bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Island Food Webs
Authors: Palis Gary A. , Rose Michael D.
Published: November 2020

Most of this book focuses on the biogeography and ecology of plants and various animal taxa on islands in the Sea of Cortés. These chapters highlight the historical and biogeographical factors that contributed to the patterns of species distribution and co-occurrence among islands. However, these patterns also reflect the action of ecological processes because the species present interact, directly or indirectly, within the food web that occurs on any given island. Island food webs may also be unique from other communities in the degree to which their structure and dynamics are also strongly influenced by the surrounding ocean. We believe that a deeper appreciation of the trophic connections between the sea and the land, and the resulting effects on the structure and dynamics of island food webs, is key to understanding the biogeography of species on islands. Many factors that operate through the food web can enhance or depress populations in a way that affects their local distribution and persistence, and, as a consequence, affects patterns of diversity on a biogeographical scale. Of these, we recognize three as being particularly important: the availability and quality of resources, competition, and consumption (i.e., by herbivores, predators, parasites). Bottom-up factors (nutrients, primary productivity, and food availability to consumers) set limits on island productivity and hence on the potential abundance of a particular group. Within a given community, secondary productivity and population density are subsequently constrained by top-down (i.e., consumption) and competitive effects. One of our goals in this chapter is to show how processes that influence productivity of gulf islands determine patterns of abundance of organisms on islands and affect interactions among species and trophic levels in these systems. Our second goal is to demonstrate the importance of spatial and temporal variability in productivity in determining the structure and dynamics of island food webs. Using our long-term studies of plants and consumers on islands in the northern gulf, we show that productivity varies greatly, both among years and islands, as a result of both local conditions and global climatic factors. Such variable productivity markedly affects food web dynamics and ultimately the abundance of species on the islands in the Sea of Cortés.
Beyond Data: Handling Spatial and Analytical Contexts with Genetics-Based Machine Learning
Authors: Dibble Catherine
Published: November 2020

Geographic information systems (GISs) are fairly good at handling three types of data: locational, attribute, and topological. Recent work holds promise for adding temporal data to this list as well (e.g., see Langran, 1992). Yet the unprecedentedly vast resources of geographically referenced data continue to outstrip our ability to derive meaningful information from such databases, despite dramatic improvements in computer processing power, algorithm efficiency, and parallel processing. In part this is because such research has emphasized improvements in processing efficiency rather than effectiveness. We humans are slow-minded compared with our silicon inventions; yet our analytical capabilities remain far more powerful, primarily because we have evolved elaborate cognitive infrastructures devoted to ensuring that we leverage our limited processing power by focusing our attention on the events and information most likely to be relevant. In GIS use, so far only human perception provides the requisite integration of spatial context, and human attention directs the determination of relevance and the selection of geographic features and related analyses. Understanding of spatial context and analytical purpose exists only in the minds of humans working with the GIS or viewing the displays and maps created by such operations. We still extract information from our geographic data systems primarily through long series of relatively tedious and complex spatial operations, performed—or at least explicitly preprogrammed—by a human, in order to derive each answer. Human integration of analytical purpose and spatial and attribute contexts is perhaps the most essential and yet the most invisible component of any geographic analysis, yet it is also perhaps the most fundamental missing link in any GIS. Only humans can glance at a map of a toxic waste dumps next to school yards, or oil spills upstream from fisheries, and recognize the potential threat of such proximity; human cartographers understand the importance of emphasizing either road or stream networks depending on the purpose of a map; humans understand that “near” operates at different scales for corner stores versus cities, or tropical jungle habitat versus open savannah. Given a GIS with the capability to deluge any inquiry with myriad layers of extraneous data, this natural human ability to filter data and manipulate only the meaningful elements is essential.
War and Other Ways to Kill People
Authors: Lienhard John H.
Published: November 2020

We humans are a hardy lot. It eventually takes the cellular deterioration of old age to set most of us up for death, which then occurs by cancer, heart disease, pneumonia, or other illness. Death by natural causes is almost always the result of a protracted assault on our bodies. We are hard to kill. But now and then we undertake the technological problem of killing one another intentionally. That is seldom easy to do, and it has to play out against the universal human commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” So the problem is not only a difficult one technologically, it is also one that calls up all manner of creative tactics of self-justification. The motivation for killing takes many forms—the greater good of society as expressed in war and capital punishment, mercy killing, personal gain (often expressed in crime against another person), revenge, anger, or suicide. I expect we all have sanctioned killing by one or more of these means at one time or another, by either words or deeds. We have created little original technology for the purpose of killing one another. However, a great deal of our existing technology has been adapted to that purpose. Weapons for hunting have repeatedly been elaborated into weapons of crime or war. Lisa Meitner, whose 1939 paper described the energy release of nuclear fission, clearly thought she had identified the ultimate peacetime power source. Asked what use the Wrights’ new airplane would be, Orville Wright unhesitatingly shot back, “Sport!” While war was far from the Wright brothers’ minds in the process of invention, their first big commercial sale was to the United States Army. The peculiar relation between creativity and killing comes home to me in my reaction to an event in the late days of World War II, when the war finally came closest to my quiet home in Minnesota. Since Tokyo was more than six thousand miles away, the mutual slaughter of Japanese and the Allies had largely been carried out in the Pacific Ocean. Then in January 1945 we learned about Japan’s secret weapon. She was trying to ignite our mainland with incendiary bombs.
Technology and Literature
Authors: Lienhard John H.
Published: November 2020

