bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interfaces on Trial 2.0
Authors: Band Jonathan , Katoh Masanobu
Published: October 2013

The debate over the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry.

We live in an interoperable world. Computer hardware and software products from different manufacturers can exchange data within local networks and around the world using the Internet. The competition enabled by this compatibility between devices has led to fast-paced innovation and prices low enough to allow ordinary users to command extraordinary computing capacity.

In Interfaces on Trial 2.0, Jonathan Band and Masanobu Katoh investigate an often overlooked factor in the development of today's interoperabilty: the evolution of copyright law. Because software is copyrightable, copyright law determines the rules for competition in the information technology industry. This book—a follow-up to Band and Katoh's successful 1995 book Interfaces on Trial—examines the debates surrounding the use of copyright law to prevent competition and interoperability in the global software industry in the last fifteen years.

Band and Katoh are longtime advocates for interoperable devices but present a reasoned view of contentious issues related to interoperability issues in the United States, the European Union, and the Pacific Rim. They discuss such topics as the protectability of interface specifications, the permissibility of reverse engineering (and legislative and executive endorsement of pro-interoperability case law), the interoperability exception to the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the interoperability cases decided under it, the enforceability of contractural restrictions on reverse engineering; and recent legal developments affecting the future of interoperability, including those related to open source-software and software patents.
Blind Vision
Authors: Cattaneo Zaira , Vecchi Tomaso
Published: October 2013

An investigation of the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficit on cognitive abilities.

Can a blind person see? The very idea seems paradoxical. And yet, if we conceive of "seeing" as the ability to generate internal mental representations that may contain visual details, the idea of blind vision becomes a concept subject to investigation. In this book, Zaira Cattaneo and Tomaso Vecchi examine the effects of blindness and other types of visual deficit on the development and functioning of the human cognitive system. Drawing on behavioral and neurophysiological data, Cattaneo and Vecchi analyze research on mental imagery, spatial cognition, and compensatory mechanisms at the sensorial, cognitive, and cortical levels in individuals with complete or profound visual impairment. They find that our brain does not need our eyes to "see."

Cattaneo and Vecchi address critical questions of broad importance: the relationship of visual perception to imagery and working memory and the extent to which mental imagery depends on normal vision; the functional and neural relationships between vision and the other senses; the specific aspects of the visual experience that are crucial to cognitive development or specific cognitive mechanisms; and the extraordinary plasticity of the brain—as illustrated by the way that, in the blind, the visual cortex may be reorganized to support other perceptual or cognitive funtions. In the absence of vision, the other senses work as functional substitutes and are often improved. With Blind Vision, Cattaneo and Vecchi take on the "tyranny of the visual," pointing to the importance of the other senses in cognition.
New Model
Authors: Balinski Michel , Laraki Rida
Published: October 2013

This chapter presents a new basic model, which consists of a common language of evaluation, a set of judges, and a set of competitors. It expresses the problem of what to do with judges’ scores and how to resolve them into a single score in a concise or systematic way. The model identifies the shortcomings of traditional models of social choice theory and provides a new model as an alternative. Six axioms of the basic model are satisfied in a method of grading called social grading function f, in which there is no ambiguity in grading, and the final grade assigned to every single alternative is independent of all other alternatives. The deep preferences or utilities of a judge or a voter play an important role in voting and judging as every decision-maker tries to maximize his utility.
Common Language: Voting
Authors: Balinski Michel , Laraki Rida
Published: October 2013

This chapter focuses on the importance of a simplified common language with clear cultural meanings for grading political candidates. Voters using majority judgment are better at expressing their opinion about a candidate compared with giving rank-orders. The 2007 Orsay experiment in the context of the majority judgment ballot that took place during the French presidential elections in 2007 is also discussed, with a focus on the use of language in which the hypothetical voting process was explained to voters. Analysis on the grades allotted during the experiment is presented along with homogeneity of voters’ grades to consider the use of language by the voting population.
Comparisons of Voting Methods
Authors: Balinski Michel , Laraki Rida
Published: October 2013

