bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Environmental conditions drive zooplankton community structure in the deep-water region of the southern Gulf of Mexico: a molecular approach
Authors: Cicala Francesco , Arteaga María , Herzka Sharon , Martinez Miguel , Hereu Clara , Jimenez-Rosenberg Sylvia , Saavedra-Flores Anaid , Robles-Flores Javier , Gomez Ricardo , Batta-Lona Paola , Galindo Clara
Published: May 2021

Zooplankton play a pivotal role in sustaining the majority of marine
ecosystems. The distribution patterns and diversity of zooplankton
provide key information for understanding the functioning of these
ecosystems. Nevertheless, due to the numerous cryptic and sibling
species and the lack of diagnostic characteristics for immature
developmental stages, the identification of the global-to-local patterns
of zooplankton biodiversity and biogeography remains a challenge in
different research fields. Here, the spatial and temporal changes in the
zooplankton community from the open waters of the southern section of
the Gulf of Mexico were assessed using a multilocus sequence analysis
and metabarcoding approach based on the genetic information of 18S and
cytochrome oxidase c subunit I (COI) genes. Additionally, a multi-scale
analysis was implemented to evaluate which environmental predictors may
explain the variability in the structure of the zooplankton community.
Our finding suggests that the synergistic effects of oxygen,
temperature, and longitude (intended as a proxy for still unexplored
forces) may explain both spatial and temporal changes in the zooplankton
community. Furthermore, the zooplankton distribution likely reflects the
coexistence of three heterogeneous ecoregions and a bio-physical
partitioning of the studied area. Finally, some taxa were either
exclusive or predominant with either 18S or COI data. This may suggest
that comprehensive assessments of the zooplankton community may be more
accurately met by the use of multi-locus approaches.
The Role of TCF7L2 in Type 2 Diabetes
Authors: del Bosque-Plata Laura , Martínez-Martínez Eduardo , Espinoza-Camacho Miguel Ángel , Gragnoli Claudia
Published: May 2021

TCF7L2 is the most potent locus for type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk and the first locus to have been robustly reported by genomic linkage studies. TCF7L2 is a transcription factor that forms a basic part of the Wnt signaling pathway. This gene has highly conserved sequence regions that correspond to functional domains. The association of TCF7L2 with T2D is one of the most powerful genetically discovered in studies of complex diseases, as it has been consistently replicated in multiple populations with diverse genetic origins. The mechanisms over which TCF7L2 exerts its effect on T2D are still not well understood. In this article, we describe the main molecular mechanisms of how TCF7L2 is related to T2D. TCF7L2 variants associated with T2D risk exert an influence on the initial therapeutic success of the hypoglycemic oral agent sulfonylurea. Thus, it is important to know whether there are other TCF7L2 variants associated with T2D that can influence treatment with oral hypoglycemic agents. Resequencing of the TCF7L2 gene in diverse ethnic groups is required to reveal common and rare variations and their role in different pathologies and in adverse reactions to drugs. Identification of TCF7L2-susceptibility disease variants will permit, at a given moment, offering of therapies to patients according to their genotype.
A Selective Look at Autophagy in Pancreatic β-Cells
Authors: Pearson Gemma L. , Gingerich Morgan A. , Walker Emily M. , Biden Trevor J. , Soleimanpour Scott A.
Published: May 2021

Insulin-producing pancreatic β-cells are central to glucose homeostasis, and their failure is a principal driver of diabetes development. To preserve optimal health β-cells must withstand both intrinsic and extrinsic stressors, ranging from inflammation to increased peripheral insulin demand, in addition to maintaining insulin biosynthesis and secretory machinery. Autophagy is increasingly being appreciated as a critical β-cell quality control system vital for glycemic control. Here we focus on the underappreciated, yet crucial, roles for selective and organelle-specific forms of autophagy as mediators of β-cell health. We examine the unique molecular players underlying each distinct form of autophagy in β-cells, including selective autophagy of mitochondria, insulin granules, lipid, intracellular amyloid aggregates, endoplasmic reticulum, and peroxisomes. We also describe how defects in selective autophagy pathways contribute to the development of diabetes. As all forms of autophagy are not the same, a refined view of β-cell selective autophagy may inform new approaches to defend against the various insults leading to β-cell failure in diabetes.
Forecasting the mobility parameters of the inhabitants of suburban areas
Authors:   National University of Water and Environmental Engineering, Krystopchuk Mykhailo
Published: May 2021

