bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stakeholders’ Expectations on Human Capital Disclosure vs. Corporate Reporting Practice in Malaysia
Authors: Sahari Salawati , Nichol Esmie Obrin , Yusof Suzila Mohamed
Published: December 2018

Corporate disclosure of human capital has received growing research attention in different countries and markets. While past studies have explored the antecedent and implications of reporting human capital, studies on how far those disclosure practices actually meet the stakeholders’ expectations are still lacking. Hence, this study attempt to apply the stakeholder theory to frame the human capital reporting practices by the corporations in Malaysia. The methodology of this study is twofold; firstly, to develop human capital reporting measurement items as per the stakeholders’ expectation and their perceived importance of those items through a Delphi technique, and secondly, to determine the extent of human capital disclosure practices through a content analysis of the annual reports. The findings indicate that despite stakeholders’ high perceived importance on human capital disclosures, the corporate reporting practices are still at an inferior stage. This study contributes in such a way to fill the gap in the literature by exploring the current extent of human capital reporting by the listed corporations in Malaysia and how far such disclosure met the stakeholders’ expectations. This study also highlights the significance of the stakeholders’ voice and participation as one of the main driver towards sustainability reporting.
From Calculus to Language Game
Authors: Durt Christoph ,   Philosophy Documentation Center
Published: December 2018

Cognitive technology is an increasingly important form of technology that can deal with meaning by either replicating or simulating human cognition. Cognitive technology can make use of information technology, but it strives to go beyond mere information processing by recognizing, changing, and creating meaning. This presents us with a two-sided challenge: On the one hand, cognitive technology is challenged to ‘understand’ meaning in ordinary language. And on the other, it challenges us to rethink fundamental questions of human cognition and sense-making. Both challenges demand a better understanding of the difference between the technical transformation of symbols and the understanding of meaning in the ordinary sense. After explaining the topic in relation to both the insights and the limitations of the reflections by Turing, Searle, and Heidegger, this paper primarily builds on Wittgenstein’s contributions to a better understanding of the difference between two conceptions of meaning and their implications for technical replication and simulation. The paper shows that Wittgenstein developed his early calculus account of meaning into that of language games and that language games not only come in many different varieties, but are also much more flexible than calculi. Of particular interest will be the difference between rigid and creative rule-following. Creative rule-following involves an intricate interplay of very different bodily, mental, and cultural constituents, so that its simulation is not merely a technical problem but also requires clarification of a number of profound philosophical questions. It will become clear that the challenge of cognitive technology shows up at unexpected places and that is much bigger than usually assumed.
The Redress of Music: Music, Mediation, and Parity of Esteem
Authors: Súilleabháin Mícheal Ó
Published: December 2018

The nature of a keynote address is to reflect upon issues of concern to the gathered assembly—to kickstart and enrich debates and to stimulate new ideas and perspectives. This address, presented at the beginning of the 44th World Conference of the International Council of Traditional Music, held in Limerick, Ireland, 12–14 July 2017, is very much grounded in my own experiences across a number of domains. I offer it as a subjective view of the potential of music and dance to act as powerful forces of cultural mediation, redressing social—and musical—inequalities.
IFMC, Masu Genjiro, Kurosawa Takatomo, and Their Recordings of Taiwanese Music
Authors: Wang Ying-Fen
Published: December 2018

Masu Genjiro (1904-1995) and Kurosawa Takatomo (1895-1987) were two Japanese musicologists who were commissioned by the Government-General of Taiwan to form the Formosan Folk Music Investigation Team with Yamagata Takayasu, then recording engineer of Victor Company of Japan (hereafter Nippon Victor), to carry out a comprehensive survey and make recordings of Taiwanese music and musical life in the spring of 1943. The purpose of the survey was to establish a music cultural policy that adapted to the wartime needs of the people on the island, which became Japan's first colony in 1895, and could also be applied to Japan's newly acquired colonies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific after the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. The team received full support from Taiwan's Government-General and was assisted by local experts, police officers in Aboriginal villages, and filming crews from both Japan and Taiwan. During its three-month stay in Taiwan, the team first conducted fieldwork around the island and then recorded and filmed Han Chinese and Aboriginal music and dance as well as rituals and ceremonies. They also collected data about Aboriginal musical instruments through questionnaires filled out by police officers in 155 Aboriginal villages.
Derecho y Fotografía. La objetividad truncada | Photography and Law. The truncated objectivity
Authors: Monereo Atienza Cristina
Published: December 2018

