bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Storing Information : Dictionaries and Encyclopedias
Authors: Headrick Daniel R.
Published: November 2020

Encyclopedias and dictionaries are the workhorses of culture; almost everyone consults them from time to time, but almost no one studies them. These useful compendia of knowledge serve their purpose for a few years and then are shelved or pulped. There are some notable exceptions to this rule, works whose significance transcends the time in which they appear. The most famous example of these is the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné of Diderot and d’Alembert. Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784) was one of the most prolific critics and essayists of the philosophes and a star of the French Enlightenment. His friend Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717 – 1783) was a mathematician, astronomer, and science writer. Together, they organized and edited the most ambitious work of their age. They planned it to be a universal compendium of all knowledge, organized in a coherent manner for the edification and enlightenment of the educated reading public. At the same time, they wanted it to be useful, practical, modern, and up-to-date. Despite its steep price, it enjoyed a huge popular success and became one of the best-selling works of the century. Yet it left a poor legacy. Its sequel, the Encyclopédie méthodique, was a com­mercial and scientific failure that few people bought at the time and hardly anyone has looked at since. Today, intellectuals pay lip service to the origi­nal Encyclopédie, but no one goes out and buys a new edition. Contrast this fate with that of two other encyclopedias that appeared a few years after Diderot and d’Alembert’s: the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Brockhaus. The first edition of the Britannica, which appeared in 1771, was a modest work, hastily put together by a printer, an engraver, and a penurious scribbler. The German Conversations-Lexicon was the creation of the publishing entrepreneur Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (1772–1823), who bought up an unfinished encyclopedia, hired writers to complete it, and issued the first edition in 1809 – 1811. These were no masterpieces of erudition or compendia of all knowledge, but simple reference works.
Simulating Digital Logic with the Reversible Aggregation Model of Crystal Growth
Authors: Homsy George E. , Margolus Norman H.
Published: November 2020

We are concerned with understanding the implicit computation occurring in a physical model of crystal growth, the Reversible Aggregation (RA) model. The RA model is a lattice gas model of reversible cluster growth in a closed two-dimensional system, which captures basic properties of physics such as determinism, locality, energy conservation, and exact microscopic reversibility. There are three species of particles in the RA model: gas, heat, and crystal. A diffusing gas particle may aggregate when contacting the boundary of a crystal cluster. Latent heat is released during each aggregation event and is explicitly modeled by introducing a heat particle into a diffusing heat bath. Conversely a cluster member at the boundary of the crystal may absorb a heat particle and evaporate, becoming a diffusing gas particle. Allowing ourselves complete control over all the initial conditions of the model, we show that the RA model can simulate any logic circuit, and, hence, perform any computation. The mobile gas and heat particles are used as logic signals. The paths these particles take are the wires. Sequences of conditional crystallization events form the basis of the logic gates. We show how to embed a universal single use gate into the dynamics of the model, then show how to construct a reusable universal gate, showing the system is capable of space-efficient computation. We show how to build arbitrary logic circuits by interconnecting gates. This requires steering and routing the signals, delaying them, and letting them cross. Finally, we briefly discuss the relationship of computation in the RA model to computation in real physical systems. We examine the computational capabilities of a physical model of crystal growth, the Reversible Aggregation (RA) model [3], which captures basic properties of physics such as determinism, locality, energy conservation, and exact microscopic reversibility. The RA model is a lattice gas model of reversible cluster growth in a closed two-dimensional system. It was introduced as a microscopically reversible physical model for studying the thermodynamics of crystal growth and pattern formation. By microscopically reversible we mean that from any state in the system we can recover the previous state exactly.
Impacts of El Niño and La Niña Cycles: Systems and Sectors
Authors: Rosenzweig Cynthia , Hillel Daniel
Published: November 2020