Potential mobility that meets the requirements of population displacement is determined following the biological and social needs, socio-economic characteristics, production necessity, and cultural needs. Because of the multifactor character and complexity of relationships, it is impossible to determine the potential mobility by a calculation method. The feasibility of different target movements, depending on their distance, is regarded by rural populations differently. Each rural settlement is located among many other rural and urban settlements with an individual quantitative and qualitative set of social, cultural, and industrial potential. With the developed road network and public transport system, the population selects the center of gravity with the limitations imposed by this transport system and is based on subjective considerations about the quality of service. The distribution of urban residents’ movements to the rural areas is affected by the size of the city, movement distance, movement purpose, i.e. the same factors as rural residents’ movement to cities. The difference is that the radius of urban residents’ movements distribution is much smaller. Thus, the zone of intensive and regular movements in the working day cycle covers only nearest to cities rural area with a radius of 15 km. On weekends, due to guest visits and holiday trips, the radius of this zone extends approximately 1,5-2 times. Based on the links distribution, the scatter band of the initial and final points of movement can be obtained. Since the density of scattering varies with respect to settlements, then we can allocate the territorial units that will make service zone on their sets. Research results can be an integral part of comprehensive studies of determining the transport links density, hubs of passenger flows’ origin, and suppression to construct mathematical models of the most efficient passenger transport system operation.
Features of operation of the Tesla Model S90D electric car in the conditions of the cities of Ukraine
Authors:   Lviv Polytechnic National University, Kachmar Roman
Published: May 2021

Tendencies of sustainable development of transport, the use of alternative energy sources, and requirements to the reduction of the carbon footprint on all stages of life cycle on all levels of road transport have led to the increase of the share of the electric car both at the first registration and used vehicles. The appearance of a large amount of used modern electric cars on the market caused the necessity to develop the procedures of provision their technical operation both by requirements of rational use and provision of traffic safety. Research of the use of electric car Tesla Model S90D in conditions of Ukraine is carried out with certain indicators of environment and with different settings of car parameters. This provides an opportunity to understand how much the given model of the electric car is appropriate in exploitation in different conditions and also to determine which parameters of electric car settings fit the economic usage in different conditions and different seasons most of all. By results of road research on the change of accumulator battery capacity depending on the temperature of the environment, we established that the capacity reduces by 1% with every degree of negative temperature. A comfortable range of temperatures is determined for the use of accumulator battery of car (from 0 to 20 °С) is determined. By results of the research, the indicators of the effectiveness of the use of electric car battery power saving mode are determined – the reduction of the consumption is from 14 to 29 % depending on energy consumers. The significant impact of the pressure values in electric car tires on the energy consumption is established independently from turning on the energy consumers – the increase is from 10% to 40% depending on its speed of movement. Additionally, the determination of the indicators of electric car energy effectiveness for the speed of 140-150 km/h is carried out by which the energy use is 550-670 W h/km and provides the driving distance on the level of 160 km.
Emotion
Authors: Sreenivasan Gopal
Published: May 2021

This chapter talks about Ronald de Sousa's dramatic claim that emotions are species of determinate patterns of salience among objects of attention, lines of inquiry, and inferential strategies. It provides an adequate background on emotion and arguments on the integral view of the role of emotion in virtue. It also analyzes the psychology of emotion, a judicious smattering of philosophy that harness Christine Tappolet's overview. The chapter investigates the biological hypothesis on the function of emotion in solving the philosopher's frame problem, meaning the problem of how to make use of just what is needed from the stupendous quantity of knowledge and how not to retrieve what is not needed. It narrates a story from Daniel Dennett about a robot that is informed a bomb is set to go off in its vicinity that resents a moral that pure reason is not sufficient to solve de Sousa's problem.
Character Traits
Authors: Sreenivasan Gopal
Published: May 2021

