bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding and Using Statistics
Authors: Cope Lewis
Published: November 2020

A doctor reports a “promising” new treatment. Is the claim believable, or is it based on biased or other questionable data? An environmentalist says a waste dump causes cancer, but an industrialist indignantly denies this. Who's right? Meanwhile, experts keep changing their minds about what we should eat to help us stay healthy. Other experts still debate what did in the dinosaurs. Which scientific studies should you believe? This chapter deals with the use (and sometimes misuse) of statistics. But don't let this S-word panic you. Being a good science writer doesn't require heavy-lifting math. It does require some healthy skepticism, and the ability to ask good questions about various things that can affect research studies and other claims. To separate the probable truth from the probable trash, you need to get answers to these questions: 1. Has a study been done, or is a claim being made on the basis of only limited observations? If a study was done, how was it designed and conducted? 2. What are the numbers? Was the study large enough (did it have enough patients or experiments or whatever) to reach believable conclusions? Are the results statistically significant? That phrase simply means that, based on scientific standards, the statistical results are unlikely to be due to chance alone. 3. Are there other possible explanations for the study's conclusions? 4. Could any form of bias have affected the study's conclusions, unintentional or otherwise? 5. Have the findings been checked by other experts? And how do the findings fit with other research knowledge and beliefs? To find the answers to these questions, we must understand five principles of scientific analysis: Experts keep changing their minds not only about what we should eat to stay healthy but also about what we should do when we get sick. A growing number of drugs and other treatments have been discredited after new research has raised questions about their effectiveness or safety. Even the shape of the universe (more precisely, how astronomers think it's shaped) has changed from one study to another. To some, these and other flip-flops give science a bad name. But this is just part of the normal scientific process, working as it's supposed to work.
Taking Your Story to the Next Level
Authors: Shute Nancy
Published: November 2020

“Don't pick the hard stories, sweetheart,” an editor told me long, long ago. “Those are the ones that will break your heart.” Nonsense, I thought. I was young and ambitious and eager to chase a story through multiple all-nighters. He was old and wily and appreciated those stories that would glide through the copy desk and get him home in time for a glass of scotch and dinner with the family. Now, more than 20 years after getting that good advice, I too appreciate the easy stories. But I'm still trying for the hard ones. Every few years, if I'm lucky, I manage to pull one off. When I do, the small, secret joy of having done so sustains me through months of too-short deadlines and too-tight space. In thinking about what elevates a story from okay to prizewinner, from another day at the office to the top of the clip file, I think again about that long-ago editor, a grizzled veteran of the Saturday Evening Post. Don't try to be different, he said. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Those are the big stories, the ones that matter. And he was right. In covering science and medicine, we're blessed with big stories galore. Cloning, cancer, Mars exploration, anthrax, the Big Bang, climate change, nanotechnology, heart disease—it's birth, death, creation, the meaning of life. If that can't get you on page Ai, what can? But that very abundance, and the flood of data that bears those stories along, make it all too tempting to settle for the easy get—to write off the journals, take your lead from the New York Times, and get by. A great story demands more. I like to think of journalism as bricklaying—a noble craft, but a craft all the same. To build a wall, I need bricks. To build a noble wall, I need the best bricks ever. Facts are the bricks of a story, and finding the right bricks requires serious reporting. I can't say that exhaustive research and reporting will guarantee a great story, but I've never been able to pull one off without it.
Finding a Voice and a Style
Authors: Everett David
Published: November 2020

I once took a graduate course, from a well-published and finely educated writer, on the topic of voice. In the first moments of the class, several of us audaciously asked the instructor to define the term. A few minutes into her answer, I sensed confusion in the classroom. After 10 more minutes of wandering discussion, it became clear that our teacher couldn't handle this most basic query. She knew it when she read it, she said to our amazement, but who could hope to define voice or its literary twin, style? Today, after years of teaching voice myself—and of continuing my own writing—I finally understand my instructor's confusion. While all writers crave an individual style, and while we yearn for a distinctive voice for ourselves or the subjects we profile, those goals remain among our greatest challenges, and even experienced practitioners can retreat into debates over their mystery. Many science writers also must contend with journalistic precepts that subjugate or even eliminate individual style. In this chapter I review the complications and examine the tools of voice and style, concluding with exercises that should help writers identify and hone their own. When writers for the New York Times or the Modern Language Association or the New England Journal of Medicine talk of style, they often mean the strict rules of spelling, punctuation, abbreviation, and other usage as set forth in hallowed style manuals. Style is also used, more colloquially, to describe writing according to purpose or profession: academic, scientific, journalistic, digital, bureaucratic, literary, postmodern, and so forth. For academics, style has classical roots in Aristotle, Cicero, and that granddaddy of Rhetoric, Hermogenes, who rated style as grand, middle, or plain. Writer Ben Yagoda, in his The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (2004), defines style as how a writer “uses language to forge or reflect an attitude toward the world.” For the purpose of this chapter, let's define voice as a writer's personality on the page. Style is the personality imposed on our writing by outside rules and/or our own techniques and mindset. Voice is an individual writing personality, whether distinctively our own, one we recount or create, or, sometimes inescapably, both.
Large Newspapers
Authors: Hotz Robert Lee
Published: November 2020

