bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
What is Not Schizophrenia?
Authors: Glatt Stephen J. , Faraone Stephen V. , Tsuang Ming T.
Published: November 2020

The words ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘schizophrenic’ are often misused in daily con­versation, in literature and film, and even in the popular news media. They mean different things to different people: an attitude of mind, a type of personality, or a psychiatric illness. For example, someone who can’t make up his mind, or who has feelings of both love and hate for something, may be falsely called schizo­phrenic (‘ambivalent’ is the more proper term). In some cultures, especially in the past, schizophrenia was seen as a sign of possession by an evil spirit or even as a sign of religious superiority. Individuals with schizophrenia were either pun­ished or praised in accord with the beliefs of their culture.Today, the most common misconception is that a person with schizophrenia has a ‘split’ personality or multiple personalities. Examples of this in film include Me, Myself, and Irene, in which the main character is diagnosed with ‘advanced delusionary schizophrenia with involuntary narcissistic rage’ instead of what appears to be dissociative identity (formerly known as multiple personality) dis­order. Even films that do a decent job depicting schizophrenia can get some aspects wrong; for example, A Beautiful Mind, which we earlier cited as a rela­tively well-done depiction of the disorder, also misses the mark by exaggerating the role of visual hallucinations of full- figure humans in guiding the main char­acter through various and extensive ‘missions’.The correct use of the word ‘schizophrenia’ is as a diagnostic term used to define a specific mental condition based on clear criteria. As described in our chapters on symptoms and on how schizophrenia is diagnosed, differential diagnosis is essential; that is, determining if the symptoms are really indica­tive of schizophrenia or of other conditions. Recognizing if mood disturbances (including depression and/ or mania), delusions (particularly grandiosity and delusions of sin or guilt), hallucinations, and disorganization are not actually reflective of a mood disorder, substance use disorder, or developmental or neuro­logical disorder is essential, since each type of disorder has a different treatment. Furthermore, it is vital to consider cultural context when determining if behav­iour is truly bizarre and qualifies for a diagnosis or is simply normal within the individual’s social setting.
How Does the Environment Influence Schizophrenia?
Authors: Glatt Stephen J. , Faraone Stephen V. , Tsuang Ming T.
Published: November 2020

Although there is very strong evidence for a genetic piece to schizophrenia, the lack of full concordance between identical twins shows that the environment also plays a role. We define an ‘environmental risk factor’ as any event that is not due to genes, specifically the individual differences in the DNA sequence.These events may be biological (e.g., head injuries, viral infections), psycho­logical (e.g., disrupted family relationships), or social (e.g., poverty).Over the past few decades, scientists have found evidence for environmental risk factors in at least some cases of schizophrenia. Before reviewing this research, we must make an important distinction: some environmental factors may cause or contribute to schizophrenia while others modify or change the illness in someone who is already sick. In this book we use the term ‘cause’ to refer to any factor that can produce the illness or increase the chance of illness in someone who has not yet been affected by schizophrenia. This cause does not have to be either necessary or sufficient. This means that other causes may exist that also produce the illness, and that any given cause may need to interact with other causes for the disorder to occur. We use the term ‘modifier’ to refer to anything that changes the symptoms of the illness in someone who is already affected. As we discuss in a later chapter, knowing modifiers can help with the treatment of the disorder. However, they should not be confused with causes.Scientists who study schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders have long ago abandoned the ‘nature–nurture’ controversy. In the past, many philo­sophers and scientists had taken one of two extreme positions. Some believed that psychiatric illness was only caused by innate or genetic factors; others felt that mental illness was the sole product of adverse environmental events. Today, we know that the question ‘genes or environment?’ is too simplistic. As Dr Paul Meehl realized several decades ago, the better question is much more com­plex: ‘What group of environmental risk factors work together with which genes to produce schizophrenia?’Before discussing specific environmental risk factors that may cause schizo­phrenia we should clarify why we believe that the study of such factors is es­sential.
Back to Basics: Bits and Pieces
Authors: Vedral Vlatko
Published: November 2020

