bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Ownership and the Fine Print
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the license agreements imposed by IP rights holders that redefine transactions and strip consumers of ownership even after an apparent sale. Despite their importance, consumers seldom read these license agreements because of their length and complexity. In response, IP rights holders produce highly uniform license terms that impose restrictions on the rights acquired by consumers. There are two approaches of interpreting license agreements: one treating them as contracts that require the mutual consent to be effective, while the other construing license agreements as expression of permission that does not require agreement to be effective. Many courts rely on license agreements to determine whether consumers enjoy ownership over the things they purchase. The better approach, however, should be to look at the economic reality of a transaction.
The “Buy Now” Lie
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

This chapter probes the reasons for consumers’ eagerness to embrace the digital marketplace despite the sacrifice of their ownership rights. It argues that the preference for digital goods is at least partially caused by consumers’ lack of information about what rights they are acquiring in digital goods. Digital retailers frequently employ misleading languages such as “buy,” “own,” “purchase” or “sell.” The chapter reports the results of a study that reveals consumers consistently overestimate their rights in digital goods, and that they prefer to purchase goods that allow them to exercise rights commonly associated with ownership. Many consumers have misconceptions about whether they can resell, lend or gift their digital goods purchased through the “Buy Now” button. A better approach should be to use short notices that unequivocally inform consumers what they are getting.
The Promise and Perils of Digital Libraries
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

The licensing model has important implications for public libraries. The practice of library lending has depended heavily on the exhaustion principle. But in the context of ebook lending, exhaustion has not given libraries the same freedom they used to enjoy over physical copies. The restrictions imposed by copyright holders allow expansive vendor control over library ebook lending. They not only infringe upon library patrons’ freedom to borrow or access library ebook collection, but also diminish the libraries’ ability to discharge their important cultural functions. The prevalence of digital copies makes it harder for libraries to preserve works that lack perceived economic value or that are subject to censorship. It also threatens the privacy of library patrons and stifles innovation.
DRM and the Secret War inside Your Devices
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

This chapter address technologies that are collectively known as Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is a set of software-based tools implemented by copyright holders, device makers, and retailers to monitor and restrict consumer behavior. For example, after the Supreme Court took the side of consumers and affirmed the legality of the VCR, Hollywood threw its weight behind the DVD, an encrypted format that allowed studios to dictate the design and functionality of playback devices. These and other forms of technological self help are strengthened by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits the bypassing, disabling, or otherwise circumventing the digital locks that DRM represents. But the DMCA has largely failed to prevent circumvention, and many copyright holders have recognized that the restrictions imposed by DRM discourage consumers from buying encumbered products. Moreover, as the Sony rootkit incident demonstrates, DRM puts consumer security and privacy at risk.
Responsibility and Blame
Authors: Halpern Joseph Y.
Published: May 2017

Up to this point in the book, causality has been treated as an all-or-nothing concept; either A is a cause of B or it is not. In this chapter, the definition is extended to take into account the degree of responsibility of A for B. For example, if someone wins an election 11--0, then each person who votes for him is less responsible for the victory than if he had won 6--5. A notion of degree of blame, which takes into account an agent's epistemic state, is then defined. Roughly speaking, the degree of blame of A for B is the expected degree of responsibility of A for B, taken over the epistemic state of an agent. The relationship between the notions of responsibility and blame and the notion of graded causation defined in Chapter 3 using the notion of normality is then examined.
Explanation
Authors: Halpern Joseph Y.
Published: May 2017

The structural-equations framework is used to provide a definition of causal explanation. Essentially, an explanation is a fact that is not known for certain but, if found to be true, would constitute an actual cause of the fact to be explained, regardless of the agent's initial uncertainty. This definition is shown to handle well a number of problematic examples from the literature. It can also be extended in a natural way to provide several notions of partial explanation and explanatory power.
Applying the Definitions
Authors: Halpern Joseph Y.
Published: May 2017

The book concludes with a summary of the key points made, and a discussion of three applications areas from computer science: causality in databases, causality in program verification, and the use of causality in accountability (e.g., determining the cause of a major data breach).
Potatoes: Pests, Plant Breeding, and the Growth of the Nazi State
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