Perturbations of the climate system caused by El Niño and La Niña events affect natural and managed systems in vast areas of the Pacific Ocean and far beyond it. (Other oscillations affect systems and sectors in wide swaths of the world as well.)1 El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have been associated with ecosystem disruptions and forest fires, crop failures and famines, disease epidemics, and even market fluctuations in various regions. The forms and degrees of impact depend not only on the strength and duration of an El Niño or La Niña event and its associated teleconnections, but also on the state, sensitivity, and vulnerability of the affected system and its biotic community, as well as its human population. The underlying characteristics of ecosystems and human societies in each region are important factors in their susceptibility to ENSO-related damages. Variation may be enhanced as ENSO effects ripple through natural and managed ecosystems. The underlying health of the affected biota, interrelationships among different biotic associations, and pressure by humans all affect marine as well as terrestrial ecosystem responses to ENSO events. Impacts on human systems can be both direct and indirect. Some ENSO phenomena, such as severe storms, affect human lives and infrastructures directly. Other impacts occur through alterations in the marine and terrestrial ecosystems and water supplies upon which human populations ultimately depend. In this chapter we consider some of the impacts that ENSO and other oscillations (described with their teleconnections in chapter 1) have on marine and terrestrial ecosystems and on human-managed systems apart from agriculture. The significant and geographically widespread changes that El Niño events induce in the Pacific Ocean alter conditions for various marine communities. These alterations include dramatic changes in the abundance and distribution of organisms, associated collapses of commercial fisheries, and ensuing consequences affecting human livelihood (Glantz, 2004; Lehodey et al., 2006). Some of the effects are well documented. Reductions in primary production of up to 95% were measured in the eastern equatorial Pacific in 1982–83 (Barber and Chavez, 1983.) Large changes in ecosystem structure and productivity have also been recorded in other parts of the Pacific Ocean, including the western Pacific and in the North Pacific subtropical gyre (north of the Hawaiian Islands) (Karl et al., 1995).
Recasting the Paradox through a Framework of Ecosystem Management Regimes
Authors: van Eeten Michel J. G. , Roe Emery
Published: November 2020

We now provide a parsimonious framework for recasting the paradox so that it can be acted on. Our framework of ecosystem management regimes is used in the following chapters to resolve the impasse between ecologists and engineers. In so doing, it integrates engineering more positively into ecosystem management than is currently done. The goal of ecosystem management is a twofold recoupling: where decision makers are managing for reliable ecosystem services, they are also improving the associated ecological functions; and where they are managing for improved ecological functions, they are better ensuring the reliability of ecosystem services associated with those functions. In practice, improvements in ecosystem functions may range from preservation or restoration of self-sustaining processes to the rehabilitation of functions by reintroducing to the ecosystem something like the complexity and unpredictability they once had. The recoupling of functions and services that have been improved varies by the type of management (more formally, the management regime) relied on by decision makers, where the principal task facing the decision maker is to best match the management regime to the ecosystem in question. A “regime” can be thought of as a distinct and coherent way of perceiving, learning, and behaving in terms of variables discussed more frilly below and summarized in table 4.3 at the end of this chapter (for more on policy and ecological regimes in ecosystem management, see Norton 1995, p. 134; Berry et al. 1998; for a discussion of regime theory, see Kratochwil and Ruggie 1986). To summarize our argument, while ecosystems are internally dynamic and complex, they also vary along a gradient in terms of their human population densities, extraction, and other significant features discussed in chapter 3, such as differing models, competing organization, and multiple-use demands. In response to changes along the gradient, ecosystem management passes through thresholds (the most important being limits to learning) as decision makers move from one management regime to another. The thresholds, in fact, are best thought of as gradual transitions between modes and models of learning about ecosystems.
Sustainability in Arid Grasslands: New Technology Applications for Management
Authors: Budge Thomas K. , Pregenzer Arian
Published: November 2020

As biodiversity, ecosystem function, and ecosystem services become more closely linked with human well-being at all scales, the study of ecology takes on increasing social, economic, and political importance. However, when compared with other disciplines long linked with human well-being, such as medicine, chemistry, and physics, the technical tools and instruments of the ecologist have generally lagged behind those of the others. This disparity is beginning to be overcome with the increasing use of biotelemetric techniques, microtechnologies, satellite and airborne imagery, geographic information systems (GIS), and both regional and global data networks. We believe that the value and efficiency of ecosystem studies can advance significantly with more widespread use of existing technologies, and with the adaptation of technologies currently used in other disciplines to ecosystem studies. More importantly, the broader use of these technologies is critical for contributing to the preservation of biodiversity and the development of sustainable natural resource use by humans. The concept of human management of biodiversity and natural systems is a contentious one. However, we assert that as human population and resource consumption continue to increase, biodiversity and resource sustainability will only be preserved by increasing management efforts—if not of the biodiversity and resources themselves, then of human impacts on them. The technologies described in this chapter will help enable better management efforts. In this context, biodiversity refers not only to numbers of species (i.e., richness) in an arbitrarily defined area, but also to species abundances within that area. Sustainability refers to the maintenance of natural systems, biodiversity, and resources for the benefit of future generations. Arid-land grazing systems support human social systems and economies in regions all over the world, and can be expected to play increasingly critical roles as human populations increase. Further, grazing systems represent a nexus of natural and domesticated systems. In these systems, native biodiversity exists side by side with introduced species and populations, and in fact can benefit from them.
Breast Cancer, Part 2: Testing The Pesticide Hypothesis
Authors: Goldstein Inge F. , Goldstein Martin
Published: November 2020

