bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy
Authors: Sniderman Paul M. , Petersen Michael Bang , Slothuus Rune , Stubager Rune
Published: November 2017

In 2005, twelve cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, igniting a political firestorm over demands by some Muslims that the claims of their religious faith take precedence over freedom of expression. Given the explosive reaction from Middle Eastern governments, Muslim clerics, and some Danish politicians, the stage was set for a backlash against Muslims in Denmark. But no such backlash occurred. This book shows how the majority of ordinary Danish citizens provided a solid wall of support for the rights of their country's growing Muslim minority, drawing a sharp distinction between Muslim immigrants and Islamic fundamentalists and supporting the civil rights of Muslim immigrants as fully as those of fellow Danes—for example, Christian fundamentalists. Building on randomized experiments conducted as part of large, nationally representative opinion surveys, the book also demonstrates how the moral covenant underpinning the welfare state simultaneously promotes equal treatment for some Muslim immigrants and opens the door to discrimination against others. Revealing the strength of Denmark's commitment to democratic values, the book underlines the challenges of inclusion but offers hope to those seeking to reconcile the secular values of liberal democracy and the religious faith of Muslim immigrants in Europe.
The Birth of Hedonism
Authors: Lampe Kurt
Published: November 2017

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn't convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. This book provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. The book reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus' atheism and Hegesias' pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism's relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the “new Cyrenaicism” of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker.
High-Frequency Observations: Identifiability and Asymptotic Efficiency
Authors: Aïıt-Sahalia Yacine , Jacod Jean
Published: November 2017

This chapter starts with a brief reminder about a number of concepts and results which pertain to classical statistical models, without specific reference to stochastic processes. It then introduces a general notion of identifiability for a parameter, in a semi-parametric setting. A parameter can be a number (or a vector), as in classical statistics; it can also be a random variable, such as the integrated volatility. The analysis is first conducted for Lévy processes, because in this case parameters are naturally non-random, and then extended to the more general situation of semimartingales. It also considers the problem of testing a hypothesis which is “random,” such as testing whether a discretely observed path is continuous or discontinuous: the null and alternative are not the usual disjoint subsets of a parameter space, but rather two disjoint subsets of the sample space, which leads to an ad hoc definition of the level, or asymptotic level, of a test in such a context. Finally, the chapter returns to the question of efficient estimation of a parameter, which is mainly analyzed from the viewpoint of “Fisher efficiency.”
Finite or Infinite Activity for Jumps?
Authors: Aïıt-Sahalia Yacine , Jacod Jean
Published: November 2017