It was a nice rock, as rocks go—a substantial chip of rose-colored quartz gleaming with flecks of crystal—but not the sort of stone that might grace a starlet's ring finger. Even so, curators at the American Museum of Natural History in New York had given it the kind of showroom treatment Tiffany's might lavish on its rarest diamond solitaire: a special exhibit case, dramatic spot lighting, and even a name designed to stir the imaginations of onlookers. The rock was a 350,000-year-old hand ax. The Spanish archaeologists who discovered it called it Excalibur. And they claimed it was the earliest known evidence of the dawn of the modern human mind. Found among the skeletal remains of 27 primitive men, women, and children, the ax might be the earliest known funeral offering, its discoverers contended. If so, it was 250,000 years older than any other evidence that such early human species honored their dead. As a reporter, I was in a bind. Discovery of the rock offered an opportunity—the potential news hook—for a fascinating story. But it posed a series of thorny questions that I had to resolve before I could, in good conscience, publish a story about the find. They are the questions that arise with every newsworthy scientific development. They center on the validity of the work, its importance to the general public, and whether independent scientists can vouch for it. There also are practical considerations. How much of a reporter's time is it worth? How quickly can the story be turned around? Is there enough material for a graphic? Can we get a photograph? How much space does it deserve? Does it have a chance of getting on page one? The claim being made by the Spanish archaeologists was certainly provocative and, no doubt, sincere. But how reliable was it? The study of human origins is a field defined by the paucity of evidence and conflicting scientific claims. As one distinguished paleo-anthropologist told me wryly, “The dividing line between reality and paleo-fantasy is very narrow.” Acting as a gatekeeper to sort the sense from scientific nonsense, a science writer ordinarily can spend almost as much time chasing down a misleading claim as publicizing valid work.
The Science Essay
Authors: Kanigel Robert
Published: November 2020

The essay is a genre-buster. Nonfiction genres—article, book review, memoir, news report—form a kind of taxonomy, like that a biologist imposes on the animal kingdom, or an astronomer on celestial objects. Yet the essay is a genre that subverts the idea of genre. It's not news. It bears a personal stamp, demanding something of the writer's insights, experiences, or idiosyncratic take. But once past these slim criteria, to call it “essay” says precious little about it. The science essay can be formal, even stately, as in Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy's long, sustained argument on climate change, originally presented as a lecture. It can be amusing, as in Alan Lightman's reminiscence of how a failed college electronics project made him, a budding physicist, an ex-experimentalist. It can suffocate with language, as in Richard Selzer's sense-rich explorations of anatomy in “Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery” (1976). . . . I sing of skin, layered fine as baklava, whose colors shame the dawn, at once the scabbard upon which is writ our only signature, and the instrument by which we are thrilled, protected, and kept constant in our natural place. . . . It can deal with life and death, the cosmos and infinity. Or it can be a slight thing, as in an elegy for the slide rule that I wrote around the time the pocket calculator was supplanting it: . . . Long nights spent working physics and chemistry problems would reveal each rule's mechanical idiosyncrasies, the points in its travel where the slide slipped smoothly and those where it snagged. No two rules were alike. Borrow a friend's—same brand, same model, perhaps purchased minutes apart at the student bookstore—and you'd feel vaguely ill at ease. It wasn't yours: The rough spots were different. . . . The science essay can be spartan and simple. Or it can delightfully digress, as Stephen Jay Gould's so often did. “To the undiscerning eye,” Gould wrote once, barnacles are “as boring as rivets.” . . . This is largely attributable to the erroneous impression that they don't go anywhere and don't do anything, ever. The truth of the matter is that they don't go anywhere and don't do anything merely sometimes—and that, other times, barnacle life is punctuated with adventurous travel, phantasmagorical transformations, valiant struggles, fateful decisions, and eating. . . .
Infectious Diseases
Authors: Chase Marilyn
Published: November 2020