We do not yet know how much of the excess rates of breast cancer on Long Island or on Cape Cod will ultimately be explained by the known risk factors. We do know that pesticides have been sprayed in both these areas, and toxic chemicals carelessly disposed in them. Has breast cancer been increased by such exposures? The studies in progress on Long Island and Cape Cod are not the only ones that have tried to answer this question: a number of completed studies, carried out in other locations, have also done so, and we will describe them in this chapter. These studies rely to a considerable extent on recent discoveries in molecular biology. This rapidly advancing field has already contributed enormously to our understanding of cancer as well as other diseases, and it will contribute even more in the future. We have learned from it how to identify certain individuals who have genetic sensitivities to particular environmental agents. It may in some cases provide means to determine which environmental hazards have caused a particular case of cancer, from the genetic makeup of the cancer cells. With knowledge of that genetic makeup, physicians who treat cancer are helped to choose the most effective therapy in any given case of the disease, without having to go through a process of trial and error. Future research into the causes, prevention, and treatment of cancer and other diseases, whether in the clinic, the research laboratory, or in the epidemiological field study, will rely more and more on the perspectives and techniques of molecular biology. We will review briefly some of the basic concepts of this field before we describe the studies, completed or in progress, of environmental agents and breast cancer. In general, even when dramatic increases in the rate of some disease have been clearly linked to an environmental agent, only a fraction of the people exposed ever suffer the disease. Most people who survived the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not suffered health effects from their radiation exposure. Cigarette smoking causes 90% of lung cancer today, but only 10% of heavy smokers will die of lung cancer.
Matrices and Wave Functions under Double-Group Symmetry
Authors: Dyall Kenneth G. , Faegri Knut
Published: November 2020

Symmetry is one of the most versatile theoretical tools of physics and chemistry. It provides qualitative insight into the wave functions and properties of systems, and it has also been used successfully to obtain great savings in computational efforts. In the preceding chapter we examined time-reversal symmetry, and now we turn to the more familiar point-group symmetry. We show how relativity requires special consideration and extensions of the concepts developed for the nonrelativistic case, and how time-reversal symmetry and double-group symmetry are connected. Although the techniques that incorporate double-group symmetry presented here are primarily aimed at four-component calculations, they are equally applicable to two-component calculations in which the spin-dependent operators are included at the SCF stage of a calculation. In the preceding chapter, we have shown how the use of time-reversal symmetry can lead to considerable reduction in the number of unique matrix elements that appear in the operator expressions. However, we are also interested in the overall structure of the matrices of the operators. In particular, we are interested in possible block structures, where classes of matrix elements may be set to zero a priori. If the matrices can be cast in block diagonal form, we may save on storage as well as computational effort in solving eigenvalue problems, for example. Matrix blocking will already be effected by the point-group symmetry of the molecule.
Evidence for Predator-Prey Cycles in a Bark Beetle
Authors: Reeve John D. , Turchin Peter
Published: November 2020

The southern pine beetle, Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmermann (Coleoptera: Scolytidae), is an economically important pest of pine forests in the southern United States (Price et al. 1992). This native bark beetle is able to attack and kill living trees, typically loblolly (Pinus taeda L.) or shortleaf (Pinus echinata Mill.) pine, through a process of mass attack coordinated by pheromones emitted by the beetle (Payne 1980). During the attack process, thousands of beetles bore through the outer bark of the tree and begin constructing galleries in the phloem layer. Trees can respond to beetle attack by exuding resin from a network of ducts, but the large number of simultaneous attacks usually overcomes this defense, literally draining the resin from the tree. Oviposition and brood development then occur in the girdled (and ultimately dead) tree. Once a tree is fully colonized the attack process shifts to adjacent trees, often resulting in a cluster of freshly attacked trees, trees containing developing brood, and dead and vacated trees (Coulson 1980). These infestations can range in size from a single tree to tens of thousands, although the latter only occur in areas where no control methods are applied. Approximately six generations can be completed in a year in the southern United States (Ungerer et al. 1999). Like many other forest insect pests, D. frontalis populations are characterized by a considerable degree of fluctuation. The longest time series available are Texas Forest Service records of infestations in southeast Texas since 1958 (figure 5.la). These data suggest that the fluctuations have at least some periodic component, with major outbreaks occurring at intervals of 7-9 years (1968, 1976, 1985, and 1992). A variety of different analyses, including standard time series analysis and response surface methodology (Turchin 1990, Turchin and Taylor 1992), suggest that D.frontalis dynamics are indeed cyclic and appear governed by some kind of delayed negative feedback acting on population growth (see chapter 1). This effect can be seen by plotting the realized per-capita rate of growth (R-values) over a year against population density in the previous year (figure 5.1b).
Parasitic Worms and Population Cycles of Red Grouse
Authors: Hudson Peter J. , Dobson Andrew P.
Published: November 2020