The previous chapter was concerned with the estimation of the degree of activity of the jumps of a process X, that is, of its Blumenthal–Getoor index. If the resulting confidence interval does not contain the value 0, one may conclude that the genuine activity index is positive, and thus the jumps have infinite activity (infinitely many jumps inside the observation interval [0, T]). Otherwise the true BG index may be equal to 0, and then a natural question to ask oneself is whether or not the observed path has infinitely many jumps on [0, T]. This chapter deals with question of deciding whether jumps have finite activity.
Co-jumps
Authors: Aïıt-Sahalia Yacine , Jacod Jean
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers some questions which only make sense in a multivariate setting. It deals with two problems: one is about a multidimensional underlying process X, and we want to decide whether two particular components of X jump at the same time: this can happen always, or never, or for some but not all jump times. The second problem is again about a one-dimensional underlying process X, but we study the pair (X, σ‎), with the second component being the volatility of the first component X. Again, we want to decide whether X and σ‎ jump at the same times, always, or never, or sometimes. The process X is observed at the regularly spaced observation times iΔ‎₀, within a finite time interval [0, T].
What Is a Virus?
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the definition of a virus followed by the dimensions of viral biodiversity. Viruses vary in size from genomes of a few thousand to more than a million nucleotides. Viral capsids vary in linear dimensions from approximately 20 nm to more than 400 nm in diameter. Virus particles are relatively nutrient rich compared with their hosts. Viral genomes are compact, with the number of putative genes scaling linearly with genome size. The functional diversity of viruses includes many canonical viral genes, such as those that code for capsid proteins and transcriptional regulators. The functional diversity of viruses includes many noncanonical genes, such as those that code for proteins that are part of photosystem pathways or cell-wall pathways.
Viral Life History Traits
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses a number of key commonalities and differences among viral life history traits. Viruses have two key life history stages: inside and outside a host cell. Viral infections of microbes often lead to the death of host cells and the release of viral progeny. Viral infections can also lead to the integration of viral genomes with those of their hosts; induction of these genomes can result in subsequent lysis and release of viral progeny. Viruses are distinguished not only by the host they infect but also by the quantitative rates and levels at which these interactions take place. Viral life history traits reflect the combined interactions of viruses and hosts; that is, they are not encoded solely by viral genomes. Viral life history traits can also vary by orders of magnitude, whether for time to lysis, burst size, probability of lysogeny, rate of induction, adsorption rate, or mortality rate.
Coevolutionary Dynamics of Viruses and Microbes
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and microbes. Virus mutation and host mutations occur rapidly, so much so that new virus and host mutants are expected to arise on timescales similar to those for changes in total population. Host evolution to resistance can lead to virus extinction, but such extinction is not inevitable either in the lab or in the field. A single dominant host and virus type can, via a combination of mutation and selection, diversify into multiple virus and host types that coexist in one community. The interaction of multiple virus and host genotypes has fundamental effects on ecological dynamics. When multiple virus and host genotypes are present, their interactions can lead to novel ecological dynamics, such as apparently reversed predator–prey cycles. Moreover, the interactions of a single virus–host pair can lead to distinct modes of evolutionary dynamics, for example, fluctuating dynamics, arms races, and diversification.
Ocean Viruses: On Their Abundance, Diversity, and Target Hosts
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces the theoretical and modeling approaches necessary to estimate (i) viral abundance, (ii) viral diversity, and (iii) virus–host interactions. Viruses are extremely abundant in the oceans, with estimates of virus-like particle densities ranging from approximately 104 to 108/ml. Virus abundance is estimated to be at its highest in coastal environments, during blooms, and in sediments. Viral diversity remains elusive. Those features of viral diversity that are estimable include Shannon and Simpson diversity, and should be utilized instead of attempting to estimate the total number of virus “species” in the community based on measurements of a small subsample. Viral diversity includes genotypic, genetic, and functional diversity. Individual viruses infect more than one host type, and individual hosts are infected by more than one virus. The cross-infection networks in natural systems include evidence of specialization, as measured by modularity, and hierarchical order, as measured by nestedness.
Virus-Host Dynamics in a Complex Milieu
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces a series of dynamic models for exploring the mechanisms underlying the emergent features of complex ecosystems. Models of complex food webs including viral parasites reflect innovations in the study of basic interactions as well as the quantitative estimation of life history traits. These models can be used to investigate the variation in the effect of viruses on ecological processes, given three key features: (i) complex multistrain and multispecies communities, (ii) nutrient regeneration via viral lysis of hosts, and (iii) competition between zooplankton and viruses for hosts. Models predict that when viruses regenerate nutrients, both resources and viruses will increase in concentration. When viruses are included in ecosystem models they are found to stimulate ecosystem-level functioning despite having negative effects on target hosts. Few models combine virus–host interactions with a consideration of complex nutrient and trophic dynamics; therefore, a synthesis remains incomplete and should be the subject of ongoing work.
Social Behavior and Evolutionary Thought
Authors: Marshall James A.R.
Published: November 2017