Every story of an infectious disease outbreak contains many stories, each illuminating a different aspect of this powerful intersection between people and medical science. There is the patient's story, of a body under assault by microscopic invaders, and a struggle to recover and live. There is the germ's story, of how a bacterium or a virus spreads from its refuge in nature to invade the bodies of animals or people, traveling through the blood, settling in organs, and wreaking cellular havoc. There are the laboratory dramas, of masked or space-suited researchers growing and analyzing germs to identify, to characterize their habits, and finally to find the Achilles heel that enables an effective counterattack. There are the doctors' stories of grasping all available tools to diagnose and treat. When tools are lacking, it's a story about inventing new tools, at first crude and full of side effects, then later more sophisticated tools including targeted drugs and vaccines. There are tales of clinical trials, of researchers who partner with volunteers balancing hope of cure with risk of harm, which also contain undercurrents of ego and altruism. There are the company stories, of corporate officers who take these discoveries and gear up to test, manufacture, distribute, and—of course—profit from drugs or vaccines. There are the regulators' stories, of the Food and Drug Administration's attempts to balance the urgency of a green light for needed treatments with the mandate to uphold safety and meet the Hippocratic requirement to “First, do no harm.” And there are stories of political and financial motives here, as well. These perspectives—personal and political, social and financial—often clash. Some of the most compelling stories involve such conflicts. The global fight against AIDS is rife with clashes between scientific and social goals. One recent conflict is centered on the study of an AIDS treatment that might be used to prevent infection. The drug, called tenofovir, is being tested among people who are unable to or who choose not to avoid exposure to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) by means of condom use, sexual abstinence, or fidelity to one partner who is uninfected.
Human Cloning and Stem Cells
Authors: Hal Stephen S.
Published: November 2020

Of the countless interviews I have conducted with scientists over the years, only once has a question prompted something of a striptease. In December of 1999, I found myself in the elegant parlor of the Union Club in New York City, chatting with a biologist named Leonard Hayflick. Although hardly a household name to the general public, Hayflick is that rare scientist whose name is permanently attached to a biological phenomenon. It is known as the “Hayflick limit,” and it derives from experiments he did in the late 19505 and early 19605 showing that human cells grown in Petri dishes will predictably replicate for a certain number of cell divisions, but then hit a wall and stop dividing. This has obvious implications for cell biology, aging, and immortality (of the in vitro sort), and indeed the Hayflick limit has been the seed around which a spirited biological debate about the biology of aging has swirled, without definitive resolution, for about four decades now. Because of this history, Hayflick has closely followed the recent work on the biology of aging and regenerative medicine, which in turn has made him a front-row spectator in the more recent controversies involving human embryonic stem cell research and “therapeutic cloning.” At the time of my conversation with Hayflick, his longtime friend Michael West was attempting to obtain human embryonic stem cells through cloning—in a particularly controversial way, by putting human cells into egg cells from ... cows. Almost as an aside, I asked Hayflick what he thought about West's experiments. Hayflick replied by rolling up his pants leg. He bared enough skin to be able to point out a tiny dimple on his right knee. “The human cells he's using for the cow work came from here,” he said. I had to stand up and lean over to see it, but there was undeniably a tiny divot in Hayflick's skin. The implications were stunning: Leonard Hayflick, the father of cellular senescence and one of the elder statesmen of gerontology, was allowing himself, in a manner of speaking, to be cloned. In addition to making the obvious point that even the most innocuous question can elicit a startling answer, Hayflick's reply offered another lesson, too: that colorful characters can provide a narrative thread for bringing a controversy to life.
Corporate Public Relations
Authors: Glick Marion E.
Published: November 2020