The chapter deals with the role of potatoes bred at the Imperial Biological Institute (Biologische Reichsanstalt - BRA) in the Nazi Battle of Production. It highlights the importance of research at the BRA for the seed cleansing of the Nazi years, with thousands of varieties eliminated from German fields, enforced by the Imperial Food Estate (Reichsnährstand - RNS), the institutional form of the ideology of Blood and Soil and the mammoth Nazi organization responsible for organizing the peasant world. The research dynamics at the BRA aimed at coping with the multiple pests afflicting German potato fields (wart, Colorado beetle, late blight, viruses) is put in relation with the growing infrastructure of the RNS, in an exemplary case of co-production of science and the state: each new experimental system at the BRA corresponded to an expansion of the power and reach of the RNS
Pigs: The Bodenständig Scientific Community in Nazi Germany
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

Chapter four explores the development by academic animal breeders of performance tests enabling the transformation of pigs into organisms embodying fascism. Standards developed at the University of Halle by Gustav Frölich and at Gottingen by Jonas Schmidt assured that pigs were fat and rooted in the soil (bodenständig) contributing to the institutionalization of the Nazi regime: Germans were now feeding their animals produce of the national soil, making the country more resilient in case of war, and following the standards imposed by a new bureaucratic structure. Contrary to many historical references of animals and humans in Nazi times, pigs were not just metaphors calling for comparisons between the way they were bred and the Nazi breeding of humans. It was the particular way they were bred, making them bodenständig,which formed the new ties weaving the German Volk. The animals scientists designed were intended to perform the transition of German society into a national community, embodying Nazi alternative modernity.
Sheep: Fascist Settlers and the Colonization of Africa and Europe
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

The sixth and final chapter is the most original in terms of methodology, for it takes a single technoscientific organism – Karakul sheep – and follows its role in the settlement of the frontier for the three fascist empires. The ability of Karakul to thrive under harsh environmental conditions and its high value in the fur market made it a perfect companion species for white settler’s imperial expansion. The Animal Breeding Institute at the University of Halle is taken as center of circulation, establishing standards and producing the rams to be used not only in white settlers farms in German possessions in Eastern Europe, but also in Italian settlement schemes in Libya and Ethiopia, and in Portuguese colonization of South-western Angola. The different local karakul sheep experiment stations located in frontier spaces are treated as experiments in colonial sociability, revealing the connections between sheep breeding and the genocides perpetrated by the three regimes.
Conclusion
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