The concept of information is so ubiquitous nowadays that it is simply unavoidable. It has revolutionized the way we perceive the world, and for someone not to know that we live in the information age would make you wonder where they’ve been for the last 30 years. In this information age we are no longer grappling with steam engines or locomotives; we are now grappling with understanding and improving our information processing abilities – to develop faster computers, more efficient ways to communicate across ever vaster distances, more balanced financial markets, and more efficient societies. A common misconception is that the information age is just technological. Well let me tell you once and for all that it is not! The information age at its heart is about affecting and better understanding just about any process Nature throws at us: physical, biological, sociological, whatever you name it – nothing escapes. Even though many would accept that we live in the age of information, surprisingly the concept of information itself is still often not well understood. In order to see why this is so, it’s perhaps worth reflecting a little on the age that preceded it, the industrial age. Central concepts within the industrial age, which can be said to have begun in the early eighteenth century in the north of England, were work and heat. People have, to date, found these concepts and their applicability much more intuitive and easier to grasp than the equivalent role information plays in the information age. In the industrial age, the useful application of work and heat was largely evident through the resulting machinery, the type of engineering, buildings, ships, trains, etc. It was easy to point your finger and say ‘look, this is a sign of the industrial age’. In Leeds, for example, as I used to take my usual walk down Foundry Street in the area called Holbeck, traces of the industrial revolution were still quite evident. John Marshall’s Temple Mills and Matthew Murray’s Round Foundry are particularly striking examples; grand imposing buildings demanding respect and appreciation for the hundreds of people who worked in squalid conditions and around the clock to ensure that the country remained well fed, clothed, or transported.
Social Informatics: Get Connected or Die Tryin’
Authors: Vedral Vlatko
Published: November 2020

Everybody knows a Joe. Joe is the kind of guy who was the most popular boy in class, head boy at school, the life and soul of the party, and whenever he needs something, it just seems to happen for him. This is the guy we love to hate! Why is he getting all the breaks when we have to work so damn hard? As we continue to grind out each day at work, we see Joe is the guy with a big house, fast car, and the most beautiful women swooning over him. Most men would give their right arm to have a bit of that magic. So, how does he do it? Of course, I cannot tell you for sure (if I could my next book would be a bestselling self-help book), but it should come as no surprise that people with more friends and contacts tend to be more successful than people with fewer. Intuitively, we know that these people, by virtue of their wide range of contacts, seem to have more support and opportunity to make the choices they want. Likewise, again it’s no surprise that more interconnected societies tend to be able to cope better with challenging events than ones where people are segregated or isolated. Initially it seems unlikely that this connectedness has anything to do with Shannon’s information theory; after all what does sending a message down a telephone line have to do with how societies function or respond to events? The first substantial clue that information may play some role in sociology came in 1971 from the American economist and Nobel Laureate, Thomas Schelling. Up until his time sociology was a highly qualitative subject (and still predominantly is); however he showed how certain social paradigms could be approached in the same rigorous quantitative manner as other processes where exchange of information is the key driver. Schelling is an interesting character. He served with the Marshall Plan (the plan to help Europe recover after World War II), the White House, and the Executive Office of the President from 1948 to 1953, as well as holding a string of positions at illustrious academic institutions, including Yale and Harvard.
Writing Neolithic Britain: an interpretive journey
Authors: Ray Keith , Thomas Julian
Published: November 2020

It is just over sixty years since Stuart Piggott published his major work, Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles. This was the first comprehensive account of what was then known and assumed about the ‘New Stone Age’ in these islands, and it surveyed discoveries and summarized debates that had occurred over the previous century. This process of gradual accumulation of data and ideas has continued apace since Piggott was writing, not least owing to the precision with which we can now date much of the activity that characterizes the Neolithic. When Piggott was writing his book in the early 1950s an American, Willard Libby, was experimenting with the technique of radiocarbon dating as a by-product of the development of nuclear technology. This dating method uses the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes to measure the time that has elapsed since a sample of organic matter last exchanged carbon with its environment—in short, the time since an organism died. Application of the method has cumulatively transformed our understanding of prehistoric chronology. To illustrate the impact upon the study of Neolithic Britain, we have only to appreciate that in Neolithic Cultures Piggott imagined a British Neolithic period that lasted for around five hundred years, beginning in about 2000BCE. This estimated span was based on a series of assumptions about the rate of cultural change, and the affinities between artefacts in Britain, continental Europe, and further afield. However, over the past half-century this inherited chronology has been swept away as radiometric dating has gradually been refined, and huge numbers of dated samples have accumulated. These now suggest that the Neolithic period began in Britain shortly before 4000 BCE, and ‘ended’ with the advent of a variety of objects made of metal instead of stone, from around 2400 BCE. The implications of this transformed appreciation of the duration of the Neolithic are profound, for while Piggott and his contemporaries were dealing with periods of historical time that were comparable with those with which we are familiar from recorded history (the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the emergence and spread of Islam, the development of capitalism), we now have evidence for human activity in the Neolithic of Britain that is dispersed across an expanse of time as much as three times longer than these major historical episodes.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: November 2020

The Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination was supposed to be the inevitable coronation of Hillary Clinton. She was the most well-known candidate; had the most support from the party establishment, and had, by far, the most financial resources. Two big names (Al Gore and John Kerry) considered running, but decided they had no hope of defeating the Clinton machine. That left an unlikely assortment of lesser-knowns: a U.S. Representative from Ohio (Dennis Kucinich), the Governor of New Mexico (Bill Richardson), and several U.S. Senators: Joe Biden (Delaware), John Edwards (North Carolina), Chris Dodd (Connecticut), Mike Gravel (Alaska), and Barack Obama (Illinois). The nomination went off script. Obama was a first-term senator, a black man with an unhelpful name, but he excited voters. He raised enough money to be competitive in the Iowa caucuses and he persuaded Oprah Winfrey to campaign for him. Obama defeated Clinton by eight percentage points in Iowa and the race was on. Obama won the Democratic nomination and, then, the presidential election against Republican John McCain because the Obama campaign had a lot more going for it than Obama’s eloquence and charisma: Big Data. The Obama campaign tried to put every potential voter into its data base, along with hundreds of tidbits of personal information: age, gender, marital status, race, religion, address, occupation, income, car registrations, home value, donation history, magazine subscriptions, leisure activities, Facebook friends, and anything else they could find that seemed relevant. Some data were collected from public data bases, some from e-mail exchanges or campaign workers knocking on front doors. Some data were purchased from private data vendors. Layered on top were weekly telephone surveys of thousands of potential voters which not only gathered personal data, but also attempted to gauge each person’s likelihood of voting—and voting for Obama. These voter likelihoods were correlated statistically with personal characteristics and extrapolated to other potential voters based on their personal characteristics. The campaign’s computer software predicted how likely each person its data base was to vote and the probability that the vote would be for Obama. This data-driven model allowed the campaign to microtarget individuals through e-mails, snail mail, personal visits, and television ads asking for donations and votes.
Patterns in Randomness
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: November 2020

I do an extra-sensory perception (ESP) experiment on the first day of my statistics classes. I show the students an ordinary coin— sometimes borrowed from a student—and flip the coin ten times. After each flip, I think about the outcome intently while the students try to read my mind. They write their guesses down, and I record the actual flips by circling H or T on a piece of paper that has been designed so that the students cannot tell from the location of my pencil which letter I am circling. Anyone who guesses all ten flips correctly wins a one-pound box of chocolates from a local gourmet chocolate store. If you want to try this at home, guess my ten coin flips in the stats class I taught in the spring of 2017. My brain waves may still be out there somewhere. Write your guesses down, and we’ll see how well you do. After ten flips, I ask the students to raise their hands and I begin revealing my flips. If a student misses, the hand goes down, Anyone with a hand up at the end wins the chocolates. I had a winner once, which is to be expected since more than a thousand students have played this game. I don’t believe in ESP, so the box of chocolates is not the point of this experiment. I offer the chocolates in order to persuade students to take the test seriously. My real intent is to demonstrate that most people, even bright college students, have a misperception about what coin flips and other random events look like. This misperception fuels our mistaken belief that data patterns uncovered by computers must be meaningful. Back in the 1930s, the Zenith Radio Corporation broadcast a series of weekly ESP experiments. A “sender” in the radio studio randomly chose a circle or square, analogous to flipping a fair coin, and visualized the shape, hoping that the image would reach listeners hundreds of miles away. After five random draws, listeners were encouraged to mail in their guesses. These experiments did not support the idea of ESP, but they did provide compelling evidence that people underestimate how frequently patterns appear in random data.
Old Wine in New Bottles
Authors: Smith Gary
Published: November 2020

The fashion industry is subject to recurring cycles of popularity that are regular enough to be dubbed the “20-year rule.” Activewear clothing that is suitable for the gym and the street was fashionable in the 1990s and, 20 years later, in the 2010s. Intellectually, the British economist Dennis Robertson once wrote, “Now, as I have often pointed out to my students, some of whom have been brought up in sporting circles, high-brow opinion is like a hunted hare; if you stand in the same place, or nearly the same place, it can be relied upon to come round to you in a circle.” In the same way, today’s data miners have rediscovered several statistical tools that were once fashionable. These tools have been given new life because they are mathematically complex, indeed beautifully complex, and many data miners are easily seduced by mathematical beauty. Too few think about whether the underlying assumptions make sense and if the conclusions are reasonable. Consider data mining with multiple regression models. Rummaging through a large data base looking for the combination of explanatory variables that gives the best fit can be daunting. With 100 variables to choose from, there are more than 17 trillion possible combinations of 10 explanatory variables. With 1,000 possible explanatory variables, there are nearly a trillion trillion possible combinations of 10 explanatory variables. With 1 million possible explanatory variables, the number of 10-variable combinations grows to nearly a million trillion trillion trillion trillion (if we were to write it out, there would be 54 zeros). Stepwise regression was born back when computers were much slower than today, but it has become a popular data-mining tool because it is less computationally demanding than a full search over all possible combinations of explanatory variables but, it is hoped, will still give a reasonable approximation to the results of a full search. The stepwise label comes from the fact that the calculations go through a number of steps, considering potential explanatory variables one by one. There are three main stepwise procedures. A forward-selection rule starts with the one explanatory variable that has the highest correlation with the variable being predicted. Then the procedure adds a second variable, the variable that improves the fit the most.
Oral medicine and oral pathology
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

