bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Protestants and the American Economy in the Postcolonial Period: An Overview
Authors: Klay Robin , Lunn John
Published: November 2023

Attempts to write the economic history of the United States for the period between the ratification of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War are handicapped by a scarcity of precise aggregate data. 1l1e carefully verified and expertly tabulated summaries of economic information that have been prepared by the United States Department of Commerce, for example, are much fuller for decades beginning in the late nineteenth century than for the early 18oos1. Efforts aimed at the economic history of American religious groups are even more scantily served by collections of aggregate financial data. To be sure, the fact that the Census Bureau during parts of the nineteenth century collected systematic information on churches means that certain data exist for the earlier period that have not been collected throughout the twentieth century. For example, a dearer picture of the total value of church property is present for 1850 and 1860 than for a century later. Yet for religious bodies, as well as for the nation as a whole, the general trend is for the quality and quantity of well-verified data to increase the closer we come to the present.
Garden Spot
Authors: Walbert David
Published: November 2023

Each year, millions of tourists are drawn to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to experience first-hand the quintessential pastoral--both as an escape from urban life and as a rare opportunity to become immersed in history. The area has attracted visitors eager to catch a glimpse of the distinctive religious community of the Old Order Amish, to appreciate the beauty of the farmland, to enjoy the abundant and delicious food of the Pennsylvania Dutch...and, most recently, to shop at the area’s outlet malls. For nearly three hundred years, Lancaster county has been a model of agricultural prosperity, rooted in the family farm. The rural character of the place remains Lancaster’s predominant tourist attraction, but is at odds with its rapidly rising population and the commercial and residential growth that has brought. It is the tension between rural tradition, progress, and urbanization that lies at the core of Garden Spot. David Walbert examines how twentieth century American culture has come to define and appreciate rurality, and how growth and economic expansion can co-exist with preservation of the traditional ways of life in the region. Will small farms fail in a culture that has increasingly come to value productivity over quality of life? What impact will further development have on maintaining this region’s character? Can rurality and progress co-exist in the 21st century? A vivid portrayal of the land and people, residents and outsiders alike, Garden Spot narrates the history of this region and considers the challenges Lancaster County and its people face in order to preserve their unique place.
The Landscape Of Progress: Urbanization and Planning
Authors: Walbert David
Published: November 2023

Lancaster Countians had always been proud of their home, for its rural character and its prosperity. In rural communities across the United States, the decades after World War II left rurality and prosperity increasingly irreconcilable, but not so in Lancaster. Agriculture remained supreme, while new industries—not the least of which was tourism—provided thousands of new jobs. While sons and daughters of farmers elsewhere headed for the city in search of work, native Lancaster Countians could stay home. But success, too, had a price. A rural community was a delicate balance: too much progress, and it became urban or metropolitan; too little, and it eroded from within. One path led to the city, the other back to wilderness. If Lancaster County avoided the latter demise, it was, by 1970, in danger of the former. Some residents seemed to recognize the change and tried to fight it, but even their efforts to find a solution brought them ever closer to urbanization. Tourists bore more than their share of the blame, but there seemed no way to control the mushrooming industry—and little will to find one. Population growth was a greater problem and even harder to handle.
Method and Inquiry: Some Socioeconomic Factors Underlying the Associational Boom
Authors: Kaufman Jason
Published: November 2023

Hindsight is not always so perfect, and contemporary studies of nineteenth century American associationalism are no exception. Whether it be the need for community, relief from work and gender roles, or political empowerment, most of the leading explanations of the associational boom rely on untenable assumptions about the emotional equilibrium of the American people. Though convincing in the abstract, such explanations rely on post hoc imputations of individually aggregated sentiments, the justification for which is usually based on the claim that there is some connection between changing macrosocial conditions, such as industrialization, and the universal needs of individuals, such as the desire to maintain connection to the mores of a bygone era.
“Communitas,” or Some Socio-cultural Factors Behind the Boom
Authors: Kaufman Jason
Published: November 2023

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, the modern term community actually conflates two antecedent words: the ancient Latin word communis, which refers to the quality of fellowship, or a “community of relations or feelings,” and the medieval Latin word commonty, which reflects a much different and I suspect more historically relevant meaning.1 A commonty is “a body of fellows or fellow-townsmen,” and it bears an exclusionary rather than inclusionary connotation, as in “The thynges of the comunete.”2 Thus, in contrast, a commonty is a jurisdiction or realm of privilege specific to a certain group of people, whereas communis denotes the touchy-feely way communitarians and associational enthusiasts would like us to feel about one another.3
Last Tango on the Heliopause
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