This chapter analyzes fundamental differences among different voting methods by comparing their qualitative properties, and also demonstrates how strategic manipulation is controlled by the majority judgment. Borda’s and point-summing, the methods that have gained substantial support by reformists, are manipulated and biased in favor of election of moderate candidates. The methods that are least manipulable include Condorcet, approval judgment, and the majority judgment. Manipulation is difficult in Condorcet due to the creation of Condorcet-cycles. The majority judgment is also considered the most balanced with regard to the left–right spectrum. Bias in favor of centrist candidates is a serious drawback of approval judgment.
A Summing Up
Authors: Balinski Michel , Laraki Rida
Published: October 2013

This book has presented several traditional and new methods of social choice theory, providing solutions to the problems of how to elect, judge, or rank. Four major arguments, including human behavior, gaming the vote, meaningfulness, and practice, which make the majority judgment the most suitable method to be used for voting and rating, have also been presented. The creation and use of common languages of grades for voters or judges have also been demonstrated through the Orsay experiment. The book has emphasized that the properties of good mechanisms for aggregating opinions are determined by various elements, including common sense, ethics, and the realities of human behavior.
Programmed Visions
Authors: Chun Wendy Hui Kyong
Published: October 2013

A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guiding metaphor for our neoliberal world.

New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations of cyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things—mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloud computing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cycles result in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New media proliferates “programmed visions,” which seek to shape and predict—even embody—a future based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor, metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.

Chun argues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software also engenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behind the objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known (knowable) and not known—its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware—makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logical effects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress
Authors: McGuire Robert A. , Coelho Philip R. P.
Published: October 2013

The crucial role played by diseases in economic progress, the growth of civilizations, and American history.

In Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress, Robert McGuire and Philip Coelho integrate biological and economic perspectives into an explanation of the historical development of humanity and the economy, paying particular attention to the American experience, its history and development. In their path-breaking examination of the impact of population growth and parasitic diseases, they contend that interpretations of history that minimize or ignore the physical environment are incomplete or wrong.

The authors emphasize the paradoxical impact of population growth and density on progress. An increased population leads to increased market size, specialization, productivity, and living standards. Simultaneously, increased population density can provide an ecological niche for pathogens and parasites that prey upon humanity, increasing morbidity and mortality. The tension between diseases and progress continues, with progress dominant since the late 1800s.

Integral to their story are the differential effects of diseases on different ethnic (racial) groups. McGuire and Coelho show that the Europeanization of the Americas, for example, was caused by Old World diseases unwittingly brought to the New World, not by superior technology and weaponry. The decimation of Native Americans by pathogens vastly exceeded that caused by war and human predation.

The authors combine biological and economic analyses to explain the concentration of African slaves in the American South. African labor was more profitable in the South because Africans' evolutionary heritage enabled them to resist the diseases that became established there; conversely, Africans' ancestral heritage made them susceptible to northern “cold-weather” diseases. European disease resistance and susceptibilities were the opposite regionally. Differential regional disease ecologies thus led to a heritage of racial slavery and racism.
Handling Digital Brains
Authors: Alač Morana
Published: October 2013

An analysis of how fMRI researchers actively involve their bodies—with hand movements in particular—in laboratory practice.

The results of fMRI brain scanning require extensive analysis in the laboratory. In Handling Digital Brains, Morana Alač shows that fMRI researchers do not sit passively staring at computer screens but actively involve their bodies in laboratory practice. Discussing fMRI visuals with colleagues, scientists animate the scans with gestures, and talk as they work with computers. Alač argues that to understand how digital scientific visuals take on meaning we must consider their dynamic coordination with gesture, speech, and working hands. These multimodal actions, she suggests, are an essential component of digital scientific visuals.

A semiotician trained in cognitive science, Alač grounds her discussion in concepts from Peirce's semiotics and her methodology in ethnography and multimodal conversation analysis. Basing her observations on videotaped records of activity in three fMRI research labs, Alač describes scientists' manual engagement with digital visuals of the human brain. Doing so, she turns her attention to the issue of practical thinking. Alač argues that although fMRI technology directs scientists to consider human thinking in terms of an individual brain, scientific practices in the fMRI lab demonstrate thinking that engages the whole lived body and the world in which the body is situated. The turn toward the digital does not bring with it abstraction but a manual and embodied engagement. The practical and multimodal engagement with digital brains in the laboratory challenges certain assumptions behind fMRI technology; it suggests our hands are essential to learning, and the making of meaning.
The Tarskian Turn
Authors: Horsten Leon
Published: October 2013

A philosopher proposes a new deflationist view of truth, based on contemporary proof-theoretic approaches.