The mouth has often been looked at as a window into the body, and this is no truer than in oral medicine. The oral mucosa is a highly adapted and robust tissue, which, at the same time, can be very susceptible to changes in homeostasis. Dysregulation of the immune system, alter­ations in cellular signalling pathways, or insult from exogenous stimuli can lead to an array of weird and wonderful oral lesions. Clinicians today are likely to see changes to the oral mucosa on a regular basis— from common ulcers, bony lumps, or white patches to more exotic pigmented lesions or unusual lumps. It is therefore vital to have good basic knowledge of common conditions and be able to iden­tify lesions that need urgent referral and treatment. It is important to take a thorough medical history, as many oral symptoms can be associ­ated with systemic conditions or changes in medication. A temporal link can be a good indicator of causation from medication changes. Having a strategic method of constructing a list of differential diag­noses, such as the surgical sieve, can be a great aide- memoire to ensure all the pertinent questions and investigations have been completed. However, it must be noted that many conditions cannot be accurately diagnosed without histological examination, and therefore, referral for specialist input is commonplace. Oral medicine can be a tricky discipline, fraught with challenging pa­tients to manage, particularly those with chronic conditions. Conversely, the diagnostic challenges make for a thoroughly rewarding and stimu­lating discipline. The questions in this chapter will test your knowledge of disease symptoms, links to medical conditions, and patient management. Key topics include: ● Patient assessment and diagnosis ● Investigations ● Basic histology ● Infections (bacterial, viral, and fungal) ● Ulcers ● Soft tissue swelling ● Bony lumps ● Systemic conditions ● White, red, pigmented, and mixed patches ● Oral cancer ● Pharmacology.
Analgesia, anaesthesia, and sedation
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

The ability to practise dentistry and provide invasive treatments to pa­tients is based on the ability to make such procedures comfortable and acceptable for patients to tolerate, as well as manage post- operative pain. A good working knowledge of the different treatment modalities available, and analgesic agents that can be prescribed, is key to effective management of patients. This must include the indications and limita­tions of each modality. The pharmacology of most drugs used in modern- day dentistry has changed very little since their introduction, some as far back as 100 years ago. However, it is important to understand the processes regarding their method of action, their effect on the human body, and their indica­tions and contraindications. All of these factors must be considered to maximize the clinical benefit to the patient. Several guidelines regarding the use of conscious sedation in dentistry have recently been introduced, and it is important that those wishing to provide conscious sedation and refer patients appropriately familiarize themselves with these guidelines. Key topics include: ● Principles of analgesia, anaesthesia, and conscious sedation ● Pharmacology and pharmacodynamics of commonly used pharmaco­logical agents ● Indications and contraindications of commonly used pharmacological agents ● Conscious sedation with nitrous oxide ● Conscious sedation with midazolam ● General anaesthesia ● Treatment planning for conscious sedation and general anaesthesia ● Managing complications and adverse reactions
Radiology and radiography
Authors: Longridge Nicholas , Clarke Pete , Aftab Raheel , Ali Tariq
Published: November 2020

When you consider that, with direct vision alone, you can only see the coronal few millimetres of teeth and none of the surrounding alveolus, it becomes clear that, without additional visual aids, we can only assess and treat a relatively small proportion of our patient’s oral health needs. In 1895, only months after the very first medical radiograph, Dr Otto Walkhoff recorded the very first dental radiograph. This exposure was of his own dentition and lasted a lengthy 25 minutes. Since then, radiography has become a staple tool of the profession and refinement of the technology has allowed us to reduce exposure times down to milliseconds, with radiation doses smaller than those ex­perienced by people taking short- haul flights. Further advances in dose reduction and reformatting protocols have allowed for computed tom­ography to become increasingly popular for diagnostics and treatment planning in endodontic, oral surgery, and orthodontic cases. The benefits of dental radiography make them an indispensable resource, but since all types of radiation pose some degree of risk to human health, the clinician must consider how useful the information from the proposed exposure will be. There are no shortages of tragic stories of employees working with radiation who suffered ill health years after stopping work. Today dental radiography can be performed routinely and safely as a result of the valuable lesson learnt from the debilitating consequences suffered by past medical professionals, nuclear workers, and even the ‘radium girls’ who painted luminous material onto watch faces. Key topics include: ● Limitations of radiographs ● Image selection criteria ● Radiation physics, protection, and legislation ● Radiographic interpretation ● Types of dental radiographic imagery.
Safety
Authors: Baecker Ronald M.
Published: November 2020