In the fascist era, rituals followed a tight calendar. Nazis celebrated the 1933 seizure of power in January, the anniversary of the founding of the Party in February, National Mourning Day in March, the Führer’s birthday in April, National Labor Day in May, and so on....
Developing Traits of Character on the Way to Altruism
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews Brooks’ recent book, considers how character develops, and points toward the development of compassion and altruism in Zen training.
The Self: A Primer
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the Self and how it is expressed in the I-Me-Mine. It relates the autobiographical self to one of the functions of the so-called “default system,” and considers how its deactivation could contribute to selflessness.
Emerging Concepts in Self–Other Relationships
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter emphasizes the other-referential kind of processing functions in the human brain. These proceed anonymously (allocentrically) instead of in a Self-centered manner. Even so, the Self is defined in space and time by its environment by a merger of Self/other functions.
Early Distinctions between Self and Other, Focal and Global, Are Coded in the Medial Temporal Lobe
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews 2014 Nobel Prize-winning research on the hippocampus and parahippocampus. It considers place cells and grid cells and emphasizes that early primate studies had identified egocentric and allocentric responses in the hippocampus. It also notes that both direction codes and landmark location codes are represented in the retrosplenial cortex as well as in the entorhinal cortex.
Remindfulness
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews the multiple aspects of human memory. It introduces a new term, remindfulness, as a reminder that the old Pali term, sati, also had implications of memory retrieval, not only present moment mindfulness. It reviews the nature of intuition and insight in general, as well as the topics of implicit processing, implicit learning, and ways to measure them using the mindful attention awareness scale (MAAS) and functional MRI (fMRI).
A Remindful Route through the Nucleus Reuniens
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on one nucleus of the limbic thalamus: the nucleus reuniens. It is important as a way station between the medial prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. Its midline location and hypothalamic connections suggest that it could contribute to our subconscious memory functions.
A Disorder Called Transient Global Amnesia
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter reviews transient global amnesia as a neurological disorder that can be confirmed by the finding of delayed distinctive hyperintense lesions in the lateral sides of the hippocampus in diffusion-weighted imaging studies.
Remindful Zen: An Auditory “Altar Ego”?
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts the evolution of the author’s benign auditory hypnopompic hallucinations over the past 12 years. They represent a memory retrieval function that can become more elaborate when meditation occurs more frequently.
Following an Auditory Stimulus, Then “Seeing the Light”
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts the visual hallucination and alternate state that was triggered in a man whose attention followed the sound of a jet airplane flying overhead. Recent research is reviewed involving subjects who are presented with auditory stimuli in so-called near space and far space. The phrases “just this,” or suchness are among those used to describe similar states of awakening.
Two Key Gyri, a Notable Sulcus, and the Wandering Cranial Nerve
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the structure and multiple functions of the angular gyrus, the parahippocampal gyrus, and the superior temporal sulcus (STS). It also distinguishes between the fusiform face area (FFA) and the parahippocampal place area (PPA).
The Nitric Oxide Connection
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter is an update on recent research involving the gaseous signaling molecule, nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is a potential candidate for some of the delayed histological changes that occur in transient global amnesia. It might also serve as a “chemical fingerprint” for some of the other brain changes that are the empirical residua of the dynamic changes during kensho-satori and internal absorption.
Keeping Your Eye on the Ball
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts the story of Shaun Green, and how “playing in the zone” enabled his powers of attention to focus so spontaneously that he could set the all-time baseball record of hitting four home runs in one major league game.
What Is Living Zen?
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter discusses Living Zen, during the direct experience of events in everyday life, as the expression of an earthy, flexible empiricism. Only repeated wholesome, daily-life practices generate the incremental brain changes that help develop one’s traits of character. A simpler, flexible, more humane being is the unannounced goal.
Basho, the Haiku Poet
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the haiku poetry of Basho from the standpoint of its avian influences and from the perspectives of multiple literary authorities.
Basho’s States of Consciousness
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the circumstances surrounding episodes in Basho’s later life when he appeared to have experienced an alternate state of consciousness. Gazing upward and listening upward spontaneously have the potential to trigger such states.
The Epistemic Dimension of the Political Opportunity Structure
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

The concept of the political opportunity structure from social movement studies has undergone various expansions, including the development of a theory of the industry opportunity structure in social movement studies and of the intellectual opportunity structure in science and technology studies. The chapter then discusses how the theory of the political opportunity structure can be further developed through systematic consideration of its epistemic dimension. This dimension has two pairs of basic features: the level of scientization (the use of technical decision-making criteria) and the extent of public participation in the policy process, and the epistemic culture of risk evaluation (the preference of government regulators for narrow or inclusive methods) and the degree of precautionary preference when making decisions in situations of uncertain evidence. The framework is applied to cases of colony collapse disorder, the regulation of genetically modified food, nanotechnology, the smart meter movement, and climate science denialism.
The Politics of Meaning: From Frames to Design Conflicts
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

The chapter reviews the literature on frame analysis and narratives in social movement studies and the parallel literature in science and technology studies on technological frames, boundary objects, and other cultural dimensions of science and expertise. It suggests the value of materializing the analysis of cultural meaning in the study of social movements and industry by developing the analysis of design conflicts. Three main types of design conflicts are reviewed: those based on social structural conflicts of race, class, and gender; those based on field-level industrial conflicts between incumbent firms and challengers; and those based on the environmental conflict between sustainability and resilience. This chapter uses examples from work on feminism, race, and design; on the solar energy and organic food movements; and on trade-offs between resilience and sustainability at the household and regional levels.
The Organizational Forms of Counterpublic Knowledge
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