Technology is a form of communication. Because it is communication, technology both echoes in our literature and seamlessly continues human discourse into another domain that is wordless. Suppose you want to tell a friend how to go from Houston to Detroit. You might write out the sequence of roads and turns that would get her there. Or you might prepare a map. On the other hand, you might do something more abstract; you might tell her what it feels like to drive to Detroit—about the ride and the sights you see on the way. The engineers in Detroit have another way to describe the trip. They design the machine we use to make the journey. They create the experience of the trip, give it its form and texture. Those engineers are using the automobile to tell you their own concept of what that experience should be. The feel of it, the sense of motion, the beauty of the auto, the way the car fits into your life and shapes it—these are all things the designer communicates in a remarkably compact and efficient way. This fact was dramatically impressed on my wife and me the day we found a prefabricated desk that we needed for her computer. Since the box had been damaged by a forklift, the as-is price was next to nothing. It was a big, complicated, three-element item, with ten pages of assembly instructions. Putting it together was no job for the timid. We took the box home, opened it, and only then found that the instructions were gone. There lay thirty precut pieces of wood, hundreds of metal and plastic fittings, and no hint as to how they were supposed to fit together. At first it was devastating. Then I realized that I could consult the designer directly! Why not just look at the parts and listen to the clear logic they represented? Why was this piece notched and drilled the way it was? Why did some fittings have little ribs while others did not? In the end, we had been relieved of the tedious and confusing intermediary of written instructions.
Emerging Markets and Persistent Inequality in a Nonlinear Voting Model
Authors: Oomes Nienke A.
Published: November 2020

Since it is one of the few spin systems that can be studied analytically, the Voter Model has been extensively discussed in the interacting particle systems literature. In the original interpretation of this model, voters choose their political positions with probabilities equal to the voting frequency of their friends. One of the main results is that, in one and two dimensions, the system clusters—i.e., converges to a homogeneous steady state—while heterogeneity can persist only in dimensions higher than two. This chapter develops an economic model that is similar to the Voter Model, in that agents decide between economic positions, conditional on the economic choices of their trade partners. The choices considered here are market production and nonmarket production, where the payoffs associated with market production for a given agent are a function of the amount of market goods produced by others. Intuitively, the more people are producing for the market, the more potential trade partners exist, hence the higher the expected payoff associated with market production. Similarly, the smaller the extent of the market, the lower the expected gains from trade, hence the smaller the incentive to produce for the market. When each agent is assumed to have an equal probability of trading with any other agent in his or.her trade network, the payoffs associated with market production are linearly increasing in the network’s total market output. However, this linearity in payoffs does not necessarily imply that the conditional probability of working for the market is linearly increasing in total market production, as the Voter Model would have it. As it turns out, this follows only if agents believe, mistakenly, that their trade partners will decide to work for the market with a probability that is exactly proportional to their current market output. Clearly, a more general approach is obtained by allowing for different types of expectations agents may have about the production decisions of their trade partners. A model that allows for such an approach is the so-called Nonlinear Voter Model (NLVM), studied by Molofsky et al.
Climate Variability and the Global Harvest
Authors: Rosenzweig Cynthia , Hillel Daniel
Published: November 2020