This book demonstrates the generality of inclusive fitness theory, with particular emphasis on its fundamental evolutionary logic. It presents the basic mathematical theory of natural selection and shows how inclusive fitness theory deals with more complicated social scenarios. Topics include the Price equation, Hamilton's rule, nonadditive interactions, conditional behaviors, heritability, and maximization of inclusive fitness. This chapter provides a brief historical introduction to the problem of apparent design in biology, evolutionary explanations of this, and in particular, evolutionary explanations of individual behaviors that appear designed to benefit not the individual themselves, but other members of their species. It examines how social behaviors can be shaped by natural selection and discusses the problem of providing an evolutionary explanation of self-sacrifice by individuals, altruism in group selection, and multilevel selection theory.
Models of Social Behavior
Authors: Marshall James A.R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers a simple and general model of natural selection: replicator dynamics. Many animal traits and behaviors are social, in that they affect the reproductive success not just of the animal performing the behavior, but also conspecifics. Mathematical theories based on classical natural selection, which acts on direct reproduction by individuals, are able to explain the evolution of traits that are for personal advantage. However, this leaves the problem of providing an evolutionary explanation of traits and social behaviors that appear to be personally costly to the bearer, in reproductive terms, while having effects on conspecifics such as increasing their direct reproduction. This chapter uses the replicator dynamics to illustrate the action of natural selection on social behavior, including nonadditive interactions. It considers the additive and nonadditive donation game, and other social interactions, along with public goods games, threshold public goods games, and interactions in structured populations.
Nonadditive Interactions and Hamilton’s Rule
Authors: Marshall James A.R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines what happens in nonadditive interactions when such interactions take place between relatives, and how Hamilton's rule can be extended in two different ways to accommodate such nonadditivity. It first considers the selective pressures on nonadditive behaviors directed towards relatives by making use of the replicator dynamics to capture interactions within structured populations, so that on average, interactions within the population occur between relatives. It then describes two extensions to Hamilton's rule to deal with nonadditive interactions. One approach takes deviations from additivity and accounts for them all in a single synergistic coefficient. The other approach applies partial regression to keep a version of Hamilton's rule with only three parameters, in which costs and benefits vary according to the frequency of social individuals in a population. The chapter also explains the use of the Price equation to study nonadditive social interactions between relatives.
Heritability, Maximization, and Evolutionary Explanations
Authors: Marshall James A.R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines which of the equivalent alternative partitions of fitness, including inclusive fitness and group fitness, can be interpreted as being subject to natural selection in a meaningful way. Inclusive fitness theory can deal with subtleties such as nonadditive fitness effects and conditionally expressed phenotypes. However, selection based on inclusive fitness gives equivalent predictions to other models of apparently different evolutionary processes, such as multilevel selection. The chapter considers how we can determine whether inclusive fitness really captures the essence of social evolution and whether inclusive fitness is really maximized by the action of selection, as suggested by William D. Hamilton. It also explains what heritability measures, and whether this makes sense biologically. Finally, it discusses the problem of classifying observed social behaviors in terms of their underlying evolutionary explanations.
Topics in Quaternion Linear Algebra
Authors: Rodman Leiba
Published: November 2017

Quaternions are a number system that has become increasingly useful for representing the rotations of objects in three-dimensional space and has important applications in theoretical and applied mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering. This is the first book to provide a systematic, accessible, and self-contained exposition of quaternion linear algebra. It features previously unpublished research results with complete proofs and many open problems at various levels, as well as more than 200 exercises to facilitate use by students and instructors. Applications presented in the book include numerical ranges, invariant semidefinite subspaces, differential equations with symmetries, and matrix equations. Designed for researchers and students across a variety of disciplines, the book can be read by anyone with a background in linear algebra, rudimentary complex analysis, and some multivariable calculus. Instructors will find it useful as a complementary text for undergraduate linear algebra courses or as a basis for a graduate course in linear algebra. The open problems can serve as research projects for undergraduates, topics for graduate students, or problems to be tackled by professional research mathematicians. The book is also an invaluable reference tool for researchers in fields where techniques based on quaternion analysis are used.
How People Respond to Participation Requests
Authors: Levine Adam Seth
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how people respond when the issues at stake refer to economic insecurity. It presents the results of a series of experiments in which citizens were randomly assigned to receive requests that mentioned either insecurity issues like education costs and healthcare costs or other issues unrelated to financial constraints that people could be facing in their own lives. The requests all involved real political organizations and the opportunity to donate real time or money to the cause. The organizations themselves ran the gamut from professionally run, national organizations with headquarters in Washington, D.C. to a local nonprofit that provides critical health care services to the community. All of them function at least in part, as prototypical examples of the types of groups that became common following the “advocacy explosion” in the 1960s and 1970s.
Rules and Regulations
Authors: El Amine Loubna
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on policies relating to security and the use of penal force, welfare and general economic measures, and the methods used for appointment to public office. The fulfillment of these policies achieves a basic level of political order, and they do not operate through the exemplary power of the virtue of the ruler, but rather through the regulation of the “basic structure” of society—the penal code, the procedures for promotion, the taxation system, and the use of the commons, among others. The chapter aims to answer the question of what consists a successful zheng (government), or, in other words, what governing should consist of such that the ruler manages to make his country zhi (the achievement of order).
A Harmonious Society
Authors: El Amine Loubna
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how Confucians prefer a society that produces a more exalted level of order. This higher level is achieved by means of rituals, which operate as an institutional mechanism for the regulation of society. The chapter also analyzes the differences between Mencius and Xunzi on the question of human nature and its relationship to the use of rituals. Mencius is more optimistic about the ability of people to develop morally in a spontaneous way, and allows for a bigger role for the emulative example of the ruler, while Xunzi emphasizes more strongly on the importance of rituals. In this dimension of their thought, the conventional view of Confucianism more closely reflects Mencius' politics than Xunzi's.
Epilogue
Authors: El Amine Loubna
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter reviews how the book reconstructed the political vision offered in the three Classical Confucian texts: the Analects, Mencius, and Xinzu. For a long time, the Chinese intellectual tradition did not receive academic interest in its own right similar to that received by the Western tradition. While the urgency of the renewed interest in it is both timely and welcome, it has meant that the Confucian texts are now mined with a view to contemporary concerns. Many of the political discussions in the early texts have thus been ignored for being irrelevant today. As a result, the book's interpretation of early Confucianism meshes with the recent trend in the discipline of political theory, which critiques the post-Kantian approach that takes ethics as a basis.
The Uniform Distribution and Benford's Law
Authors: Berger Arno , Hill Theodore P.
Published: November 2017

