bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Narrow Function
Authors: Pinillos N. Ángel
Published: August 2023

Chapter 2 argued that the skeptical rule (PBS) checks to see if the principal basis for an agent’s belief that p is sensitive to p. If it is not sensitive, the algorithm produces an inclination to judge that the agent does not know p. This chapter argues that the narrow goal of this algorithm is to approximate a derived Bayesian principle I call “Norm.” On David Marr’s conception of information processing, the function which implements PBS is the “function” or computational description of the algorithm. Insofar as Norm is a principle of rationality, we get an explanation for why our skeptical reactions are rational after all. Of course, the skeptical judgment might not be correct or even rational in the sense that the deployment of PBS will depart from Norm in certain interesting cases of philosophical and practical relevance. We will investigate these departures further in the following chapters.
Varieties of Doubt
Authors: Pinillos N. Ángel
Published: August 2023

This chapter provides a partial taxonomy of doubt. This will give us perspective into where our skeptical inclinations fall in the larger catalog of uncertainty mental states. The chapter also discusses the “Spinozan” truth-bias according to which we tend to have pro-doxastic attitudes towards any proposition we entertain. On such a conception of the mind, doubting mechanisms such as the one proposed in this book play a crucial role in regulating the quality of our beliefs. At the end, the chapter also discusses some studies on deficits of doubt which will grant us some insight into where those states may be localized in the human brain. The latter is needed if we are to achieve a full understanding of the skeptical mechanism. It corresponds to the third level (physical implementation) of cognitive explanations in David Marr’s hierarchy of information processing.
Objections to Sensitivity
Authors: Pinillos N. Ángel
Published: August 2023

This chapter considers a series of new as well as familiar objections to sensitivity principles. It explores whether they might be trouble for our approach which invokes the Principal Base Sensitivity (PBS) principle. The chapter discusses Closure-style arguments and also introduces a new type of counter-example involving insensitive yet probative evidence which, nonetheless, can yield knowledge. These two cases, it is argued, are genuine counter-examples to PBS. But they are not problematic for our thesis that PBS is deployed as a heuristic. The chapter also considers a barrage of difficult problems for sensitivity theorists developed by Robert Nozick, Michael Blome-Tillmann, Sarah Moss, Timothy Williamson, Jonathan Vogel, and others. The nature of these problems may even challenge the status of PBS understood as a heuristic. The chapter argues that the difficulties can be handled.
Land Management and Rural Society Before and After 1000
Authors: Tabarrini Lorenzo
Published: August 2023

Chapter 1 sets out to describe land management and rural society around Lucca and Florence between the early and the central Middle Ages. It starts off by examining the characteristics of the manorial system (sistema curtense in Italian) in the countryside of both cities. It then moves on to the analysis of the process of castle-building (incastellamento) and explores its connections with the so-called ‘signorial mutation’ or ‘feudal revolution’ in northern Tuscany—which took place between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. Finally, the chapter discusses the emergence of unfree tenancy in the Lucchesia and the Fiorentino after 1100. Indeed, unfree tenancy played a crucial role in the transformations of the forms of estate management around the year 1200, as the burden of change was often placed on the highly dependent strata of rural society (particularly in the Fiorentino).
Introduction
Authors: Graham Erin R.
Published: August 2023

Chapter 1 sets out the nature of the United Nations’ transformation in funding and governance and the puzzle it poses to standard conceptions of the UN system and to international relations theory. It explicates how funding relates to multilateral governance and how changes to funding rules have slowly, and quietly, transformed fundamental principles of UN governance. The chapter previews the contours of the book’s theoretical framework. It makes the case that identifying instances of international rule change based on negotiation and revision misses much of the action, which occurs through legal interpretive tools like subsequent agreement and practice. It introduces the importance of genuine uncertainty, permissive rules, and creative agents to understanding subterranean transformation. Finally, it outlines three sets of contributions related to institutional transformation and the historical institutionalist research program, the integration of legal interpretive strategies to how international rules change, and new conceptions of United Nations programs as actors in world politics.
Asking Too Much of Forgiveness
Authors: Russell Luke
Published: August 2023

This chapter aims to explain why there is such a high level of disagreement amongst philosophers about the nature of forgiveness. Some moral disputes about the permissibility of forgiveness rest on deeper disagreements about what forgiveness entails in relation to blame, punishment, and reconciliation. It is not clear which methodology we should use to settle the definitional disagreements, nor whether we should be aiming for a single unified definition or accepting multiple legitimate conceptions of forgiveness. The way forwards is to see that the deep philosophical disagreements are driven by the tension between three pivotal intuitions concerning the permissibility, the availability, and the peaceful functionality of forgiveness. Many of us expect that forgiveness is morally permissible whenever it is possible, and that forgiveness is available to every victim, and that forgiving ends conflict and allows victim and perpetrator to move on in peace. While each one of these intuitions is attractive when considered on its own, philosophers who try to endorse all three thereby end up in a morally untenable position. Rather than try to endorse all three claims, I suggest that the best way forwards is to face up to the fact that there are difficult trade-offs in the philosophy of forgiveness, and to reject at least one of the pivotal intuitions.
Digital First
Authors: Dahiya Surbhi
Published: August 2023