The Earth's climate is constantly changing. Some of the changes are progressive, while others fluctuate at various time scales. The El Niño-la Niña cycle is one such fluctuation that recurs every few years and has far-reaching impacts. It generally appears at least once per decade, but this may vary with our changing climate. The exact frequency, sequence, duration and intensity of El Niño's manifestations, as well as its effects and geographic distributions, are highly variable. The El Niño-la Niña cycle is particularly challenging to study due to its many interlinked phenomena that occur in various locations around the globe. These worldwide teleconnections are precisely what makes studying El Niño-la Niña so important. Cynthia Rosenzweig and Daniel Hillel describe the current efforts to develop and apply a global-to-regional approach to climate-risk management. They explain how atmospheric and social scientists are cooperating with agricultural practitioners in various regions around the world to determine how farmers may benefit most from new climate predictions. Specifically, the emerging ability to predict the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle offers the potential to transform agricultural planning worldwide. Biophysical scientists are only now beginning to recognize the large-scale, globally distributed impacts of ENSO on the probabilities of seasonal precipitation and temperature regimes. Meanwhile, social scientists have been researching how to disseminate forecasts more effectively within rural communities. Consequently, as the quality of climatic predictions have improved, the dissemination and presentation of forecasts have become more effective as well. This book explores the growing understanding of the interconnectedness of climate predictions and productive agriculture for sustainable development, as well as methods and models used to study this relationship.
Cos
Authors: Fant Clyde E. , Reddish Mitchell G.
Published: November 2020

Cos, home of Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, is the third largest island of the Dodecanese (Twelve Islands). In antiquity its population was 120,000, eight times that of today. Its fame derived from the renowned Asclepeion of Cos, a healing center and religious shrine devoted to Asclepius, the god of healing. Tourists still come to marvel at this spectacular architectural structure, and international medical conferences are conducted on the island in memory of Hippocrates. Cos (also spelled Kos) lies only 3 miles off the coast of Turkey, near the Bodrum peninsula. Connections are available to the Turkish mainland by ferry, and a fascinating circuit of biblical sites can be made from Athens through the Greek islands to Cos and then up the western coast of Turkey for a departure from Istanbul. Access to Cos by air is available from Athens (three flights daily), or by ferry from Piraeus, Rhodes, or Thessaloniki through Samos. Hydrofoils are available from Rhodes and Samos for faster trips. (Always check ferry and hydrofoil schedules closely; frequent and erratic changes occur, particularly with hydrofoils in the event of high winds.) Cos was settled by the Mycenaeans in 1425 B.C.E., and Homer described it as heavily populated (Iliad 14:225). Pliny referred to it as a major shipping port (Natural History 15:18). Among its exports were wine, purple dye, and elegant, diaphanous fabrics of silk (raw silk; pure silk from the Orient did not reach the west until the 3rd century C.E.). Aristotle wrote that silk fabric was invented on the island of Cos: “A class of women unwind and reel off the cocoons of these creatures [caterpillars] and afterward weave a fabric with the thread thus unwound; a Koan woman by the name of Pamphila, daughter of Plateus, being credited with the first invention of the fabric” (The History of Animals 5.19). Cos reached the pinnacle of its prosperity and power in the 7th and 6th centuries B.C.E., but by the end of the 6th century B.C.E. it had come under the control of Persia.
Smyrna
Authors: Fant Clyde E. , Reddish Mitchell G.
Published: November 2020

Izmir, the modern name for the city that once was known as Smyrna, is the third largest city in Turkey, with a population of around 3 million. Situated on the Aegean coast, it is Turkey’s second busiest port. Not only is Izmir an interesting place itself to visit, but the city also serves as a good base from which to visit several important sites in the area, such as the ancient cities of Ephesus, Sardis, Miletus, Didyma, and Priene. The ancient city of Smyrna, which according to some reports was the birthplace of Homer, was commercially successful due to its harbor and its location (approximately 35 miles north of Ephesus) at the end of a major route through Asia Minor. The earliest settlement at this location was in the first half of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. on a hill known as Tepekule in the Bayraklï suburb of the city. In the 10th century B.C.E., the first Greek colonists from Aeolia settled at Tepekule. They remained there until the end of the 8th century, when Ionian Greeks took over. Excavations at the site have uncovered houses from the 9th to the 7th centuries B.C.E. In the 7th century a temple to Athena was built. This temple was destroyed around 600 B.C.E. by King Alyattes of Lydia when he captured the city. The people of Smyrna rebuilt and enlarged the temple, but it was destroyed again around 545 B.C.E., this time by the Persians. An insignificant settlement in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.E., the site was finally abandoned. According to a story related by Pausanias (Description of Greece 7.5.1–3), the city was refounded by Alexander the Great, who was instructed in a dream to establish a new city on Mt. Pagus (now the site of the Kadifekale, or “Velvet Fortress”). The new city was actually not started until the beginning of the 3rd century by the Hellenistic ruler Lysimachus. During the subsequent centuries Smyrna, situated around the harbor, grew and prospered. By the 1st century B.C.E., Strabo was able to describe Smyrna as “the most beautiful of all” cities (Geography 14.646).
The Marijuana Milpa: Agricultural Adaptations in a Postsubsistence Maya Landscape in Southern Belize
Authors: Steinberg Michael K.
Published: November 2020