The uniform distribution characterization of Benford's law is the most basic and powerful of all characterizations, largely because the mathematical theory of uniform distribution modulo one is very well developed for authoritative surveys. This chapter records and develops tools from that theory which will be used throughout this book to establish Benford behavior of sequences, functions, and random variables. Topics discussed include uniform distribution characterization of Benford's law, uniform distribution of sequences and functions, and uniform distribution of random variables.
Multi-dimensional Linear Processes
Authors: Berger Arno , Hill Theodore P.
Published: November 2017

Chapter 6 studied models based solely on the one-dimensional processes, however, for many applications, these models are often too simple and have to be replaced with or complemented by more sophisticated multi-dimensional models. This chapter studies Benford's law in the simplest deterministic multi-dimensional processes, namely, linear processes in discrete and continuous time. Despite their simplicity, these systems provide important models for many areas of science. Through far-reaching generalizations of results from earlier chapters, they will be shown to very often conform to Benford's law in that their dynamics is an abundant source of Benford sequences and functions. As in the previous chapter, the properties of continuous-time systems (i.e., differential equations) are analogous to those of discrete-time systems, and the chapter focuses on the latter in every but its last section.
Real-valued Random Processes
Authors: Berger Arno , Hill Theodore P.
Published: November 2017

Benford's law arises naturally in a variety of stochastic settings, including products of independent random variables, mixtures of random samples from different distributions, and iterations of random maps. This chapter provides the concepts and tools to analyze significant digits and significands for these basic random processes. Benford's law also arises in many other important fields of stochastics, such as geometric Brownian motion, random matrices, and Bayesian models, and the chapter may serve as a preparation for specialized literature on these advanced topics. By Theorem 4.2 a random variable X is Benford if and only if log ¦X¦ is uniformly distributed modulo one.
Finitely Additive Probability and Benford's Law
Authors: Berger Arno , Hill Theodore P.
Published: November 2017