Many years before Charles Elton collected the detailed data on fur returns to The Hudson’s Bay Trading Company, or described the regular fluctuations in small mammal numbers, scientists and naturalists had observed and were proposing explanations for the cause of periodic crashes in numbers of red grouse known as “grouse disease.” MacDonald (1883) claimed “that it was more than eighty years since the alarm of grouse disease was sounded in this country,” implying that naturalists were starting to examine the phenomenon nearly 200 years ago. In 1873, The House of Commons established a Select Committee to consider the game laws of the United Kingdom and, since this had followed a year of particularly severe population collapse in red grouse numbers, they took exhaustive evidence on a wide range of possible causes of “grouse disease.” An examination of the letters in The Times and The Field shows that the debate over the cause of the population crashes was contentious and as heated as many of the recent debates over the causes of population cycles. Scientific studies were initiated by Cobbold (1873) who examined grouse killed during a population crash, published a pamphlet that described the presence of large numbers of “strongle worms,” and advocated the theory that the cause of grouse disease was wholly due to the presence of nematode worms. In 1905, the Board of Agriculture appointed a Committee of Inquiry on Grouse Disease to investigate the life history of the parasite and the causes of “grouse disease.” The extensive survey and detailed analysis was quite remarkable for the time, and was presented in a two-volume publication (Lovat 1911). The Committee surveyed grouse populations, undertook experiments and, after nearly 2000 dissections, came to the conclusion that “the strongyle worm, and the strongyle worm alone, is the immediate causa causans of adult ‘Grouse Disease.’“ The Principal Field Officer was E. A. Wilson, a gifted artist and scientist who was later appointed as the Scientific Director to Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition on the Terra Nova. Unfortunately, Wilson never saw the production of the final report as he died with Scott during their return from the South Pole.
Cell and Tissue Mechanics
Authors: Saltzman W. Mark
Published: November 2020

Mechanics is the branch of physics that is concerned with the action of forces on matter. Tissue engineers can encounter mechanics in various settings. Often, the mechanical properties of replacement biological materials must replicate the normal tissue: for example, there is limited use for a tissue-engineered bone that cannot support the load encountered by its natural counterpart. In addition, the mechanical properties of cells and cell–cell adhesions can determine the architecture of a tissue during development. This phenomenon can sometimes be exploited, since the final form of engineered tissues depends on the forces encountered during assembly and maturation. Finally, the mechanics of individual cells—and the molecular interactions that restrain cells—are important determinants of cell growth, movement, and function within an organism. This chapter introduces the basic elements of mechanics applied to biological systems. Some examples of biomechanical principles that appear to be important for tissue engineering are also provided. For further reading, comprehensive treatments of various aspects of biomechanics are also available. Consider an elongated object—for example, a segment of a biological tissue or a synthetic biomaterial—that is fixed at one end and suddenly exposed to a constant applied load. The material will change or deform in response to the load. For some materials, the deformation is instantaneous and, under conditions of low loading, deformation varies linearly with the magnitude of the applied force: . . . σ[≡F/A]= Eε (5-1) . . . where σ is the applied stress and ε is the resulting strain. This relationship is called Hooke’s law, after the British physicist Robert Hooke, and it describes the behavior of many elastic materials, such as springs, which deform linearly upon loading and recover their original shape upon removal of the load. The Young’s modulus or tensile elastic modulus, E, is a property of the material; some typical values are provided in Table 5.1. Not all elastic materials obey Hooke’s law (for example, rubber does not); some materials will recover their original shape, but strain is not linearly related to stress. Fortunately, many interesting materials do follow Equation 5-1, particularly if the deformations are small.
Four-Legged Animals Skeleton & Superficial Muscles (Side View)
Authors: Goldfinger Eliot
Published: November 2020