Resumen: Este trabajo muestra que el discurso fotográfico está en estrecha conexión con la historia e ideología jurídicas. Las cuestiones que atañen a qué es una imagen, la relación entre imagen fotográfica, verdad y objetividad, o el poder de construcción narrativa de la imagen atañen directamente al concepto de Derecho. Como una fotografía, el Derecho moderno nació con el mismo afán de verdad y fe absoluta en la ciencia. Bajo el velo de la neutralidad y objetividad, buscaba la seguridad y control de las relaciones humanas, con la misma aspiración de poseer, cosificar y comercializar la naturaleza y lo humano. Como sucede con las primeras fotografías, el Estado y el Derecho modernos consiguieron acercarse supuestamente a la verdad al fundarse en lo empírico y también en lo espiritual, si bien una vez asentado el discurso narrativo burgués, con promesa de duración y permanencia, se olvidó el fundamento moral. Sin embargo, la otra faceta de la fotografía es subjetiva y creativa, y también lo es la del Derecho. Por eso, el Derecho no puede ser neutral. Muestra y genera un determinado discurso ideológico verosímil acerca de la forma de organización justa. Hablar del poder narrativo del Derecho, pone de manifiesto la capacidad jurídica de inventar la Justicia y, por tanto, sus peligros ideológicos y sus posibilidades emancipadoras.
Abstract: This work shows that the photographic discourse is in close connection with the legal history and ideology. Questions that concern on what an image is, the relationship between photographic image, truth and objectivity, or the power of narrative construction of the image directly concern the concept of Law. Like a photograph, the Modern Law was born with the same zeal for truth and absolute faith in science. Under the veil of neutrality and objectivity, he sought the security and control of human relationships, with the same aspiration to possess, reify and commercialize Nature and Humanity. As it happens with the first photographs, the Modern State and Law managed to approach the truth by basing themselves on the empirical facts as well as on the spiritual ideas, although once the bourgeois narrative discourse was established, with promise of duration and permanence, the moral foundation was forgotten. However, the other facet of photography is subjective and creative, and so is that of Law. Therefore, the Law cannot be neutral. It shows and generates a certain credible ideological discourse about the form of just organization. Speaking of the narrative power of Law shows the legal capacity to invent Justice and, therefore, its ideological dangers and its emancipatory possibilities.
Cuerpo, lenguaje y transgresión: fuerzas disolutivas y multiplicidad diferencial en los intersticios del discurso de la ley | Body, language and criminality: dissolving forces and differential multiplicity in the interstices of modern legal subject
Authors: Coppa Lucía Inés
Published: December 2018

Resumen: El propósito del presente artículo es revisar concepciones en torno a la dimensión corporal, analizando modos en que la dinámica formalizante del discurso jurídico opera en sus aspectos productores de subjetividad. En ese sentido, nos centramos en algunos enfoques filosóficos –a modo de ‘panorama por escorzos’-, relativos al estatuto de lo corporal y la forma en que el cuerpo es construido y atravesado. En particular, presentamos aspectos de la concepción dialéctica hegeliana –a partir de la lectura de Kojève-, a través de la cual creemos la experiencia corporal no puede ser pensada o conceptualizada; para luego retomar una serie de propuestas en torno a filosofías de la diferencia que entendemos fungen como herramientas para propiciar un acercamiento a la experiencia corporal y a los modos en que es codificada por el discurso jurídico, en particular el vinculado al delito y la trangresión
Abstract: The aim of this article is to revise conceptions around the corporal dimension that operates in law discourse. In that sense we focus on some philosophical approaches related to the place that body asummes and the way it is constructed and crossed by. In particular, we criticize some aspects of the dialectic hegelian conception, through which we believe the corporal experiencie can not be thought or conceptualized. We take up a series of questions around philosophies of differencethat we asumme are a way to zoom in this experience and then to the modes that it is codified by the law discourse.
Hermida del Llano, Cristina. La mutilación genital femenina. El declive de los mitos de legitimación. Valencia, Tirant lo Blanch 2017.
Authors: Prada García Aurelio
Published: December 2018

Se trata de una recension
El derecho como dogma en la forma etico-politico liberal. Otra lectura desde el realismo critico de E. Mounier: la persona como fundamento ético de los derechos | Law as a Tenet in Liberalism. A New Reading from E. Mounier’s Critical Realism: The Person as an Ethical Foundation of Rights
Authors: Seco Martínez Jose María
Published: December 2018