This chapter defends the traditional definition of virtue against the situationist critique, which is wielded by empirically minded philosophers and originate in the situationist tradition in social psychology. It demonstrates philosophical arguments and position that are consistent with a scientific psychology. It also organizes the use of virtue terms as evaluations of rightness and connect this use to a significant additional way in which exemplars of virtue are relevant. The chapter defines virtue as a species of character trait, which exposes a theory of virtue to what has come to be known as the situationist critique of virtue ethics. It analyses experimental results in social psychology that demonstrate that most people do not have any character traits.
Adverbial Requirements
Authors: Sreenivasan Gopal
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the nature of the virtue of compassion, in which every exemplar of compassion's generic ability is to make correct moral judgements in situations that call for compassion that is partly constituted by a morally rectified sympathy trait. It discusses the role assigned to emotion by the structure of the integral view that can be filled by an emotion that is conveniently both independently familiar and independently marked. It also distinguishes between sympathy and empathy, as well as between emotion traits and virtue traits. The chapter examines the two distinctions that yield a clean contrast between the emotion of 'sympathy' and the virtue of 'compassion.'
Adaptive Biases
Authors: Johnson Dominic D. P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores the notion of adaptive biases and strategic instincts in more detail and compares social science and life science approaches to understanding human behavior. It explains why cognitive biases evolved in the evolutionary past, whether they continue to be adaptive today, and why a bias can be better than accuracy. It also mentions that historians disagree on the relative influence of individual human actors in how history unfolds, while other historians dispute the fact that many or a majority of the most important figures across the ages do not fit the model of a perfectly rational actor. The chapter offers insights, predictions, and sources of variation that unifies a scientific theory to understand the origins, causes, and consequences of human cognitive and behavioral biases. It draws on evolutionary psychology to make two core arguments: cognitive biases are adaptations and cognitive biases are strategic.
Fortune Favors the Bold
Authors: Johnson Dominic D. P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the strategic role of overconfidence. It describes mentally healthy people that exhibit an overestimation of their capabilities, an illusion of control over events, and a perceived invulnerability to risk. It also describes overconfidence that has long been noted as a cause of disasters and wars, citing Geoffrey Blainey, Barbara Tuchman, and Stephen Van Evera who all blamed false optimism as one of the key causes of World War I. The chapter reviews the considerable discussion of the role of overconfidence in the contemporary world, such as the U.S. planning for the 2003 Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis. It elaborates how overconfidence can offer adaptive advantages by increasing ambition, resolve, and perseverance.
The Lion and the Mouse
Authors: Johnson Dominic D. P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter looks at a case study of the American Revolution to suggest that George Washington and the birth of the United States benefited in no small measure from a remarkable confidence. It highlights the overconfidence that inspired Washington to fight and sustain the revolution despite the formidable odds stacked against them and repeated setbacks along the way. It also highlights how ambition and boldness paid off in a long and grueling war in which Americans lost most of the battles and struggled to keep an army in the field. The chapter discusses the battle for North America, which was aimed to preserve global political and economic power at a time of intense competition with lethal enemies that threatened the British and their colonial territories. It investigates what led Washington to believe he could win, given the daunting circumstances.
No Mercy
Authors: Johnson Dominic D. P.
Published: May 2021

This chapter argues that the United States was able to persist and prevail in the long and brutal Pacific campaign against the Japanese in World War II because of the in-group/out-group bias. It recounts how the group prejudice helped boost support for the war effort among citizens at home, the cohesion of soldiers, sailors, and airmen in the field, and the commitment and determination of leaders. It also describes the Pacific campaign of World War II that had a strong overtone of clashing Western and Eastern cultures, with vastly different worldviews and conceptions of themselves and each other. The chapter analyses the complex roots and widespread expressions of prejudice and racism on both sides. It refers to John Dower, who emphasized that group biases are ever present, but are directed at whoever becomes the most salient rival of the day.
Divine Institutions
Authors: Padilla Peralta Dan-el
Published: May 2021

Many narrative histories of Rome's transformation from an Italian city-state to a Mediterranean superpower focus on political and military conflicts as the primary agents of social change. This book places religion at the heart of this transformation, showing how religious ritual and observance held the Roman Republic together during the fourth and third centuries BCE, a period when the Roman state significantly expanded and diversified. Blending the latest advances in archaeology with innovative sociological and anthropological methods, the book takes readers from the capitulation of Rome's neighbor and adversary Veii in 398 BCE to the end of the Second Punic War in 202 BCE, demonstrating how the Roman state was redefined through the twin pillars of temple construction and pilgrimage. The book sheds light on how the proliferation of temples together with changes to Rome's calendar created new civic rhythms of festival celebration, and how pilgrimage to the city surged with the increase in the number and frequency of festivals attached to Rome's temple structures. The book overcomes many of the evidentiary hurdles that for so long have impeded research into this pivotal period in Rome's history. It reconstructs the scale and social costs of these religious practices and reveals how religious observance emerged as an indispensable strategy for bringing Romans of many different backgrounds to the center, both physically and symbolically.
Writing in the Dark
Authors: Miller Nicola
Published: May 2021