The chapter reviews literature in social movement studies on resource mobilization, mobilizing structures, and organizations, then it examines a parallel literature in science and technology studies on networks. It suggests a way to build on these literatures by analyzing the organizational dimension of counterpublic knowledge, and it argues that three are four main types of organizational forms. Scientific and intellectual movements involve attempts to reform research agendas within the scientific field; science associations and public interest science organizations involve means by which scientists communicate with the public and political field; citizen-science alliances involve collaborative projects between citizen groups and scientists; and citizen science involves research projects by lay communities.
Contemporary Change: Liberalization and Epistemic Modernization
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

The chapter discusses the problem of developing a historical sociological perspective on science, technology, and social movements during the period of the 1980s through 2015. It argues in favor of a historical dynamic based on liberalization and reflexive modernization that is similar to Polanyi’s double movement. The dynamic is formulated specifically for technological and industrial change based on the relationship between the liberalization of regulatory policy and the epistemic modernization of policy and knowledge production. Epistemic modernization involves the opening up of the research agendas of the scientific field to the concerns of undone science and the research needs of industrial transition movements and counterpublics. The theoretical framework is applied to a case history on the movement that supports greater access to and more research on cancer treatment based on complementary and alternative medicine. Both liberalization and epistemic modernization processes are documented for the movement.
Conclusion
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

The study of science, technology, and social movements could develop as a syncretism of concepts from the fields of SMS and STS, but I have argued that the research field requires its own conceptual toolkit that builds on and modifies the frameworks of the existing fields. To this end, I have suggested various bridges that synthesize the empirical research and conceptual developments of the two fields into a more coherent whole....
Summary
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

We began by arguing that prevailing intuitions about information behaviors are inaccurate (chapter 1). People are not exclusively consumers of new public information. Instead, their information behaviors often involve curation, in which they keep and manage valued personal information for future access. Curation can be viewed as a form of ...
The Search Alternative
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

The two main retrieval strategies for accessing personal information are navigation and search. Critics of navigation point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders; so people have to remember the exact location of information in order to access it. Despite these arguments, several studies show that search is not the main way that people actually access their files. Instead people generally prefer to manually navigate to information rather than using desktop search. This preference is independent of the quality of the search engine used, and improved search engines do not reduce the extent to which people actively organize their information. Except when finding new web information, people use search only as a last resort when accessing personal files.
The Tagging Alternative
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

Tags are an effective tool for organizing and retrieving Web 2.0 data, but they show low adoption rates when organizing and retrieving personal files and emails. Tags potentially offer flexible organization and retrieval by letting users apply multiple labels to the same information item. In practice, however users prefer folders over tags, and make very little use of multiple classification. In Web 2.0 settings the sheer number of information items means that users cannot possibly know where every item is located. In PIM on the other hand, users are highly familiar with their own information organization, having stored items according to their own subjective needs. In most PIM settings, they are therefore able to retrieve their own personal information quickly and efficiently without the need to generate multiple retrieval labels.
The Group Management Alternative
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

People who are collaborating can share and organize files in two main ways: performing Group Information Management (GIM) using a common repository or performing Personal Information Management (PIM) by distributing files as e-mail attachments and storing them in personal repositories. One potential benefit for GIM is that it reduces the need for every collaborating participant to individually organize their information. However people are less successful and less efficient at finding files from common repositories than personal folders. Consistent with this, people show a preference for more traditional methods of file-sharing using email. PIM may induce better retrieval because it encourages people to actively organize their files using personal classifications. Such active personal organization is less likely with GIM.
Why Is Navigation the Preferred PIM Retrieval Method?
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

This chapter explores fundamental reasons for navigation preference. It explores cognitive and neuroscience explanations about why navigation is preferred to search. Two studies reveal that navigation is less cognitively demanding than search. The first uses a cognitive psychology technique, the dual-task paradigm, to show that search requires more verbal attention than navigation. The second study indicates that PIM navigation involves primitive brain structures previously observed during real-world navigation. In contrast, search activates brain areas commonly observed in linguistic processing. These deep-rooted neurological biases may promote automatic activation of location-related retrieval, leaving the language system available for other tasks.
Summary
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