In The Tarskian Turn, Leon Horsten investigates the relationship between formal theories of truth and contemporary philosophical approaches to truth. The work of mathematician and logician Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) marks the transition from substantial to deflationary views about truth. Deflationism—which holds that the notion of truth is light and insubstantial—can be and has been made more precise in multiple ways. Crucial in making the deflationary intuition precise is its relation to formal or logical aspects of the notion of truth. Allowing that semantical theories of truth may have heuristic value, in The Tarskian Turn Horsten focuses on axiomatic theories of truth developed since Tarski and their connection to deflationism.

Arguing that the insubstantiality of truth has been misunderstood in the literature, Horsten proposes and defends a new kind of deflationism, inferential deflationism, according to which truth is a concept without a nature or essence. He argues that this way of viewing the concept of truth, inspired by a formalization of Kripke's theory of truth, flows naturally from the best formal theories of truth that are currently available. Alternating between logical and philosophical chapters, the book steadily progresses toward stronger theories of truth. Technicality cannot be altogether avoided in the subject under discussion, but Horsten attempts to strike a balance between the need for logical precision on the one hand and the need to make his argument accessible to philosophers.
Mind and Brain
Authors: Uttal William R.
Published: October 2013

The search for mind-brain relationships, with a particular emphasis on distinguishing hyperbole from solid empirical results in brain imaging studies.

Cognitive neuroscience explores the relationship between our minds and our brains, most recently by drawing on brain imaging techniques to align neural mechanisms with psychological processes. In Mind and Brain, William Uttal offers a critical review of cognitive neuroscience, examining both its history and modern developments in the field. He pays particular attention to the role of brain imaging—especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)—in studying the mind-brain relationship. He argues that, despite the explosive growth of this new mode of research, there has been more hyperbole than critical analysis of what experimental outcomes really mean. With Mind and Brain, Uttal attempts a synoptic synthesis of this substantial body of scientific literature.

Uttal considers psychological and behavioral concerns that can help guide the neuroscientific discussion; work done before the advent of imaging systems; and what brain imaging has brought to recent research. Cognitive neuroscience, Uttal argues, is truly both cognitive and neuroscientific. Both approaches are necessary and neither is sufficient to make sense of the greatest scientific issue of all: how the brain makes the mind.
Like-Minded
Authors: Sneddon Andrew
Published: October 2013

A proposal that the cognitive processes that make us moral agents are partially constituted by features of our external environments.

What are the psychological foundations of morality? Historically, the issue has been framed as one of emotion versus reason. Hume argued that reason is the slave of the passions and so morality must be based on them; Kant argued that moral law is given by rational agents to themselves in virtue of their rationality. The debate has continued in these terms to the present day. In Like-Minded, Andrew Sneddon argues that "reason" and "passion" do not satisfactorily capture all the important options for explaining the psychological foundations of morality. He proposes a third possibility: that the cognitive processes that make us moral agents are centrally constituted by features of our external environments. Sneddon calls this the Wide Moral Systems Hypothesis (WMSH).

The WMSH fits within an array of positions known as externalism or the Extended Mind Hypothesis, according to which the world outside our bodies is not just input to cognitive processes located within our brains but partially constitutes those processes. After explaining the WMSH, Sneddon presents a series of more particular hypotheses about distinct aspects of our moral psychology: moral judgment, moral reasoning, the attribution of moral responsibility, and production of action. Sneddon revisits overlooked externalist aspects of moral psychology, noting the integration of agent and environment found in existing research. With Like-Minded, Sneddon offers an innovative contribution to work in both moral psychology and the Extended Mind Hypothesis.
Neither Physics nor Chemistry
Authors: Gavroglu Kostas , Simões Ana
Published: October 2013

The evolution of a discipline at the intersection of physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

Quantum chemistry—a discipline that is not quite physics, not quite chemistry, and not quite applied mathematics—emerged as a field of study in the 1920s. It was referred to by such terms as mathematical chemistry, subatomic theoretical chemistry, molecular quantum mechanics, and chemical physics until the community agreed on the designation of quantum chemistry. In Neither Physics Nor Chemistry, Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simões examine the evolution of quantum chemistry into an autonomous discipline, tracing its development from the publication of early papers in the 1920s to the dramatic changes brought about by the use of computers in the 1970s.