This chapter demonstrates the robustness of Benford's law even with regard to basic underlying mathematical hypotheses. It records, without proof, several of the main theorems pertinent to a theory of Benford's law in the context of finitely additive probability, and points the interested reader to further references on that theory in the literature.
Androgynous Gods in Archaic Rome
Authors: Corbeill Anthony
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the role of grammatical gender in daily religious experience by focusing on androgynous gods in ancient Rome. It shows that the grammatical gender of a god's name matches the perceived sex of its imagined incarnation. This observation is extended to an analysis of the indigetes, a set of minor deities who seem to have ruled every aspect of daily life, and to whom the Romans appealed, in particular at significant transitional stages such as birth, marriage, and death. A tendency to group gods in sexed pairs is evident in the numerous extant allusions to these deities, as well as to other divine powers. The chapter concludes by showing how this originary state of divine androgyny—whether historical or the product of intellectual speculation—collapses over time in ways analogous to the loss of fluid gender for nouns.
On Assemblages and Machines
Authors: Smith Adam T.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines modernity's effort to banish objects from the production of social life alongside a series of counterprojects that have consistently smuggled things back into our thinking. The current “material” or “archaeological” turn in the human sciences represents only the most recent of these counterprojects, embracing multiple perspectives from the abstract philosophies of speculative materialism and object-oriented philosophy to grassroots social movements, such as permaculture and transition towns. The intention in situating the archaeological turn within a wider genealogy of our struggle to understand the world of things is to develop a conceptual repertoire that will allow us to accord objects a presumption of difference—an analytical stance that neither anthropomorphizes their operation nor dismisses them as unknowable.
Conclusion
Authors: Smith Adam T.
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter returns to the overarching question that opened the Introduction—how do objects shape our political lives?—by drawing insights gained from the Bronze Age Caucasus into a wider reflection on the political work of things in contemporary moments of revolution and reproduction. It discusses the events leading up to Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution and its aftermath; the Soviet Union's commemoration in 1968 of the founding of the Urartian fortress at Erebuni, on the outskirts of Yerevan, Armenia, which inaugurated a new archaeologically derived assemblage that transformed the material fabric of Yerevan; and a fairy tale written by Armenian poet Hovannes Toumanyan about Brother Axe.
Should you Be Happy?
Authors: Winkler Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses a method of computing probabilities called “coupling.” The idea of coupling is that, when comparing probabilities of two events A and B, one tries to put them into the same experiment. All one would need to do is compare Pr(A but not B) with Pr(B but not A). This might be quite easy, especially if most of the time either both A and B occur or neither. The chapter illustrates this method through a Venn diagram showcasing the desired situation. In addition, this chapter applies this method through a series of problems: an argument involving chess games, the probability of a baseball team winning games, and finally, an application to squash strategy.
From the Outside In
Authors: Smith Derek
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses Slothouber–Graatsma–Conway puzzle, which asks one to assemble six 1 × 2 × 2 pieces and three 1 × 1 × 1 pieces into the shape of a 3 × 3 × 3 cube. The puzzle has been generalized to larger cubes, and there is an infinite family of such puzzles. The chapter's primary argument is that, for any odd positive integer n = 2k + 1, there is exactly one way, up to symmetry, to make an n × n × n cube out of n tiny 1 × 1 × 1 cubes and six of each of a set of rectangular blocks. The chapter describes a way to solve each puzzle in the family and explains why there are no other solutions. It then presents several related open problems.
Error Detection and Correction using SET®
Authors: Gordon Gary , McMahon Elizabeth
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers two fundamental questions for detecting and correcting errors made while playing the card game SET®. The game is played with a special deck of eighty-one cards, and the objective is to find three cards that form a set. Over the course of a game, a player may make a mistake by taking three cards that do not form a set—a common occurrence which this chapter examines by first introducing coordinates for the cards and then uses these coordinates to define a Hamming weight for any subset of cards. The chapter then uses the facts about Hamming weight to describe a variant of the game, called the EndGame, which leads to error detection. Afterward, the chapter produces a perfect, single-error-correcting linear code solely from SET® cards. It concludes with additional topics that demonstrate the deep connections between the simple card game and advanced mathematics.
The Cookie Monster Problem
Authors: Braswell Leigh Marie , Khovanova Tanya
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the problem of the “Cookie Monster number.” In 2002, Cookie Monster® appeared in the book The Inquisitive Problem Solver by Vaderlind, Guy, and Larson, where the hungry monster wants to empty a set of jars filled with various numbers of cookies. The Cookie Monster number is the minimum number of moves Cookie Monster must use to empty all the jars. The chapter analyzes this problem by first introducing known general algorithms and known bounds for the Cookie Monster number. It then explicitly finds the Cookie Monster number for jars containing cookies in the Fibonacci, Tribonacci, n-nacci, and Super-n-nacci sequences. The chapter also constructs sequences of k jars such that their Cookie Monster numbers are asymptotically rk, where r is any real number, 0 ≤ r ≤ 1.
Representing Numbers Using Fibonacci Variants
Authors: Lucas Stephen K.
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces the Zeckendorf representation of a Fibonacci sequence, a form of a natural number which can be easily found using a greedy algorithm: given a number, subtract the largest Fibonacci number less than or equal to it, and repeat until the entire number is used up. This chapter first compares the efficiency of representing numbers using Zeckendorf form versus traditional binary with a fixed number of digits and shows when Zeckendorf form is to be preferred. It also shows what happens when variants of Zeckendorf form are used. Not only can natural numbers as be presented sums of Fibonacci numbers, but arithmetic can also be done with them directly in Zeckendorf form. The chapter includes a survey of past approaches to Zeckendorf representation arithmetic, as well as some improvements.
States and Power in Africa
Authors: Herbst Jeffrey , Herbst Jeffrey
Published: November 2017