Bob reaches down to help Miss Muxdröözol out of a hole she has fallen into while hiding from the alien ants. “Mr. Plex, she still has her legs. It’s normal for her species to lose legs and regenerate them minutes later. She has body-repair nanoparasites living in the left acetabulum of her pelvis, or so I’m told. Give her a minute, and she’ll be good as new.”
Stellar Evolution and the Helium Flash
Authors: Pickover Clifford A
Published: November 2023

“It’s okay, Mr. Plex. This is one of the new electronic ones. I apply them occasionally, and they dump free-radical scavengers into the blood. I’m trying to regain some energy. But, my God, what happened to Miss Muxdröözol?”
Study Design
Authors: Haddix Paul G , Farnham Anne C
Published: November 2023

Before beginning a prevention-effectiveness analysis, researchers must address a number of issues. The perspective of the study, the analytic methods, and other key issues affect not only the nature of the analysis but also the interpretation and usefulness of the results. This process is referred to as framing the study. Its successful completion is one of the most important steps in designing a study.
Cost–Benefit Analysis
Authors: Messonnier Mark , Meltzer Martin
Published: November 2023

Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is considered the preeminent method of economic evaluation because it allows for the direct comparison of different types of outcomes resulting from a variety of actions. If done correctly, it provides the most comprehensive monetary measures of the positive (beneficial) and negative (costly) consequences of a possible course of action, such as recommending the routine vaccination of restaurant employees against hepatitis A.1 With CBA, one can compare two or more different public health strategies, such as using whole- cell pertussis vaccine versus acellular vaccine for routine childhood immunizations.
Cost-Effectiveness Analysis
Authors: Gift Thomas L , Haddix Anne C , Corso Phaedra S
Published: November 2023

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) has become the predominant method for evaluating the costs and effects of alternative health-care strategies. Unlike many clinical decision models, CEAs address questions about population-based health policies and programs. They have has been used to compare strategies designed to address the same health problem (competing interventions) and strategies targeted at different health problems (independent interventions). At the programmatic level, CEAs have been used for planning purposes and at the highest levels of government for setting priorities for resources allocated to health.
Using Economic Evaluations in Decision Making
Authors: Siegel Joanna E , Carolyn Carolyn M
Published: November 2023

The goal of efficiency in the health-care system has broad appeal. Politicians and policy makers periodically have mounted efforts to eliminate or reduce waste. Demands for evidence of the return on investment for health-care services have been prominent for well over a decade, often framed in the context of coverage decisions for health-care services not traditionally reimbursed by insurance policies. Calls for improved cost effectiveness of health-care services are part of the national parlance, reflecting not so much a commitment to the rational allocation of resources as the conviction that improving cost effectiveness, that is, getting value for money, is a widely accepted and legitimate goal.
Psychotherapy
Authors: Cohen Bruce J
Published: November 2023

In Chapter 3, the important features of the life-story perspective were discussed. To recap briefly, this perspective seeks to understand the patient as an individual with a unique story. There are as many stories as there are lives and many stories within each life. Stories are not data, but are narrative—that is, a series of interpretive connections made between pieces of data in an attempt to “make sense” of the data. Stories also are not facts. They are “true” only to the extent that they are accepted by and prove useful to the therapist and the patient. Of the many stories that a therapist and a patient might potentially construct, the one that they ultimately will choose will be one that sufficiently illuminates the clinical issue at hand. Thus, the “truth” of the story is not validated in the same manner as a scientific theory might be. Its truth is “narrative truth” rather than “historical truth.” We use the logic of the life-story perspective every day in our personal lives. Without the life-story perspective, we would have no sense of our lives having meaning. Our lives would appear to be a random series of events, without any subjective sense of personal identity, relationships to family and coworkers, opinions about the past, or predictions about the future.
A Theory of the Social Function of Asceticism
Authors: Valantasis Richard
Published: November 2023

Over the course of the past seventy years or more, theorists in the social sciences and the humanities have explored asceticism as a vital component of sociology, social history, and hermeneutics; while historians have been exploring the role of asceticism and the place of ascetics in the societies of late antiquity and the western Middle Ages. The historical perspective has focused on the function of asceticism and the ascetic within the dominant social context, while the attention of the theorists has focused on it as an economic, social, political, and interpretative instrument within the larger cultural domain. Although at first glance the distinction seems minor, there is in fact a great difference in approach: the theorists understand asceticism as a large and pervasive cultural system; while the historians view asceticism as specific religious practices relating to social withdrawal, restriction of food, regulation of sexuality, and the formation of religious community. The larger cultural systems of the ascetical theorists locate asceticism at the center of cultural, social, and individual engagement in every sphere of cultural expression; the particular religious practices of the historian locate asceticism only in the religious or philosophical arenas.
A Perfect Babel of Confusion
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: November 2023