The authors focus on the culture that emerged from the creative synthesis of the various traditions of chemistry, physics, and mathematics. They examine the concepts, practices, languages, and institutions of this new culture as well as the people who established it, from such pioneers as Walter Heitler and Fritz London, Linus Pauling, and Robert Sanderson Mulliken, to later figures including Charles Alfred Coulson, Raymond Daudel, and Per-Olov Löwdin. Throughout, the authors emphasize six themes: epistemic aspects and the dilemmas caused by multiple approaches; social issues, including academic politics, the impact of textbooks, and the forging of alliances; the contingencies that arose at every stage of the developments in quantum chemistry; the changes in the field when computers were available to perform the extraordinarily cumbersome calculations required; issues in the philosophy of science; and different styles of reasoning.
Money, Payments, and Liquidity
Authors: Nosal Ed , Rocheteau Guillaume
Published: October 2013

Two experts in monetary policy offer a unified framework for studying the role of money and liquid assets in the economy.

In Money, Payments, and Liquidity, Ed Nosal and Guillaume Rocheteau provide a comprehensive investigation into the economics of money and payments by explicitly modeling trading frictions between agents. Adopting the search-theoretic approach pioneered by Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and Randall Wright, Nosal and Rocheteau provide a logically coherent dynamic framework to examine the frictions in the economy that make money and liquid assets play a useful role in trade. They discuss the implications of such frictions for the suitable properties of a medium of exchange, monetary policy, the cost of inflation, the inflation-output trade-off, the coexistence of money, credit, and higher return assets, settlement, and liquidity.

After presenting the basic environment used throughout the book, Nosal and Rocheteau examine pure credit and pure monetary economies, and discuss the role of money, different pricing mechanisms, and the properties of money. In subsequent chapters they study monetary policy, the Friedman rule in particular, and the relationship between inflation and output under different information structures; economies where monetary exchange coexists with credit transactions; the coexistence of money and other assets such as another currency, capital, and bonds; and a continuous-time version of the model that describes over-the-counter markets and different dimensions of liquidity (bid-ask spreads, trade volume, trading delays).
Birth of a Market
Authors: Garbade Kenneth D.
Published: October 2013

The evolution of “a marvel of modern finance,” the market for U.S. Treasury securities, from 1917 to 1939.

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from 4-day bills to 30-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about $1 billion of interest-bearing Treasury debt outstanding, spread out over just six issues. New offerings were rare, and the debt was narrowly held, most of it owned by national banks. In Birth of a Market, Kenneth Garbade traces the development of the Treasury market from a financial backwater in the years before World War I to a multibillion dollar market on the eve of World War II.

Garbade focuses on Treasury debt management policies, describing the origins of several pillars of modern Treasury practice, including “regular and predictable” auction offerings and the integration of debt and cash management. He recounts the actions of Secretaries of the Treasury, from William McAdoo in the Wilson administration to Henry Morgenthau in the Roosevelt administration, and their responses to economic conditions. Garbade's account covers the Treasury market in the two decades before World War I, how the Treasury financed the Great War, how it managed the postwar refinancing and paydowns, and how it financed the chronic deficits of the Great Depression. He concludes with an examination of aspects of modern Treasury debt management that grew out of developments from 1917 to 1939.
Bilingual Competence and Bilingual Proficiency in Child Development
Authors: Francis Norbert
Published: October 2013

A study of first and second language development in an indigenous community with implications for broader linguistic and cognitive issues.

When two or more languages are part of a child's world, we are presented with a rich opportunity to learn something about language in general and about how the mind works. In this book, Norbert Francis examines the development of bilingual proficiency and the different kinds of competence that come together in making up its component parts. In particular, he explores problems of language ability when children use two languages for tasks related to schooling, especially in learning how to read and write. He considers both broader research issues and findings from an ongoing investigation of child bilingualism in an indigenous language–speaking community in Mexico. This special sociolinguistic context allows for a unique perspective on some of the central themes of bilingualism research today, including the distinction between competence and proficiency, modularity, and the Poverty of Stimulus problem.