Foreign fieldwork always presents interesting and unique challenges; however, fieldwork that involves illegal activities on the part of the study group is “ethnography” like no other. The typical fieldwork tools such as tape recorders, cameras, statistical models, and formal questionnaires are often not an option. Instead, great caution and sensitivity must be maintained to protect the identity of informants, as well the researcher’s personal safety. Informants may be willing to talk about illegal activities, but in this study no one was willing to go on record or have their photographs taken with their illegal marijuana (Cannabis sativa) crop. As a result of these cautious methods, much of the information contained in this chapter is based on interviews with unnamed informants in unstructured interviews whom I came to know and trust mainly during the late 1990s while conducting fieldwork with the Mopan and Kekchí Maya in southern Belize on various cultural ecological topics. There was no intention to assist informants in illegal activities by hiding their identities, but similar to investigative journalism (which in many ways these chapters resemble), informants must have sufficient trust in the investigator in order to provide reliable information. This chapter discusses a situation that the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the U.S. media, and most citizens would consider a success story in the so-called war on drugs—small-scale marijuana producers who, through the actions of interdiction authorities, were largely driven out of business. However, this chapter presents a slightly different angle on the war on drugs in that it examines the recent history of marijuana production among Maya farmers in southern Belize: why seemingly traditional and conservative peasant farmers turn to drug production in the first place, how these activities affect village life and culture, and some implications and lessons this case study provides on the larger battle over what crops, legal or illegal, smallholder farmers produce. This chapter provides some useful lessons for the larger war on drugs because the Mopan and Kekchí Maya are quite similar to other smallholder farmers who grow most of the commodities that are then consumed in raw form or manufactured into narcotics. These are economically poor farmers who perceive psychoactive plants as cash crops, much like coffee or cacao, that are consumed in distant lands by unknown peoples.
Sacred and Profane Uses of the Cactus Lophophora Williamsii from the South Texas Peyote Gardens
Authors: Kimber Clarissa T. , McDonald Darrel
Published: November 2020

Peyote is one of the best-known plant sources for a psychedelic experience. This small cactus is also associated in the popular mind with North American Indians and Hippies. Although its ritual use is thought to be over 7,000 years old (Furst 1989, cited in Schaefer 1996: 141), its use by Indians of the Native American Church (NAC) is less than 100 years old. The peyote button is the essential ingredient in the ritual ceremony associated with NAC meetings and is referred to as “the medicine” by those who regard the button as a god-being and ingest it as a sacrament (Slotkin 1956: 29; Smith and Snake 1996: 80, 91, 105–6). Even more recently, non-Indians have formed churches (the Neo American Church) to follow the Peyote Way or Road (Trout 1999: 47). Secular uses of peyote are as medicine, especially for topical application to the skin on open wounds (Schultes 1940), for divination to discover something lost or when possible attacks of the enemy will occur; or for mind-altering experiences of a nonreligious nature, that is, for recreation. These nonritual (profane) uses have a long history, but peyote’s more significant sacred use in the United States, as measured by numbers of participants, has been in force for little more than 100 years. Various plants are called peyote in Mexico (Schultes 1938: 157), and their usage in the public and official literature of Texas and the United States has not been precise over the years (Morgan 1976: 12, La Barre 1975: 14–17). The major confusion over the common name among field anthropologists and government officials has been with the mescal bean, or Texas mountain laurel [Sophora secundiflora (Ort.) DC]. This hardy, small tree produces a hard, highly toxic, red seed, which has had a long history of ritual use by Amerinds (La Barre 1975: 15). The distribution of the mescal bean is on the southern edge of the Edwards Plateau, on the caliche cuestas in the Rio Grande Plains, and in the mountains of the Trans-Pecos. The native Americans of this region strung the beans into necklaces or bracelets, and a shaman might have passed down to another shaman some of these items as important paraphernalia.
Drugs that are Useful in Selected Fibromyalgia Patients
Authors: Wallace Daniel J. , Brock Wallace Janice
Published: November 2020

