving the PDEs governing laminar flows of viscous incompressible fluids using the FVM (this chapter is a counterpart of Chapter 6 on FEM, where velocity–pressure and penalty finite element models of two dimensional flows of viscous incompressible fluids were presented). These equations are expressed in terms of the primitive variable, namely, the velocity field and the pressure. To begin with, we will consider isothermal flows (flows without the presence of the temperature effect), and demonstrate the use of the FVM for two-dimensional laminar flows of viscous incompressible fluids. Then cases of non-isothermal flows with both forced convection and natural convection will be considered in the sequel.

In Chapter 4 we considered finite element analysis of steady state heat transfer. When external stimuli (e.g., boundary conditions and internal heat generation) are independent of time, heat transfer in a medium may attain a steady state; otherwise, the temperature field changes with time (i.e., unsteady state). The governing equations of unsteady heat transfer are obtained using the principle of balance of energy. When unsteady equations are solved the temperature field reaches a steady state if the external stimuli are independent of time (i.e., the time dependence decays with time).

All numerical methods, including the FEM and FVM, ultimately result in a set of linear or nonlinear algebraic equations, relating the values of the dependent variables at the nodal points of the mesh. These algebraic equations can be linear or nonlinear in the nodal values of the primary variables, depending on whether the governing differential equations being solved are linear or nonlinear. When the algebraic equations are nonlinear, we linearize them using certain assumptions and techniques, such as the Picard method or Newton’s method.

Chapters 1 to 7 don’t give us many ways to organize data. S-expressions are great, but you might have noticed that they serve as a kind of high-level assembly language on top of which you have to craft your own data structures. For programming at scale, that’s not good enough—programmers need to define proper data structures whose shapes and contents are known.

Congratulations! You now have some solid skills using functions, types, modules, objects, and more. You also have a cognitive framework that you can use to learn new programming languages, and if you’re like my students, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how broadly your skills apply. Now you get the dessert menu. As your server, I recommend some tasty treats: languages that are superlative, unusual, or popular. Many are widely recognized as interesting or important, and some are just to my personal taste. Together, they offer a variety of jumping-off points, ranging from younger, less proven ideas to fashionable ideas drawn from the headlines.