Public relations is not just sending out a press release or invitations to an event. It is the profession of managing communications between an organization and its audiences. As a public relations professional, you develop and execute communications programs that consider and support such corporate goals as reputation, the selling of products or services, recruitment of employees, or encouragement of investments. You can do this as an in-house professional at the company or as a client service if you work in an agency. If you want to apply your science journalism skills to corporate public relations, they will be highly prized by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, technology, and related companies. You not only comprehend the facts about environmental, physical, or life sciences, you can make them understandable to others. You can accurately and efficiently translate the function and value of a product or service to audiences as varied as customers, stockholders, regulators, and journalists, all of whom have different levels of scientific understanding. But being savvy about the scientific process and journalism is not enough. You also have to understand the business. Yes, it is about the money or, rather, commercial decision-making. To do your job well, you must know how the company makes money, who runs the show, who are the customers, how the business will grow, how it is regulated, and who are the existing or potential partners and competitors. And you should know these aspects as well as you know the company's research and development pipeline, patents, or marketed products or services. As someone who made the transition from managing public relations about medical research for academic and governmental organizations to that of Pharmaceuticals and biotechs, I can say that mastering “the business stuff” is possible. Many excellent resources are available, but start by skimming business magazines, checking out Hoover's Online (www.hoovers.com), and reading the annual reports of your company or clients. To manage corporate public relations, you need a program, which is the blueprint that captures the vision and the means to obtain it. Programs are very structured and have goals, objectives, strategies, and measurable tactics to achieve them.
The Phase Transition in the Random HornSAT Problem
Authors: Demopoulos Demetrios D. , Vardi Moshe Y.
Published: November 2020

This chapter presents a study of the satisfiability of random Horn formulas and a search for a phase transition. In the past decade, phase transitions or sharp thresholds, have been studied intensively in combinatorial problems. Although the idea of thresholds in a combinatorial context was introduced as early as 1960 [147], in recent years it has been a major subject of research in the communities of theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and statistical physics. As is apparent throughout this volume, phase transitions have been observed in numerous combinatorial problems, both for the probability that an instance of a problem has a solution and for the computational cost of solving an instance. In a few cases (2-SAT, 3-XORSAT, 1-in-k SAT) the existence and location of these phase transitions have also been formally proven [7, 94, 101, 131, 156, 202]. The problem at the center of this research is that of 3-satisfiability (3-SAT). An instance of 3-SAT consists of a conjunction of clauses, where each clause is a disjunction of three literals. The goal is to find a truth assignment that satisfies all clauses. The density of a 3-S AT instance is the ratio of the number of clauses to the number of Boolean variables. We call the number of variables the size of the instance. Experimental studies [110, 395, 397, 466, 469] have shown that there is a shift in the probability of satisfiability of random 3-S AT instances, from 1 to 0, located at around density 4.27 (this is also called the crossover point}. So far, in spite of much progress in obtaining rigorous bounds on the threshold location, highlighted in the previous chapters, there is no mathematical proof of a phase transition taking place at that density [1, 132, 177]. Experimental studies also show a peak of the computational complexity around the crossover point. In Kirkpatrick and Selman [319], finite-size scaling techniques were used to suggest a phase transition at the crossover point. Later, in Coafra et al. [96], experiments showed that a phase transition of the running time from polynomial in the instance size to exponential is solver-dependent, and for several different solvers this transition occurs at a density lower than the crossover point.
Combinatorics of Genotype-Phenotype Maps: An RNA Case Study
Authors: Reidys Christian M.
Published: November 2020

The fundamental mechanisms of biological evolution have fascinated generations of researchers and remain popular to this day. The formulation of such a theory goes back to Darwin (1859), who in the The Origin of Species presented two fundamental principles: genetic variability caused by mutation, and natural selection. The first principle leads to diversity and the second one to the concept of survival of the fittest, where fitness is an inherited characteristic property of an individual and can basically be identified with its reproduction rate. Wright [530, 531] first recognized the importance of genetic drift in evolution in improving the evolutionary search capacity of the whole population. He viewed genetic drift merely as a process that could improve evolutionary search. About a decade later, Kimura proposed [317] that the majority of changes that are observed in evolution at the molecular level are the results of random drift of genotypes. The neutral theory of Kimura does not deny that selection plays a role, but claims that no appreciable fraction of observable molecular change can be caused by selective forces: mutations are either a disadvantage or, at best, neutral in present day organisms. Only negative selection plays a major role in the neutral evolution, in that deleterious mutants die out due to their lower fitness. Over the last few decades, there has been a shift of emphasis in the study of evolution. Instead of focusing on the differences in the selective value of mutants and on population genetics, interest has moved to evolution through natural selection as an abstract optimization problem. Given the tremendous opportunities that computer science and the physical sciences now have for contributing to the study of biological phenomena, it is fitting to study the evolutionary optimization problem in the present volume. In this chapter, we adopt the following framework: assuming that selection acts exclusively upon isolated phenotypes, we introduce the following compositum of mappings . . . Genotypes→ Phenotypes →Fitness . . . . We will refer to the first map as to the genotype-phenotype map and call the preimage of a given phenotype its neutral network. Clearly, the main ingredients here are the phenotypes and genotypes and their respective organization. In the following we will study various combinatorial properties of phenotypes and genotypes for RNA folding maps.
What are the catastrophic risks, and how catastrophic are they?
Authors: Posner Richard A.
Published: November 2020