Doctors often prescribe drugs for fibromyalgia patients with distinct manifestations associated with the disorder such as tension headache, chronic fatigue, or bladder spasms. Few of the preparations discussed in this chapter have been shown to be specifically effective in fibromyalgia, but nearly all of them are widely prescribed by doctors who treat fibromyalgia patients. In an April 1982 bulletin, the Food and Drug Administration specifically allowed physicians to use approved drugs for “off-label” purposes. This chapter reviews our clinical experience with these drugs for fibromyalgia-related manifestations and presents a personalized, critical evaluation of them. One of the most commonly employed interventions in fibromyalgia is the tender point injection. Controlled studies have clearly demonstrated its usefulness in patients with myofascial pain syndrome. When a patient comes to our office and reports that a specific point—for example, in the upper back or neck area—hurts, we try to ascertain how severe this discomfort is in relation to their overall pain. If we are told that at least 30 percent (and preferably more than 50 percent) of their pain at the moment is from a specific tender area, this is an indication for a local injection. Patients who “hurt all over” rarely respond to tender point injections for more than a few days. Once we have decided to give a local injection or injections (usually limiting the number of injections to three per visit, with visits spaced several weeks apart), what preparations are used? The drugs of choice always include a local pain deadener, or anesthetic, usually xylocaine, novocaine, or marcaine. After the painful area is sprayed with a coolant anesthetic such as ethyl chloride or florimethane, the anesthetic in the shots usually works immediately. Sometimes a steroid is added to the anesthetic in the same syringe. Not all doctors use steroids for tender point injections. However, the doses we use are very low, and systemic effects are uncommon.
Work and Disability
Authors: Wallace Daniel J. , Brock Wallace Janice
Published: November 2020

Most of us have to work for a living. There are bills to pay and families to provide for. Since fibromyalgia patients do not usually look ill and on superficial examination appear strong, complaints of difficulty performing the job can be hard to believe. This chapter will review definitions as they apply to disability, impairments reported in fibromyalgia patients, and constructive approaches that allow individuals with the syndrome to work most effectively. The World Health Organization defines disability as a limitation of function that compromises the ability to perform an activity within a range considered normal. Efforts to manage work disabilities considers issues such as age, sex, level of education, psychological profile, past attainments, motivation, retraining prospects, and social support systems. Additionally, work disability issues take into account work-related self-esteem, motivation, stress, fatigue, personal value systems, and availability of financial compensation. An impairment is an anatomic, physiologic, or psychological loss that leads to disability. Impairments include pain from work activities (e.g., heavy lifting), emotional stress (e.g., working in a complaint department), or muscle dysfunction (e.g., cerebral palsy). A handicap is a job limitation or something that cannot be done (e.g., deafness). Patients with a disability can be permanently, totally disabled and thus potentially eligible for Social Security Disability and Medicare health benefits. Other classifications include being permanently, partially disabled, whereby vocational rehabilitation, occupational therapy, and psychological or ergonomic evaluations can address impairments or handicaps to optimize employment retraining possibilities. Temporary, partial disability allows one to work with restrictions (e.g., no lifting more than ten pounds) while treatment is in progress. Temporary, total disability involves a leave of absence from employment while undergoing treatment so that one can return to work. Subjective factors of disability include symptoms such as pain or fatigue, while objective factors of disability are physical signs such as a heart murmur or a swollen joint. One can be disabled from a work category and granted disability even if employment is ongoing in a different work category. Work categories are rated as sedentary, light work, light medium work, medium work, heavy work, or very heavy work, each defined by how much exertion is used over a time interval.
Hot Spots and the Globalization of Conservation
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

Eight friends were seated around the dining room table, two bulging photo albums at the ready, about to start a round of that curious adult version of Show and Tell known as Our Summer Vacation. Donna and Stanley had begun their album with pictures of Stanley delivering a lecture to clinical psychologists at the Catholic University of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. This was followed by page after page of lush, colorful South American scenery: snapshots of the mighty Iguazú Falls taken from the river below; towering walls of green vegetation along the Rio Paraná; a thick growth of native trees overtaking the exotic plantings left behind by the celebrated botanist Moises Bertoni at the remains of his agricultural experiment station in the Paraguayan province of Alto Paraná. Then there were pictures of Stan-ley and Donna with their Brazilian hosts, flanked by stately palms; pictures at their friends’ beautiful beach house in Ubatuba; pictures of costumed samba dancers; and more pictures of scarlet and blue macaws, gaudy toucans, purple bougainvilleas, brilliant butterflies, and the rich magnificence of one of the last remaining patches of Brazil’s Atlantic coastal forest. The album provided a breathtaking display of natural and human exuberance painted in a profusion of vivid reds, blues, yellows, and, above all, greens. I could almost smell the myriad fragrances borne on the tropical breeze and hear one of my favorite sounds, the chattering of parrots far above in the treetops. As the pages turned, the phrase “hot spots” came into my mind, that graphic term for those patches of exceptionally high biodiversity—many of them in the tropics—that receive the lion’s share of attention from conservation biologists and others dedicated to the preservation of endangered species. I thought of the conservation argument that says if we want to preserve life, look first at the places where, acre for acre, the most kinds of life exist—where an acre can yield a hundred species of trees instead of a handful, and more species of insects than most of us can imagine.
Introduction: The Design of Culture and the Culture of Design
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