Francis proposes that competence (knowledge) should be considered as an integral component of proficiency (ability) rather than something separate and apart, arguing that this approach allows for a more inclusive assessment of research findings from diverse fields of study. The bilingual indigenous language project illustrates how the concepts of modularity and the competence-proficiency distinction in particular might be applied to problems of language learning and literacy.

Few investigations of indigenous language and culture approach bilingual research problems from a cognitive science perspective. By suggesting connections to broader cognitive and linguistic issues, Francis points the way to further research along these lines.
Imposters
Authors: Collins Chris , Postal Paul M.
Published: October 2013

A study of pronominal agreement with imposters, third person DPs (this reporter, yourstruly, mylord, Madam) that denote the speaker or addressee.

Normally, a speaker uses a first person singular pronoun (in English, I, me, mine, myself) to refer to himself or herself. To refer to a single addressee, a speaker uses second person pronouns (you, yours, yourself). But sometimes third person nonpronominal DPs are used to refer to the speaker—for example, this reporter, yours truly—or to the addressee—my lord, the baroness, Madam (Is Madam not feeling well?). Chris Collins and Paul Postal refer to these DPs as imposters because their third person exterior hides a first or second person core.

In this book they study the interactions of imposters with a range of grammatical phenomena, including pronominal agreement, coordinate structures, Principle C phenomena, epithets, fake indexicals, and a property of pronominal agreement they call homogeneity.

Collins and Postal conclude that traditional ideas about pronominal features (person, number, gender), which countenance only agreement with an antecedent or the relation of the pronoun to its referent, are much too simple. They sketch elements of a more sophisticated view and argue for its relevance and explanatory power in several data realms. The fundamental proposal of the book is that a pronoun agrees with what they call a source, where its antecedent constitutes only one type of source. They argue that the study of imposters (and closely related camouflage DPs) has far-reaching consequences that are inconsistent with many current theories of anaphora.
Human Information Interaction
Authors: Fidel Raya
Published: October 2013

A fresh research approach that bridges the study of human information interaction and the design of information systems.

Human information interaction (HII) is an emerging area of study that investigates how people interact with information; its subfield human information behavior (HIB) is a flourishing, active discipline. Yet despite their obvious relevance to the design of information systems, these research areas have had almost no impact on systems design. One issue may be the contextual complexity of human interaction with information; another may be the difficulty in translating real-life and unstructured HII complexity into formal, linear structures necessary for systems design. In this book, Raya Fidel proposes a research approach that bridges the study of human information interaction and the design of information systems: cognitive work analysis (CWA). Developed by Jens Rasmussen and his colleagues, CWA embraces complexity and provides a conceptual framework and analytical tools that can harness it to create design requirements. CWA offers an ecological approach to design, analyzing the forces in the environment that shape human interaction with information.

Fidel reviews research in HIB, focusing on its contribution to systems design, and then presents the CWA framework. She shows that CWA, with its ecological approach, can be used to overcome design challenges and lead to the development of effective systems. Researchers and designers who use CWA can increase the diversity of their analytical tools, providing them with an alternative approach when they plan research and design projects. The CWA framework enables a collaboration between design and HII that can create information systems tailored to fit human lives.
The Neural Architecture of Grammar
Authors: Nadeau Stephen E.
Published: October 2013

A comprehensive, neurally based theory of language function that draws on principles of neuroanatomy, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and parallel distributed processing.

Linguists have mapped the topography of language behavior in many languages in intricate detail. To understand how the brain supports language function, however, we must take into account the principles and regularities of neural function. Mechanisms of neurolinguistic function cannot be inferred solely from observations of normal and impaired language. In The Neural Architecture of Grammar, Stephen Nadeau develops a neurologically plausible theory of grammatic function. He brings together principles of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and parallel distributed processing and draws on literature on language function from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and functional imaging to develop a comprehensive neurally based theory of language function.