Digital journalism in India has witnessed experienced journalists from traditional media turning into trailblazers and game changers. Giving a new identity to news dissemination, they have put together the technological advancements and are trying to compete the media majors in India. In this book, the author has tried to bring together genesis and growth of these popular digital journalism organizations working towards making a name in the news industry. Some of the digital journalism trailblazers in India that the author has covered in detail in this book are ThePrint, ScoopWhoop, Inshorts, IndiaSpend, BOOM Live, Alt News, Youth Ki Awaaz (YKA), Democracy News Live, Beyond Headlines, Better India, The Quint, People’s Archives of Rural India (PARI), The Wire, Exchange4media (e4m), Newslaundry, Scroll, The Logical Indian, etc. Many others such as Editorji, Khabar Lahariya, and CGNet Swara have been discussed briefly in a separate chapter. All these journalism start-ups have different approaches to digital journalism in India. One chapter each is dedicated to the case study of such groups where the author is trying to explore their origin, founders, and the major attributes that make them stand apart, such as strategic intent, vision, mission, goals, objectives, organizational structure, content strategies and management, editorial policies, target audience and distribution strategies, collaborations, market, business models, mergers, work culture, environment, revenue, social media presence, competitive edge, challenges and achievements, business models, and the future of entrepreneurial journalism in India. Some are for-profit (such as The Quint and Scroll), some are non-profit content-based start-ups (such as PARI and Khabar Lahariya), and others are aggregation based with a greater emphasis on technology (such as Inshorts). At present, these start-ups do not match the muscle of the leading legacy news media such as the Times of India or HT Media, but they have definitely grown big in terms of audience.
IndiaSpend
Authors: Dahiya Surbhi
Published: August 2023

IndiaSpend, also known as ‘an agency of record’, is the first public interest journalism initiative that uses data to tell stories. It works to promote accurate facts from government sources to make them accountable for their actions. This chapter tries to trace the growth of IndiaSpend and how it has made the use of data an important practice in journalism in India. It also looks at the way it reports and writes stories through data. The chapter outlines the variety of stories covered by the organization and their emphasis on the use of data journalism to give an edge to the prevailing journalism in the country. The chapter also discovers the diversification of the product development of IndiaSpend and how successful it has been in its fact-checking initiative. In addition to this, the chapter also traces the organization’s revenue and business model, marketing initiatives, and the use of technology to promote data journalism. Further in the chapter, the author discusses the niche that this digital organization has carved for itself for serious stories, its competitive edge, and its strategic intent for improving the public discourse and editorial and content management.
The Logical Indian
Authors: Dahiya Surbhi
Published: August 2023

The chapter explicitly presents the journey of The Logical Indian (TLI), an innovative organization that believes in being a ‘democratised and approachable media’. It aims to create an impact on the society on a whole and provide a platform to everyone to talk about stuff that needs or deserves attention. The chapter tries to understand the independent digital media organization which wants to affect the sensibility of the millennial and inspire them with its stories acting as a catalyst for the change. The author unravels their strategic intent and also the type of content they produce, how they keep misinformation at bay, and the business model they follow. The chapter also explores how they try to promote campaigns for various social issues to spread awareness with the help of volunteers and social workers.
Colonized by Humanity
Authors: Waters Rob
Published: August 2023

Colonized by Humanity is a study of racial liberalism in London at the end of empire. It explores the projects to cultivate racial integration developed in the two decades between the arrival of the Empire Windrush and the passage of the first Race Relations Act. These were the years that integrationism took hold as a social phenomenon, its reflexes lodged deep in an English culture that took the idea of ‘tolerance’ as its watchword. It was, as this book describes it, an ambivalent culture, which sought to do away with the discriminations of race but operated through a racial vision: the white English were to lead the way in integration, reforming away the problems of racial otherness that marked their darker-skinned neighbours. Viewing integrationism through the eyes of Caribbean Londoners, Colonized by Humanity allows us to see it, as they did, with its colonial and racial dynamics up close.
Good citizens
Authors: Waters Rob
Published: August 2023