Examining the interaction of the Dutch and the English in colonial New York and New Jersey, this study charts the decline of European culture in North America. Balmer argues that the combination of political intrigue, English cultural imperialism, and internal socio-economic tensions eventually drove the Dutch away from their hereditary customs, language, and culture. He shows how this process, which played itself out most visibly and poignantly in the Dutch Reformed Church between 1664 and the American Revolution, illustrates the difficulty of maintaining non-English cultures and institutions in an increasingly English world. A Perfect Babel of Confusion redresses some of the historiographical neglect of the Middle Colonies and, in the process, sheds new light on Dutch colonial culture.
Religion in Great Danger: Leisler’ s Rebellion and Its Repercussions
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: November 2023

Early in the 1680s, the dominies enjoyed a respite from some of the contentiousness that had plagued ecclesiastical life in the period immediately following the English Conquest of 1664. “Everything goes on well in our churches,” the colonial clergy wrote in 1680. As late as 1684, Governor Thomas Doogan reported to England on the religious composition of the colony, noting that the “most prevailing opinion is that of the Dutch Calvinists.” When he returned to New York in 1682 after several years’ hiatus in the Netherlands, Dominie Henricus Selyns reported with equanimity that the colony’s churches operated with the same order of worship and church government as in Holland and that “religious services are held with quietness, and without any annoyances.” Selyns later informed the Classis of Amsterdam that former “complaints and difficulties” in the New York church had been “adjusted and removed” and that his congregation “is now engaged in building me a large house, wholly of stone and three stories high. It is built,” he said, “on the foundation of unmerited love.”
Fit for Catechizing: The Long Island Schism and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
Authors: Balmer Randall
Published: November 2023

On the night of February 9, 1714, vandals broke into the north steeple window of Trinity (Episcopal) Church, made their way to the vestry room, and located the surplices used in Anglican worship services. They tore the sleeve off one of the surplices and ripped the other completely to pieces. They then took the shredded vestment into the churchyard, where, in the words of Trinity’s rector, “having spread the Surplice on the ground and put the common prayer books and Psalm books round it left their ordure on the Sacred Vestment as the greatest outrage and the most Villanous indignity they could offer the Church of England and Her Holy Priesthood. ”

The incident scandalized the colony’s religious leaders, who publicized their condemnations and offered rewards for the apprehension of the perpetrators. But the event underscores the resentment fueled by more than a decade of intense efforts by the English to Anglicize the colonists in politics, social customs, language, and religion. Their efforts met with varying degrees of success among the Dutch. The Leislerian party continued as a political force into the first decade of the century, until attrition by death and emigration decreased their power.
Cadmus and the Tragic Dynasty of Thebes
Authors: Fantham Elaine
Published: November 2023

In the last chapter our focus on the natural world rather detracted from Ovid’s lively characterization of men and gods, but toward the end of book 2 Ovid turns to the history of a human family, the Cad mean dynasty of Thebes, whose sufferings he depicts in recognizably tragic form. The story begins with another of Jupiter’s seductions, presented as a sort of mirror image of his rape of Io. This time he himself becomes a handsome young bull in order to abduct the princess Europa from the seashore of Tyre.
Aspects of Love
Authors: Fantham Elaine
Published: November 2023

Some critics have argued that love is the real theme of Ovid’s great poem, and there can be no doubt that what Brooks Otis (1970) called “the pathos of love” is the heart of the central section of Metamorphoses, from the Tereus episode in book 6 to the end of book 11. By the end of book 6, however, the poet has only added one particularly cruel human counterpart to the earlier divine rapes. With the story of Medea that opens book 7, Ovid introduces his first love-struck girl and uses her confused response to this new emotion as a model for what will be a series of women in love. But by referring to “the story of Medea” I am begging the question.
Genre and Narrative: Ovid’s Polymorphous Poem
Authors: Fantham Elaine
Published: November 2023

When Ovid was a young man, Rome’s dean of poets, Horace, wrote a poem that styled itself as a letter of literary advice to the young sons of the aristocrat Piso. By the time of Quintilian, around 90 C.E., this was already known as Ars poetica (Art of poetry). In it Horace sketches rapidly the origin of the classical Greek verse genres associated with different meters, from elegy, couched in the elegiac couplet of inscriptions (hexameters alternating with shorter, end-stopped pentameters), to the dialogue of comedy and tragedy set in the iambic trimeter coined for satirical invective by Archilochus.
The Rise of the Immigrant Church
Authors: Fisher James T
Published: November 2023