Theories of international relations, assumed to be universally applicable, have failed to explain the creation of states in Africa. There, the interaction of power and space is dramatically different from what occurred in Europe. This book places the African state-building process in a truly comparative perspective. Its bold contention—that the conditions now facing African state-builders existed long before European penetration of the continent—is sure to provoke controversy, for it runs counter to the prevailing assumption that colonialism changed everything. This revised edition includes a new preface in which the author links the enormous changes that have taken place in Africa over the past fifteen years to long-term state consolidation. The final chapter on policy prescriptions has also been revised to reflect the evolution of African and international responses to state failure.
Government Paternalism
Authors: Le Grand Julian , New BILL
Published: November 2017

Should governments save people from themselves? Do governments have the right to influence citizens' behavior related to smoking tobacco, eating too much, not saving enough, drinking alcohol, or taking marijuana—or does this create a nanny state, leading to infantilization, demotivation, and breaches in individual autonomy? Looking at examples from both sides of the Atlantic and around the world, this book examines the justifications for, and the prevalence of, government paternalism and considers when intervention might or might not be acceptable. Building on developments in philosophy, behavioral economics, and psychology, the book explores the roles, boundaries, and responsibilities of the government and its citizens. It investigates specific policy areas, including smoking, saving for pensions, and assisted suicide. It then discusses legal restrictions on risky behavior, taxation of harmful activities, and subsidies for beneficial activities. The book pays particular attention to “nudge” or libertarian paternalist proposals that try to change the context in which individuals make decisions so that they make the right ones. It argues that individuals often display “reasoning failure”: an inability to achieve the ends that they set themselves. Such instances are ideal for paternalistic interventions—for though such interventions might impinge on autonomy, the impact can be outweighed by an improvement in well-being. Finally, the book rigorously considers whether the state should guide citizen decision making in positive ways and if so, how this should be achieved.
The Material and Cultural Foundations of American Magazines
Authors: Haveman Heather A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the material and cultural foundations that provided the resources necessary for magazine publishing and the demand necessary to sustain a large number of magazines in locations across America. In particular, it explores a number of fundamental changes in American society that supported the explosive growth and increasing variety of magazines. It first considers basic material supports such as advances in printing and papermaking technologies and the development of the U.S. postal system before discussing the more complex demographic, economic, and cultural supports. These include population growth and urbanization and the rise of various religious, political, and economic communities of readers. In particular, the chapter describes the growth of an increasingly urban, better-educated, more prosperous population, along with the development of copyright law in Britain and America and its impact on cultural conceptions of authorship in both countries.
The Geography of the Immigration Backlash
Authors: Abrajano Marisa , Hajnal Zoltan L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines whether demographics influences white attitudes toward immigration. It asks whether living near heavy concentrations of immigrants and Latinos is threatening enough to produce a reaction by white Americans; that is, whether context is driving at least part of white America's response to immigration. It shows that white attitudes are strongly and consistently correlated with the size and growth of the state Latino population on a range of immigrant-related policies and white partisanship. Whites who live in states with more Latinos are more punitive, less supportive of social welfare and other public services, and generally more conservative than whites in other states. Whites in those same states are also significantly more likely to support the Republican Party.
Media Coverage of Immigration and White Partisanship
Authors: Abrajano Marisa , Hajnal Zoltan L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the role of news media in driving white fears regarding immigration. In particular, it explores the relationship between media coverage of immigration and aggregate shifts in white party identification. It first considers how the media influences public opinion before discussing the media's profit-driven incentives to frame immigration in a negative manner. Content analysis of immigration-related articles from the New York Times from 1980 to 2011 shows that when the issue of immigration is brought to the attention of the public, it is generally with an emphasis on the negative consequences of immigration. This negative coverage leads to important effects on white macropartisanship. Across this time period, the chapter finds that the reliance on the Latino threat narrative by the media is correlated with significant defection away from the Democratic Party along with increases in the proportion of the public that identifies as Republicans and Independents.
Marriage and Lineal Authentication
Authors: Samin Nadav
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines marriage patterns in Arabian history and how knowledge of these patterns became a key element of Saudi Arabia's modern genealogical culture. It begins with a review of new historical evidence from the central Arabian oasis town of al-Ghāt, which reveals the way marital patterns preserve knowledge about premodern status hierarchies. It then considers Hamad al-Jāsir's use of marital patterns as a tool of lineal authentication, a practice epitomized in his study of a historically maligned Arabian tribe, Bāhila. It also shows how al-Jāsir made use of Arabian marital patterns as a form of ethnographic data that could serve as a basis for rehabilitating the reputation of historically maligned Arabian tribes and advancing a nativist ethical blueprint for modern Saudi society in which tribal and religious values could cohere harmoniously against perceived external threats.
“Poets of the First Book, Writers of Promise”
Authors: Zuba Jesse
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the professionalization of the poetic vocation in the wake of the expansion of the American system of higher education during the post-1945 era. The teaching of poetry writing in colleges and universities redefined poetry as something that could, at least in some sense, be taught, and it rendered the traditional image of the poet as an “untutored genius” highly problematic. First-book prizes for poetry proliferated in this new literary environment largely because they served to reinforce its central values. For the institutions to which they were in many cases linked, such prizes functioned as an assertion of cultural authority. They strengthened poetry's status as a profession by presenting its hierarchy as a meritocracy, open, like other professions, to anyone with talent and drive, and also affirmed the authority of contest judges.
“Everything Has a Schedule”
Authors: Zuba Jesse
Published: November 2017