‘Good citizens’ explores the efforts to make black Londoners into good citizens, surveying the various projects of civics, good neighbourliness, and voluntary association that defined integration politics at the local level in the 1950s and 1960s. These integration projects were undertaken always with one eye on the possible alternatives—civic disengagement or, worse still, violence and revolt. These were the nightmare scenarios that many felt were only narrowly escaped in 1958. Telling the story of the efforts to cultivate ‘good citizenship’ for integration, this chapter shows a different history of citizenship to that which dominates the historiography of the post-war. In that story, the end of the Second World War and the birth of social democracy stand as turning points for British citizenship, when the emphasis on citizens’ duties gave way to an emphasis on their rights. This chapter points to the unevenness of this transformation. In the context of mass multiculture and decolonization, the emphasis on citizenly duty remained strong.
The Jewish War
Authors: Davies Jonathan
Published: August 2023

This chapter considers important preliminary questions of structure, date, and audience. It concludes that the Jewish War seems to have been targeted at a broad readership, encompassing educated Greeks and Romans as well as Greek-literate Jewish readers; it outlines a suggested structure for the work; and it concludes that, while Jewish War 1–6 seems to date to late in the reign of Vespasian, there remains a strong possibility (though certainty is impossible) that Book 7 was added later, in the reign of Domitian. As a consequence of this, Book 7 will be treated separately in this study, and special care will be taken to be sensitive to specifically Domitianic resonances in that book.
The Flavians in Jewish War 1–6
Authors: Davies Jonathan
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines the portrayals of the three major members of the Flavian family, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, in Books 1–6 of the Jewish War. It examines the portrayals of Vespasian and Titus under major headings, considering how they are depicted as military commanders, in relation to the divine, in terms of their virtues, with reference to the legitimacy of their imperial accession, and in relation the issue of the extent of their responsibility for the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. It concludes that, while always ostensibly courteous to the two senior Flavians (as any literary work written in the Flavian period would have been), Josephus is fundamentally engaged in promoting a view of the Jewish Revolt which is radically different from that promoted by the dynasty and which in some respects could be seen as discourteous to the dynasty. The depiction of Domitian in these books is minimal, courteous, and proportionate.
The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: August 2023

The book has two goals. The first goal is meta-theoretical and is fulfilled by Part One: an interpretation of the past (Chapter 1), the present (Chapter 2), and the future of AI (Chapter 3). Part One develops the thesis that AI is an unprecedented divorce between agency and intelligence. On this basis, Part Two investigates the consequences of such a divorce, developing the thesis that AI as a new form of agency can be harnessed ethically and unethically. Chapter 4 offers a unified perspective on the many principles that have been proposed to frame the ethics of AI. Chapter 5 discusses the potential risks that may undermine the application of these principles, and then Chapter 6 analyses the relation between ethical principles and legal norms, and offers a definition of soft ethics as post-compliance ethics. Chapters 7–9 analyse the ethical challenges caused by the development and use of AI, evil uses of AI, and good practices when applying AI. The last group of chapters focuses on AI for social good or AI4SG (Chapter 10), the positive and negative impacts of AI on the environment (Chapter 11), and the possibility of using AI in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (Chapter 12).The book concludes (Chapter 13) by arguing in favour of a new marriage between the Green of all our habitats and the Blue of all our digital technologies and how this new marriage can support and develop a better society and a healthier biosphere.
A Unified Framework of Ethical Principles for AI
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: August 2023

Previously, in Chapters 1–3, we saw how AI is a new form of agency that can deal with tasks and problems successfully, in view of a goal, without any need for intelligence. Every success of any AI application does not move the bar of what it means to be an intelligent agent. Instead, it bypasses the bar altogether. The success of such artificial agency is increasingly facilitated by the enveloping (that is, reshaping into AI-friendly contexts) of the environments in which AI operates. The decoupling of agency and intelligence and the enveloping of the world generate significant ethical challenges, especially in relation to autonomy, bias, explainability, fairness, privacy, responsibility, transparency, and trust (yes, mere alphabetic order). For this reason, many organizations launched a wide range of initiatives to establish ethical principles for the adoption of socially beneficial AI after the Asilomar AI Principles and the Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of Artificial Intelligence were published in 2017. This soon became a cottage industry. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of proposed principles threatens to overwhelm and confuse.
AI and the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Authors: Floridi Luciano
Published: August 2023