This chapter recounts how printing was born with the republic in Chile, describing the full-size press that was brought from Boston in late 1811 and was set in motion to print the country's first periodical, La Aurora de Chile. It traces the long history of printing in most Spanish American countries, such as Peru and Mexico, where it dated back to the sixteenth century. It also cites new political communities that were baptised in print as the independence wars generated both quantitative and qualitative changes in publishing. The chapter looks at journals that championed the cause of independence by establishing a founding tradition of speaking truth to power and stimulating a demand for new ideas and discoveries, as well as for news and information. It points out how the printing press was a means of sustaining the momentum of the promised popular enlightenment for independent governments.
A New Sociology of Civic Action
Authors: Lichterman Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses how advocates for social change act. Advocates spend much of their time writing position papers, raising money, enduring meetings, or running educational workshops. All these activities fit within the usual definition of a social movement: collective action that challenges institutional authorities to redistribute resources, remake policy, or bestow social recognition. In the last several decades, studies of both the showier and more backstage kinds of movement activity share something else that may seem simply like common sense, but should not. Researchers often assume that social advocates are goal-oriented operatives. In this view, social advocates are like savvy business entrepreneurs. Style has a powerful effect on social problem-solving efforts. This study looks in depth at the workings of two scene styles, both of which are common in US advocacy circles. Acting as a community of interest, participants treat each other as loyal partners pursuing a specific goal limited to an issue for which they share concern. In a setting styled as a community of identity, in contrast, participants assume they should coordinate themselves as fellow members of a community resisting ongoing threats from the powers that be.
Placing and Studying the Action
Authors: Lichterman Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines the fight for housing affordability, which is just one instance of civic action. Advocates across the coalitions and organizations in this study talked about housing “affordability” as one of their primary concerns, and often the biggest one. When they said housing in Los Angeles was unaffordable and there was a “housing crisis,” they usually meant housing was too expensive for many ordinary Angelenos or frequently unavailable at an affordable price. Using the same language of affordability, it makes sense to ask about the big picture. Is housing unaffordability usually temporary or chronic? Does it result from deep, institutional processes or contingencies relatively easy to alter? Does it affect only particular kinds of people or places? It makes sense to ask about this study's locale too. What might make housing conditions and problems in Los Angeles distinctive, or characteristic of life in the United States, or global, or maybe all three? The chapter provides a brief sketch of crucial contexts that affect the affordability of housing and make it potentially a problem.
Solving Problems by Protecting an Identity
Authors: Lichterman Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter follows the action in scenes from the earlier phase of the Tenants of South Los Angeles's antidisplacement campaign. When advocates style themselves as a community of identity, they give themselves a distinctive dilemma. Their style of action, with its emphasis on a distinct, subordinated community, entangles them with different social realities from the ones immediately salient to a community of interest. The central dilemma for a community of identity is to balance strategies that are from the people most central to “the community” and those crafted by advocates for the community. The community of identity is a cultural reality of its own, with its own influence on how activists make claims and build relationships around claims. It generates distinct ways of talking and feeling. The chapter ends with scenes from Los Angeles People's Organization, a predominantly African American group that pursued housing and civil rights issues in the same style of interaction.
Why Follow the Style, Not Just the Organization?
Authors: Lichterman Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates how different scene styles inhabit different spaces of a coalition. Following scene style presents a new angle on what makes or breaks a coalition. Indeed, disagreements over style can weaken a coalition. Sparks flew as a clash of styles at two Housing Justice (HJ) coordinating committee meetings. After those episodes, the HJ coalition fractured as several HJ ally organizations withdrew their representatives and energies from the coalition's work. Field evidence suggests that these decisions emerged from an ongoing commitment to a style of action — in this case, a community of identity. The chapter argues that HJ advocates had a different kind of disagreement about framing from what the entrepreneurial model highlights. A close look at several dramatic HJ meetings shows that advocates' deeper clash was over what framing is for to begin with.
How Homelessness Does Not Become a Housing Problem
Authors: Lichterman Paul
Published: May 2021

This chapter explores how, if at all, housing and homelessness advocates made claims about both homelessness and housing problems together. Many advocates make fleeting claims about homelessness or homeless people. Yet they do not talk much about homelessness as a housing problem, even though it may seem like the most urgent one. Here is where investigating discursive fields and style can help. The chapter compares Tenants of South Los Angeles and Housing Justice coalition members' claims about homelessness with those of professional-led volunteer efforts organized to address homelessness as a problem in itself. The evidence suggests that in Los Angeles, cultural conditions conspired to make homelessness a marginal topic across different quarters of the housing advocacy world. And homeless service workers talked little, if at all, about affordable housing as a public issue.
The Populist Roots of Mass Production
Authors: Link Stefan J.
Published: May 2021