Nadeau reviews the aphasia literature, including cross-linguistic aphasia research, to test the model's ability to account for the findings of these empirical studies. Nadeau finds that the model readily accounts for a crucial finding in cross-linguistic studies—that the most powerful determinant of patterns of language breakdown in aphasia is the predisorder language spoken by the subject—and that it does so by conceptualizing grammatic function in terms of the statistical regularities of particular languages that are encoded in network connectivity. He shows that the model provides a surprisingly good account for many findings and offers solutions for a number of controversial problems. Moreover, aphasia studies provide the basis for elaborating the model in interesting and important ways.
Invisible Users
Authors: Burrell Jenna
Published: October 2013

An account of how young people in Ghana's capital city adopt and adapt digital technology in the margins of the global economy.

The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country's elite, use the Internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and amass foreign ties—activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The Internet, accessed on second-hand computers (castoffs from the United States and Europe), has become for these youths a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. In Invisible Users, Jenna Burrell offers a richly observed account of how these Internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted to their own priorities, a technological system that was not designed with them in mind.

Burrell describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region's famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of “big gains” that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region.

Burrell, integrating concepts from science and technology studies and African studies with empirical findings from her own field work in Ghana, captures the interpretive flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlights how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.
Radicalizing Enactivism
Authors: Hutto Daniel D. , Myin Erik
Published: October 2013

A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality—intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience—are best understood as embodied yet contentless.

Most of what humans do and experience is best understood in terms of dynamically unfolding interactions with the environment. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists now acknowledge the critical importance of situated, environment-involving embodied engagements as a means of understanding basic minds—including basic forms of human mentality. Yet many of these same theorists hold fast to the view that basic minds are necessarily or essentially contentful—that they represent conditions the world might be in. In this book, Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin promote the cause of a radically enactive, embodied approach to cognition that holds that some kinds of minds—basic minds—are neither best explained by processes involving the manipulation of contents nor inherently contentful. Hutto and Myin oppose the widely endorsed thesis that cognition always and everywhere involves content. They defend the counter-thesis that there can be intentionality and phenomenal experience without content, and demonstrate the advantages of their approach for thinking about scaffolded minds and consciousness.
Our Own Minds
Authors: Bogdan Radu J.
Published: October 2013

An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develope self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation.

In Our Own Minds, Radu Bogdan takes a developmental perspective on consciousness—its functional design in particular—and proposes that children's functional capacity for consciousness is assembled during development out of a variety of ontogenetic adaptations that respond mostly to sociocultural challenges specific to distinct stages of childhood. Young human minds develop self-consciousness—in the broad sense of being conscious of the self's mental and behavioral relatedness to the world—because they face extraordinary and escalating sociocultural pressures that cannot be handled without setting in motion a complex executive machinery of self-regulation under the guidance of an increasingly sophisticated intuitive psychology. Bogdan suggests that self-consciousness develops gradually during childhood. Children move from being oriented toward the outside world in early childhood to becoming (at about age four) oriented also toward their own minds. Bogdan argues that the sociocultural tasks and practices that children must assimilate and engage in competently demand the development of an intuitive psychology (also known as theory of mind or mind reading); the intuitive psychology assembles a suite of executive abilities (intending, controlling, monitoring, and so on) that install self-consciousness and drive its development. Understanding minds, first the minds of others and then our own, drives the development of self-consciousness, world-bound or extrovert at the beginning and later mind-bound or introvert. This asymmetric development of the intuitive psychology drives a commensurate asymmetric development of self-consciousness.

Bradford Books imprint
The Paradox of Scientific Authority
Authors: Bijker Wiebe E. , Bal Roland , Hendriks Ruud
Published: October 2013

Assessing the influence of scientific advice in societies that increasingly question scientific authority and expertise.

Today, scientific advice is asked for (and given) on questions ranging from stem-cell research to genetically modified food. And yet it often seems that the more urgently scientific advice is solicited, the more vigorously scientific authority is questioned by policy makers, stakeholders, and citizens. This book examines a paradox: how scientific advice can be influential in society even when the status of science and scientists seems to be at a low ebb. The authors do this by means of an ethnographic study of the creation of scientific authority at one of the key sites for the interaction of science, policy, and society: the scientific advisory committee. The Paradox of Scientific Authority offers a detailed analysis of the inner workings of the influential Health Council of the Netherlands (the equivalent of the National Academy of Science in the United States), examining its societal role as well as its internal functioning, and using the findings to build a theory of scientific advising. The question of scientific authority has political as well as scholarly relevance. Democratic political institutions, largely developed in the nineteenth century, lack the institutional means to address the twenty-first century's pervasively scientific and technological culture; and science and technology studies (STS) grapples with the central question of how to understand the authority of science while recognizing its socially constructed nature.
Engineering Invention
Authors: Dalzell Frederick
Published: October 2013

The technological breakthroughs and entrepreneurial adventures of Frank J. Sprague during the transformative years of the early electrical industry.