Coming on the harvest time of the year 1845, the crops looked splendid,” recalled an Irish American of a fateful moment in world history, “but one fine morning in July there was a cry around that some blight had struck the potato stalks.” Soon the “air was laded with a sickly odor of decay, as if the hand of death had stricken the potato field, and . . . everything growing in it was rotten.”
Reformers and Crusaders
Authors: Fisher James T
Published: November 2023

American society has frequently witnessed a strong impulse toward reform of its major institutions. The Progressive era (stretching roughly from the late 1890s until 1917, when the United States entered World War I) and the New Deal years of the depression-wracked 1930s were two periods marked by sustained desires to achieve greater social and economic justice in the United States. Because so much of the reform activity of the Progressive era and the New Deal focused on urban life, American Catholics found themselves closer to the center of national concerns than ever before.
The people of god divided?
Authors: Fisher James T
Published: November 2023

In October 1958 Pope Pius XII died after leading the Roman Catholic Church for two eventful decades. The College of Cardinals, the body responsible for electing a new pope, chose as his successor Angelo Roncalli, the popular bishop of Venice, Italy. The cardinals could hardly have selected a man more different from the aloof, aristocratic Pius XII. Roncalli, who reigned as John XXIII, came from a peasant family with 13 children.
Plan To Win
Authors: Koehn Cheryl , Palmer Taysha , Esdaile John
Published: November 2023

Every day, people make plans-for small things like seeing a movie with a friend or running errands around town, to realizing larger life goals such as attending college or pursuing a career change. We plan vacations, finances-even our gardens are planned. Successful people everywhere take that planning one step further. They take great care in thinking through the things they most want to have or accomplish in life, then mal<ing plans to accomplish those goals and “working” their plans until their dreams are realized. For you, and the nearly 2.5 million others in North America diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), developing a solid plan and seeing it through is essential to realizing one of the most valuable goals anyone can attain in life-enjoyment of optimal health. In the PLAN TO WIN, we do not propose a miracle cure or an “easy way out” of having RA. This book is about a plan to minimize, possibly even beat, the potentially devastating effects of RA in your life.
Relationships and Sexuality
Authors: Koehn Cheryl , Palmer Taysha , Esdaile John
Published: November 2023

Being in relationships is a basic part of being human-so much so, that we often take them completely for granted. Whether we’re single or married, work at home or at an outside job, are highly social or more inwardly focused, we all depend on others to help us make sense of our lives, share companionship and laughter, and give and receive much-needed love and support during times of struggle. Relationships have cycles and a rhythm of their own, ups and downs brought on by events in our own lives or those of others. These events can be internal (such as coping with depression, or dealing with the onset of RA), or external (job changes, moving, childbirth, loss of a loved one). These stressors affect many aspects of our day-to-day lives, including the way we interact with others-and, often, the way others interact with us. We might become irritable, for instance, or seem to suddenly look at the world through new eyes and emerge with a whole different set of priorities-and this can cause reactions in others. As you may have discovered already, the onset of RA can be just such a life event.
Surgery
Authors: Koehn Cheryl , Palmer Taysha , Esdaile John
Published: November 2023

Since surgery is far from being a certainty for people with RA, it seemed appropriate to reserve this chapter in the Plan To Win as one of the last. In fact, if your disease is well controlled by the other components of your treatment plan (medication, exercise, physical and occupational therapy, mind-body work, among others), you may never need surgery to help manage the consequences of RA. However, for those with long-standing moderate to severe disease dealing with the hardship of daily pain or loss of joint use and disability in their life, surgery could be a saving grace. The goals of surgery in RA are threefold: to reduce pain, to prevent joint damage, and to improve one’s ability to function day to day. Coming to grips with needing surgery may actually be the most difficult part of the procedure for some people. For others, the commitment to months of postsurgical rehabilitation might seem daunting. Whichever the case, making the decision to have surgery requires careful consideration.
More Resources
Authors: Koehn Cheryl , Palmer Taysha , Esdaile John
Published: November 2023

Your Plan To Win involves learning everything you can about RA. By reading this book, you’ve taken a giant leap forward in your understanding of the disease process, and you’ve gained a vast amount of knowledge about how you, personally, can influence your symptoms and prevent joint damage. A book such as this one aims to provide information and tools in many areas: from lifestyle to medications, exercise, relationships, sex, mind-body work, nutrition, reproductive health, and surgery. As such, it can only scratch the surface of many of these topics. We have drawn on hundreds of studies, reports, books, and experts worldwide to provide you with the most reliable, up-to-date information, but there is always more to be learned. If you wish to expand your knowledge of a specific topic, seek emotional support, involve yourself in advocacy efforts, or get a referral to an RA health professional, the following credible, tried, and true resources may be of assistance.
The New Middle Class: I
Authors: Mills C Wright
Published: November 2023