Environmentalists are often regarded as people wanting to stop one thing or another, and there are surely lots of things that ought to be stopped. The essays in this book, however, have to do with beginnings. How, for example, do we advance a long-delayed solar revolution? Or begin one in forest management? Or materials use? How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul? Such questions are the heart of what theologian Thomas Berry (1999) calls “the Great Work” of our age. This endeavor is nothing less than the effort to harmonize the human enterprise with how the world works as a physical system and how it ought to work as a moral system. In the past two centuries the human footprint on earth has multiplied many times over. Our science and technology are powerful beyond anything imagined by the confident founders of the modern world. But our sense of proportion and depth of purpose have not kept pace with our merely technical abilities. Our institutions and organizations still reflect their origins in another time and in very different conditions. Incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world. If we are to build a better world—one that can be sustained ecologically and one that sustains us spiritually—we must transcend the disorder and fragmentation of the industrial age. We need a perspective that joins the hardwon victories of civilization, such as human rights and democracy, with a larger view of our place in the cosmos—what Berry calls “the universe story.” By whatever name, that philosophy must connect us to life, to each other, and to generations to come. It must help us to rise above sectarianism of all kinds and the puffery that puts human interests at a particular time at the center of all value and meaning. When we get it right, that larger, ecologically informed enlightenment will upset comfortable philosophies that underlie the modern world in the same way that the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century upset medieval hierarchies of church and monarchy.
Technological Fundamentalism
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

Scene 1: Entry to a classroom building. With a deafening noise he revved up the two-cycle engine on a blower preparing to clean the leaves, paper, and cigarette butts that had accumulated in the entryway. He made considerable progress herding the debris away from the building and down the sidewalk until cigarette butts lodged in the seams in the concrete. Turning, he blasted the miscreant trash at right angles, but this only blew the debris onto the grass, posing still greater difficulties. Moving cigarette butts and bits of paper in an orderly fashion through grass is a challenge, even for a machine capable of generating gale-force winds. Then the apparatus stalled out—“down time,” it’s called. In that moment of sweet silence, I walked over and inquired whether he thought a broom or rake might do as well. “What’d you say?” he responded. “Can’t hear anything, my ears are still ringing!” I repeated the question. “S’pose so,” he said, “but they think I’m more productive with this piece of *&!@.” Perhaps he is more productive. I do not know how experts calculate efficiency in complex cases like this. If, however, the goal is to disrupt public serenity, burn scarce fossil fuels, create a large amount of blue smoke, damage lung tissue, purchase expensive and failureprone equipment, frazzle nerves, interrupt conversations, and improve the market for hearing aids, rakes and brooms cannot compete. When the technology and the task at hand are poorly matched, however, there is no real efficiency. In such cases the result, in Amory Lovins’s telling phrase, is rather like “cutting butter with a chain saw.” Scene 2: Committee meeting. I once served on what is called with some extravagance the Educational Plans and Policies Committee. It is a committee to which one is elected, or sentenced, depending on your view. In one meeting we were casually asked to pronounce our blessing on a plan to link the entire campus so that everyone would be able to communicate with everyone else via computer, 24 hours a day, without leaving dormitory rooms or offices. This, we were told, was what our competitor colleges were doing. We were assured that this was the future.
Ideasclerosis, Continued
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

General George Lee Butler ascended through the ranks of the air force from fighter pilot to the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command. He was a true believer in the mission of the military and specifically in the efficacy of nuclear deterrence, but he was also a thinking man, and his doubts had begun in the 1970s. Finally, in 1988 during a visit to Moscow, he wrote, “it all came crashing home to me that I really had been dealing with a caricature all those years” (Smith 1997, 20). Butler was nearing the end of what he described as a “long and arduous intellectual journey from staunch advocate of nuclear deterrence to a public proponent of nuclear abolition” (Butler 1996). The difference between Butler and many others in the military was that “he reflected on what he was doing time and again,” and much of what he’d come to take for normal did not add up. He wrote, “We have yet to fully grasp the monstrous effects of these weapons . . . and the horrific prospect of a world seething with enmities, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.” To do so will require overcoming a “terror- induced anesthesia which suspend[s] rational thought” in order to see that “we cannot at once keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it” (Butler 1998). Butler, now in private business, devotes a substantial part of his life to the abolition of nuclear weapons. Ray Anderson, founder and CEO of Interface Corporation, experienced an even more abrupt conversion. In 1994, after 21 years as the head of a highly successful carpet and tile company, he was asked by his senior staff to define the company’s environmental policy. “Frankly,” he writes, “I did not have a vision” (Anderson 1998, 39). In trying to develop one, he happened to read Paul Hawken’s (1993) The Ecology of Commerce, and the effect was, as he put it, like “a spear in the chest” (Anderson 1998, 23). He subsequently read other books ranging from Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The effect of his reading and reflection was to deepen and intensify an emotional and intellectual commitment to transform the company.
Introduction
Authors: Hochschild Jennifer L. , Scovronick Nathan
Published: November 2020