Over the course of a little less than twenty years, inventor Frank J. Sprague (1857-1934) achieved an astonishing series of technological breakthroughs—from pioneering work in self-governing motors to developing the first full-scale operational electric railway system—all while commercializing his inventions and promoting them (and himself as their inventor) to financial backers and the public. In Engineering Invention, Frederick Dalzell tells Sprague's story, setting it against the backdrop of one of the most dynamic periods in the history of technology. In a burst of innovation during these years, Sprague and his contemporaries—Thomas Edison, Nicolas Tesla, Elmer Sperry, George Westinghouse, and others—transformed the technologies of electricity and reshaped modern life. After working briefly for Edison, Sprague started the Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company; designed and built an electric railroad system for Richmond, Virginia; sold his company to Edison and went into the field of electric elevators; almost accidentally discovered a multiple-control system that could equip electric train systems for mass transit; started a third company to commercialize this; then sold this company to Edison and retired (temporarily). Throughout his career, Dalzell tells us, Sprague framed technology as invention, cast himself as hero, and staged his technologies as dramas. He toiled against the odds, scraped together resources to found companies, bet those companies on technical feats—and pulled it off, multiple times. The idea of the “heroic inventor” is not, of course, the only way to frame the history of technology. Nevertheless, as Dalzell shows, Sprague, Edison, and others crafted the role consciously and actively, using it to generate vital impetus behind the process of innovation.
The Path Not Taken
Authors: Horn Jeff
Published: October 2013

In The Path Not Taken, Jeff Horn argues that—contrary to standard, Anglocentric accounts—French industrialization was not a failed imitation of the laissez-faire British model but the product of a distinctive industrial policy that led, over the long term, to prosperity comparable to Britain's. Despite the upheavals of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, France developed and maintained its own industrial strengths. France was then able to take full advantage of the new technologies and industries that emerged in the "second industrial revolution," and by the end of the nineteenth century some of France's industries were outperforming Britain's handily. The Path Not Taken shows that the foundations of this success were laid during the first industrial revolution.

Horn posits that the French state's early attempt to emulate Britain's style of industrial development foundered because of revolutionary politics. The "threat from below" made it impossible for the state or entrepreneurs to control and exploit laborers in the British manner. The French used different means to manage labor unruliness and encourage innovation and entrepreneurialism. Technology is at the heart of Horn's analysis, and he shows that France, unlike England, often preferred still-profitable older methods of production in order to maintain employment and forestall revolution. Horn examines the institutional framework established by Napoleon's most important Minister of the Interior, Jean-Antoine Chaptal. He focuses on textiles, chemicals, and steel, looks at how these new institutions created a new industrial environment. Horn's illuminating comparison of French and British industrialization should stir debate among historians, economists, and political scientists.
Weather by the Numbers
Authors: Harper Kristine C.
Published: October 2013

The history of the growth and professionalization of American meteorology and its transformation into a physics- and mathematics-based scientific discipline.

For much of the first half of the twentieth century, meteorology was more art than science, dependent on an individual forecaster's lifetime of local experience. In Weather by the Numbers, Kristine Harper tells the story of the transformation of meteorology from a “guessing science” into a sophisticated scientific discipline based on physics and mathematics. What made this possible was the development of the electronic digital computer; earlier attempts at numerical weather prediction had foundered on the human inability to solve nonlinear equations quickly enough for timely forecasting. After World War II, the combination of an expanded observation network developed for military purposes, newly trained meteorologists, savvy about math and physics, and the nascent digital computer created a new way of approaching atmospheric theory and weather forecasting.

This transformation of a discipline, Harper writes, was the most important intellectual achievement of twentieth-century meteorology, and paved the way for the growth of computer-assisted modeling in all the sciences.
Identity Games
Authors: Imre Anikó
Published: October 2013

An examination of the unique, hybrid media practices generated by Eastern Europe's accelerated transition from late communism to late capitalism.