Resumen: El realismo crítico personalista plantea una nueva idea de juridicidad. Reclama frente a la escisión radical entre teoría y praxis jurídica, entre lo axiológico y lo normativo, entre la realidad y lo objetivo, que esgrime la argumentación kelseniana, una instancia crítica para el derecho positivo: la existencia de la persona humana concreta, (que hace y vive la historia), como fundamento inmediato de todo lo jurídico. Si partimos de la base de que siendo la teoría general del derecho una invención moderna, hasta su culminación en Kelsen, ¿por qué no admitir que pueda ser matizada por otros marcos axiológicos y cognitivos, también modernos, descuidados desde entonces por esa concepción normativista? Por eso, hablamos de “realismo crítico”. 
Abstract: The personalist critical realism sets out a new idea about legality facing Kelsen’s argument. Kelsen claims a radical separation between legal theory and praxis, between the axiological and the normative, and between reality and objectivity. However, the personalist critical realism proposes a critical starting point: the existence of the real human being, the one who makes and lives history, as the immediate basis of the legal world. If we start from the assumption that the general theory of law is a modern invention, until it reached its highest point with Kelsen; why do not we admit that it can be elaborated by other cognitive frameworks, also modern, which have been ignored since then, by that normative idea? Therefore, we talk about “critical realism”.
La esterilización forzada en intersecciones distintas: un enfoque estructural para el análisis de las desigualdades complejas | Forced sterilization across intersections: a structural approach to complex inequalities
Authors: Ghidoni Elena
Published: December 2018

Resumen: El artículo propone profundizar un enfoque de la interseccionalidad poco desarrollado dentro de los estudios jurídicos: la interseccionalidad estructural. A través del análisis de dos casos de esterilización forzosa del TEDH, referidos a dos grupos interseccionales distintos (mujeres gitanas y mujeres con discapacidad), la contribución tiene como fin subrayar el interés que conlleva la investigación sobre las dinámicas de poder en los casos de desigualdad compleja. En ambos casos emergen algunos elementos críticos comunes a la configuración del derecho y de su interpretación a la hora de enfrentarse al solapamiento de múltiples categorias de discriminación.
Abstract: This paper tries to reflect on one of the approaches of intersectionality, which is less developed in legal studies: the structural one. Through the analysis of two cases of forced sterilization before the ECtHR that involved different intersectional groups (Roma women and disable women), the paper aims at underlining the importance of focusing on power dynamics when tackling complex inequality. In both cases, it emerges a number of critical elements, which are common to the law’s configuration and to its interpretation when it comes to deal with overlapping categories of discrimination.
El derecho del menor extranjero a ser escuchado y su interés superior en los procedimientos de repatriación | The Right of foreign child to be heard and the best interests of the child in the return process
Authors: Arce Jiménez Elena
Published: December 2018

Resumen: Las dificultades para ser escuchado del menor extranjero en cualquier procedimiento que le afecte ponen de relieve las deficiencias generales existentes en nuestro ordenamiento jurídico para hacer efectivos los derechos de los que son titulares las personas menores de edad, sean extranjeras o no. Se analiza en primer lugar el artículo 12 de la Convención de los Derechos del niño, las condiciones imprescindibles para para hacer efectivo el derecho a ser escuchado y la conexión que existe entre ese derecho y la consideración primordial de su interés superior. A continuación se hace un repaso de la regulación española de los procedimientos de repatriación de menores extranjeros no acompañados a la luz del interés superior del menor y su derecho a ser escuchado.
Abstract: The current challenges that migrant children face to have their right to be heard fulfilled and respected, put in evidence the general deficiencies of our legal system ensuring  the effective enjoyment of children rights, irrespective if the children in question are migrant or not. At the outset, article12 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child and its content is analysed, including the essential requirements for an effective implementation and enjoyment of the right to be heard and its linkages with the best interest of the child as the primary consideration. An analysis of the Spanish regulations under the return procedures for unaccompanied foreignchildren is also provided in light of the respect of the best interests of the child and their right to be heard.
How to Write a Thesis
Authors: Eco Umberto
Published: December 2018

Umberto Eco's wise and witty guide to researching and writing a thesis, published in English for the first time.

By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis—from choosing a topic to organizing a work schedule to writing the final draft. Now in its twenty-third edition in Italy and translated into seventeen languages, How to Write a Thesis has become a classic. Remarkably, this is its first, long overdue publication in English.

