bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Smallpox Eradication in Mexico
Authors: Agostoni Claudia
Published: May 2016

The control and eradication of smallpox have been among the most studied and chronicled topics in histories of health and medicine, which is not coincidental considering the dramatic nature of the disease, the official measures developed to deal with it, and the declaration in 1980 by the World Health Organization of its global eradication. Smallpox first erupted in Mexico-Tenochtitlán in 1520 during the Spanish conquest, and in 1952 the health authorities and the federal government declared that that long-feared disease had finally been eradicated there. Numerous historical studies have perpetuated the image of a single smallpox campaign in Mexico, free from conflicts, problems, and inertia. Recent scholarship, however, has increasingly emphasized that smallpox vaccination efforts were not homogenous or consistent, that they were not pursued equally in all geographic and cultural regions, and that vaccination strategies and campaigns gradually became less coercive and more selective and persuasive.
Social Movements in Late 20th-Century Ecuador and Bolivia
Authors: Becker Marc
Published: May 2016

Both Ecuador and Bolivia have gained a reputation for powerful social movements that have repeatedly challenged entrenched political and economic interests that have controlled the countries since their independence from Spain almost two hundred years ago. A wealthy and powerful minority of European descendant landowners ruled the countries to the exclusion of the majority population of impoverished Indigenous farm workers. Repeated well-organized challenges to exclusionary rule in the late 20th century shifted policies and opened political spaces for previously marginalized people. Social movement organizations also altered their language to meet new realities, including incorporating identities as ethnic groups and Indigenous nationalities to advance their agenda. Their efforts contributed to a significant leftward shift in political discourse that led to the election of presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa.
Quechua
Authors: Durston Alan
Published: May 2016

The Quechua languages are spoken today by several million people in the Andes Mountains and adjacent lowlands, from northwestern Argentina to southwestern Colombia. Quechua historical sources and scholarship, are heavily concentrated in the southern Peruvian Andes. While key aspects of Quechua’s early history remain unclear, both Inca and Spanish rule appear to have resulted in the spread of varieties of Quechua. Large regions of the Andes, including urban areas and nonindigenous social strata, were almost entirely Quechua speaking well into the 20th century. “Quechua” embraces a tremendous diversity of dialects, sociolects, and contexts of use, and it has experienced surprising transformations over time. Its post-conquest history cannot be envisioned in terms of gradual decline; there have been retreats but also resurgences, and losses in one arena have been offset by gains in another.
Digital Resources: The H-LatAm Listserv
Authors: Schwaller John
Published: May 2016

H-LatAm, short for History-Latin America, is an electronic list that has served the scholarly community since the late 20th century as a forum in which important issues facing Latin American history can be debated. It has served as a means of spreading information about publications, a channel for soliciting research and research collaborations, and an instrument that links historians of Latin America who are spread throughout the world. A review of this resource allows for a look at the history of Latin American studies on the Internet—useful for understanding and researching early threads—and some of the specific contributions of H-LatAm to the profession.
Digital Resources: Social Media, Gender, and the Electronic Music Scene in São Paulo
Authors: Polivanov Beatriz
Published: May 2016

Women occupy few professional roles in electronic music scenes worldwide. In Brazil, and particularly in the city of São Paulo, female collectives have been playing an important role in raising awareness and trying to change this scenario in recent years. In order to do so, they appropriate social media as communication tools, which become relevant digital resources. Mamba Negra was founded in 2013, and was initially organized by Carolina Schutzer and Laura Diaz. They are part of a cultural movement that seeks to occupy São Paulo’s underused public spaces for festivities that embrace especially the female, queer, and black communities. Their name is that of a dangerous snake from Africa (Dendroaspis polylepis). Their considerable number of supporters is concentrated on their Facebook fan page, which had more than 38,000 followers as of April 11, 2019. The page was created on August 27, 2013. Since its origin, the page aims at sharing multimedia content related to the collective’s activities, such as events (mostly performances and parties), their online radio show, and photos and videos from specific artists.

Bandida Coletivo is a collective of female DJs, event and music producers, photographers, and graphic artists that was created in 2016 with the aim of building safe spaces for women within the electronic music scene, not only to experiment with their art, but also to obtain more visibility and professional participation in events. Their name can be translated as “Female Bandit Collective,” and they are especially addressed to an audience of women from the outskirts of São Paulo. Their Instagram profile, @bandidacoletivo, is their preferred outlet in social media. It was created in December 2016 and had almost 2,400 followers as of April 24, 2019. It is filled with pictures and videos from different events they promote, such as parties and workshops, and their DJs’ performances.
Digital Resources: Mesolore, a History, 1995–2015
Authors: Bakewell Liza , Hamann Byron Ellsworth
Published: May 2016

Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Culture is a variously incarnated bilingual resource for teaching and research on indigenous Mesoamerica. The project’s first iteration began in the late 20th century, when its authors developed a CD-ROM/Internet hybrid and released it on two discs in 2001. This version of the project centered on three interactive primary-source Ñudzavui documents from Oaxaca, Mexico: the prehispanic Codex Nuttall, the Codex Selden (c. 1560), and the Mixtec Vocabulario of Francisco de Alvarado (1593). Ten tutorials on Ñudzavui writing and culture, three introductory video lectures, an interdisciplinary gallery of scholarly portraits, four audio debates, and an atlas supported these core materials.