The first three chapters of part II explored various alternatives to hierarchical folder navigation and showed that search, tags, and group classification are unlikely to replace folder hierarchies for personal information management. The fourth chapter (chapter 8) provided cognitive and neurological explanations for this navigation preference. However, there are other technical alternatives that were not directly covered in these chapters, such automatic classification (discussed briefly in ...
The Subjective Project Classification Principle
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

This chapter presents the subjective project classification principle which states that all information items related to the same project should be stored together regardless of their technological format. A study shows that users tend to think about their information items as projects. They simultaneously retrieve information items of different formats when working on the same project and store files of different formats together according to projects when the system design allows them to. However, current system designs discourage users from storing emails and Web favorites with files, so people currently store them in separate folder hierarchies leading to project fragmentation. Following the subjective project principle the chapter addresses fragmentation by proposing a single hierarchy solution in which all project-related information items are stored in the same folder hierarchy regardless of their format, so that files, emails, Web favorites, tasks and contacts are stored together, separated by tabs.
Summary
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

In the previous parts of the book, we argued that PIM is a different sort of game from other information management fields. In this part, we focused on the ways that new designs might help users play this game more effectively. We introduced the user-subjective design approach and its three principles, demonstrating the use of subjective attributes with nine design schemes. In most cases, we presented system deployments and their evaluations as evidence for the effectiveness of both the specific design and the user-subjective design principles more generally. Support for the approach is twofold: First, our initial research (...
Conclusions and Future Directions
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

The final chapter describes future research and technology for curation. Personal archives will continue to grow as new types of personal data and systems play even greater roles in our everyday lives. As a result, we believe that users will confront even greater challenges of organizing their personal information. The chapter first assesses emerging technology, including lifelogging and machine learning, as well as automatic organization of personal information. It outlines requirements for new PIM theory and new methods.
Archive Everything
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This book traces the evolution of the archive across the centuries by looking at primitive, Medieval, Renaissance, Victorian and contemporary archives. Crucially, the book evidences the fluidity and potential inter-changeability between libraries, archives and museums. A number of case studies offer an insight into the operation of a variety of different types of archives, including cabinets of curiosity, archival artforms, architectures, performances, road-shows, time capsules, social media documentation practices, databases, and a variety of museological web-based heritage platforms. The archive is shown to play a crucial role in how individuals and social groups administer themselves through and within a burgeoning social memory apparatus. This is why at the heart of every industrial revolution thus far, the archive continues to contribute to the way we store, preserve and generate knowledge through an accumulation of documents, artifacts, objects, as well as ephemera and even debris. The archive has always been strategic for different types of economies, including the digital economy and the internet of things. Shown here to increasingly affect to the way we map, produce, and share knowledge, the apparatus of the archive, which allows us to continuously renew who we are in relation to the past, so that new futures may become possible, now effectively pervades almost every aspect of our lives.
A Brief History of the Archive
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This Chapter analyzes the historical evolution of the archive throughout the centuries, looking at different archives, archiving methodologies, practices and technologies, including theories around provenance. In particular, the chapter how the archive, traditionally referring to a site and/or a body of documents, evolved through the introduction of different systems of categorization, mechanicization, preservation, data analysis and broadcast, to encompass, often concurrently, a broad, but inter-related number of practices and technologies that are traditionally considered separately from the archive. The exponential growth of archives thus produced a certain fluidity and potential inter-changeability between these forms.
Archives as Archaeological Sites
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This Chapter shows how archaeology offers a set of translating and mediating practices that help us to build an understanding of the apparatus of the archive as an amalgam of materials that may have been produced at different points in time. To unearth the archive as a site, the chapter introduces an archaeological toolkit including elements such as survey; excavation; media archaeology and remediation. The chapter also shows how the archive operates as strata. In particular, the chapter focuses on the capacity of the archive to facilitate the production and transmission of our presence, our present, and our identity. By analyzing Lynn Hershman Leeson’s !R.A.W. project archaeologically, the chapter shows the inter-relatedness of materials and the media used to frame them, unpacking how archives ought to be read contextually as inter-archives.
Diasporic Archives
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This Chapter draws from studies in geography and anthropology, diasporic and postcolonial studies to explore the operation of transformation discourse within the archive showing also the importance of the emergence of a hybrid methodology for the presentation of cultural origin, contexts of digital displays and interpretation of archival materials. In particular, the chapter looks into the use of participatory forms of appraisal in the context of the creation of community archives. The case studies for this chapter include Thomas Allen Harris’s multimedia community engagement archival project Digital Diaspora Family Reunion (DDFR); ‘Creating Collaborative Catalogues’, a collaboration between Ramesh Srinivasan, Robin Boast, and Jim Enote; and a number of educational projects by the Museum of the African.
By What Rules? Human Rights and Religious Authority
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