Chapter 11 analysed the positive and negative impact of AI on climate change and offered some recommendations to increase the former and decrease the latter. Climate change is one of the areas where AI is being used to support the UN SDGs. As we saw in Chapter 9, initiatives relying on AI to deliver socially beneficial outcomes (so-called AI4SG) are on the rise. However, existing attempts to understand and foster AI4SG initiatives have so far been limited by the lack of normative analyses and a shortage of empirical evidence. Following the analyses provided in Chapters 9–11, this chapter addresses these limits by supporting use of the United Nations’ SDGs as a benchmark for tracing the scope and spread of AI4SG. The chapter also presents in more detail a database of AI4SG projects (already mentioned in Chapter 11) collected using this benchmark. Several key insights are discussed, including the extent to which different SDGs are being addressed. The goal of the chapter is to facilitate the identification of pressing problems that, if left unaddressed, risk hampering the effectiveness of AI4SG initiatives.
From “Season” to “Hour”
Authors: Miller Kassandra J.
Published: August 2023

Chapter 5 examines how Galen incorporates references to hourly timekeeping into his justifications for and refinement of Hippocratic “critical-day” schemes, which were designed to help physicians anticipate turning points in febrile diseases. This chapter proposes that Galen, in both his fever case histories and his astrological explanations for critical days, used hourly timekeeping to support a set of interrelated claims: first, that the Hippocratic writings are internally consistent and prefigure later technological developments, like hourly timekeeping; second, that Galen alone should be seen as the true successor of Hippocrates; and third, that, in keeping with Hippocratic injunctions, Galen’s own approach to medicine integrated knowledge and methods appropriate to the highly esteemed mathematical sciences—in this case, to astronomy.
Is Free Movement (Law) Fully Emancipated from Migration (Law)?
Authors: Barbou des Places Ségolène
Published: August 2023

The objective of the chapter is to understand how free movement was ‘constructed’ as an exceptional form of mobility, which has very little in common with ordinary regimes of migration, and then to address the exception hypothesis. It asks simple, yet provocative, questions: Is free movement (still) as exceptional as it is claimed to be? Is not free movement an ordinary type of migration after all? The chapter first analyses how the divide between free movement and migration in EU law was constructed, on both conceptual and practical levels. Then it questions the ‘exceptionalism’ of EU free movement law: free movement and migration are intertwined realities that are connected at structural and conceptual levels. Absent the logic of evolution and progression, which underpinned the EU institutional approach to free movement law, what in fact separates free movement and migration in EU law could well be a difference in intensity rather than in substance.
England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages
Authors: Savill Benjamin
Published: August 2023

This monograph provides the first dedicated, book-length study of interactions between England and the papacy throughout the early middle ages. It takes as its lens the extant English record of papal privileges: legal diplomas drawn-up on metres-long scrolls of Egyptian papyrus, acquired by pilgrim-petitioners within the city of Rome, and then brought back to Britain to negotiate local claims and conflicts. How, why, and when did English petitioners choose to invoke the distant authority of Rome in this way, and how did this compare to what was taking place elsewhere in Europe? How successful were these efforts, and how were they remembered in later centuries? By using these still-understudied papal documents to reassess what we know of the worlds of Bede, the Mercian Supremacy, the West Saxon ‘Kingdom of the English’, and the Norman Conquest—locating them in the process within a comparative, Europe-wide setting—this book offers important new contributions to Anglo-Saxon studies, legal and documentary history, papal history, and the study of early medieval Europe more widely. It also includes an annotated handlist of the corpus of English papal privileges up to 1073—a critical reference work for future research in the field.
Introduction
Authors: Savill Benjamin
Published: August 2023

This chapter introduces the corpus of papal privileges in early medieval England, together with the much larger European body of evidence. It argues for the special value to historians of these unique, still-understudied early medieval documentary sources, especially through their potential as comparative tools. It surveys in brief the current state of research on Anglo-papal relations and papal ‘diplomatic’ (charter and documentary studies); provides some basic definitions of genre; and outlines the scope and structure of the book as a whole.
Getting to Grips with Papal Privileges in the Early Middle Ages
Authors: Savill Benjamin
Published: August 2023

Chapter 2 provides the key contextual background for the book, exploring in detail what it meant to acquire a papal privilege in the early middle ages. These were unique material artefacts, usually granted in person by the pope in Rome: their acquisition signalled an event, not a routine bureaucratic process. Using evidence from across Europe, this chapter outlines the stages by which these documents were petitioned, composed, and conveyed, and then brought back into their beneficiaries’ own societies. It stresses in particular the spectacular material form of these documents, as well as the importance of the role of the petitioner/beneficiary at every stage in the acquisition process.
Papal Privileges and the English Benedictine Movement (c. 960–c. 1000)
Authors: Savill Benjamin
Published: August 2023