This chapter traces mass production to its beginnings in the United States, where it emerged from the distinctive ideology of Midwestern populism. Why did Detroit, of all places, pioneer the industry that would shape the twentieth century like no other? Was Detroit simply lucky, as it were, to count a Henry Ford and a Ransom Olds among its citizens — incarnations of the American genius for innovation and entrepreneurship? Figures like Ford and Olds acted within the political economy of the Midwest and shared the characteristic populist commitments that suffused the region. These two factors — political economy and political ideology — go a long way toward explaining why, at the turn of the twentieth century, southeastern Michigan was in an auspicious position to get ahead of rapid technological developments and to spread its fruits widely. Experts with machines and metal, Midwestern mechanics gave their producerism a characteristic technological spin. This kind of producer populism permeated Detroit politics. The chapter then looks at a series of very different conflicts which honed Henry Ford's conviction that automotive mass production should reflect a producer-populist orientation.
The Soviet Auto Giant
Authors: Link Stefan J.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how the Soviet Union strove to acquire American mass production technology in order to create their own version of Fordism in the 1930s. It traces the origin and operation of one of the prestigious objects of the First Five-Year Plan: the automobile factory at Nizhnii Novgorod. After 1933, when the city changed names in honor of its scion Maxim Gorky, the Soviet River Rouge went by the official name of Gaz (Gor'kovskii Avtomobil'nyi Zavod); but to the Soviet press, it was known simply as the “Auto Giant.” The chapter then follows four men who helped the Auto Giant awaken and rise. Economist Nikolai Osinskii pushed through an ambitious agenda for Soviet motorization that culminated in the foreign technical assistance contract with the Ford Motor Company of May 1929. In fulfillment of this agreement, Stepan Dybets traveled to Detroit and led a group of Soviet engineers who were in charge of transferring Ford technology and know-how from the Midwest to central Russia during the years of the First Five-Year Plan. Meanwhile, as director of Gaz between 1932 and 1938, Sergei D'iakonov oversaw the uneven and troubled implementation of Fordism during the Second Five-Year Plan. Finally, Ivan Loskutov ascended to the helm of Gaz after Stalin's purges, and presided over the factory's redoubled embrace of Fordism in the late 1930s and World War II.
Conclusion
Authors: Link Stefan J.
Published: May 2021

This concluding chapter explains that American-style postwar “Fordism” was only one pattern in the mottled global legacy left behind by Henry Ford. It was not the least ideological effect of American hegemony that in the 1960s modernization theory could universalize this unique historical arrangement — what can be called “high mass-consumption” — as the target of successful development itself. Responding to the crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, social scientists added a next phase: “Post-Fordism” or “post-industrial society” signaled deindustrialization to some and the promise of a “service and information economy” to others. What united these constructs was a thinking in sequential stages, a preoccupation with national patterns of development, and a theory of causation centered on self-generating forces. It has become clear that cycles of industrialization and deindustrialization are inseparable from concerted efforts to restructure the global division of labor, that productive dual-use technologies are fiercely contested by states and corporations alike, that investment and disinvestment cannot be dislodged from contests over the terms of globalization, and that capital has no autonomous power outside of the designs and struggles of political actors.
Prose Poetry
Authors: Hetherington Paul , Atherton Cassandra
Published: May 2021

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.
The Prose Poem’s Post-Romantic Inheritance
Authors: Hetherington Paul , Atherton Cassandra
Published: May 2021

This chapter discusses prose poetry's connection to Romanticism. Although contemporary writers take the fragmentary nature of the prose poem for granted, it was once an important innovation to celebrate fragmentary literary forms — an innovation that took hold with the Romantic movement. Given the relationship between prose poetry and the Romantic fragment, comprehending one offers the opportunity to better appreciate the other. Moreover, if “the extended influence of Romantic fragments into Modernist and even Postmodernist poetry” is uncovered, then this underscores the view that the contemporary prose poem is simultaneously a product of postmodernism, modernism, and Romanticism. While contemporary prose poetry is sometimes self consciously fractured and fragmentary, destabilizing and interrupting notions of TimeSpace in ways Romantic writers rarely attempted, the prose poem's Romantic inheritance remains.
Ideas of Open Form and Closure in Prose Poetry
Authors: Hetherington Paul , Atherton Cassandra
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on ideas of open form and closure in prose poetry. While lineated lyric poetry is typically highly suggestive and open to various interpretations, it simultaneously tends toward conveying a sense of formal resolution and closure. The attention to formal elements in lineated lyric poetry, including the beginnings and endings of lines and the opening and closing of works, is very different from other kinds of less formalized writing — including prose poetry, where sentences are drawn together in paragraphs rather than separated. Prose poetry refuses lineated poetry's rhythmic closure even as it visually preempts its conclusion in the capacious white space that follows the last sentence of the paragraph. In other words, openness and closure are likely to be manifested very differently in lineated poems compared to prose poems. Prose poems have their own integrity as works, but their sense of completeness turns on their appeal to incompleteness in the same way as the literary fragment. Structurally, prose poetry's use of the sentence rather than the line as its unit of composition allows the poet to engage in “narrative digression.”
Gangsters and Other Statesmen
Authors: Mandić Danilo
Published: May 2021