Constitutional and legal frameworks influence the practice of hate spin. This chapter explains the international human rights approach, which draws the line of legal permissibility at incitement to discrimination and violence. It also discusses the American First Amendment tradition, which is significantly more tolerant of extreme speech in public discourse. At the other extreme are states that have wide latitude to police offence and insult. Islamic nations have attempted to export their domestic approaches into international law through the idea of “defamation of religion”. This debate raises the larger question of how constitutions should accommodate religious rationales for law. Drawing insights from the sociology of religion and comparative political science, this chapter argues that a plural and tolerant democracy does not require religion to be forced out of the public sphere, but must give primacy to the rule of law.
India: Narendra Modi and the Harnessing of Hate
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

This case study of India analyzes the use of hate spin in Narendra Modi’s triumphant 2014 election campaign. The Sangh Parivar network of Hindu nationalists targeted the Muslim minority through classic hate speech in order to mobilize the far right and unite the caste-riven Hindu majority behind the Brahmin-dominated BJP. The Hindu right also conducted a systematic campaign to manufacture extreme offendedness against historical writing perceived as defaming their religion. India’s legal system has been unable to contain hate spin. Laws against incitement are poorly enforced, offering little protection for vulnerable groups facing violence. At the same time, laws intended to preserve harmony by regulating insult have created a de facto right to be offended, which is used by hate spin agents to demand censorship of legitimate speech.
Indonesia: Democracy Tested amid Rising Intolerance
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines rising religious intolerance in Indonesia, which threatens its reputation for moderatism and secularism. A relatively young democracy, Indonesia’s newly opened political terrain has allowed intolerant groups to emerge. Rather than a tightly coordinated Islamist conspiracy, the country has an ecosystem of organizations and interest groups—political parties, militant gangs, government agencies, and the main Muslim clerical body—whose self-serving actions cultivate an environment that is conducive to hate. Christians in some locations have been unable to build churches because of these hate campaigns. There has also been serious violence against the Ahmadiyah sect and the Shia Muslim minority. The country’s blasphemy law is especially problematic, enabling the most intolerant segments of the majority community to oppress religious minorities.
United States: Exceptional Freedoms, Fabricated Fears
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

The United States has exceptionally strong Constitutional protections for free speech, but also for religious freedom. This chapter considers how this unique legal framework affects hate spin in the country. It finds that although hate speech can be expressed with a high degree of impunity, strong anti-discrimination laws limit the harms caused by such speech. Hate spin can, nonetheless, succeed in fostering fear and cultivating prejudice against minorities. The chapter examines how a network of anti-Muslim activists have used hate spin to campaign against mosque building, to oppose multi-cultural textbooks, and to introduce legislation protecting states from the fabricated threat of encroaching Muslim law. Beyond their stated goals, which may be frustrated by courts, these campaigns often have the symbolic purpose of spreading Islamophobia.
Pushing Back, Through Media and Civil Society
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