Chapter 6 focuses on the role—or lack thereof—of papal privileges in the tenth-century West Saxon (Cerdicing) ‘Kingdom of the English’. Why is our evidence for the use of papal documentary culture in England so comparatively poor for this period, when we know that strong Anglo-papal relations otherwise existed, and that a great many privileges were acquired across contemporary Europe? By surveying the dearth of English evidence against the corpus of acquisitions from Ottonian Germany and Italy, late Carolingian and Capetian France, and the emerging Catalan polity, this chapter argues that ideas about papal authority developed in the new English kingdom along lines quite different from those of the ‘post-Carolingian’ polities. The discussion includes reassessments of evidence of papal documents from within the milieu of the English ‘Benedictine movement’, at Dunstan’s Canterbury, Æthelwold’s Winchester, Oswald’s Ramsey, and Glastonbury abbey.
The Indian Intoxicant
Authors: Sohal Amar
Published: August 2023

Abul Kalam Azad claimed that while Indians had transcended their religious identities to create the secular nation, this process had not destroyed but had carefully maintained these separate individualities. This chapter explores how advocates of the Azadian idea placed limitations on the fluidity of culture to avoid the perils of religious majoritarianism. They furnished notions of accommodation and adjustment to grant Hinduism and Islam an equal right to autonomous development. These concepts, like the profane national culture shared by Hindus and Muslims, were similarly historicized. By locating them not only in medieval and early modern Muslim kingship but also in pre-Islamic Indian philosophy, Muslim thinkers were able to cast the shared nation as more than just a minoritarian necessity. But though they deemed the refusal of religious homogeneity essential to coexistence, they also recognized that pluralism marked Indian nationality with a certain fragility; an imperfection which required Indians to be doubly vigilant of religious nationalists who wished to exploit this weakness. History was consequently alive in the competitive form of positive and negative inheritance, and had to thus be made an active principle to which Indians would forever be responsible. This chapter also demonstrates that while Azad and his associates were concerned with upholding the integrity of India’s religions, they drew on the universality of Islam to encourage a theological dialogue with Hinduism in the hope of establishing a monotheistic meeting point.
Conclusion
Authors: Sohal Amar
Published: August 2023

This Conclusion demonstrates the capacity of the Muslim secular to produce different but equally legitimate answers to the question of political representation for minorities in post-Partition India. Abul Kalam Azad’s total endorsement of secular, interest-based organization immediately after independence was revised by Sheikh Abdullah two decades later. Abdullah’s call for a restricted form of communitarian politics responded to the steady institutionalization of religious discrimination. Apart from summarizing the most important arguments of this book, this Conclusion briefly traces their implications for the contemporary politics of India and Pakistan. It discusses the (limited) usefulness of Azadian ideas in the age of Hindu nationalism. It also reappraises the Kashmir problem through Abdullah’s conditional federalism, and casts Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s universal ethics onto Pashtun demands in today’s Pakistan.
Brain Computations and Connectivity
Authors: Rolls Edmund T.
Published: August 2023

The subject of this book is how the brain works. In order to understand this, it is essential to know what is computed by different brain systems; and how the computations are performed. The aim of this book is to elucidate what is computed in different brain systems; and to describe current computational approaches and models of how each of these brain systems computes. Understanding the brain in this way has enormous potential for understanding ourselves better in health and in disease. Potential applications of this understanding are to the treatment of the brain in disease; and to artificial intelligence which will benefit from knowledge of how the brain performs many of its extraordinarily impressive functions. This book is pioneering in taking this approach to brain function: to consider what is computed by many of our brain systems; and how it is computed. The book is also pioneering in taking biologically plausible approaches to brain computation. The book is also pioneering in incorporating evidence on the connectivity of 360 cortical regions in the human brain, making the book highly relevant to understanding the human brain. The book will be of interest to all scientists interested in brain function and how the brain works, whethr they are from neuroscience, or from medical sciences including neurology and psychiatry, or from the area of computational science including machine learning and artificial intelligence, or from areas such as theoretical physics.
The temporal cortex
Authors: Rolls Edmund T.
Published: August 2023

The inferior and middle temporal gyri are involved visual object recognition, with the more dorsal areas involved in face expression, gesture, and motion representation that is useful in social behaviour. The superior temporal cortex is involved in auditory processing. The anterior temporal lobe is involved in semantic representations, for example information about objects, people, and places. Network mechanisms involved in semantic representations are described. The output of this system reaches the inferior frontal gyrus, which on the left is Broca’s area, involved in language production. The concept that the semantics for language are computed in the anterior temporal lobe, and communicates with Broca’s area for speech production, is introduced. These temporal lobe semantic regions have strong connectivity with the inferior parietal cortex visual regions especially PGi.
The hippocampus, memory, and spatial function
Authors: Rolls Edmund T.
Published: August 2023