Safety is often confused with security. A system or an environment may be secure, but if its normal operation does not achieve the intended goals, it may not be safe. Events will not progress as intended, and could go horribly wrong, even to the extent of grave injuries and loss of life. The more society relies upon digital technologies, the more we count on software to assure our safety. The issue of safety arises in a great variety of circumstances. Our discussion will start with dangers to the individual, then we will widen our focus to the organization, to society, and, finally, to the world. The digital divide that discourages internet use among older adults is due in part to threats posed to safe use of computers by ‘evil’ software such as programs that ‘phish’ for personal information, thereby gaining access to finances and committing identity theft, as we have discussed in the previous chapter. We shall enlarge upon this discussion by speaking of another risk—computer rage, which is caused by frustration when users cannot understand or manage the technology. Such instances are especially dangerous for senior citizens. We shall also discuss two ways in which the internet may not be safe for younger people: cyberbullying and revenge porn. We then examine a topic that arises in daily life: safety threats caused to pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers by the continual use of distracting mobile devices. Our inability to control the costs of large-scale data processing implementations is a threat to the safety and health of organizations and governments, as is our inability to understand, modify, and fix large software systems that are no longer maintained by their creators. We shall describe several software disasters, both during their development and after they have been deployed and used. These include the software crisis at the turn of the century—the Y2K threat—which actually was averted, and several cases in which up to billions of dollars or pounds were wasted, including the decades-long saga of air traffic control in the USA.
Background on Orthogonal Functions and Covariance
Authors: van den Dool Huug
Published: November 2020

The purpose of this chapter is to present some basic mathematics and statistics that will be used heavily in subsequent chapters. The organization of the material and the emphasis on some important details peculiar to the geophysical discipline should help the reader.
Empirical Wave Propagation
Authors: van den Dool Huug
Published: November 2020

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that, given a long data set of global extent, one can design a simple forecast method called Empirical Wave Propagation (EWP), which has modest forecast skill and allows us to explore aspects of atmospheric dynamics empirically, most notably aspects that help to explain mechanisms of teleconnection. The highlight of this chapter are dispersion experiments where we ask the question what happens to an isolated source at t = 0? Even though Nature has never done such an experiment, we will address this question empirically. In case the reader does not need/want to know the technical details of deriving wavespeeds he/she can skip to page 22 (EWP diagnostics sct 3.2) of this chapter. We will also discuss the skill of one-day EWP forecasts, in comparison to skill controls like “persistence”, as a function of season, hemisphere, level and variable. While short-range (1 day) forecasts are certainly not the topic of this book, we note that the short-term wave propagation features described here do nourish and maintain the teleconnection patterns thought to be important for longer range forecasts. EWP uses either zonal harmonic waves (sin/cos pairs) along each latitude circle separately, or global domain spherical harmonics (see Parkinson and Washington (1986) for the basics on spherical harmonics). The orthogonal functions used here are thus analytical. The atmosphere is to first order rotation-symmetric and obviously periodic in the east–west direction, which makes the zonal Fourier transform a natural. Moreover, many weather systems, wave-like in the upper levels, are seen to move from west to east (east to west) in the mid-latitudes (tropics), so a decomposition in sin/ cos functions should inform us about phase propagation and energy dispersion on the sphere. For any initial time we decompose the state of the atmosphere into harmonic waves. If we knew the wave speed, and made an assumption about the future amplitude, we could make forecasts by analytical means. But how do we know the phase speed? One way to proceed, with data alone, is to calculate from a large data set the climatological speeds of anomaly waves. This is where the empirical aspects come in.
Hunting or management? The status of Sus in the Jomon period in Japan
Authors: Hongo Hitomi , Anezaki Tomoko
Published: November 2020