How a society responds to hate spin depends on not only its laws, but also its social norms—in particular, whether people consider bigotry to be socially acceptable or something to fight against, how comfortable they are with ideas and beliefs that are different, and whether their sense of national belonging is based on inclusive democratic values or an exclusive cultural identity. This chapter examines the role of non-state actors in shaping societies’ responses to hate spin. These players—secular and religious civil society groups, news organizations, and social media platforms, for example—are essential parts of any effort to build democracies that are respectful of religious differences. But, like state policy, media and civil society organizations are also often part of the problem, facilitating, encouraging, or even generating hate spin.
Assertive Pluralism for a World of Irreducible Diversity
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

Drawing from the preceding case studies, the concluding chapter finds hate spin to be a sophisticated form of contention that is strategic, versatile and networked. These characteristics make hate spin difficult for the law to deal with. Laws against offense are fundamentally flawed because they fail to take into account the subjectivity of offense, which makes such laws prone to abuse by hate spin agents. Prohibition of incitement is necessary but usually insufficient, because hate propaganda can be designed in ways to evade the law. Rather than merely addressing speech, democracies should institute strong antidiscrimination laws. Hate spin causes the most damage in contexts where equality for minorities is not guaranteed. A multicultural, equality-protecting constitutional order is the only viable way to organize a society that is internally diverse.
Prologue: “The Most Primitive Question”
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

The Prologues argues that the question “What is a system?” is a fundamental question across the disciplines, from quantum mechanics to the social sciences and humanities. To answer the question we need to see system not as an “idea” needing a definition but as a genre—a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to know it. We can then identify features of that genre, such as scalability, that explain why system came to play such a central role in efforts to know the world for so long. We can also count systems and account for their becoming something to blame, as in “blaming the system,” and for the role they play in constituting infrastructure. The Prologue then begins this tale of how system has mediated knowledge by turning back to Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s lunar system, the entry of “system” into English, and a discussion of the role of The Re:Enlightenment Project’s touchstones—past and present, mediating technologies, connectivities—in shaping this book.
Histories for Systems
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

History is a genre consisting historically of different kinds with different functions. Instead of just writing “a history” of system, we need to recover the changing relationship between these two genres—starting with Bacon’s emphasis on the need for new histories and Galileo’s focus on system. This chapter follows their interrelations into the eighteenth century using a new computational resource I call Tectonics. It maps spatially over time the coming together of system and history at the century’s end as they share more and more title pages, modifying each other and forming a new platform for knowledge: the narrow-but-deep disciplines of modernity. The chapter confirms this finding using Encyclopedia Britannica and then—with turns to William Jones and the novel--shows how history itself became one of those narrowed disciplines by foregrounding “ideas” and the modern subject that embodies them. The chapter shows how these interrelations of system and history shaped the efforts of system theory, including Immanuel Wallerstein and Niklas Luhmann, and recovers for this book a different kind of history: Bacon’s notion of a capacious literary history that would tell the “story of learning” from age to age. The chapter concludes with Carl Woese’s efforts to transform biology through a newly capacious history, and with explanations of the scope and kinds of history featured in this book: the histories of “mediation,” “blame,” and the “real.”.
The Project of Enlightenment (Master Systems)
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a new take on the history of science by detailing how the turn from Scholasticism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries took the form of a gradual turn to system as the “firmer” form of what the physicist, and Enlightenment scholar, David Deutsch calls “guesswork.” That turn was completed in grand fashion with Newton’s decision to communicate his principles and laws philosophically by adding a “System of the World” to his treatise. I explain how and why Newton came very close—repeatedly—to sending the Principia into the world without any “System” at all. Why was system such a vexed issue in the late seventeenth century? What was at stake for Newton in choosing to write a system over competitors such as “hypothesis”? And why, once it did make it onto the printed page, did system become so successful that a copy of Newton’s system was launched into space as one of humanity’s calling cards three centuries later? How did that particular form of knowledge come to represent—for Condillac, Goldsmith, Hume, Pownall, Granger—our species’ good and bad efforts to advance knowledge? The primary generic marker of what came to be called Enlightenment, I conclude, were the monumental efforts—highlighted by Adam Smith’s project for Scotland—to scale up systems into master SYSTEMs that persisted from roughly the 1730s through the 1780s.
Disciplinarity (Embedded and Specialized Systems)
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.
Blaming the System—Instituting the Political
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