Separatism has been on the rise across the world since the end of the Cold War, dividing countries through political strife, ethnic conflict, and civil war, and redrawing the political map. This book examines the role transnational mafias play in the success and failure of separatist movements, challenging conventional wisdom about the interrelation of organized crime with peacebuilding, nationalism, and state making. The book demonstrates how globalized mafias shape the politics of borders in torn states, shedding critical light on an autonomous nonstate actor that has been largely sidelined by considerations of geopolitics, state-centered agency, and ethnonationalism. Blending extensive archival sleuthing and original ethnographic data with insights from sociology and other disciplines, the book argues that organized crime can be a fateful determinant of state capacity, separatist success, and ethnic conflict. Putting mafias at the center of global processes of separatism and territorial consolidation, the book raises vital questions and urges reconsideration of a host of separatist cases in West Africa, the Middle East, and East Europe.
Mafia Filter
Authors: Mandić Danilo
Published: May 2021

This chapter compares the organized criminal filtering of regional smuggling opportunities (in drugs and arms) into separatist movement benefit. For separatists, it is preferable to have transnational smuggling in their region than not. This is trivial, almost axiomatic. Movements are denied formal channels for various resources they sorely need — money, arms, fighters, and propaganda channels. What they cannot procure within host state borders, they must smuggle across them. When separatists have the fortuitous circumstance of regional smuggling routes, it is only natural they exploit it. But the advantage does not come automatically. Mafia capacity and predisposition in these rackets at critical junctures — 1999 in Kosovo and 2008 in South Ossetia — enhanced and stagnated separatism, respectively.
West Africa
Authors: Mandić Danilo
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on West Africa during 1989–2019. West Africa's transnational smuggling enterprises are hardly a novelty — or as menacing as they sound. Troc, or barter trade, is a way of life that preceded and survived colonialism. Commerce is known as al-frud, from the French fraude (fraud), reflecting the World War II-era tradition of regional smuggling. What is new in the globalized period is that mafias in five nations — and just as many budding ones — have played formative roles in regional politics. Three of the host states (Mali, Senegal, and Nigeria) were significantly torn by ethnocentric, separatist-controlled rackets in drugs and migrants (Azawad), marijuana (Casamance), and extortion (Boko Haram). Nigeria employed ethnocentric Niger Delta mafias to fight its northern separatists. In Niger's Agadez and Cameroon's Ambazonia, however, organized crime promoted cohesion.
State Dependency and Middle-Class Demand for Democracy
Authors: Rosenfeld Bryn
Published: May 2021

This chapter clarifies the variation in middle-class regime preferences and details the individual-level logic of state dependency. It discusses key concepts and descriptive data on the middle-classes and state economic engagement in the countries under study. It also captures the distinction between highly educated white-collar and professional strata versus less educated routine and manual laborers. The chapter provides a normative view of the middle-class as a carrier of democracy, as synonymous with the capital-owning bourgeoisie, and as an exclusively income-based category. It highlights the middle-class of educated professionals in modernization theory and its values-based variants, including the “middle sector” that emphasizes on members of a broad range of occupational groups between the working class and economic elite.
Aligning the Middle Class with Autocracy: Rhetoric and Practice
Authors: Rosenfeld Bryn
Published: May 2021

This chapter studies the vocabulary and practice of state-led, middle-class growth in Kazakhstan, a Central Asian country whose post-independence development has been shaped by both Soviet legacies and the experience of its East Asian neighbors. It suggests how the argument about Kazakhstan might travel beyond the post-communist region and speak to newer modes of state capitalism. It also examines the discursive context in which fostering middle-class growth has become a priority of post-Soviet states. The chapter demonstrates that Kazakhstan's regime has self-consciously adopted a view of the symbolic and strategic importance of the middle-class as a guarantor of stability and source of societal mobilization. It illustrates the size and composition of the middle-class that has begun to emerge in post-independence Kazakhstan.
Machine Dreams
Authors: Bell Duncan
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on the proleptic literature of war and racial order. Writings dedicated to imagining future conflict contain some of the most elaborate attempts to envision an Anglotopian future. The chapter identifies a distinct shift in content between the 1880s and the end of the century, from a common figuration of the United States and the British Empire as antagonists to one in which they are often united in the attempt to govern the globe. It starts by teasing out some of the similarities and differences between American and British narratives, before turning to Stanley Waterloo's Armageddon, a popular American tale of a racial union in which the former colony supplants the “mother country” as the dominant partner in a mission to stabilize a chaotic world. Ultimately, the chapter concludes with a reading of William Cole's The Struggle for Empire 2236, one of the first “space operas,” which the author read as an ambivalent attempt to critique the will to power underpinning the quest for racial domination.
Introduction
Authors: Manekin Rachel
Published: May 2021