The number of extreme catastrophes that have a more than negligible probability of occurring in this century is alarmingly great, and their variety startling. I want to describe them and in doing so make clear the importance of understanding what science is doing and can do and where it is leading us. I begin with the natural catastrophes and move from there to the man-made ones, which I divide into three groups: scientific accidents, other unintended man-made catastrophes, and intentional catastrophes. The 1918–1919 flu pandemic is a reminder that nature may yet do us in. The disease agent was an unexpectedly lethal variant of the commonplace flu virus. Despite its lethality, it spread far and wide because most of its victims did not immediately fall seriously ill and die, so they were not isolated from the healthy population but instead circulated among the healthy, spreading the disease. No one knows why the 1918–1919 pandemic was so lethal, although it may have been due to a combination of certain features of the virus’s structure with the crowding of troops in the trenches and hospitals on the Western Front (where the pandemic appears to have originated near the end of World War I), facilitating the spread of the disease. The possibility cannot be excluded that an even more lethal flu virus than that of the 1918–1919 pandemic will appear someday and kill many more people. There is still no cure for flu, and vaccines may be ineffective against a new mutant strain—and the flu virus is notable for its high rate of mutations. Another great twentieth-century pandemic, AIDS, which has already killed more than 20 million people, illustrates the importance to the spread of a disease of the length of the infectious incubation period. The longer a person is infected and infectious yet either asymptomatic or insufficiently ill to be isolated from the healthy population, the farther the disease will spread before effective measures, such as quarantining, are taken.
Computations by Means of Macroscopic Chemical Kinetics
Authors: Ross John , Schreiber Igor , Vlad Marcel O.
Published: November 2020

The topic of this chapter may seem like a digression from methods and approaches to reaction mechanisms, but it is not; it is an introduction to it. We worked on both topics for some time and there is a basic connection. Think of an electronic device and ask: how are the logic functions of this device determined? Electronic inputs (voltages and currents) are applied and outputs are measured. A truth table is constructed and from this table the logic functions of the device, and at times some of its components, may be inferred. The device is not subjected to the approach toward a chemical mechanism described in the previous chapter, of taking the device apart and testing its simplest components. (That may have to be done sometimes but is to be avoided if possible.) Can such an approach be applicable to chemical systems? We show this to be the case by discussing the implementation of logic and computational devices, both sequential machines such as a universal Turing machine (hand computers, laptops) and parallel machines, by means of macroscopic kinetics; by giving a brief comparison with neural networks; by showing the presence of such devices in chemical and biochemical reaction systems; and by presenting some confirming experiments. The next step is clear: if macroscopic chemical kinetics can carry out these electronic functions, then there are likely to be new approaches possible for the determination of complex reaction mechanisms, analogs of such determinations for electronic components. The discussion in the remainder of this chapter is devoted to illustrations of these topics; it can be skipped, except the last paragraph, without loss of continuity with chapter 5 and beyond. A neuron is either on or off depending on the signals it has received. A chemical neuron is a similar device.
Mini-Introduction to Bioinformatics
Authors: Ross John , Schreiber Igor , Vlad Marcel O.
Published: November 2020