The hippocampal system provides a beautiful example of how different classes of neuronal network in the brain work together as a system to implement episodic memory, the memory for particular recent events. The hippocampus contains spatial view neurons in primates including humans, which provide a representation of locations in viewed space, built in a ventromedial visual stream that reaches the parahippocampal scene or place area. These representations can be combined with object and temporal representations to provide an episodic memory about what happened where and when. A key part of the system is the CA3 system with its recurrent collateral connections that provide a single attractor network for these associations to be learned. The computational generation of time, encoded by time cells in the hippocampus, is described, and this leads to a theory of hippocampal replay and reverse replay. The computational operation of a key part of the architecture, the recall of memories to the neocortex, which takes part in memory consolidation, is described. Reward signals from the orbitofrontal are incorporated into hippocampal episodic memory, and in addition influence cholinergic neurons, so are involved in memory consolidation.
The motor cortical areas
Authors: Rolls Edmund T.
Published: August 2023

Premotor cortical areas have outputs to the motor cortex, and receive inputs from the parietal cortex to implement actions such as reaching into space and grasping objects. Neurons in some premotor areas respond not only to movements being performed, but also to the sight of movements being performed, and are termed ‘mirror neurons’.
The basal ganglia
Authors: Rolls Edmund T.
Published: August 2023

The basal ganglia include the striatum (caudate, putamen, and ventral striatum) which receive from all cortical areas, and which project via the globus pallidus and substantia nigra back to the neocortex. The basal ganglia are implicated in stimulus-response habit learning, which may be provided by a reinforcement learning signal received by dopamine neurons responding to reward prediction error. The dopamine neurons may receive reward-related information from the orbitofrontal cortex, via the ventral striatum and habenula. The network mechanisms in the basal ganglia implement selection of a single output for behaviour, which is highly adaptive, by mutual direct inhibition between neurons.
Computations by different types of brain, and by artificial neural systems
Authors: Rolls Edmund T.
Published: August 2023

A comparison is made between computations in the brain and computations performed in computers. This is intended to be helpful to those engineers, computer scientists, AI specialists et al interested in designing new computers that emulate aspects of brain function. In fact, the whole of this book is intended to be useful for this aim, by setting out what is computed by different brain systems, and what we know about how it is computed. It is essential to know this if an emulation of brain function is to be performed, and this is important to enable this group of scientists to bring their expertise to help understand brain function more. Key differences between artificial deep learning using error backpropagation, and biologically plausible networks with local synaptic learning rule that are emphasized in this book, are described. The important issue of the relation between the mind and the brain, and how we should view causality in complex systems with different levels of explanation is considered, and leads to an overview of how brain systems implement consciousness. Section 19.10 makes it clear why the focus of this book is on computations in primate (and that very much includes human) brains, rather than on rodent (rat and mice) brains. It is because the systems-level organization of primate including human brains is quite different from that in rodents, in many fundamental ways that are described.
Islamic Jihadism and the Laws of War
Authors: Mekky Omar
Published: August 2023

The rapid rise of global Islamic Jihadism in the past few decades and the limited success of the anti-terror campaign in halting their expansion have raised hard-hitting questions about how different political actors might preserve and restore the world’s peace and security. International law, since the end of the Second World War, has often been the chief instrument to address global conundrums of this kind. Nevertheless, in relation to this particular phenomenon, this book argues that international law, at worst, has very little to do to solve the problem and, at best, cannot solve it alone. On the one hand, Jihadist groups often cite Islamic law interpretations and argumentations to justify their combat-related actions against states while rejecting traditional international law rules. On the other hand, some of these states never hesitate to drift from traditional international law rules to justify their so-called counterterrorism measures to halt these groups from expanding on their territories. In these wars, the internationally recognized laws of war that were originally created to protect those who don’t or no longer participate in hostilities are equally and constantly being challenged by the two sides to justify their combat actions. Thus, the ambition of this book is that, by examining the notion of Islamic Jihadism through a comparative and interdisciplinary approach between international law and Islamic law, international lawyers and policymakers will become more willing to engage with legal cultures other than the ones that they are used to, in order to ultimately reach their pursued objectives.
The Islamic Jus ad Bellum from International Law Perspective
Authors: Mekky Omar
Published: August 2023

This chapter tackles the jus ad bellum from international law and Islamic law perspectives. Its main purpose is to shed the light on the commonalities and differences between these two existing legal paradigms as they are, mainly, the norms regulating the initiation of wars by and against the Jihadist movements in our contemporary world. It starts with defining the different meanings of the concept of Jihad under Islamic law as well as the particularities of the prohibition on the use of force as articulated in the UN Charter. Moreover, it explores the definition of the right of self-defence in Islamic law and its compatibility with Article 51 of the UN Charter. It further discusses the principle of humanitarian intervention under both bodies of law. Finally, this chapter evaluates thoroughly the positions and debates of Muslim jurists vis-à-vis the notion of offensive Jihad.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Mekky Omar
Published: August 2023