Eco's approach is anything but dry and academic. He not only offers practical advice but also considers larger questions about the value of the thesis-writing exercise. How to Write a Thesis is unlike any other writing manual. It reads like a novel. It is opinionated. It is frequently irreverent, sometimes polemical, and often hilarious. Eco advises students how to avoid “thesis neurosis” and he answers the important question “Must You Read Books?” He reminds students “You are not Proust” and “Write everything that comes into your head, but only in the first draft.” Of course, there was no Internet in 1977, but Eco's index card research system offers important lessons about critical thinking and information curating for students of today who may be burdened by Big Data.

How to Write a Thesis belongs on the bookshelves of students, teachers, writers, and Eco fans everywhere. Already a classic, it would fit nicely between two other classics: Strunk and White and The Name of the Rose.

Contents The Definition and Purpose of a Thesis • Choosing the Topic • Conducting Research • The Work Plan and the Index Cards • Writing the Thesis • The Final Draft
Connectedness and Contagion
Authors: Scott Hal S.
Published: December 2018

An argument that contagion is the most significant risk facing the financial system and that Dodd¬Frank has reduced the government's ability to respond effectively.

The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008. Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis—that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures. In this book, Hal Scott argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system. Contagion is an indiscriminate run by short-term creditors of financial institutions that can render otherwise solvent institutions insolvent. It poses a serious risk because, as Scott explains, our financial system still depends on approximately $7.4 to $8.2 trillion of runnable and uninsured short-term liabilities, 60 percent of which are held by nonbanks.

Scott argues that efforts by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Treasury to stop the contagion that exploded after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers lessened the economic damage. And yet Congress, spurred by the public's aversion to bailouts, has dramatically weakened the power of the government to respond to contagion, including limitations on the Fed's powers as a lender of last resort. Offering uniquely detailed forensic analyses of the Lehman Brothers and AIG failures, and suggesting alternative regulatory approaches, Scott makes the case that we need to restore and strengthen our weapons for fighting contagion.
Plato and the Nerd
Authors: Lee Edward Ashford
Published: December 2018

How humans and technology evolve together in a creative partnership.

In this book, Edward Ashford Lee makes a bold claim: that the creators of digital technology have an unsurpassed medium for creativity. Technology has advanced to the point where progress seems limited not by physical constraints but the human imagination. Writing for both literate technologists and numerate humanists, Lee makes a case for engineering—creating technology—as a deeply intellectual and fundamentally creative process. Explaining why digital technology has been so transformative and so liberating, Lee argues that the real power of technology stems from its partnership with humans.

Lee explores the ways that engineers use models and abstraction to build inventive artificial worlds and to give us things that we never dreamed of—for example, the ability to carry in our pockets everything humans have ever published. But he also attempts to counter the runaway enthusiasm of some technology boosters who claim everything in the physical world is a computation—that even such complex phenomena as human cognition are software operating on digital data. Lee argues that the evidence for this is weak, and the likelihood that nature has limited itself to processes that conform to today's notion of digital computation is remote.

Lee goes on to argue that artificial intelligence's goal of reproducing human cognitive functions in computers vastly underestimates the potential of computers. In his view, technology is coevolving with humans. It augments our cognitive and physical capabilities while we nurture, develop, and propagate the technology itself. Complementarity is more likely than competition.
Faster, Smarter, Greener
Authors: Sumantran Venkat , Fine Charles , Gonsalvez David
Published: December 2018

A call to redefine mobility so that it is connected, heterogeneous, intelligent, and personalized, as well as sustainable, adaptable, and city-friendly.

The twentieth century was the century of the automobile; the twenty-first will see mobility dramatically re-envisioned. Automobiles altered cityscapes, boosted economies, and made personal mobility efficient and convenient for many. We had a century-long love affair with the car. But today, people are more attached to their smartphones than their cars. Cars are not always the quickest mode of travel in cities; and emissions from the rapidly growing number of cars threaten the planet. This book, by three experts from industry and academia, envisions a new world of mobility that is connected, heterogeneous, intelligent, and personalized (the CHIP architecture).

The authors describe the changes that are coming. City administrators are shifting from designing cities for cars to designing cities for people. Nations and cities will increasingly employ targeted user fees and offer subsidies to nudge consumers toward more sustainable modes. The sharing economy is coaxing many consumers to shift from being owners of assets to being users of services. The auto industry is responding with connected cars that double as virtual travel assistants and by introducing autonomous driving.