Domestic cat characteristics: Rounded skull, short snout. Long whiskers. Large canines, small incisors. Cheek teeth with sharp edges for shearing. Large temporalis and masseter muscles of skull. Eyes shifted slightly forward for binocular vision. Large eyes in domestic cats. Constricted pupil in domestic cats is vertical; round in large cats. Top edge of scapula usually higher than tips of thoracic vertebrae. Small rib cage. Five digits on front limb (thumb reduced); four digits on hind limb—may have very reduced first metatarsal or reduced first digit with claw (dewclaw). Walks on toes. Sharp, curved, retractile claws (which keeps them sharp—they don’t walk on them). Forearm rotates (pronates/supinates). Hairy tail. Very flexible body. Spine (back) straight or arched. Can walk in crouched position, as when stalking prey. Bear characteristics: Large, powerful body; powerful limbs appear relatively short. Rear feet wide. Walks on sole and heel of rear foot and usually on digits of front foot. Five digits per limb with long, curved, nonretractile claws. Front claws longer than rear claws. Large head, small eyes. Small, round, erect, furry ears. Large canines; flat, grinding molars. Short tail. Arched back, high shoulder. Grizzly has most prominent shoulder hump and dished, slightly concave face (in profile). Can have very thick layer of fur. Grizzly and brown bear belong to the same species, but differ in geographical range and size. The giant panda is now considered to be a member of the bear family, not the raccoon family.
Introduction
Authors: Steinberg Michael K.
Published: November 2020

The global drug trade and its associated violence, corruption, and human suffering create global problems that involve not only the use and abuse of substances that have traveled across great geographic spaces but also political and military conflict and policy, economic development, and indigenous and ethnic minority rights in the production regions. Drug production and eradication efforts directly affect the stability of many states and relations between states, shaping and sometimes distorting foreign policy (McCoy 1991, 1999; Bagley and Walker 1996; Meyer and Parssinen 1998; Albright 1999; Rohter 1999). Drug production and the efforts to halt it often derail national and local development (Westermeyer 1982; Smith 1992; Goodson 2001) and create potential human rights violations as small-scale producers get caught in the legal crossfire between their dangerous harvest and economic hardship (Sanabria 1992; Kent 1993; Clawson and Lee 1998). External demand and influence, not indigenous cultures, have transformed apparently simple, local agricultural activities into very complex global problems. Psychoactive plants have always played important cultural roles in indigenous and ethnic minority landscapes. After a history of coevolution and experimentation, indigenous societies came to use psychoactive substances derived from plants in a range of religious and healing rituals. Traditional healers, or shamans, consume psychoactive plants to consult with the spiritual world in order to foretell the future and assist patients; patients ingest psychoactive substances to rid themselves of demons or diseases; and indigenous cultures use psychoactive substances in semiritualistic social situations to reinforce social and political bonds or simply as recreation. However, as these traditional cultures come into contact with the outside world, nonindigenous societies often mimic these practices, trying to reach a “new level of consciousness.” The poppy is an example of a psychoactive plant taken out of a traditional context and adopted by cultural outsiders for nonsacred use. In turn, globalization alters the plant’s use and symbolic meaning within its traditional-use hearth area. Several chapters in this volume show that heroin, a derivative of poppies, is used and abused worldwide and in its original hearth, where the plant was once viewed as a sacred medicinal and ritualistic plant. The profane use of opium leaves a trail of destruction in its wake in the form of addicts and soaring HIV rates as the virus spreads through shared heroin needles.
Governing
Authors: Keller Morton , Keller Phyllis
Published: November 2020

As soon as he became president, Bok set out to modernize Harvard’s central administration. His first move, recruiting a core of professional administrators, met with universal approval. In principle the administration simply provided services: financial, legal, health, information technology, food, real estate, personnel, development, government relations. But in practice this meant replacing Conant’s and Pusey’s low-keyed central “holding company” with a much more assertive, take-charge body of managers. As the number and agendas of the new bureaucrats grew, so did the tension between the faculty and the administration, between the more centralized direction of the University’s affairs and the venerable each-tub-on-its-own-bottom Harvard tradition. When Bok took office, the Harvard Corporation consisted of two recently elected academics, Charles Slichter of Illinois and John Morton Blum of Yale; two lawyers, Bostonian senior fellow Hooks Burr and Hugh Calkins of Cleveland; Socony-Mobil executive Albert Nickerson of New York; and Harvard’s treasurer, State Street banker George Bennett. By the time he left in 1991, all of them were gone, replaced by a heterogeneous mix ranging from Boston-New York businessmen (Gillette CEO Colman Mockler, Time publisher Andrew Heiskell, venture capitalist Robert G. Stone, Jr.) to Henry Rosovsky, the Corporation’s first Jewish fellow and its first Harvard faculty member since 1852, and Washington lawyer Judith Richards Hope, the first female fellow. Brahmin Boston had no representative on the Corporation that Bok bequeathed to his successor. During this time, too, three new treasurers came in quick succession: George Putnam, another State Street banker; Roderick MacDougall, a Bank of New England executive; and Ronald Daniel, a former partner in the conspicuously non-Old Boston consulting firm of McKinsey and Company. Across the board, old boys gave way to non-Brahmin newcomers. As both Harvard and its bureaucracy grew, the Corporation became more detached from the mundane realities of University governance. Streaming in from points south and west, the fellows met every two weeks on Monday mornings for a heavy schedule of reports, discussions, and meetings with the president and his chief administrative officers.
What Happens at a Fibromyalgia Consultation?
Authors: Wallace Daniel J. , Brock Wallace Janice
Published: November 2020