IN the early nineteenth century, although there are no exact figures, probably four-fifths of the occupied population were self-employed enterprisers; by 1870, only about one-third, and in 1940, only about one-fifth, were still in this old middle class. Many of the remaining four-fifths of the people who now earn a living do so by working for the 2 or 3 per cent of the population who now own 40 or 50 per cent of the private property in the United States. Among these workers are the members of the new middle class, white-collar people on salary. For them, as for wage-workers, America has become a nation of employees for whom independent property is out of range. Labor markets, not control of property, determine their chances to receive income, exercise power, enjoy prestige, learn and use skills. Of the three broad strata composing modem society, only the new middle class has steadily grown in proportion to the whole.
The Enormous File
Authors: Mills C Wright
Published: November 2023

As skyscrapers replace rows of small shops, so offices replace free markets. Each office within the skyscraper is a segment of the enormous file, a part of the symbol factory that produces the billion slips of paper that gear modem society into its daily shape. From the executive’s suite to the factory yard, the paper webwork is spun; a thousand rules you never made and don’t know about are applied to you by a thousand people you have not met and never will. The office is the Unseen Hand become visible as a row of clerks and a set of IBM equipment, a pool of dictaphone transcribers, and sixty receptionists confronting the elevators, one above the other, on each floor. The office is also a place of work. In the morning irregular rows of people enter the skyscraper monument to the office culture. During the day they do their little part of the business system, the government system, the war-system, the money-system, co-ordinating the machinery, commanding each other, persuading the people of other worlds, recording the activities that make up the nation’s day of work. They transmit the printed culture to the next day’s generation. And at night, after the people leave the skyscrapers, the streets are empty and inert, and the hand is unseen again.
The Politics of the Rearguard
Authors: Mills C Wright
Published: November 2023

The political psychology of any social stratum is influenced by every relation its members have, or fail to have, with other strata; all the objective and subjective factors to which they are exposed play into their political psychology. Composed as they are of a wide range of in-between occupational groups, the new middle classes are especially open to many cross-pressures, as well as to all those larger forces that more or less define the structure and atmosphere of modern society. To understand the political form and content of white-collar mentality, we must first understand what political consciousness, as well as lack of it, means; to understand how it has been shaped, we must explore the effects on it of the mass media of communication, of the social-historical structure, and of the political institutions and traditions that have prevailed in the United States. Our most familiar model of political consciousness is liberalism, which in focusing upon the individual citizen has tried to enlarge his political rights, his formal opportunities to act politically and to be political. It has assumed that once given the rights, the individual citizen would naturally become politically alerted and act on his political interests. It might be that he would require more education, but education was one of the rights that liberalism sought to make universal.
Introduction: Talking About Religious Outsiders
Authors: Stein Stephen J
Published: November 2023

How do you respond to people who are different? What is your reaction when you meet individuals who belong to religious communities whose beliefs you do not understand? Why do we often feel uncomfortable when we encounter belief systems that we do not share or religiously motivated behavior that is unusual? Is there a way to talk about such groups that is both accurate and fair? These are questions we will explore in this book as we focus on the lesser-known, and sometimes controversial, religious traditions of the United States.
Peace Movements in Colonial America
Authors: Stein Stephen J
Published: November 2023

The Quakers were the largest and most successful group of religious outsiders in colonial America. Formally identified today as the Religious Society of Friends, these followers of the seventeeth-century Englishman George Fox-known for their commitment to peace and pacifism became a dominant religious and cultural force in the colony of Pennsylvania and a significant presence in the adjacent colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. Their experiences as outsiders-turned-insiders who became outsiders again demonstrates the dramatic difference between the situation of outsiders and insiders.
Sectarians in the City
Authors: Stein Stephen J
Published: November 2023

According to the Pentecost experience of the first Christians recorded in the biblical book of Acts, chapter 2, miraculous events occurred when the first disciples of Christ were infused with God’s Spirit. Tongues of fire appeared on their heads, and a rushing wind filled the building. In America Pentecostalism emerged on the national scene in a depressed industrial area of Los Angeles in early 1906. The site was 312 Azusa Street, where a dilapidated building that once housed a Methodist mission stood. The revival that took place, the Azusa Street revival, has been called the birth of modern Pentecostalism.
First Journeys: 1654–1820
Authors: Diner Hasia R
Published: November 2023

In late August or early September of 1654, a total of twenty-three Jews stepped from a ship onto the soil of what would one day be New York City, the largest Jewish community in the world. But in 1654 it was the Dutch city of New Amsterdam, and the twenty-three new arrivals were the first Jews there. Many of them scattered to other places soon thereafter, and all but one of them have disappeared from history. We know, however, that they had been traveling for a long time.

The Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam came from the Dutch colony of Recife in northeastern Brazil. A few generations earlier, however, their families had lived in Spain and Portugal on Europe’s Iberian peninsula. These Iberian Jews were known as Sephardim (Sepharad is Hebrew for “Spain”). Under Muslim rule, the large and prosperous community of Spanish Jews created a rich culture in which tight-knit, all-Jewish communities enjoyed good relations with their Spanish neighbors.
Across America: 1820–1880
Authors: Diner Hasia R
Published: November 2023

On June 15, 1842, Abraham Kohn left his home village in Bavaria, southern Germany. He confessed to his diary, “I wept bitterly as I kissed my dear mother, perhaps for the last time, in Wittelshofen, pressing her hand and commending her to the protection of the Eternal, the Father of all widows and orphans.” Kohn was not alone. A childhood friend and his brother Moses accompanied him. They were just three of the thousands of young Jewish women and men who left their European homes in the mid-nineteenth century. Small groups of siblings and friends, mostly young unmarried people, abandoned the villages of southern and western Germany, Alsace, Bohemia, Hungary, Posen, Lithuania, and western Russia to seek opportunities in America.
On the Move: 1945–1967
Authors: Diner Hasia R
Published: November 2023

Abraham Levitt and his sons William and Alfred had been in the business of building houses since 1929. Even during the desperation of the depression and the short-ages of the war years, Levitt and Sons managed to build massive tracts of new housing at relatively low cost in a kind of assembly-line style.

For the Levitt family—and for tens of thousands of young American families eager to own their own houses—the good times began when World War II ended. In 1946 Levitt and Sons began plans for the biggest private housing project in American history. Set on an undeveloped stretch of land near the town of Hempstead on New York’s Long Island, the project was called Island of Trees. Eventually, however, it took the name of Levittown.
Market Efficiency and Anomalies
Authors: Singal Vijay
Published: November 2023

This chapter addresses common questions related to market efficiency and anomalies. If prices properly reflect available information, then markets are said to be efficient. Although markets are known to be broadly efficient, there may be pockets of inefficiency that lead to mispricings or anomalies.

In general, claims of anomalous pricing must be viewed with skepticism. The discussion describes reasons for skepticism as well as causes for persistence of some anomalies. Moreover, even when profits can’t be made by trading on anomalous prices, it may be possible to alter trading behavior to avoid losses due to these anomalies.

Market efficiency in this book refers to the informational efficiency of markets as opposed to structural efficiency, administrative efficiency, or operational efficiency. That is, this chapter focuses on the efficiency with which information is reflected in prices. If new information becomes available about a stock (change in earnings), an industry (change in demand), or the economy (change in expected growth), an efficient market will reflect that information in a few minutes, even a few seconds. However, if only half of that information is reflected in the stock price immediately and the remaining half takes several days, then the market is less than fully efficient. Markets that are less than fully efficient open an opportunity for making profits because the inefficiency causes a mispricing in stocks.
The January Effect and the New December Effect
Authors: Singal Vijay
Published: November 2023

Small loser stocks are known to appreciate considerably in January, giving rise to the so-called January effect. The primary explanation for the January effect is tax-loss selling by investors in December to realize capital losses that are used to offset capital gains. When the selling pressure abates in January, the loser stocks appreciate. Unfortunately, it is not possible to arbitrage the January effect, though investors can gain by changing their trading patterns.

The December effect is similar in spirit to the January effect. Stocks that have done well in the January-November period are not sold by investors in December because selling those stocks will result in taxable capital gains. By waiting a few days, investors can postpone payment of capital gains taxes by almost one year. It is relatively easy to gain from the December effect, as popularly available indexes can be used for trading.

Academics, practitioners, and investors have known about the January effect for decades. It is generally accepted that the January effect is a consequence of tax-loss selling. Since investors must pay taxes on net capital gains, investors sell losers toward year-end to realize capital losses that can offset capital gains. Thus, past losers experience abnormal selling pressure in December. In January the selling pressure is relieved, resulting in large gains for loser stocks. Evidence of large January returns for loser stocks is dubbed the January effect.
Changes to the S&P 500 Index
Authors: Singal Vijay
Published: November 2023

Firms in the S&P 500 are occasionally replaced by new firms because the existing firm is no longer representative of the economy or the firm ceases to exist (goes bankrupt or is acquired by another firm). In general, the changes are announced about a week before they become effective.

Evidence indicates that a firm added to the index typically rises in value, while a firm dropped from the index falls in value. Not all of this change takes place on the announcement date; rather, it continues to occur until the effective date. However, after the effective date, the price change reverses itself. The added firms give up some value, and the deleted firms regain nearly all of their lost value. There are several explanations for these price movements.