This chapter focuses on Western Galicia, specifically Kraków, as the main arena in which the stories of the thirty Galician Jewish minor girls that ran away took place. It describes that the majority of female Jewish converts to Catholicism were from villages and small towns in Western Galicia. It also talks about Polish-Catholics that constituted the absolute majority in rural and urban areas in Western Galicia and Kraków, the most important city of the region. The chapter describes Kraków as the center of religious, intellectual, and cultural life in Western Galicia, with an elite class that included conservative academics, high-ranking church and state officials, authors, and artists. It looks at the intention of Jewish females in Western Galicia to convert that set off alarm bells among the Jewish population and generated a debate on the causes of this problem.
Inventions of Nemesis
Authors: Mao Douglas
Published: May 2021

Examining literary and philosophical writing about ideal societies from Greek antiquity to the present, this book offers a striking new take on utopia's fundamental project. Noting that utopian imagining has often been propelled by an angry conviction that society is badly arranged, the book argues that utopia's essential aim has not been to secure happiness, order, or material goods, but rather to establish a condition of justice in which all have what they ought to have. The book also makes the case that hostility to utopias has frequently been associated with a fear that they will transform humanity beyond recognition, doing away with the very subjects who should receive justice in a transformed world. Further, the book shows how utopian writing speaks to contemporary debates about immigration, labor, and other global justice issues. Along the way, the book connects utopia to the Greek concept of nemesis, or indignation at a wrong ordering of things, and advances fresh readings of dozens of writers and thinkers — from Plato, Thomas More, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. G. Wells to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Fredric Jameson, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Chang-Rae Lee. The book offers a vital reconsideration of what it really means to imagine an ideal society.
Coda
Authors: Mao Douglas
Published: May 2021

This coda studies the concepts of the experience machine and the metautopia. Both address what may be the most intractable of the problems that human beings themselves present for the utopian imagination: the variety of human desires and convictions about what is right and good. Can we conceive of an order of things that would really be utopian yet in which people would develop as they do in our own world — that is, in unpredictable, nonpreordained ways — and in which their desires and convictions would in some meaningful sense come from themselves rather than the algorithms of social engineers? To answer this question, the coda looks at one of Octavia Butler's stories in Bloodchild and Other Stories (2005), “The Book of Martha.” “The Book of Martha” sets the possibility that humankind may yet prove not an obstacle to justice but rather the way forward to that condition in which all and each have what they ought to have. Perhaps people can be not only the ends utopia serves but also the means to get there.
Introduction
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Arnold diffusion. The famous question called the ergodic hypothesis, formulated by Maxwell and Boltzmann, suggests that for a typical Hamiltonian on a typical energy surface, all but a set of initial conditions of zero measure have trajectories dense in this energy surface. However, Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theory showed that for an open set of (nearly integrable) Hamiltonian systems, there is a set of initial conditions of positive measure with almost periodic trajectories. This disproved the ergodic hypothesis and forced reconsideration of the problem. For autonomous nearly integrable systems of two degrees or time-periodic systems of one and a half degrees of freedom, the KAM invariant tori divide the phase space. These invariant tori forbid large scale instability. When the degrees of freedoms are larger than two, large scale instability is indeed possible, as evidenced by the examples given by Vladimir Arnold. The chapter explains that the book answers the question of the typicality of these instabilities in the two and a half degrees of freedom case.
Forcing Relation
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes forcing relations, different diffusion mechanisms, and Aubry-Mather types. The Aubry set can be decomposed into disjoint invariant sets called static classes, which gives important insight into the structure of the Aubry set. The chapter then formulates Theorem 2.2 and shows that it implies the book's main theorem. It utilizes the concept of forcing equivalence. The actual definition is not important for the current discussions, instead, the chapter states its main application to Arnold diffusion. The chapter also looks at symplectic coordinate changes. The definition of exact symplectic coordinate change for a time-periodic system is somewhat restrictive, and in particular, it does not apply directly to the linear coordinate change performed at the double resonance.
Cohomology of Aubry-Mather type
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This chapter defines cohomology of Aubry-Mather type and explains why it implies one of the diffusion mechanisms, after a generic perturbation. The definition of Aubry-Mather type includes a much simpler case, that is when the Aubry set is a hyperbolic periodic orbit, still contained in a normally hyperbolic invariant cylinder. This definition says that each of the two local components of the Aubry set is of Aubry-Mather type. There is another type of bifurcation in which one component of the Aubry set is of Aubry-Mather type with an invariant cylinder and another is a hyperbolic periodic orbit. This can be called the asymmetric bifurcation. This case appears at double resonance, when the shortest loop is simple non-critical.
Normally hyperbolic cylinders at double resonance
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This chapter proves the geometric picture of double resonance described in Chapter 4. There are two cases. In the simple critical homology case, the chapter shows the homoclinic orbit can be extended to periodic orbits both in positive and negative energy. The union of these periodic orbits forms a normally hyperbolic invariant manifold (which is homotopic to a cylinder with a puncture). In the non-simple homology case, the chapter demonstrates that for positive energy, there exist periodic orbits. The strategy is to prove the existence of these periodic orbits as hyperbolic fixed points of composition of local and global maps. A main technical tool to prove the existence and uniqueness of these fixed points is the Conley-McGehee isolation block.
Aubry-Mather type at the Double Resonance
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This chapter proves Aubry-Mather type for the double resonance regime. It begins by considering the “non-critical energy case” and showing that the cohomologies as chosen are of Aubry-Mather type. The proof consists of two cases. In the first case, the chapter uses the almost verticality of the cylinder, and the idea is similar to the proof of Theorem 9.3. It applies the a priori Lipschitz estimates for the Aubry sets. In the second case, the chapter uses the strong Lipschitz estimate for the energy, and the idea is similar to the proof of Theorem 11.1. It then looks at the construction of the local coordinates. This is done separately near the hyperbolic fixed point (local) and away from it (global).
Variational Aspects Of The Slow Mechanical System
Authors: Vadim Kaloshin , Ke Zhang
Published: May 2021