Fibromyalgia is usually a diagnosis of exclusion. Often poorly understood by some primary care physicians, the diagnosis of fibromyalgia is often delayed. Even though in one survey up to 10 percent of general medical visits involve a complaint of generalized musculoskeletal pain, the diagnosis was made only after patients saw a mean of 3.5 doctors. This chapter will take you through the workup that establishes the definitive diagnosis and eliminates other possible explanations for the patient’s complaints. Doctors who diagnose and treat fibromyalgia often cross specialty lines. Although rheumatologists tend to regard fibromyalgia as residing within their bailiwick, there are too few of us to handle all the needs of the 6 million fibromyalgia sufferers. The 5,000 rheumatologists in the United States are internal medicine subspecialists. A total of 80,000 doctors practice primary care internal medicine in the United States, and an additional 80,000 general or family practitioners are the front-line doctors for most patients. These physicians may suspect fibromyalgia and consult a rheumatologist to confirm the diagnosis. In complicated cases, the rheumatologist can take over the management of the condition. Orthopedists, neurosurgeons, and neurologists frequently diagnose fibromyalgia but generally refer patients to rheumatologists or internists for treatment. Rheumatologists may refer patients to physical medicine specialists or pain management centers when their approaches do not bear fruit. Suppose that you are suspected of having fibromyalgia, and a primary care physician has referred you to a fibromyalgia consultant (usually a rheumatologist but sometimes an internist, physiatrist, neurologist, orthopedist, or osteopath) to confirm the diagnosis and make management suggestions. Is any sort of advanced preparation advisable? Yes. Bring copies of outside records and previous test results or workups to the consultant. If you have more than a few complaints or are taking more than a few medications, a summary list is useful. The evaluation will consist of a history, physical examination, diagnostic laboratory tests, and possibly imaging studies (X-rays, scans, etc.). Once all the observations and test results are in, the doctor will discuss the findings with you—perhaps at the time of the visit, by telephone after the initial meeting, or in a follow-up visit.
Nothing Simple
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

There is a saying attributed to the eighteenth-century Ukrainian philosopher Gregory Skovoroda that has long stayed in my mind. Skovoroda wrote that “we must be grateful to God that He created the world in such a way that everything simple is true and everything complicated is untrue.” I have always suspected this statement to be very profound, and I would like to believe it. I often do believe it. As I write these words, I am pretty sure that I believe it. But I can’t say that I am 100 percent free of doubt. Gregory Skovoroda came of simple peasant stock and lived in the days before multinational corporations, environmental management, lengthy tax returns, and global free trade. I know that great wisdom is supposed to be timeless, unaffected by changing circumstances, yet I wonder if exceptions can be made for times like ours. The trouble is that so many of the things I used to think were simple have turned out to be complicated. At times, usually around six in the morning when I am still in bed and life seems grim, I even wonder whether anything is simple anymore. Take the case of overpopulation. Any ecologist worthy of the name knows two things about overpopulation: first, it is bad; and second, the United States, because of its excessive per capita consumption, is already over populated. In this country, ecological, social, political, cultural, and economic systems have all been strained past the breaking point by the burden of too many people consuming too much. True, most citizens do not yet perceive the magnitude of the danger. The root causes of our worst problems rarely appear in plain view. As the biologist and social critic Garrett Hardin once wrote, “Nobody ever dies of overpopulation”; the death certificate—if there is a death certificate—lists something more tangible such as tuberculosis or AIDS. It is difficult to acknowledge distant ultimate causes such as over population when there is something easier and closer at hand to blame. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people, even some economists, are beginning to recognize the simple idea that the world and its wealth are finite and that population growth must stop.
Sherlock Nero and Us
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