There is enormous interest in the biology of complex reaction systems, be it in metabolism, signal transduction, gene regulatory networks, protein synthesis, and many others. The field of the interpretation of experiments on such systems by application of the methods of information science, computer science, and biostatistics is called bioinformatics (see for a presentation of this subject). Part of it is an extension of the chemical approaches that we have discussed for obtaining information on the reaction mechanisms of complex chemical systems to complex biological and genetic systems. We present here a very brief introduction to this field, which is exploding with scientific and technical activity. No review is intended, only an indication of several approaches on the subject of our book, with apologies for the omission of vast numbers of publications. A few reminders: The entire complement of DNA molecules constitute the genome, which consists of many genes. RNA is generated from DNA in a process called transcription; the RNA that codes for proteins is known as messenger RNA, abbreviated tomRNA. Other RNAs code for functional molecules such as transfer RNAs, ribosomal components, and regulatory molecules, or even have enzymatic function. Protein synthesis is regulated by many mechanisms, including that for transcription initiation, RNA splicing (in eukaryotes), mRNA transport, translation initiation, post-translational modifications, and degradation of mRNA. Proteins perform perhaps most cellular functions. Advances in microarray technology, with the use of cDNA or oligonucleotides immobilized in a predefined organization on a solid phase, have led to measurements of mRNA expression levels on a genome-wide scale (see chapter 3). The results of the measurements can be displayed on a plot on which a row represents one gene at various times, a column the whole set of genes, and the time of gene expression is plotted along the axis of rows. The changes in expression levels, as measured by fluorescence, are indicated by colors, for example green for decreased expression, black for no change in expression, and red for increased expression. Responses in expression levels have been measured for various biochemical and physiological conditions. We turn now to a few methods of obtaining information on genomic networks from microarray measurements.
Introduction
Authors: Harris James C.
Published: November 2020

The aim of this book is to provide professionals with the latest and most reliable information on intellectual disability and associated impairments. It utilizes a developmental perspective and reviews the various types of intellectual disability, discusses approaches to classification, diagnosis, and appropriate interventions, and provides information on resources that may offer additional help. The term “intellectual disability” is used throughout this book instead of “mental retardation” to reflect current perspectives. Intellectual disability refers to impairments in both cognitive functioning and adaptive skills whose onset is during the developmental period. It is a developmental, intellectual, and cognitive disability. Although the term “mental retardation” continues to be used in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and DSM-IVTR, the continued use of this designation has been questioned because it implies a static, unchanging condition rather than one that can change over time. Other terms, such as “mental handicap” and “learning disability,” have also been used. These variations in terminology are derived from long-standing concerns about the stigma of applying the term “mental retardation” to individuals. A more general term applied to individuals with intellectual disability is “mental disability.” The World Health Organization and the United Nations generally use the term “mental disability” as a broad descriptor, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in the Olmstead decision emphasizing the importance of community living, also used the term “mental disability.” The definition of “mental retardation” has changed nine times over the past 100 hundred years in the United States. Such changes in nomenclature come about with the acquisition of new knowledge regarding causes and efforts to preserve the dignity of persons who are intellectually disabled. Reflecting this new knowledge and concerns about the stigma sometimes associated with the term, on July 25, 2003, the name of the federal advisory committee, the President’s Committee on Mental Retardation (PCMR), was changed to the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities (PCPID). Because the name designates the committee that advises the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the President on federal policy regarding programs and services, the change is noteworthy.
The Age of Construction
Authors: Hough Susan Elizabeth , Bilham Roger G.
Published: November 2020

As the human population of our planet rises to hitherto unprecedented levels, we find ourselves wondering whether the half-century from 1990 to 2040 might be remembered not so much as the age when the oil ran out, as the age of construction. Never before have we built so many dwellings, roads, dams, and civic structures than will be constructed during the span of this half-century. A little reflection suggests that in our (allegedly) highly evolved society, with our sophisticated knowledge of the forces of nature and the strengths of materials, we would be stupid to commit the unforgivable sin of knowingly constructing buildings that will crush and maim our descendants. Yet in many parts of the world this is indeed what we are doing. Homo sapiens decided long ago to live in houses. Other animals do it, but rarely do they build such precarious structures as do humans. The nests of birds are woven to be resilient, mammals and reptiles live in caves selected for their permanence, burrows are dug by animals content with the knowledge that a little more burrowing is all that’s needed to keep the walls in place, or the driveway clear. Only humans spend at least eight hours of every turn of the planet within a dwelling assembled from a variety of materials that are often close to the point of structural failure, and often without considering the consequences of constructing permanent dwellings in regions subject to geologically extreme events. The shift from Homo the hunter-gatherer to Homo urbanensis means that many of the remaining 16 hours of each day are spent in another structure, more often than not also assembled with an eye on thrift —maximum volume for minimum cost. Even the journey to and from these different structures can expose humans to seismic risks—as is evident from the collapse of bridges and overpasses in recent earthquakes. The damage done by an earthquake is caused by shaking, either directly or indirectly (via landslides, etc.). Shaking involves accelerations: the rate at which speed changes or, in qualitative terms, what can be thought of as “jerkiness.”
Introduction
Authors: Bauder Harald
Published: November 2020