This chapter describes the variational property of the slow mechanical system. The main goal is to derive some properties of the “channel” and information about the Aubrey sets. More precisely, the chapter proves Proposition 5.1. It provides a condition for the “width” of the channel to be non-zero. The chapter then discusses the limit of the set, which corresponds to the “bottom” of the channel. It drops all subscripts “s” to simplify the notations. The results proved in the chapter are mostly contained in John Mather's works. The chapter reformulates some of them for its purpose and also provides some different proofs.
Incomplete information and irrationality
Authors: Kreps David M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter presents a methodological innovation: the notion of a game of incomplete information. This notion has been extremely useful in the modeling of all sorts of economic phenomena. As an example of this sort of application, the chapter discusses again the problem of entry deterrence in monopoly. It uses games of incomplete information to model situations in which one or more of the players is suspected of being “irrational.” “Rationality” is meant to connote behavior that is in accord with the originally given payoffs, taking into account the predicted behavior of one's opponent(s). “Irrationality” connotes behavior that is taken without much thought of introspection. With this tool, the chapter returns to questions concerning refinements of Nash equilibrium.
Bilateral bargaining
Authors: Kreps David M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter examines how, after discussing monopoly, many principles and intermediate microeconomics books move on to the cases of monopsony (one buyer and many sellers) and bilateral monopoly (one buyer and one seller). The analysis of monopsony is straightforward after monopoly. The monopsonist, taking their supply curve as given, equates the marginal value of the factor to them with the “marginal factor cost.” Then there is a paragraph or two about bilateral monopoly. The chapter considers what noncooperative game theory has to offer to this situation. This is a case where institutions matter (according to the theory), and rather more than seems sensible, although the extreme and unintuitive sensitivity to institutional form that one sees in the theory may be attributable to the starkness of the models in terms of what players know about each other. The chapter then looks at the problem of bilateral bargaining.
Adverse selection and market signaling
Authors: Kreps David M.
Published: May 2021

This chapter investigates problems of adverse selection. In problems of adverse selection, one party to a transaction knows things pertaining to the transaction that are relevant to but unknown by the second party. Here a classic example is life insurance, where the insuree may know things about the state of their health that are unknown by the insurer. The “solution” to problems of adverse selection is market signaling, where the party in possession of superior information signals what they know through their actions. For example, an insurance company may offer life insurance on better terms if the insured is willing to accept very limited benefits for the first two or three years the policy is in effect, on the presumption that someone who suffers from ill health and is about to die is unwilling to accept those limited benefits.