This study focuses on Japanese Sus and their relationships with humans during the Jomon period. Since pig (Sus scrofa f. domestica) is the only domestic ungulate species of which the wild progenitor (Sus scrofa) naturally inhabits Japan, the relationship of Sus and humans, including possible local domestication in the Japanese archipelago, is one of the major issues in archaeozoological studies in Japan. There are two subspecies of wild boar in Japan, Ryukyu wild boar (S. scrofa riukiuanus) and Japanese wild boar (S. scrofa leucomystax). Today the former subspecies inhabits the Amami-Ohshima, Tokunoshima, Okinawa, Ishigaki, and Iriomote islands of the Ryukyu archipelago and the latter the main islands of the Japanese archipelago (Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu, but not Hokkaido). Our study deals with the latter subspecies, the Japanese wild boar. The primary aim is to examine and compile data on the regional and temporal variation of the size of the Japanese wild boar during the Jomon period, and of kill-off patterns. This, we think, is necessary for discussing whether or not a domestication process was underway during the Jomon period. Information on the variation within the wild boar population during the Jomon period also helps to evaluate the domestic or wild status of Sus remains from the later Yayoi Period (c.2700–1700 BP). The Jomon period lasted about 10,000 years, from 13000 to 2500 cal. BP, and, based on pottery types and styles, is divided into six phases: Incipient, Earliest, Early, Middle, Late, and Final. The subsistence economy during the Jomon period was primarily based on hunting and gathering, but it has been argued that some form of incipient plant cultivation was already practiced at least from the Early Jomon period, possibly even from the Incipient Jomon period on (e.g. Matsumoto 1979; Kasahara 1981; Umemoto & Moriwaki 1983; Habu 2001). Also, an increasing degree of sedentism is observed in central and eastern Japan from the Middle Jomon period on. Pottery was used from the beginning of the Jomon period. Jomon culture is also characterized by exquisite wood craftsmanship, as represented by lacquer ware found at some waterlogged sites.
Arresting carbon dioxide emissions: why and how?
Authors: Vincent David
Published: November 2020

This chapter sets the scene for future chapters covering a range of low carbon technologies from renewables through to nuclear. It reviews how the evidence base for climate change is building up, what the impacts of climate change might be, and how we are beginning to explore the policies and measures which will be needed to make the transition to a low carbon economy. The year 2005 will go down in history as the beginnings of a broad, politically backed consensus that man’s activity is influencing our climate. In February 2005, the Kyoto Protocol came into force—binding over 170 countries in action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, accepted by most informed commentators to be the principal cause of anthropogenically forced climate change. In the same year, the G8 group of countries at Gleneagles, Scotland, considered climate change as a key agenda item. Significantly, it set up a forum for discussion with other countries and the emerging economies. The forum, known as the ‘Dialogue on Climate Change, Clean Energy and Sustainable Development’ met for the first time in November 2005. However, the value of the Kyoto protocol is not universally acknowledged. Some argue that although the science underpinning the existence of climate change and the link with carbon dioxide emissions has become unequivocal, the Kyoto protocol is not appropriate for them. A group of these countries, including the US, China, and India (huge emitters of carbon dioxide in their own right) has agreed the need to tackle climate change. Their approach is to promote clean technology development initiatives; though how exactly that partnership will evolve and deliver new low carbon technologies is not, at the time of writing, clear. Nevertheless, whether via the formalized Kyoto Protocol with carbon dioxide emission reduction targets or via other initiatives, a start has been made on the long, uncertain road to a low carbon world. Slowly, but surely, global action on climate change is gathering momentum. The term ‘greenhouse effect’ was first coined by the French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier in 1827. It enables and sustains a broad balance between solar radiation received and Earth’ s radiation emitted or reflected.
Governing the transition to a new energy economy
Authors: Meadowcroft James
Published: November 2020

Over the next two or three decades a new energy economy should begin to take shape in the developed industrial countries. This will not be a post-fossil fuel economy. But it could be an economy in which non-fossil sources play a more important role; where efficiency in the production, distribution, and use of energy is significantly enhanced; where new storage and carrier technologies are being adopted; and where the fossil sector is being transformed by the imperative of carbon sequestration. Such an energy economy would represent a critical staging post in a much longer transition towards a carbon neutral, low-environmental impact, energy system. The extent to which a new energy economy actually materializes will depend on many factors including the pace and orientation of international economic development, the rate and direction of technological innovation and diffusion, as well as patterns of geo-strategic cooperation and conflict. But there is no doubt the trajectory will be significantly influenced by political decisions and government action on the energy file. This is the issue with which this chapter is concerned. At the moment there are two main political drivers for the move to look beyond oil. First, there are supply concerns. Increasing global demand, production bottlenecks, and political instability have pushed oil prices towards historic highs. Although the oil intensity (oil consumption per unit of GDP) of the OECD economies is less than during the oil crises of the 1970s (IMF, 2005), there is no doubt that the long term economic impact of high oil prices would be considerable. There are also critical issues associated with the geographic distribution of reserves. Production from areas opened up following the turbulence of the early 1970s (such as the North Sea) is peaking. In coming years the United States will be more heavily dependent on imported oil, with an increasing percentage of these imports destined to come from politically volatile areas in the Middle East and Asia. And this presents a serious risk of supply disruption.
Meeting the People
Authors: Zalasiewicz Jan
Published: November 2020