The CHIP architecture embodies an integrated, multimode mobility system that builds on ubiquitous connectivity, electrified and autonomous vehicles, and a marketplace open to innovation and entrepreneurship. Consumers will exercise choice on the basis of user experience and efficiency, aided by “intelligent advisors,” accessible through their mobile devices.

An innovative mobility architecture reconfigured for this century is a social and economic necessity; this book charts a course for achieving it.
Modern HF Signal Detection and Direction Finding
Authors: Sklar Jay R.
Published: December 2018

Detailed descriptions of detection, direction-finding, and signal-estimation methods, using consistent formalisms and notation, emphasizing HF antenna array sensing applications.

Adaptive antenna array technology encompasses many powerful interference suppression approaches that exploit spatial differences among signals reaching a radio receiver system. Today, worldwide propagation phenomenology occurring in the High Frequency (HF) radio regime has made such interference common. In this book, Jay Sklar, a longtime researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, presents detailed descriptions of detection, direction-finding, and signal-estimation methods applicable at HF, using consistent formalisms and notation. Modern electronic system technology has made many of these techniques affordable and practical; the goal of the book is to offer practicing engineers a comprehensive and self-contained reference that will encourage more widespread application of these approaches.

The book is based on the author's thirty years of managing MIT Lincoln Laboratory work on the application of adaptive antenna array technologies to the sensing of HF communication signals. After an overview of HF propagation phenomenology, communication signal formats, and HF receiver architectural approaches, Sklar describes the HF propagation environment in more detail; introduces important modulation approaches and signaling protocols used at HF; discusses HF receiver system architectural features; and addresses signal processor architecture and its implementation. He then presents the technical foundation for the book: the vector model for a signal received at an adaptive array antenna. He follows this with discussions of actual signal processing techniques for detection and direction finding, including specific direction-finding algorithms; geolocation techniques; and signal estimation.
Quantum Language and the Migration of Scientific Concepts
Authors: Burwell Jennifer
Published: December 2018

How highly abstract quantum concepts were represented in language, and how these concepts were later taken up by philosophers, literary critics, and new-age gurus.

The principles of quantum physics—and the strange phenomena they describe—are represented most precisely in highly abstract algebraic equations. Why, then, did these mathematically driven concepts compel founders of the field, particularly Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg, to spend so much time reflecting on ontological, epistemological, and linguistic concerns? What is it about quantum concepts that appeals to latter-day Eastern mystics, poststructuralist critics, and get-rich-quick schemers? How did their interpretations and misinterpretations of quantum phenomena reveal their own priorities? In this book, Jennifer Burwell examines these questions and considers what quantum phenomena—in the context of the founders' debates over how to describe them—reveal about the relationship between everyday experience, perception, and language.

Drawing on linguistic, literary, and philosophical traditions, Burwell illuminates representational and linguistic problems posed by quantum concepts—the fact, for example, that quantum phenomena exist only as probabilities or tendencies toward being and cannot be said to exist in a particular time and place. She traces the emergence of quantum theory as an analytic tool in literary criticism, in particular the use of wave/particle duality in interpretations of gender differences in the novels of Virginia Woolf and critics' connection of Bohr's Principle of Complementarity to poetic form; she examines the “quantum mysticism” of Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav; and she concludes by analyzing “nuclear discourse” in the context of quantum concepts, arguing that it, too, adopts a language of the unthinkable and the indescribable.
What IS Sex?
Authors: Zupančič Alenka
Published: December 2018

Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology.

Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.”

Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.
Transit Life
Authors: Bissell David
Published: December 2018

An exploration of the ways that everyday life in the city is defined by commuting.

We spend much of our lives in transit to and from work. Although we might dismiss our daily commute as a wearying slog, we rarely stop to think about the significance of these daily journeys. In Transit Life, David Bissell explores how everyday life in cities is increasingly defined by commuting. Examining the overlooked events and encounters of the commute, Bissell shows that the material experiences of our daily journeys are transforming life in our cities. The commute is a time where some of the most pressing tensions of contemporary life play out, striking at the heart of such issues as our work-life balance; our relationships with others; our sense of place; and our understanding of who we are.