This chapter pursues the effects of that proliferation by identifying the social incarnations of system—the ways that system re-formed society itself. It situates system as a form that mediated modernity, and shows how that mediation gave rise to the concept and practice of systematizing, its sister phenomenon of “instituting,” and the phenomenon of blaming “The System.” System became an object to blame as the traveling of system into other forms produced a new formal effect—a sense of expansive but attenuated authority: something that works both too well—“you can’t beat The System”—and not well enough—it always seems to “break down.” This chapter tracks that notion of blame in the novel, especially in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Anna Barbauld’s editorial efforts, and links it to what I call “the logic of liberalism.” In that logic, what Smith called the “simple system of natural liberty,” came to be known, simply, as “the system.” In blaming it, we configure “things as they are” as needing change, as capable of being changed, as providing the means of effecting that change, and, crucially as always failing enough to maintain an ongoing need for change. As demonstrated by Macaulay’s speech on the Reform Bill, Liberalism’s object will always be in need of reform because those reforms will always fall short. Liberalism always needs system as an object to blame.
Secretly Seeking System—Instituting the Social
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

The subject here is system’s shaping of the subject of culture, literature, and liberalism—the modern self. Narrow-but-deep selves emerged from system’s role in mediating the formation of narrow-but-deep disciplines. With Mary Hays supplying a primary example, the chapter shows that when systems are extended through disciplinary travel so that they can no longer do what isolated systems do—they talk to themselves, the parts making a whole—another kind of self must be formally interpolated to do the talking. Embedded systems yield a newly expressive “I”—that is why in blaming The System we are also somehow blaming ourselves. This chapter bookends the tale of system and self by juxtaposing An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club” from 1720 to Douglas Englebart’s report on Augmenting Human Intellect from 1962. In the former, young women try to improve themselves through system—both by forming a “club” as a social incarnation of system and by writing systems. In the latter, Englebart describes a “system” in which humans improve themselves by interfacing with technology. The presentation of this report announced the invention of the computer mouse. The chapter concludes by showing how issues of gender and privilege, secrecy and privacy, individual and national development, mix with new kinds of order and method generated by system.
Re:Enlightenment (Algorithmically Enhanced Systems)
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

To bring the story of system forward to the present, this Coda recounts the author’s involvement in an attempt to reshape knowledge called the Whole Enchilada group. Its work highlighted the ongoing importance of Darwin to current efforts at reform. Building on Daniel Dennett’s focus on the algorithmic in Darwin—the “If … then” format of his arguments—the Coda examines how algorithm and system have been deployed as variations of each other: if we reverse engineer any complex system we will find the simple algorithm that generated it. Just as we engage system as something both conceptual—a way of knowing the world—and as something that is really there, that constitutes part of that world, so algorithm is both a formal mode of producing knowledge about the world and—thanks to its simple-to-complex mechanicity—constitutive of that world. Using David Deutsch’s arguments about knowledge and virtual reality, the Coda then asks “Have we been able to know the world through system because the world is, in fact, itself structured as a system?” This question leads to a turn to Stephen Wolfram’s “new science” and the possibility of significant change: a reformulating on the Enlightenment’s once startling conviction that the world could be known through complex master SYSTEMS into the notion that knowledge—in the form of simple, iterative systems—renders the world. The book ends by emphasizing the persistence of system in the growing consensus that the universe is computational—with system generating the world it helps us to know.
Signal and Noise
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

A very detailed study of the acquisition of English inflectional morphology and derivational morphology (nominalization). How, and when, children learn the regular and irregular past tense rules of English. How children learn to stress English words correctly, from an initial state of mislearning. The fine-grained analysis of German noun plurals where a very small rule (‘add -s’) can be productive. The entire discussion is driven by the equation, using child-directed language data.
On Language Design
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

Summary. How the current study impacts traditional problems in linguistics, and how it leads to a simplification of the theory of UG and language learning, with a reduced role for domain-specific innate knowledge of language, leading to an arguably more plausible solution to the problem of language evolution.