Some people have a drink when they get home from work—a martini, a beer. Maybe two or three. Life is especially stressful in the twenty-first century. The same indecent forces that are destroying nature are disrupting our working lives as well. Who will own the company tomorrow? Will there be a “reduction in force” or some other euphemism for the ax? When is the next reorganization coming? Is my ten or twenty years of faithful service an asset or, more likely, a sign of obsolescence and suspicious loyalty to bosses and co-workers now out of favor or working for other companies? How am I to answer the fax that arrived at 4:00 p.m., the one that seemed to contradict the fax that arrived at 11:00? When will I find time to fill out the questionnaire from the Resource Management Office, and does it take precedence over the Goals Enhancement Strategy questionnaire that came from the Administrative Services Division? Are my computer files compatible with the new software system, and, if so, why did the box on the screen say, “This paragraph is un-readable. Do you wish to substitute a standard paragraph?” Just what is our real work, anyway? Alcohol can take the edge off stress, but it is not everyone’s consolation. Some choose television or the Internet; mine is to pick up one of the scores of detective novels that I keep close to hand and plunge in. Then I can forget for a little while the vice presidents, deans, and other academic, corporate-style bosses who do their best to make life in the modern university an unproductive misery. In this way I can put out of mind, temporarily, the pleas of students who don’t understand why there are no courses to take and the ravings of colleagues who can’t figure out how to cope with the contradictory, impossible demands placed on them. Why should detective stories be, for so many, such a good and entertaining way of escaping from reality? That they are is clear; billions of copies have been sold.
Adaptation
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

When my wife Joan and I were newly married, we lived in a north Jersey suburb not far from the New York state line. Every weekday morning we drove down the Palisades Interstate Parkway to the George Washington Bridge and crossed the Hudson River to Manhattan, where I taught and Joan was a graduate student. The parkway runs along the Palisades, a magnificent, igneous bluff that flanks the west bank of the Hudson and faces, on the far shore, Yonkers, the Riverdale section of the Bronx, and Manhattan. Wooded parkland extends on both sides of the road for its entire length until just before the approach to the bridge, where many lanes of superhighway converge on the toll booths. We loved the woods along the parkway—they calmed us before our immersion in the chaotic city, and soothed us when we left it at the end of the day. That was before we went on our honeymoon, a three-week hike on the Appalachian Trail (interspersed with some hitchhiking on country roads), from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to the border of the Great Smokies in North Carolina. The forest we walked through was a mixture of tall pines and an incredible variety of native hardwoods—an experience of natural diversity that was overwhelming. Nearly every tree we saw was new to us, yet we could feel the pattern and cohesiveness of the forest as a whole. Rhododendrons formed a closed canopy over our heads, fragmenting the June sunshine into a softly shifting mosaic of dap-pled patches. We stepped on a carpet of rhododendron petals. The trip was over all too quickly. The plane carrying us back de-scended through a dense inversion layer of black smog before touching down on the runway at Newark. Home. We were depressed and silent. The ride from Newark Airport to our house took us on the Palisades Parkway. For the first time, we became aware that the woods along the park way were dominated by thin, ungainly Ailanthus, with their coarse(and, we knew, rank-smelling) foliage, and by other weedy species such as the lanky Paulownia. Suddenly, these exotic species seemed very much out of place.
Spending Our Capital
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

A deeply felt aversion to spending accumulated capital is an ancient part of the heritage of most societies. Although my father was a doctor, not a businessman, he taught this to me. He had lived through the bankruptcy of his own parents during the Great Depression, watching as they gradually sacrificed the inventory of their store in Passaic to keep the family in food and clothing. On one side of this store, my grandfather sold records, phonographs, and sewing machines and repaired the appliances that he sold; on the other side, my grandmother, a brilliant dress de-signer, prepared bridal gowns for customers who came from as far away as New York City. She would dress the brides on the wedding day, too, and was celebrated for her ability to make the plainest bride look beautiful. But as the depression wore on, business fell off, the customers stopped coming from New York, and the stock of goods dwindled away. There was no choice but to close the store; my grandparents’ livelihood was gone forever. Later, my father and the oldest of his four brothers made it a priority to pay their parents’ creditors in full, a decision that entailed sacrifices in itself. The lesson was handed down to me: you can spend your earned income and any interest you may have received, providing you first set aside a portion to increase your savings; but never spend the principal, your capital, except as an act of final desperation. To most of us, capital is associated with business, yet the habit of pre-serving capital and handing it on to the next generation started, I am pretty sure, not as an economic or financial practice, but as an agricultural one. In Neolithic societies, it must have begun when farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main source of food. From Anatolia to North Africa to Peru, the staple grains of wheat, rice, corn, millet, oats, barley, and rye, the legumes such as peas and beans, and other vegetables from squashes to radishes, were almost all annual crops.
Death of a Plastic Palm
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