Summarizing the previous chapters’ findings, the conclusion urges its readers to seek partnership with other more equipped disciplines such as Islamic law, in order to solve the flagrant incapacity of traditional international law rules in responding to ‘Islamic Jihadism’. It suggests that international lawyers should not be intimidated by the horror vacui arguments that raise the alleged risk of abandoning familiar intellectual frames, which thrive on an endemic fear of disorder and uncertainty and a desire to maintain the status quo. In order to resolve the quest of responding to Islamic Jihadism, international lawyers, policy-makers, and humanitarians ought to engage in a constructive dialogue between international law and Islamic law, including all its diverse interpretations.
Autumn Flies
Authors: Blower Brooke L.
Published: August 2023

Russia’s entrance into the Great War upends life for Tamara Drasin, the eldest child of Jewish tailors in Ukraine. After her father is drafted into the tsar’s army, Tamara, her mother, and her brother struggle to survive a series of catastrophes—first wartime disruptions, then fallout from the Bolshevik Revolution. Full civil and legal equality may have been officially granted to women by the new radical regime, but the turmoil it unleashes leaves them and their children particularly vulnerable. By age thirteen—after living through Ukrainian civil war and a wave of antisemitic violence perpetrated against the region’s shtetls—Tamara understands the devastating stakes of armed conflict for communities caught in the path of rival forces.
The Silk-Stocking Revolt
Authors: Blower Brooke L.
Published: August 2023

George stood in his brother’s shadow during the Great War, but after earning a Harvard law degree he walks in the footsteps of his father, the prominent municipal court judge Frederick Spiegelberg, Sr. Devoting himself to a life of hard work, public service, and political engagement, George distrusts Tammany Democrats and wants to live in a society governed by the laws of the open courtroom, not the whims of bureaucrats and their backroom deals. Like many elite lawyers, his aspirations extend beyond courtroom advocacy into the world of governance. Running for Congress in 1934 as an opponent of the New Deal, he enters the political fray at the start of a transformative era of partisan realignments when the nation’s two major political parties are becoming standard-bearers for opposing ideological orthodoxies—until world events, particularly the growing power of the Nazis, test the limits of his partisan loyalties.
Red Mississippi
Authors: Blower Brooke L.
Published: August 2023

Ben agrees to go to Russia for PM to report on the state of the Eastern Front and advocate for the immediate opening of a second front against the Nazis to take pressure off the Soviet forces fighting for their state’s very survival. Still obsessed with his own Confederate heritage, Ben believes that as a Southerner he understands better than other Americans what it is like to face an invasion. Soviet policies severely curtail the newsgathering efforts of foreign journalists. But because Ben’s quest is to invest American audiences in the Soviet Union’s plight, he has no need to dig below the Kremlin’s propaganda.
Patent Denials
Authors: Blower Brooke L.
Published: August 2023

Harry emerges as one of Standard Oil’s top diplomats as the firm’s new Foreign Producing Department scrambles to break into the oil fields of Venezuela, Iraq, and the Netherlands East Indies. To keep prices stable (and high), the industry’s leaders embark on an unprecedented effort to strike cooperative agreements among themselves. Doing business with the Germans proves far easier than with the British, the French, the Dutch, or the Soviets. As Jersey Standard becomes the US corporation with the greatest stake in the Third Reich, the leftist press zeroes in on the company’s ties to the powerful chemical conglomerate IG Farben, which in turn sparks government investigations into Standard’s protection of German synthetic rubber patents from the American market.
Profiteering
Authors: Grogan Colleen M.
Published: August 2023

This chapter details the second main consequence of Grow and Hide: profiteering due to government policies that encourage private capital investments in the U.S. health care system. Two main implications arise from the health care system’s reliance on capital markets. First, while public hospitals had long taken care of the poor, the “health care safety net” emerged as a new term and concept in the post-1980 period. Government’s support of the competitive approach demanded that safety-net institutions compete for patients in the medical marketplace. Under this logic, private actors define the composition of the health care safety net. Second, because health planning failed, the central concept of public health in America—What is it? Who controls it?—was questioned. Despite several important public health crises, which made visible the dramatic importance of public health work, the federal government continued to support the competitive approach and further encouraged private capital investments in the health care market.
Inequality
Authors: Grogan Colleen M.
Published: August 2023