Investors and arbitrageurs can earn abnormal returns by buying (short-selling) the added firm (deleted firm) upon announcement and reversing the positions on the effective date. The new positions are held for about a month and then liquidated.
A Description of Other Possible Mispricings
Authors: Singal Vijay
Published: November 2023

Ten pricing anomalies are discussed in Chapters 2 through 11. However, there are many more perceived anomalies in financial markets— probably in the hundreds. Some of the so-called anomalies have little basis or research associated with them. For example, street folklore would have you believe that an NFC win in the Super Bowl is good for the stock market. Whether true or not, there is no scientific or economic basis for such an assertion. This chapter briefly discusses many other mispricings that have not been disproved by academic research. The list of references at the end of each mispricing allows the reader to learn more about that mispricing.

There are many mispricings that have been discovered by academic and practitioner research that have not been discussed in previous chapters. While it is not possible to list all possible anomalies and nonanomalies, a few popular or interesting anomalies are listed below, with a brief description relating to that anomaly.
Nanoscale Energy Transport And Conversion
Authors: Chen Gang
Published: November 2023

This is a graduate level textbook in nanoscale heat transfer and energy conversion that can also be used as a reference for researchers in the developing field of nanoengineering. It provides a comprehensive overview of microscale heat transfer, focusing on thermal energy storage and transport. Chen broadens the readership by incorporating results from related disciplines, from the point of view of thermal energy storage and transport, and presents related topics on the transport of electrons, phonons, photons, and molecules. This book is part of the MIT-Pappalardo Series in Mechanical Engineering.
Material Waves And Energy Quantization
Authors: Chen Gang
Published: November 2023

For macroscopic systems, we take the continuity of many variables for granted, including the continuity in energy. For example, the heat flux along a rod through conduction, according to the Fourier law, can be continuously varied to any desired value by controlling the temperature difference and the material properties. The microscopic picture of energy, however, is entirely different. According to quantum mechanical principles, the permissible energy levels of matter (electrons, crystals, molecules, and so on) are often discontinuous. Differences in allowable energy levels among materials are major factors that distinguish them from each other. For example, why is glass transparent in the visible light range but not silicon, and why are some materials electrical insulators but others are conductors? In this chapter, we introduce the basic quantum mechanical concepts necessary to appreciate various energy states found in different materials. It should be remembered that these energy states represent the range of possibilities for the matter but do not tell which state the matter will be in. The latter depends on the temperature, a topic we will discuss in chapter 4. Important concepts that should be mastered through this chapter include the wave-particle duality, the Schrodinger equation and the meaning of the wave function, the Pauli exclusion principle, quantum states, and degeneracy. Solutions of the Schr6dinger equation for various simple yet very common potentials will be given. Key concepts and results of this chapter are summarized in the last section of the chapter.
Energy States In Solids
Authors: Chen Gang
Published: November 2023

The previous chapter introduced the energy levels in simple potential fields, such as quantum wells, harmonic oscillators, atoms, and molecules. In this chapter, we will discuss energy levels in solids. We focus our discussion on single crystals, which are the simplest form of solids because the atoms are regularly arranged. As we will see, crystal periodicity plays a central role in determining the energy levels. So we will start by discussing crystal structures, including lattices and the potentials binding the atoms into a crystal. Since atoms in solids are packed closely, the electron wave functions of individual atoms overlap and form new wave functions and, correspondingly, new electron energy levels. The interatomic forces bond nuclei together so that the vibration of the atoms inside the crystal is strongly coupled. The collective atomic vibration can be decomposed into normal modes extending over the crystal and the basic energy quantum of each normal mode is called a phonon, in the same way of that the basic energy quantum of an electromagnetic mode is called a photon. Each electron and phonon wave function is characterized by a frequency (or energy) and a wave vector. The relationship between the energy and the wave vector is called the dispersion relation, which plays a central role in determining the properties of the crystal. We limit mathematical derivations to the dispersion relations of electrons and phonons in one-dimensional periodic structures and explain the energy levels in real crystals without a more detailed mathematical derivation, because the dispersion relation in a real crystal can be appreciated on the basis of a sound understanding of the behavior of a one-dimensional periodic system. The energy levels in crystals are highly degenerate. A very useful tool that takes into account the degeneracy of the energy states is the density of states, which will be used repeatedly throughout the book and should be mastered.
Classical Size Effects
Authors: Chen Gang
Published: November 2023