If one has found the ruins of an ancient civilization on a distant planet, and the skeletal remains of some of the civilization-builders amid those ruins, there would follow a flood of questions—if the discoverers possess anything like human levels of curiosity, that is—about just what these beings were like. War-like and aggressive, or peaceful and harmonious? Socially cohesive and communicative, or individualistic? Sedentary or highly mobile? Rational or superstitious? Good or bad . . . What could an impartial observer, coming fresh to such a scene, make of humanity’s actions and habits and motives? It is hard—well, yes, impossible— for us to think through the mind of an extraterrestrial alien. It is hard enough to think through the mind of another human being. In the study of past humanity one might take the example of Stonehenge, a magnificent, geometrically highly ordered structure, designed and constructed by members of our own species with great ingenuity and eff ort. It served, quite obviously, a highly important purpose. But just what was that purpose? All we have is the structure itself, and the archaeological evidence that surrounds it (for there is a stratigraphy too in such studies, of placing physical evidence within a time framework). We have lost all contact with the constructors, for the chain of word-of-mouth history-telling has long been broken, and if any kind of written records were ever produced, none have been unearthed. But this is an artefact of our own species, remember, and there are many potential parallels, in modern and ancient culture, that we can draw on. Yet basic questions about its function continue to be debated. Was it produced for ritualistic purposes, from deeply felt religious motives? Or for purely practical purposes, to do with the organization and management of goods and labour. Or as an awe-inspiring symbol of naked political power? Did the people of those times go there as people go to church today, or as they go down to the pub, or to a wedding, or to the labour exchange or to Buckingham Palace or perhaps to a village council meeting? Or perhaps they went for different reasons at different times: the structure was built and embellished over something like a thousand years, so its function and context may well have evolved.
Eoliths: An Earlier Phase of the Stone Age?
Authors: O'Connor Anne
Published: November 2020

In 1912, Edwin Ray Lankester (1847–1929), a well-regarded zoologist, was introducing some interesting and ancient flints to the academic world at a Royal Society soirée when he spotted Dawkins in the room. The two men started to quarrel over the stones. Soon afterwards, Lankester described the incident to a friend, explaining ‘Dawkins was there and I made him go over them with me’. Dawkins, though now elderly, was still outspoken. He proceeded to attack Lankester’s view that the flints in question were very early tools, arguing that they had not been flaked by human hands. Lankester recalled that Dawkins had ‘idiotically said that such conchoidal fractures as they showcould be produced by pressure’ and had placed the burden of proof on Lankester’s shoulders: ‘Well, unless you can show that these flints could not possibly be produced by natural agencies, I shall refuse to attribute them to man.’ Lankester had responded that this was ‘a preposterous & unscientific attitude’ and further informed Dawkins: ‘neither I nor any one who had studied the subject, attached any importance to his opinion!’ The kind of stones displayed by Lankester in 1912 aroused enthusiasm and irritation in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were claimed as the artefacts of tool-makers who had lived before the Palaeolithic period, in Eolithic times (from the Greek eos: dawn and lithos: stone). Lankester’s flints, which came from East Anglia, belonged to the second major group of eoliths to be discovered in Britain; the first group had been reported from Kent in the 1880s and 1890s. His arguments with Dawkins in the rooms of the Royal Society encapsulate the character of the British eolith debates. Lankester was trying to describe what he thought was an important new Stone-Age industry and was irritated by the suggestion that he should prove they were not produced by natural agencies. Dawkins could see only natural chipping in these stones; neither was convinced by the case of the other and the discussion grew heated. Nowadays, both groups of eoliths are usually regarded as the natural products of geological forces; in these chapters, though, the eoliths will occasionally be described as artefacts to retain the atmosphere of the arguments.
Chronologies of the Early Twentieth Century
Authors: O'Connor Anne
Published: November 2020