All over the United States, phone companies are planting artificial trees. An old-growth, imitation pine has just gone up in the community of Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, where it towers 100 feet over barns and fields. Holes in its synthetic brown bark admit bundles of black cables that travel up through the hollow metal trunk to the wireless digital phone antennas hidden among the plastic pine branches high above. In the desert near Phoenix, Arizona, where pines are scarce, another phone company plans to conceal its antennas inside a giant, imitation saguaro cactus. Evidently some large corporations are finally beginning to realize that the destruction of nature by their business activities is not accept-able. To improve public relations, they are now providing facsimiles of the nature they eliminate. This solves many annoying problems, but, alas, other difficulties have arisen. Copying nature is not as easy as it looks—it’s not like using a photocopier. If the phone companies don’t know this, somebody ought to tell them. I first became aware of the downside of artificial nature when I was living in Middlesex, New Jersey. To get to work at the university I had to drive through South Bound Brook, a down-at-the-heels little town nestled cozily between American Cyanamid’s huge organic chemical factory on one side and GAF and Union Carbide—also cooking up organics—on the other. True, the Raritan River runs alongside of South Bound Brook, and George Washington, an experienced surveyor who had seen many rivers, once described the Raritan as the most beautiful of all. But the river’s magic seemed to work feebly in South Bound Brook; my memories are only of floods, brown mud, and the occasional corpse of carp or sucker floating belly up past the dirty red brick of the aged factory walls. Then one day as I made my daily commute, I noticed an unexpected splash of color in the town. A popular saloon along the road I travelled had erected a very large plastic palm tree on the sidewalk next to the entrance.
Thinking about Breeds and Species
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

Our family dog is an Andalusian bog hound, a perfect specimen of his breed. His appearance and behavior are typical of bog hounds, but for those readers not familiar with them, a description is in order. An un-usually handsome animal, he stands 22 inches high at the shoulder, maintains a trim weight of fifty-seven pounds, and has a short, smooth coat of a rich, red-brown color and a well-proportioned head with strong jaw musculature and brown eyes. He is extremely fast, and while running in open areas makes frequent, stiff-legged bounds straight up in the air. This may be an ancient canine technique of cooperative pack hunting, probably serving both to stir up prey and to provide a view over tall grass. His name is J. D., given by my daughter Kate because the way he moves his hindquarters when he walks reminded her of a character of that name played by Brad Pitt, in the movie Thelma and Louise. J. D. is exceptionally affectionate. He has never been known to growl or snap at anyone, although he once took exception to a recording of Paul Robeson singing “Old Man River.” When permitted, he greets people by standing on his hind legs with his feet on their chest (or shoulders, if they are short) and gazing directly into their eyes. He rarelys hows affection by licking; as a special mark of favor he may take a handor arm into his mouth and chew gently. His distaste for swimming—as opposed to walking in muck—is characteristic of bog hounds, especially Andalusians. We tested this behavior during a trip along the headwaters of the Passaic River, in northwest New Jersey. Coming to a deep pool, my wife, Joan, J. D.’s favorite, jumped in and pretended to be drowning. J. D. watched from the ban kin great agitation as she splashed and screamed, but he made it quite plain that if anyone were to jump in and save her, it would have to be me, or perhaps another dog. It is hard to judge J. D.’s intelligence.
A Walk in the Woods
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

The forest was small by American standards, perhaps fifty or sixty acres, but in the rolling Devon countryside with its parceled fields and narrow, hedge-enclosed lanes, it felt appropriately spacious. I was enjoying the guided tour in one of my favorite parts of the world. The light rain and chilly July breezes felt right; the English ivy carpeting the ground seemed right; the leafy hardwoods looked right (although I didn’t know the species and could easily have been fooled); and the probably medieval bank and ditch running through the woods at right angles to the path gave everything an impressive air of authenticity. The path turned. As we rounded the corner, I saw ahead the darker shade of conifers. Soon we were in the midst of a grove of youthful but already towering California-coast redwoods. A deep silence hung like a benediction over the dark wood, but it was quickly shattered. “I’d give anything to be allowed to cut them down,” said our guide, Stephan, in an angry voice. This incident passed out of my thoughts until weeks later back in New Jersey, when I was reading the chapter on conservation in Oliver Rack-ham’s The History of the Countryside, an account of the origins of Britain’s landscapes, flora, and fauna. The British landscape of the late twentieth century, Rack-ham wrote, is suffering from an acute loss of meaning—the unique messages once conveyed by many historic woodlands, witness to millennia of slow and painstaking change, have been garbled beyond recognition in five or six decades of modern planting, “restoration,” development, and agriculture. The more I read in this remarkable book, surely one of the most profound and eloquent descriptions of people and nature ever written, the more I understood Stephan’s feeling that his Devon woodland had been desecrated by the planting of those redwoods. I also began to understand how little I knew about the long discourse between people and trees in Britain, where the history of the relationship is probably as well documented as in any place on earth.