Drawing on in-depth fieldwork with commuters, journalists, transit advocates, policymakers, and others in Sydney, Australia, Transit Life takes a holistic perspective to change how we think about commuting. Rather than arguing that transport infrastructure investment alone can solve our commuting problems, Bissell explores the more subtle but powerful forms of social change that commuting creates. He examines the complex politics of urban mobility through multiple dimensions, including the competencies that commuters develop over time; commuting dispositions and the social life of the commute; the multiple temporalities of commuting; the experience of commuting spaces, from footpath to on-ramp, both physical and digital; the voices of commuting, from private rants to drive-time radio; and the interplay of materialities, ideas, advocates, and organizations in commuting infrastructures.
On Accident
Authors: Eigen Edward
Published: December 2018

Engaging essays that roam across uncertain territory, in search of sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, plagiarized tabernacles, and other phenomena missing from architectural history.

This collection by “architectural history's most beguiling essayist” (as Reinhold Martin calls the author in the book's foreword) illuminates the unfamiliar, the arcane, the obscure—phenomena largely missing from architectural and landscape history. These essays by Edward Eigen do not walk in a straight line, but roam across uncertain territory, discovering sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, unvisited shores, plagiarized tabernacles. Taken together, these texts offer a group portrait of how certain things fall apart.

We read about the statistical investigation of lightning strikes in France by the author-astronomer Camille Flammarion, which leads Eigen to reflect also on Foucault, Hamlet, and the role of the anecdote in architectural history. We learn about, among other things, Olmsted's role in transforming landscape gardening into landscape architecture; the connections among hedging, hedge funds, the High Line, and GPS bandwidth; timber-frame roofs and (spider) web-based learning; the archives of the Houses of Parliament through flood and fire; and what the 1898 disappearance and reappearance of the Trenton, New Jersey architect William W. Slack might tell us about the conflict between “the migratory impulse” and “love of home.”

Eigen compares his essays to the “gathering up of seeds that fell by the wayside.” The seedlings that result create in the reader's imagination a dazzling display of the particular, the contingent, the incidental, and the singular, all in search of a narrative.
Calculating a Natural World
Authors: Akera Atsushi
Published: December 2018

During the Cold War, the field of computing advanced rapidly within a complex institutional context. In Calculating a Natural World, Atsushi Akera describes the complicated interplay of academic, commercial, and government and military interests that produced a burst of scientific discovery and technological innovation in 1940s and 1950s America. This was the era of big machines—the computers that made the reputations of IBM and of many academic laboratories—and Akera uses the computer as a historical window on the emerging infrastructure of American scientific and engineering research. The military-industrial complex is often spoken of as a coherent and unified power, but Akera argues that it was the tensions as much as the convergences among military, business, and academic forces that fueled scientific and technological advances.

Akera's study is unique in its integration of a history of postwar computing—usually told in terms of either business or hardware—and a mapping of an "ecology of knowledge" represented by the emerging institutional infrastructure for computing. For example, Akera sees John Mauchly's early work on computers as a product of his peripatetic career—his journey through different institutional ecologies—and John von Neumann's work as emerging from the convergence of physics and applied mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. Akera also looks at the ways in which the institutional contexts of the National Bureau of Standards and MIT's Project Whirlwind pulled research in diverging directions, and he examines IBM's dominance from the perspectives of both business and users. Finally, Akera compares the academic computing centers at MIT and the University of Michigan, tracing the tensions on those campuses over whether computers were a service facility, a commercial technology, or a subject of research.
Civic Space/Cyberspace
Authors: Molz Redmond Kathleen , Dain Phyllis
Published: December 2018

Quintessentially American institutions, symbols of community spirit and the American faith in education, public libraries are ubiquitous in the United States. Close to a billion library visits are made each year, and more children join summer reading programs than little league baseball. Public libraries are local institutions, as different as the communities they serve. Yet their basic services, techniques, and professional credo are essentially similar; and they offer, through technology and cooperative agreements, myriad materials and information far beyond their own walls.

In Civic Space/Cyberspace, Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain assess the current condition and direction of the American public library. They consider the challenges and opportunities presented by new electronic technologies, changing public policy, fiscal realities, and cultural trends. They draw on site visits and interviews conducted across the country; extensive reading of reports, surveys, and other documents; and their long-standing interest in the library's place in the social and civic structure. The book uniquely combines a scholarly, humanistic, and historical approach to public libraries with a clear-eyed look at their problems and prospects, including their role in the emerging national information infrastructure.
Comparative Political Economy
Authors: Kindleberger Charles P.
Published: December 2018

The essays collected here reflect the author's shift in interests from foreign exchange to international trade, economic growth, and economic history, especially financial history.