Dr Allen Sturge spelled out some of the problems facing researchers who worked on the British Palaeolithic in his first Presidential Address to the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia. For the Drift period, the main task was ‘to ascertain the relative ages of the humanly-worked stones, and the number of the periods concerned’.1 In 1908, when Sturge made this suggestion, he was troubled by suspicions that the French divisions—Chellean, Acheulian, and Mousterian—were too broad to encompass the variety of British tools. He called on the younger school of geologists to help solve the dificulty. A few elderly Wgures, familiar from previous chapters, would accompany Sturge’s younger school of geologists as they worked on various sequences that could give a date to the stone tools of Britain. James Geikie published The Antiquity of Man in Europe in 1914, still defending his sequence of interglacials. 2 Harmer was inspired to take up the glacial researches of his old friend Wood as the twentieth century dawned. The refiection left by the Glacial epoch in East Anglia also led the young geologist Percy Boswell (1886–1960) to consider the connections between boulder clays and Palaeolithic industries. Dawkins continued to promote his classification of Quaternary mammals and to attack Geikie’s views, but two newcomers took a different approach to the palaeontological sequence. Martin A. C. Hinton and Alfred Santer Kennard used the bones of smaller mammals and the shells of molluscs to reconstruct the geological history of the Thames Valley. They maintained the traditional antagonism of palaeontologists towards the theories of glacial geologists by suggesting controversial links between the river drifts and the glacial sequence.3 Meanwhile, Warren, the eolith sceptic, developed his own opinions about the British Palaeolithic sequence and its place in geological time as he worked on Palaeolithic sites around Essex. Several different answers to Sturge’s question about the relative ages of stone tools would be extracted with the help of these sequences of glacial deposits, bones and shells, and river sediments.
Swanscombe: A Standard Stone-Age Sequence for Britain?
Authors: O'Connor Anne
Published: November 2020

In the early twentieth century, Palaeolithic research seemed to be flourishing on the Continent. Commont was carrying out groundbreaking work in the Somme, and rich hauls were being recovered from the reindeer-caves of France and Spain. France could also boast a research centre: the Institute of Human Palaeontology, where Boule, Breuil, and Obermaier held posts. Britain, though, was weighed down by nostalgia: unfavourable contrasts were being drawn between current research and the glorious decades of the past when Evans and Prestwich had brought such renown to British investigations. This apparent loss of impetus was noted abroad. Boule considered the British to have sunk into insularity after 1875, never to regain their early brilliance; in 1912, Breuil remarked at a luncheon party in Cambridge that no one in England knew anything about prehistory. The British Museum’s Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age, published in 1911 at the height of Commont’s work, declared: ‘the French system has now been revised in the light of recent discoveries, and is the basis of all Continental classifications’. It was regretted that the English river drifts had still not received any systematic excavations, and that the implements in these sediments still lay in confusion. This Guide was produced by Reginald Smith of the British Museum under the direction of Charles Hercules Read (1857–1929). In 1912, the same year that Breuil made his disparaging comment, Read arranged for Smith to excavate in one of the most productive Palaeolithic localities of the Thames Valley: Swanscombe village. Smith was assisted by Henry Dewey (1876–1965) of the Geological Survey, but the negotiations that gained Dewey’s help would also reveal differences of opinion between their two respective institutions about the value of Palaeolithic research. The connections drawn by Smith to the Continental sequence after working at Swanscombe would lift the gloom about British backwardness. These connections would also help draw the Palaeolithic and geological sequences closer together.
Disturbances: fires and floods
Authors: Horning Ned , Robinson Julie A. , Sterling Eleanor J. , Turner Woody , Spector Sacha
Published: November 2020

From space, much of Indonesia appeared to be on fire. One of the strongest El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events of the twentieth century had generated drought conditions in the fall of 1997 and early 1998. These conditions, probably in concert with the impacts of logging, resulted in what has been called the largest fire disaster ever observed (Siegert et al. 2001). The powerful 1997–8 ENSO also led to extensive fires in Amazonia. The humid tropics, home to Earth’s greatest concentrations of biodiversity, had long been thought to be fire resistant due to high-moisture levels in the leaf litter and the humidity of the understory. The massive fires of 1997–8 increased our understanding of the complex interactions between fire and humid tropical forests. Since the late 1990s, a new synthesis has emerged linking ENSO events, drought, logging, and fire in the wet tropics. This synthesis has sought to understand the impacts of these phenomena on tropical environments and also explain the role humans play in tropical fires and fire impacts. Remote sensing has been an important tool in forging this new synthesis of understanding. For example, NOAA’s workhorse AVHRR sensor, the SeaWiFS sensor, and NASA’s TOMS instrument were among the satellite tools available to provide imagery of the dramatic events of 1997–8. In this chapter, we discuss the potential for remote sensing to detect, monitor, and increase our understanding of certain disturbance mechanisms affecting ecosystems. We focus on fires and floods, adding shorter sections at the end on two other drivers of disturbance, volcanoes and dams. A key challenge lies in understanding the degree to which logging, even selective logging, is interacting with periodic droughts to drive fires in humid forests. Are humid tropical forests essentially immune to fire unless disturbed by human logging, or have they always been subject to climate-induced droughts and subsequent fires? The answer is crucial in determining our impact on these great storehouses of biodiversity and holds major implications for forest management. Part of the answer lies in looking backward in time.