Eastern Europe's historically unprecedented and accelerated transition from late communism to late capitalism, coupled with media globalization, set in motion a scramble for cultural identity and a struggle over access to and control over media technologies. In Identity Games, Anikó Imre examines the corporate transformation of the postcommunist media landscape in Eastern Europe. Avoiding both uncritical techno-euphoria and nostalgic projections of a simpler, better media world under communism, Imre argues that the demise of Soviet-style regimes and the transition of postcommunist nation-states to transnational capitalism has crucial implications for understanding the relationships among nationalism, media globalization, and identity. Imre analyzes situations in which anxieties arise about the encroachment of global entertainment media and its new technologies on national culture, examining the rich aesthetic hybrids that have grown from the transitional postcommunist terrain. She investigates the gaps and continuities between the last communist and first post-communist generations in education, tourism, and children's media culture, the racial and class politics of music entertainment (including Roma Rap and Idol television talent shows), and mediated reconfigurations of gender and sexuality (including playful lesbian media activism and masculinity in “carnivalistic” post-Yugoslav film). Throughout, Imre uses the concepts of play and games as metaphorical and theoretical tools to explain the process of cultural change—inspired in part by the increasing “ludification” of the global media environment and the emerging engagement with play across scholarly disciplines. In the vision that Imre offers, political and cultural participation are seen as games whose rules are permanently open to negotiation.
Natural Experiments
Authors: Layzer Judith A.
Published: October 2013

This systematic assessment of seven prominent initiatives is the first to evaluate the effectiveness of ecosystem-based management at protecting the environment.

Scholars, scientists, and policymakers have hailed ecosystem-based management (EBM) as a remedy for the perceived shortcomings of the centralized, top-down, expert-driven environmental regulatory framework established in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. EBM entails collaborative, landscape-scale planning and flexible, adaptive implementation. But although scholars have analyzed aspects of EBM for more than a decade, until now there has been no systematic empirical study of the overall approach. In Natural Experiments, Judith Layzer provides a detailed assessment of whether EBM delivers in practice the environmental benefits it promises in theory. She does this by examining four nationally known EBM initiatives (the Balcones Canyonlands Conservation Program in Austin, Texas, the San Diego Multiple Species Program, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, and the California Bay-Delta Program) and three comparison cases that used more conventional regulatory approaches (Arizona's Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan and efforts to restore Florida's Kissimmee River and California's Mono Basin). Layzer concludes that projects that set goals based on stakeholder collaboration, rather than through conventional politics, are less likely to result in environmental improvement, largely because the pursuit of consensus drives planners to avoid controversy and minimize short-term costs. Layzer's resolutely practical focus cuts through the ideological and theoretical arguments for and against EBM to identify strategies that hold genuine promise for restoring the ecological resilience of our landscapes.
Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care
Authors: Lynch Holly Fernandez
Published: October 2013

A balanced proposal that protects both a patient's access to care and a physician's ability to refuse to provide certain services for reasons of conscience.

Physicians in the United States who refuse to perform a variety of legally permissible medical services because of their own moral objections are often protected by “conscience clauses.” These laws, on the books in nearly every state since the legalization of abortion by Roe v. Wade, shield physicians and other health professionals from such potential consequences of refusal as liability and dismissal. While some praise conscience clauses as protecting important freedoms, opponents, concerned with patient access to care, argue that professional refusals should be tolerated only when they are based on valid medical grounds. In Conflicts of Conscience in Health Care, Holly Fernandez Lynch finds a way around the polarizing rhetoric associated with this issue by proposing a compromise that protects both a patient's access to care and a physician's ability to refuse. This focus on compromise is crucial, as new uses of medical technology expand the controversy beyond abortion and contraception to reach an increasing number of doctors and patients. Lynch argues that doctor-patient matching on the basis of personal moral values would eliminate, or at least minimize, many conflicts of conscience, and suggests that state licensing boards facilitate this goal. Licensing boards would be responsible for balancing the interests of doctors and patients by ensuring a sufficient number of willing physicians such that no physician's refusal leaves a patient entirely without access to desired medical services. This proposed solution, Lynch argues, accommodates patients' freedoms while leaving important room in the profession for individuals who find some of the capabilities of medical technology to be ethically objectionable.