Imagine, if you will, that, on the same day, all migrants and immigrants decide to return to their countries of origin. The Filipina nanny would pack her bags and leave the family in Singapore whose children she has been raising. The suburban couple in San Diego would be without their Mexican gardener who worked for less than five dollars an hour. Italian farmers would find the fruit rotting on their trees because their cheap migrant workers left the orchard. New York’s manufacturing sector would collapse because a large portion of the workforce is absent. Worse, Wall Street would be closed because cleaners, security guards, office staff, and taxi drivers are unavailable. Many sectors of the economy in industrialized countries would come to an immediate standstill. The rest of the economy would follow within days, if not hours. Although not your typical doomsday scenario, this hypothetical example illustrates that our economy depends on the labor of often “invisible” international migrants. Labor Movement pursues the idea that the international movement of people lies at the heart of regulating today’s economies, or more precisely, labor markets. “If you build it, they will come,” the saying goes. Industrialized countries have built powerful economies that depend on a disciplined labor force. They have become a magnet for international migrants willing to satisfy this demand for labor. However, the stream of migration to the industrialized world is relatively unaffected by cyclical fluctuations in national labor markets. In the United States, for example, immigration streams steadily persist, independent of the condition of the economy and whether labor is in general demand or not (Camarota 2003). Despite increasing evidence of the autonomy of immigration flows relative to market conditions, the view that economic processes produce international migration continues to dominate public and academic debate. Critics, however, have questioned whether migration is indeed as market-driven as the dominating narrative suggests. Michael Piore (1979: 8), for example, states, “Income is not the critical analytical variable” in explaining international migration patterns. A less common view turns the conventional relationship between economic processes and migration on its head.
Capital and Distinction
Authors: Bauder Harald
Published: November 2020

Early approaches to labor market segmentation focused on either demand- or supply-side processes (e.g., Ashton and Maguire 1984; Gordon et al. 1982; Reich et al. 1973). Work and social reproduction, however, are not independent spheres of human life and should not be separated into independent analytical categories. Recent scholarship on the segmentation of immigrant labor has begun treating labor markets as a multidimensional process involving the interaction of economic, social, and cultural practices. Michael Samers (1998), for example, has shown in his research that labor demand, citizenship, and policies on immigration and education are interlocking components of the segmentation of labor. In this chapter, I show how Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas of capital and habitus can be applied to the structuring of labor markets. Because labor markets are socially regulated, social theories, such as those developed by Bourdieu, can help us understand the relationship between migration and the labor market. Bourdieu’s ideas contribute an important cultural perspective to this relationship. My aim in this chapter is thus to present a coherent outline of this cultural perspective. The work of Pierre Bourdieu has been enormously influential in the social sciences over the past decades. His ideas have found widespread application in almost every research topic imaginable. Bourdieu’s own career stretched over several decades, beginning with early research in Algeria in the 1950s and ending with his death in January 2002. It would be impossible to give a full account of his work in this chapter. I therefore limit my discussion to his treatment of habitus and capital, extending the notion of capital to the context of citizenship. Although I already discussed citizenship at some length in the previous chapter, this discussion stopped short of revealing how citizenship can act as a form of capital that complements other types of capital. For Bourdieu, capital is about social reproduction. In this respect, citizenship and other social and cultural processes of distinction—as practices of social reproduction—link to international migration and the social regulation of labor markets. The chapter is organized into four sections.
Cultural Judgments
Authors: Bauder Harald
Published: November 2020

No one would seriously argue that South Asian men drive taxis because of their navigational superiority or that South Asian women are preternaturally inclined to sew. However, cultural representations of a more subtle nature are a common ideological tool to organize the labor market and match immigrants with particular jobs. Stereotypical perceptions of the cultural characteristics of immigrant workers can typecast immigrants into certain occupations. Yet, cultural labor market processes typically involve more than stereotypes. They include processes of social and cultural distinction aimed at reproducing prevailing labor market structures. In other words, the subordination of immigrants in the labor market elevates nonimmigrants into a position of relative superiority. Cultural judgments differ from the processes involving norms and conventions discussed in the previous chapter. The latter relate to internal, group-particular structures of engagement and prioritization that guide the behavior of immigrants. The former, on the other hand, involve the external representation of immigrants by nonimmigrants. Though conceptually distinct, the two processes are related in the manner in which they occur in the everyday. Group-particular norms and conventions often provide the basis for critical judgment by people outside the group. Emphasizing processes of cultural judgment links the segmentation of immigrant labor to the forces of social reproduction. It does not simply attribute segmentation to the characteristics of immigrants themselves. The focus in this chapter is on representation of embodied cultural markers and performances, such as clothing and speech patterns. I use the example of South Asian immigrants to examine how exactly these characteristics relate to the segmentation of immigrant labor. The human body can be seen “as a surface of inscription” (McDowell and Sharpe 1997: 3) that is subject to the reading and interpretation of employers and other labor market actors. It creates distinct labor market identities for South Asian immigrants that imply a special suitability for certain occupations. For example, one respondent remarked that the concierge of the office building in which she worked as a consultant asked her to sign the janitor’s book every day. Office workers are usually not asked to sign this book.
Institutionalized Labor Devaluation
Authors: Bauder Harald
Published: November 2020