In section 6.3.6, we discussed the premises of the diffusion laws. Generally, for the diffusion laws to be applicable, the length scale of the structures in which the transport occurs must be much larger than the mean free path and the time scale of the process must be much longer than the relaxation time. When one or both of these conditions is violated, the transport can no longer be described by diffusion theory. Chapter 5 examined interface and size effects from the wave propagation point of view. In this chapter, we will study size effects on transport processes by treating energy carriers as particles to which the Boltzmann equation is applicable. In this sense, we are dealing with classical size effects. However, even under the particle picture, quantum effects can be included to a certain extent, based on consideration of factors such as the density of states and statistical distributions. For example, when we take the energy of one phonon as hv, we are implicitly using the quantum concept. Classical size effects on transport processes and transport properties of all the energy carriers have been studied in the past. Classical size effects on electron transport were summarized in the book of Tellier and Tosser (1982). The transport of photons is inherently related to the conditions at the boundaries, due to the long photon mean free path in weakly absorbing and scattering media, and thus the vast literature on photon transport is always a good source to consult for solutions and solution methods of the Boltzmann equation. Another useful source of reference is the past literature on neutron transport (Davison, 1957), built on the neutron Boltzmann equation. Flow and heat transfer of rarefied gas has also been studied extensively in the past (Cercignani, 2000). Studies of size effects on phonon transport began in the 1930s through Casimir’s pioneering work (Casimir, 1938).
Molecular Dynamics Simulation
Authors: Chen Gang
Published: November 2023

So far most of our discussion of energy storage and energy transport has been built on the reciprocal space: the dispersion relations between wavevectors and frequencies. We discarded the history of the motion of individual particles (electrons and atoms) and focused on their collective modal behavior. However, the approximate trajectory of individual particles can be traced if the computational power is sufficient, and from the calculated trajectory of all the particles we can evaluate the desired macroscopic properties or examine the microscopic processes in real space. When the particles are individual molecules or atoms, the approach is typically called molecular dynamics simulation. In classical molecular dynamics, the equations of motion for each individual atom in the system are established on the basis of an empirical interatomic force (or potential) and Newton’s second law. These equations for all the atoms in the system are coupled through the interatomic potential and solved numerically. A quantum molecular dynamics simulation solves the coupled time-dependent Schrodinger equations for all the particles in the system. Exact direct numerical solution of the Schrodinger equations for a system comprising a large number of particles is impractical, and so various approximations have been used. For example, Car and Parrinello (1985) combined the classical atomistic simulation for atomic ions with the density function theory for electrons. Both classical and quantum molecular dynamic simulations require extensive computation but are becoming increasingly useful as computers become faster. The simulation results are usually analyzed on the basis of statistical mechanics principles. In this chapter, we focus on classical molecular dynamic simulations, since quantum molecular dynamics is still limited to a small number of atoms. Molecular dynamic simulation methods have been used as a basic tool in a wide range of fields. A single chapter will not be able to cover even a small number of potential applications.
Language
Authors: Appiah Kwame Anthony
Published: November 2023

Ever since Charles Darwin published The  Origin  of  Species, biologists have increasingly seen human beings as just one kind of animal. Darwin’s theory of evolution claims that we are descended from other, earlier kinds of animals by natural selection. Biologists are not surprised, therefore, that our respiration, nutrition, and reproduction are typically mammalian; and that our cells look very like the cells of other animals, with their nuclei and cytoplasm and the multiplicity of organelles that we can see under an electron-microscope. But even a biologist would have to agree that we have some important distinctive traits, and one of the most important is that we use language, to speak, to write, and, some would say, to think. So far as we know, we are the only animals, from the amoeba to the elephant, that naturally use language. Furthermore, many of the other distinguishing.
Science
Authors: Appiah Kwame Anthony
Published: November 2023

Every day, in newspapers all around the world, astrologers tell people what life has in store for them. Under each of the star signs, which go with birthdates, there is a short message telling, say, Taureans to take special care in financial matters or Librans to expect progress in affairs of the heart. People make many kinds of criticism of these horoscopes: that they are vague, or that they are inaccurate, or that they make people fatalistic. All of these criticisms could have been made of astrological predictions any time in the last 2,500 years, anytime since Socrates. But there is one kind of criticism that is relatively modern and that is made very often nowadays. It is that astrology is unscientific.
Metaphysics
Authors: Appiah Kwame Anthony
Published: November 2023

This is the first chapter of this book whose title is a technical philosopher’s word. That word—“metaphysics”—was first used as the name of a book by Aristotle, and what it means takes a certain amount of explanation. But it’s important to say something about metaphysics in any introduction to philosophy, because this subject is central to the Western philosophical tradition. The origin of the word “metaphysics” seems to have been this. The Greek adverb “meta” can mean “beyond.” Aristotle had written a book called the Physics, which was about what we would call “natural science.” Aristotle (or his students) called the book that followed his Physics “the book beyond the Physics.” So, etymologically at least, metaphysics is the subject that comes after natural science.