This chapter offers an interpretation of one of the most remarkable debut collections ever selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets award—Some Trees by John Ashbery. The reputation of the book as an unconventional debut has dominated the critical response to it, from the early, largely negative judgments by critics such as William Arrowsmith and Donald Hall, to more recent attempts to revalue it by Marjorie Perloff, Vernon Shetley, David Lehman, and others. The chapter argues that Some Trees has been misread both by its detractors and defenders, who tend to stress the ways in which the poems resist interpretation while ignoring many of the ways in which they encourage and support it.
From Firstborn to Vita Nova
Authors: Zuba Jesse
Published: November 2017

This chapter turns to a poet whose work lies at the opposite end of the spectrum, in several respects, from Ashbery's. Here, the chapter focuses on first books to consider subsequent volumes from Louise Glück's oeuvre. The differences between Ashbery and Glück are meant to stress the pervasiveness of the fascination with the vocational trajectory that they share: the same conflicted embrace of career is as legible in the serene disorders of Some Trees as it is in the fierce analyses of Firstborn and throughout the seven collections Glück published leading up to Vita Nova. The logic of Glück's career, the chapter argues, illustrates the double bind of literary professionalism with radical severity.
Sounding the Limits of Life
Authors: Helmreich Stefan , Roosth Sophia , Friedner Michele
Published: November 2017

What is life? What is water? What is sound? This book investigates how contemporary scientists—biologists, oceanographers, and audio engineers—are redefining these crucial concepts. Life, water, and sound are phenomena at once empirical and abstract, material and formal, scientific and social. In the age of synthetic biology, rising sea levels, and new technologies of listening, these phenomena stretch toward their conceptual snapping points, breaching the boundaries between the natural, cultural, and virtual. Through examinations of the computational life sciences, marine biology, astrobiology, acoustics, and more, the book follows scientists to the limits of these categories. Along the way, it offers critical accounts of such other-than-human entities as digital life forms, microbes, coral reefs, whales, seawater, extraterrestrials, tsunamis, seashells, and bionic cochlea. It develops a new notion of “sounding”—as investigating, fathoming, listening—to describe the form of inquiry appropriate for tracking meanings and practices of the biological, aquatic, and sonic in a time of global change and climate crisis. The book shows that life, water, and sound no longer mean what they once did, and that what count as their essential natures are under dynamic revision.
How Like A Reef
Authors: Helmreich Stefan , Roosth Sophia , Friedner Michele
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the history of coral reef science by drawing on the work of the feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway. This history moves from early British preoccupations with coral structure, which had reefs as a sort of architecture, to anthropological visions of coral as a metaphor for culture, to reproductive ecological fascinations with the spawning sexways of corals, to contemporary readings of coral genomes for signs of reef health in the age of warming and acidifying seas. The chapter uses Haraway's notion of the “figure” to highlight change and continuity in coral science. It argues that coral reefs can attune their human visitors and inquisitors to empirical and epistemological questions of scale and context— where context, drawing upon a once-upon-a-time literal, but now more figurative, meaning, refers to a “weaving together.”
Revival and Reform
Authors: Moosa Ebrahim , Tareen SherAli
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes the terms, revival and reform, which are widely disseminated across a range of genres in Muslim literature. They are found in commentaries of prophetic traditions, political discourses, debates about shari'a, and the integrity of learning and scholarship. Often these key words are rhetorically invoked in exhortations of moral awakening in order to advance a Muslim social and political gospel. Over time, these terms have been used together to represent a concept that links newness and creativity (renewal/revival) to wholeness and integrity (iṣlaṭ, reform). Whether the “renewal and reform” is aimed at the collective or the individual or both, the discourse of revival and reform addresses stability and change, the mutable and immutable in Muslim thought. In this larger semantic framework, two things loom large: political theology and the integrity of the learned tradition.
Traditional Political Thought
Authors: Crone Patricia
Published: November 2017