THE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it creates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the collective good of all. From the perspective of the individual, the ideology is as compelling as it is simple. “I am an American, so I have the freedom and opportunity to make whatever I want of my life. I can succeed by working hard and using my talents; if I fail, it will be my own fault. Success is honorable, and failure is not. In order to make sure that my children and grandchildren have the same freedom and opportunities that I do, I have a responsibility to be a good citizen— to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the democratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country.” Not all residents of the United States believe all of those things, of course, and some believe none of them. Nevertheless, this American dream is surprisingly close to what most Americans have believed through most of recent American history. Public schools are where it is all supposed to start—they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans expect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but also to make them good citizens who will maintain the nation’s values and institutions, help them flourish, and pass them on to the next generation. The American public widely endorses both of these broad goals, values public education, and supports it with an extraordinary level of resources. Despite this consensus Americans disagree intensely about the education policies that will best help us achieve this dual goal. In recent years disputes over educational issues have involved all the branches and levels of government and have affected millions of students. The controversies—over matters like school funding, vouchers, bilingual education, high-stakes testing, desegregation, and creationism—seem, at first glance, to be separate problems.
What Americans Want from Public Schools
Authors: Hochschild Jennifer L. , Scovronick Nathan
Published: November 2020

AMERICANS CONTINUE TO FOLLOW the advice of Benjamin Franklin in making “the proper education of youth” the most important American social policy. Public education uses more resources and involves more people than any other government program for social welfare. It is the main activity of local governments and the largest single expenditure of almost all state governments. Education is the American answer to the European welfare state, to massive waves of immigration, and to demands for the abolition of subordination based on race, class, or gender. Although public schools in the United States are expected to accomplish a lot for their students, underlying all of these tasks is the goal of creating the conditions needed for people to believe in and pursue the ideology of the American dream. Our understanding of the American dream is the common one, described by President Clinton this way: “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one—if you work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.” The dream is the unwritten promise that all residents of the United States have a reasonable chance to achieve success through their own efforts, talents, and hard work. Success is most often defined in material terms, but everyone gets to decide what it is for himself or herself. The first man to walk across Antarctica talks about this idea in the same way as people who make their first million: “The only limit to achievement,” he said, “is the limit you place on your own dreams. Let your vision be guided by hope, your path be adventurous, and the power of your thoughts be directed toward the betterment of tomorrow.” The American dream is a brilliant ideological invention, although, as we shall see, in practice it leaves much to be desired. Its power depends partly on the way it balances individual and collective responsibilities. The role of the government is to make the pursuit of success possible for everyone. This implies strict and complete nondiscrimination, universal education to provide the means for pursuing success, and protection for virtually all views of success, regardless of how many people endorse them.
Holocene Development of the Alaskan Boreal Forest
Authors: Lloyd Andrea H. , Edwards Mary E.
Published: November 2020

Paleoecological data provide insight into patterns of change in vegetation and in the factors, such as climate and disturbance, that cause vegetation change. Disturbance by fire, insect, and mammalian herbivores and, in floodplains, flooding are the primary drivers of changes in population structure, community composition, and species distribution in the boreal forest on time scales of years to decades (Chapter 7). On longer time scales, such as centuries to millennia, the role of variation in regional climate in determining compositional changes in the boreal forest is also clearly visible. Variability in regional climate may act directly on boreal species (e.g., causing changes in species distributions) or indirectly, by altering disturbance regimes. Proxy records of environmental and ecological change (e.g., pollen and macrofossils in lake sediments, tree rings) are selective in the kind of information they record. Evidence of fires, for example, is more persistent and thus better represented in the paleoecological record than is evidence of mammalian herbivory. For this reason, our understanding of long-term patterns of compositional and structural change in the boreal forest is limited to an analysis of the effects of a few key drivers of change, primarily climate and fire. In this chapter, we offer a long-term perspective on changes in climate and disturbance regimes and their relationship to major changes in vegetation. We first consider multimillennial time scales and discuss the role of climate and disturbance in driving the two major vegetation transitions that have occurred during the Holocene (the past 12,000 years). We then explore evidence for spatial and temporal variation in disturbance regimes during the late Holocene. Much of the terrain that is currently occupied by the Alaskan boreal forest remained ice-free during the glacial episodes of the Quaternary period (Pleistocene and Holocene), which spans the past 1.8 million years. Alaska forms part of the largely unglaciated Beringian region (named after the Bering Strait that lies at its heart; see Hopkins 1967) that extends from the Kolyma River in Siberia to the MacKenzie in northwest Canada and constitutes ca. 30% of the circumboreal zone.
Advances in Homogeneous, Heterogeneous, and Biphasic Metal-Catalyzed Reactions in Dense-Phase Carbon Dioxide
Authors: Ikariya Takao , Noyori Ryoji
Published: November 2020