Charles P. Kindleberger's rich and distinguised career has spanned nearly six decades. The essays collected here reflect the author's shift in interests from foreign exchange to international trade, economic growth, and economic history, especially financial history. They also contain dollops of sociology and political science. Kindleberger views himself as a historical economist who tests economic propositions against the historical record in more than one setting. The collection contains many of the jewels of Kindleberger's work. Most of the papers are strong on comparison (within Western Europe and between Europe and the United States), on economic or financial history, and on social science beyond the confines of economics.
Debt Defaults and Lessons from a Decade of Crises
Authors: Sturzenegger Federico , Zettelmeyer Jeromin
Published: December 2018

Detailed case studies of debt defaults by Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Moldova, and Uruguay, framed by a comprehensive discussion of the history, economic theory, legal issues, and policy lessons of sovereign debt crises.

The debt crises in emerging market countries over the past decade have given rise to renewed debate about crisis prevention and resolution. In Debt Defaults and Lessons from a Decade of Crises, Federico Sturzenegger and Jeromin Zettelmeyer examine the facts, the economic theory, and the policy implications of sovereign debt crises. They present detailed case histories of the default and debt crises in seven emerging market countries between 1998 and 2005: Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Ecuador, Argentina, Moldova, and Uruguay. These accounts are framed with a comprehensive overview of the history, economics, and legal issues involved and a discussion from both domestic and international perspectives of the policy lessons that can be derived from these experiences.

Sturzenegger and Zettelmeyer examine how each crisis developed, what the subsequent restructuring encompassed, and how investors and the defaulting country fared. They discuss the new theoretical thinking on sovereign debt and the ultimate costs entailed, for both debtor countries and private creditors. The policy debate is considered first from the perspective of policymakers in emerging market countries and then in terms of international financial architecture. The authors' surveys of legal and economic issues associated with debt crises, and of the crises themselves, are the most comprehensive to be found in the literature on sovereign debt and default, and their theoretical analysis is detailed and nuanced. The book will be a valuable resource for investors as well as for scholars and policymakers.
Early Reading Instruction
Authors: McGuinness Diane
Published: December 2018

Early Reading Instruction is a comprehensive analysis of the research evidence from early writing systems to computer models of reading. In this book, Diane McGuinness provides an innovative solution to the "reading war"—the century-old debate over the efficacy of phonics (sound-based) versus whole-word (meaning- based) methods. She has developed a prototype—a set of elements that are critical to the success of a reading method.

McGuinness shows that all writing systems, without exception, are based on a sound unit in the language. This fact, and other findings by paleographers, provides a platform for the prototype. Other elements of the prototype are based on modern research. For example, observational studies in the classroom show that time spent on three activities strongly predicts reading success: learning phoneme/symbol correspondences, practice at blending and segmenting phonemes in words, and copying/writing words, phrases, and sentences. Most so-called literacy activities have no effect, and some, like sight word memorization, have a strongly negative effect.

The National Reading Panel (2000) summarized the research on reading methods after screening out thousands of studies that failed to meet minimum scientific standards. In an in-depth analysis of this evidence, McGuinness shows that the most successful methods (children reading a year or more above age norms) include all the elements in the prototype. Finally, she argues, because phonics-type methods are consistently shown to be superior to whole-word methods in studies dating back to the 1960s, it makes no sense to continue this line of research. The most urgent question for future research is how to get the most effective phonics programs into the classroom.

Bradford Books imprint
The Institutional Dimensions of Environmental Change
Authors: Young Oran R.
Published: December 2018

Researchers studying the role institutions play in causing and confronting environmental change use a variety of concepts and methods that make it difficult to compare their findings. Seeking to remedy this problem, Oran Young takes the analytic themes identified in the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) Science Plan as cutting-edge research concerns and develops them into a common structure for conducting research. He illustrates his arguments with examples of environmental change ranging in scale from the depletion of local fish stocks to the disruption of Earth's climate system.Young not only explores theoretical concerns such as the relative merits of collective-action and social-practice models of institutions but also addresses the IDGEC-identified problems of institutional fit, interplay, and scale. He shows how institutions interact both with one another and with the biophysical environment and assesses the extent to which we can apply lessons drawn from the study of local institutions to the study of global institutions and vice versa. He examines how research on institutions can help us to solve global problems of environmental governance. Substantive topics discussed include the institutional dimensions of carbon management, the performance of exclusive economic zones, and the political economy of boreal and tropical forests.
Learnability in Optimality Theory
Authors: Tesar Bruce , Smolensky Paul
Published: December 2018

Highlighting the close relationship between linguistic explanation and learnability, Bruce Tesar and Paul Smolensky examine the implications of Optimality Theory (OT) for language learnability.