At the 2004 Law and Diversity Conference in Toronto on the accreditation of foreign-trained immigrants in Canada, speaker Naomi Alboim called Canadian immigration policy “one of seduction and abandonment.” Seduction because skilled workers are selected as immigrants based on their high levels of education and experience, which leads them to expect that they will be able to apply these skills and experience in the Canadian labor market. Abandonment because, once in Canada, the immigrant workers receive little help with the accreditation of their education and professional certification, preventing them from applying their skills. Immigrants in regulated trades and professions such as the electrical trade, engineering, law, medicine, nursing, and teaching often lose access to the occupations they previously held—an effect commonly known as “deskilling.” The abandonment of immigrants is not simply the result of inadvertent neglect and the failure of policy. It can also be interpreted as a systematic process of distinction and subordination. By excluding many skilled, foreign-trained immigrants from high-status occupations in Canada, the regulation of educational and professional credentials enables domestic-educated workers to dominate these occupations. The level of education among Canadian immigrants has steadily increased since the 1950s (Akabari 1999). Nevertheless, immigrants have failed to benefit from their educational attainments and have lower returns on their education than Canadian-born workers (Reitz 2001a, 2001b). Level of education, in fact, fails as an accurate predictor of labor market performance among immigrants (E. N. Thompson 2000). Similarly, the benefits immigrants receive for foreign work experience have deteriorated. In the 1960s, one year of foreign work experience was rewarded with an average 1.5 percent increase in earnings for immigrants. By the late 1990s, this wage increase dropped to only 0.3 percent (Statistics Canada 2004: 5). Furthermore, skilled immigrants require an increasing amount of time to catch up with the wages of Canadian workers with similar skills and education, if they catch up at all (Ley 1999). These national trends also apply to immigrants in Vancouver. Three-fourths of all immigrant professionals from India who settled in Vancouver experienced occupational downward mobility after their arrival in Canada.
Citizenship and Legal Classification
Authors: Bauder Harald
Published: November 2020

“Tell me under which paragraph you arrive, and I’ll tell you who you are!” These words explain how a community worker who helps immigrants settle in one of Berlin’s eastern suburbs assesses the issues confronting her newly arriving clients. Legal status categories are a defining factor in the eligibility for services and access to employment. This interviewee’s clients, all Spätaussiedler, are admitted to Germany under different paragraphs of German law. Paragraph 4 (of the Bundesvertriebenengesetz) indicates to the community worker that immigrants are eligible for the formal recognition of their foreign work experience; paragraph 7 (of the Staatangehörigkeitsgesetz) signifies that the immigrant is an immediate relative of a paragraph 4 Spätaussiedler and is entitled to government- sponsored language training but ineligible for recognition of work experience; and paragraph 8 (of the Bundesvertriebenengesetz) defines other family members who are not eligible for either the recognition of their work experience nor language training and are essentially treated as foreigners. This example illustrates how immigrants are being legally classified, permitting their differential treatment. Legal criteria slot immigrants into a hierarchy of status categories that not only provide different levels of access to services but also determine the level of access to the labor market. Although one could debate the underlying philosophical legitimacy of classifying immigrants in this manner, a political economy perspective sheds a revealing light on the function of this particular immigration scheme. Workers in each status category fulfill distinct roles in the German labor market. The web of legal definitions and policies for immigrants is thus an important component in the regulation of the German labor market. Germany has long maintained stringent regulations that limit labor market access to immigrants. Citizenship has been a particularly useful mechanism for dividing the immigrant population, generating a hierarchy of administrative categories and creating different labor market circumstances for each category. Germany not only distinguishes between Germans and non-Germans, but it also differentiates between Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler, European Union nationals, and immigrants of other nationalities. It imposes different sets of regulations on each of these groups.