The use of compressed carbon dioxide as a reaction medium, either as a liquid or a supercritical fluid (sc CO2), offers the opportunity not only to replace conventional hazardous organic solvents but also to optimize and potentially control the effect of solvent on chemical synthesis. Although synthetic chemists, particularly those employing catalysis, may be relative latecomers to the area of supercritical fluids, the area of catalysis in carbon dioxide has grown significantly since around 1975 to the point that a number of excellent reviews have appeared (Baiker et al., 1999; Buelow et al., 1998; Jessop and Leitner, 1999; Jessop et al., 1995c, 1999; Morgenstern et al., 1996). Developing and understanding catalytic processes in dense-phase carbon dioxide could lead to “greener” processing at three levels: (1) solvent replacement, (2) improved chemistry (e.g., higher reactivity, selectivity, less energy), and (3) new chemistry (e.g., use of CO2 as a C-1 source). In this chapter, we will highlight a number of examples from the literature in homogeneous and heterogeneous transition-metal catalysis, as well as the emerging area of biphasic catalysis in H2O/sc CO2 mixtures. The intent is to provide an illustrative rather than a comprehensive overview to four classes of catalytic transformations: acid catalysis, reduction via hydrogenation, selective oxidation catalysis, and catalytic carbon–carbon bond-forming reactions. The reader is referred to other chapters in this book and other reviews (King and Bott, 1993) for discussion of uncatalyzed reactions, phase-transfer catalysis, polymerization, and radical reactions in sc CO2. From a synthetic chemist’s viewpoint, sc CO2 has a number of potential advantages that one would like to capitalize upon. • Solvent Replacement Carbon dioxide is a nontoxic, nonflammable, inexpensive alternative to hazardous organic solvents. Simple solvent replacement will not be a sufficient driver for all chemical reactions; however, as described below, the use of carbon dioxide could lead to better chemistry for certain reactions. • Gas Miscibility Gases such as H2, O2, and CO are sparingly soluble in liquid solvents but they are highly miscible with sc CO2.
Clopidogrel
Authors: Becker Richard C. , Spencer Frederick A.
Published: November 2020

Clopidogrel, a thienopyridine derivative, is a novel platelet antagonist that is several times more potent than ticlopidine but associated with fewer adverse effects. After repeated 75-mg oral doses of clopidogrel, plasma concentrations of the parent compound, which has no platelet-inhibiting effect, are very low. Clopidogrel is extensively metabolized in the liver. The main circulating metabolite is a carboxylic acid derivative with a plasma elimination half-life of 7.7 ± 2.3 hours. Approximately 50% of an oral dose is excreted in the urine and the remaining 50% in feces over the following 5 days. Dose-dependent inhibition of platelet aggregation is observed 2 hours after a single oral dose of clopidogrel, with a more significant inhibition achieved with loading doses (≥300 mg) by approximately 6 hours. Repeated doses of 75 mg of clopidogrel per day inhibit adenosine diphosphate (ADP)-mediated aggregation, with steady state being reached between day 3 and day 7. At steady state, the average inhibition to ADP is between 40% and 60%. Based on ex vivo studies, clopidogrel is approximately 100-fold more potent than ticlopidine. There are no cumulative antiplatelet effects with prolonged oral administration. The combined administration of clopidogrel (300 mg loading dose) and aspirin yields a readily discernible platelet-inhibiting effect within 90 to 120 minutes. Clopidogrel selectively inhibits the binding of ADP to its platelet receptor (P2Y12) and the subsequent G-protein–linked mobilization of intracellular calcium and activation of the glycoprotein (GP)IIb/IIIa complex (Gachet et al., 1992). The specific receptor has been cloned and is abundantly present on the platelet surface (Hollopter et al., 2001). Clopidogrel has no direct effect on cyclooxygenase, phosphodiesterase, or adenosine uptake. Clopidogrel is rapidly absorbed following oral administration with peak plasma levels of the predominant circulating metabolite occurring approximately 60 minutes later. Administration with meals does not significantly modify the bioavailability of clopidogrel. The available information suggests that clopidogrel offers safety advantages over ticlopidine, particularly with regard to bone marrow suppression and other hematologic abnormalities. Although thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) has been reported with clopidogrel (Bennett et al., 2000), its occurrence (11 cases per 3 million patients treated) is rare, and has not been reported in randomized clinical trials performed to date.