This chapter details the third main consequence of Grow and Hide: growing inequality. The Grow-and-Hide Regime has put the Medicaid program at the center of health policy debates since its early years. Medicaid’s political evolution from 1965 to 2008 illustrates the power of the Grow-and-Hide Regime to entrench an expanded Medicaid as fragmented, unequal, and strategically hidden through federalism with a heavy reliance on the private sector. While each critical juncture of expanded coverage has invited a struggle over the program’s generosity and scope, it has at every turn created more fragmentation and unequal treatment between groups. This chapter explicates for each major Medicaid reform over time how coverage expands in important ways into the middle class, yet its middle-class reach is hidden by policy designs and discourse that foster fragmentation, inequality, and division within Medicaid and the larger health care system.
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Muslim Intellectuals on Islam–Democracy Compatibility
Authors: Ahmad Parray Tauseef
Published: August 2023

This chapter deliberates on Islam and democracy reconciliation by providing an assessment of the views of some prominent pioneering Muslim modernists of the Arab world, of the nineteenth and some twentieth centuries, on this discourse. Providing a valuable contribution and some important insights to this hotly debated discourse, the prominent Arab thinkers included in this chapter are: Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi (d. 1873), Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897), Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905), and some later twentieth-century thinkers like Rashid Rida (d. 1935), and Malek Bennabi (d. 1973). They offer a broad spectrum of perspectives on Islam-democracy discourse by focusing mainly on the concepts of Shura and Maslaha.
Twenty-First Century Muslim Thinkers on Islam–Democracy Compatibility—I
Authors: Ahmad Parray Tauseef
Published: August 2023

Elaborating further Islam–democracy discourse, this chapter deliberates on the relationship between Islam, democracy, and democratization in the light of the views and observations of some of the globally reputed twenty-first-century intellectuals and thinkers (including academicians, religious and political leaders/activists, and analysts). Some of these selected figures include Mohamed Fathi Osman (d. 2010), Dr Israr Ahmed (d. 2010), Asghar Ali Engineer (d. 2013), Mawlana Wahiduddin Khan (d. 2021), Sadek J. Sulaiman (d. 2021), Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b. 1926), Professor Khurshid Ahmad (b. 1932), Muhammad Khalid Masud (b. 1939), Rachid al-Ghannoushi (b. 1941), Abdulaziz Sachedina (b. 1942), and Abdolkarim Soroush (b. 1945).
Democracy and Its Muslim Critics
Authors: Ahmad Parray Tauseef
Published: August 2023

This chapter highlights the views and perceptions of some ‘hard-core’/‘radical’ Islamists (scholars/leaders and organizations) who oppose Islam–democracy compatibility, i.e., supporters of ‘incompatibility pole’ (‘Rejectionists’ or ‘Opponents’). It brings forth, and contextualizes within the broader perspective of Islam–democracy discourse, the views and approaches of radical Islamists like Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966); Taqiuddin al-Nabhani (d. 1977) and Abd al-Qadim Zallum (d. 2003)—both associated with Hizb al-Tahrir; and of the academics like Abdul Rashid Moten (Malaysia) and Canada-based Abid Ullah Jan. This is followed by a succinct overview, with a specific focus on the insights of Asef Bayat, Nader Hashemi, Amr Sabet, Graham E. Fuller, Irfan Ahmad, etc., on ‘Islam and Democracy: What is the Real Question?’
CALEOSIN 1 interaction with AUTOPHAGY-RELATED PROTEIN 8 facilitates lipid droplet microautophagy in seedlings
Authors: Miklaszewska Magdalena , Zienkiewicz Krzysztof , Klugier-Borowska Ewa , Rygielski Marcin , Feussner Ivo , Zienkiewicz Agnieszka
Published: August 2023

Lipid droplets (LDs) of seed tissues are storage organelles for triacylglycerols (TAGs) that provide the energy and carbon for seedling establishment. In the major route of LD degradation (lipolysis), TAGs are mobilized by lipases. However, LDs may also be degraded via lipophagy, a type of selective autophagy, which mediates LD delivery to vacuoles or lysosomes. The exact mechanisms of LD degradation and the mobilization of their content in plants remain unresolved. Here, we provide evidence that LDs are degraded via a process morphologically resembling microlipophagy in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) seedlings. We observed the entry and presence of LDs in the central vacuole as well as their breakdown. Moreover, we show co-localization of AUTOPHAGY-RELATED PROTEIN 8b (ATG8b) and LDs during seed germination and localization of lipidated ATG8 (ATG8–PE) to the LD fraction. We further demonstrate that structural LD proteins from the caleosin family, CALEOSIN 1 (CLO1), CALEOSIN 2 (CLO2), and CALEOSIN 3 (CLO3), interact with ATG8 proteins and possess putative ATG8-interacting motifs (AIMs). Deletion of the AIM localized directly before the proline knot disrupts the interaction of CLO1 with ATG8b, suggesting a possible role of this region in the interaction between these proteins. Collectively, we provide insights into LD degradation by microlipophagy in germinating seeds with a particular focus on the role of structural LD proteins in this process.