In terms of political thought, as in so many other respects, Muslims today could be said to be bilingual. On the one hand, they speak the global political language of Western derivation marked by key concepts such as democracy, freedom, human rights, and gender equality. On the other hand, they still have their traditional political idiom, formed over 1,400 years of Islamic history and marked by concepts such as prophecy, imamate, and commanding right and forbidding wrong. The Islamic tradition is alien to most Western readers. This chapter attempts to familiarize them with it to make it easier for them to follow the other entries in this volume. The single most important difference between contemporary Western political thinking and the Islamic tradition is that contemporary thought focuses on freedom and rights whereas the Islamic tradition focuses on authority and duties. This separates contemporary political thought from that of all premodern societies, not just that of the Islamic world.
The Journey Begins
Authors: Jordan William Chester
Published: November 2017

This chapter details the journey of abjurers to their ports of embarkation. Abjurations of the realm occurred throughout the kingdom, and residents of some populous localities, such as London or Bristol, could expect to see them and to hear of them far more often than elsewhere. But in most towns, even county seats, and in any and every village, to witness an abjuration was unusual; it was an event. The abjurer received a public shaming, and at the rarest times this rite even included the torching of an abjurer's home. The evidence is ambivalent on whether abjurers chose their place of departure, had it imposed on them by crown authorities, or were, either by choice or assignment, encouraged to accept the port.
Democracies Are Not Created Equal: A Theory of Democratic Constraint
Authors: Baum Matthew A. , Potter Philip B. K.
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces a theory of democratic constraint and derives testable hypotheses. Drawing on literatures ranging from principal-agent theory to political communication and crisis bargaining, it establishes expectations about the processes that result in the public actually becoming aware of foreign policy and then responding at the ballot box. The chapter argues that democratic institutions that favor the flow of information between citizens and leaders—most notably those fostering both political opposition that can generate credible information and an independent and accessible media that can transmit it—contribute to constraint. However, there is substantial heterogeneity among democracies in the extent to which these conditions hold. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how various combinations of these institutional attributes will translate into foreign policy behavior, with a particular focus on conflict behavior.
What Is “In-Your-Face” Politics?
Authors: Mutz Diana C.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the concept of “in-your-face” politics. When it comes to expressing political views in face-to-face settings, most people are usually polite. With political television, in contrast, there is considerable political disagreement, and the opinion holders that people see are often chosen specifically as exemplars of extremely divergent, highly polarized positions. It is well established that violating norms for interpersonal distance or norms for polite conversation can have important consequences in real life. The chapter addresses whether these same norm violations have consequences when they occur via television. It also provides background on incivility in political discourse and what is known about the importance of spatial distance in how people react to one another.
The Consequences of In-Your-Face Politics for Arousal and Memory
Authors: Mutz Diana C.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores how emotional arousal is a common component of everyday experience. Arousal can be positive and/or negative, and it can vary greatly in its intensity. Importantly, arousal is a state of excitation that involves activation of the autonomic nervous system and heightened activity in both mind and body. Television has been viewed as particularly capable of prompting emotional arousal relative to print. Studies of media effects have focused primarily on the effects of television on arousal in the form of fear and aggression in response to violent media. The chapter uses highly controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate the consequences of close-ups and incivility for viewers' levels of emotional arousal and their memory of political television content.
Effects on Public Perceptions of the Legitimacy of the Opposition
Authors: Mutz Diana C.
Published: November 2017

This chapter uses additional experiments to investigate viewers' perceptions of the legitimacy of the candidates and issue positions they like least. Conflict is central to the democratic process, and it is altogether appropriate that media highlight differences of political opinion. The legitimacy of democratic outcomes requires that political options be contested, and the in-your-face style could be just another way to present conflicting ideas to the public. Televised political discourse plays an important role in familiarizing viewers with issue arguments related to matters of public controversy. If television did so for rationales for oppositional political perspectives in particular, then it could be extremely valuable in discouraging polarization and encouraging perceptions of a legitimate opposition.