Highlighting the close relationship between linguistic explanation and learnability, Bruce Tesar and Paul Smolensky examine the implications of Optimality Theory (OT) for language learnability. They show how the core principles of OT lead to the learning principle of constraint demotion, the basis for a family of algorithms that infer constraint rankings from linguistic forms.

Of primary concern to the authors are the ambiguity of the data received by the learner and the resulting interdependence of the core grammar and the structural analysis of overt linguistic forms. The authors argue that iterative approaches to interdependencies, inspired by work in statistical learning theory, can be successfully adapted to address the interdependencies of language learning. Both OT and Constraint Demotion play critical roles in their adaptation. The authors support their findings both formally and through simulations. They also illustrate how their approach could be extended to other language learning issues, including subset relations and the learning of phonological underlying forms.
Methods of Theoretical Psychology
Authors: Kukla André
Published: December 2018

The aim of this book is not to impart a substantive knowledge of core psychological theories, or even to analyze critically selected theories. Instead, it is to prepare the reader to analyze and advance the theoretical literature in any tradition.

Theoretical psychology stands in the same relation to psychology as theoretical physics does to physics. The traditional way to study theoretical psychology is to take up one approach after another—behavioral, psychoanalytic, cognitive, and so on. The aim of this book is not to impart a substantive knowledge of core psychological theories, or even to analyze critically selected theories. Instead, it is to prepare the reader to analyze and advance the theoretical literature in any tradition.

A good theoretician should be able to contribute to the study of psychoanalytic theory as readily as to behavioral theory. The skills required are the same. Instead of covering a sequence of theories, therefore, the book is organized around types of theoretical activities. It is not a work in theoretical psychology; it is a book about theoretical psychology. It also confronts psychologists' underestimation of the variety and the significance of theoretical work. Many theoretical issues do not call for empirical research—they require nothing but thinking.

Bradford Books imprint
Seeing and Visualizing
Authors: Pylyshyn Zenon W.
Published: December 2018

In Seeing and Visualizing, Zenon Pylyshyn argues that seeing is different from thinking and that to see is not, as it may seem intuitively, to create an inner replica of the world. Pylyshyn examines how we see and how we visualize and why the scientific account does not align with the way these processes seem to us "from the inside." In doing so, he addresses issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.

First, Pylyshyn argues that there is a core stage of vision independent from the influence of our prior beliefs and examines how vision can be intelligent and yet essentially knowledge-free. He then proposes that a mechanism within the vision module, called a visual index (or FINST), provides a direct preconceptual connection between parts of visual representations and things in the world, and he presents various experiments that illustrate the operation of this mechanism. He argues that such a deictic reference mechanism is needed to account for many properties of vision, including how mental images attain their apparent spatial character without themselves being laid out in space in our brains.

The final section of the book examines the "picture theory" of mental imagery, including recent neuroscience evidence, and asks whether any current evidence speaks to the issue of the format of mental images. This analysis of mental imagery brings together many of the themes raised throughout the book and provides a framework for considering such issues as the distinction between the form and the content of representations, the role of vision in thought, and the relation between behavioral, neuroscientific, and phenomenological evidence regarding mental representations.

Bradford Books imprint
Internet Architecture and Innovation
Authors: van Schewick Barbara
Published: December 2018

A detailed examination of how the underlying technical structure of the Internet affects the economic environment for innovation and the implications for public policy.

Today—following housing bubbles, bank collapses, and high unemployment—the Internet remains the most reliable mechanism for fostering innovation and creating new wealth. The Internet's remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. In this pathbreaking book, Barbara van Schewick argues that this explosion of innovation is not an accident, but a consequence of the Internet's architecture—a consequence of technical choices regarding the Internet's inner structure that were made early in its history.

The Internet's original architecture was based on four design principles: modularity, layering, and two versions of the celebrated but often misunderstood end-to-end arguments. But today, the Internet's architecture is changing in ways that deviate from the Internet's original design principles, removing the features that have fostered innovation and threatening the Internet's ability to spur economic growth, to improve democratic discourse, and to provide a decentralized environment for social and cultural interaction in which anyone can participate. If no one intervenes, network providers' interests will drive networks further away from the original design principles. If the Internet's value for society is to be preserved, van Schewick argues, policymakers will have to intervene and protect the features that were at the core of the Internet's success.