The explosion of broadband Internet at the dawn of the 21st century suddenly made it possible to deliver Mesolore’s high-resolution images and multimedia content online—and simultaneously sounded the death-knell for the CD-ROM as a medium. The second phase of the project therefore worked to gather funding for an online reincarnation and expansion of the project’s core content to include three documents from Nahua Central Mexico: the Matrícula de Tributos (c. 1519), the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (c. 1552), and the Nahua vocabulary of Alonso de Molina (1555). Like their Oaxacan predecessors, these three documents were supported by ten tutorials. Also new for the online relaunch was an archive of hundreds of primary-source alphabetic documents transcribed from physical archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. In addition the authors and designers redesigned Mesolore’s atlas to allow for better comparison of the geographic scope of the four core pictorial primary sources (the Nuttall, the Selden, the Matrícula, and the Lienzo). After much drama involving funding agencies, incompetent designers, and incompetent programmers, mesolore.org went live late in 2012, just in time for the non-Apocalypse on December 21.

Although Mesolore’s creators now focus on print publications delivered on paper, their efforts to offer democratically accessible, multidisciplinary pedagogical and research materials to any and all users, as well as translate three-dimensional painted manuscripts into the light of computer screens, generated productive inquiry. Furthermore the detailed interpretations of text offered from the outset insights into how those documents communicated visual information at various scales, as well as how the differing scales of their geographical representations connected to 16th-century political claims.
Political Violence and the Left in Latin America, 1967–1979
Authors: Marchesi Aldo
Published: May 2016

In the late 1960s, several leftist political movements in Latin America began to claim the use of political violence as a means of social transformation. This second wave of leftist political violence was distinct from an earlier wave—composed of rural guerillas inspired by the Cuban Revolution, roughly a decade and a half earlier—in several ways. The later proponents of armed struggle emphasized the importance of cities in armed actions, not just rural settings. They also advocated interaction between armed organizations and other actors in social movements, including far-left nationalist and populist factions within traditional political parties and the Catholic Church. Armed action was seen by such groups as a valid response to increasingly repressive governments, and to limitations on political action that made social change through peaceful means impossible. The use of violence provided a way to develop collective action in the hostile environment of the Latin American Cold War, which was marked by extreme political and ideological polarization.
Gothic
Authors: Miller D. Gary
Published: May 2016

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Please check back later for the full article.

Apart from runic inscriptions, Gothic is the earliest attested language of the Germanic family, dating to the 4th century. Along with Crimean Gothic, it belongs to the branch known as East Germanic. The bulk of the extant Gothic corpus is a translation of the Bible, of which only a portion remains. The translation is traditionally ascribed to Wulfila, who is credited with inventing the Gothic alphabet. The many Greek conventions both help and hinder interpretation of the Gothic phonological system. As in Greek, letters of the alphabet functioned as numerals, but the late letter names were from runic.

Gothic inflectional categories include nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Nouns are inflected for three genders, two numbers, and four cases. Various stem types inherited from Indo-European constitute different form classes in Gothic. Adjectives have the same properties and are also inflected according to so-called weak and strong forms, as are Gothic verbs. Verbs are inflected for three persons and numbers, an indicative and a nonindicative mood (here called “optative”), past and nonpast tense, and voice. The mediopassive survives in Gothic morphologically as a synthetic passive and syntactically in innovated periphrastic formations; middle and anticausative functions were taken over by reflexive-type structures. Nonfinite forms are the infinitive, the imperative, and two participles.

In syntax, Gothic had null subjects as an option, mostly in the third person singular. Aspect was effected primarily by prefixes, which have many other functions, and aspect is not consistently indicated. Absolute constructions with a participle occurred in various cases with functional differences. Relativization was effected primarily by relative pronouns built on demonstratives plus a complementizer. Complementizers could be used with subordinate clause verbs in the indicative or optative. The switch to the optative was triggered by irrealis, matrix verbs that do not permit a full range of subordinate tenses, expression of a hope or wish, potentiality, and several other conditions. Many of these are also relevant to matrix clauses (independent optatives).

Essentials of linearization include prepositional phrases, default postposed genitives and possessive adjectives, and preposed demonstratives. Verb-object order predominates, but there is much Greek influence. Verb-auxiliary order is native Gothic.
Articulatory Phonetics
Authors: Huffman Marie K.
Published: May 2016

Articulatory phonetics is concerned with the physical mechanisms involved in producing spoken language. A fundamental goal of articulatory phonetics is to relate linguistic representations to articulator movements in real time and the consequent acoustic output that makes speech a medium for information transfer. Understanding the overall process requires an appreciation of the aerodynamic conditions necessary for sound production and the way that the various parts of the chest, neck, and head are used to produce speech. One descriptive goal of articulatory phonetics is the efficient and consistent description of the key articulatory properties that distinguish sounds used contrastively in language. There is fairly strong consensus in the field about the inventory of terms needed to achieve this goal. Despite this common, segmental, perspective, speech production is essentially dynamic in nature. Much remains to be learned about how the articulators are coordinated for production of individual sounds and how they are coordinated to produce sounds in sequence. Cutting across all of these issues is the broader question of which aspects of speech production are due to properties of the physical mechanism and which are the result of the nature of linguistic representations. A diversity of approaches is used to try to tease apart the physical and the linguistic contributions to the articulatory fabric of speech sounds in the world’s languages. A variety of instrumental techniques are currently available, and improvement in safe methods of tracking articulators in real time promises to soon bring major advances in our understanding of how speech is produced.
Vulnerability as Concept, Model, Metric, and Tool
Authors: Wisner Benjamin
Published: May 2016

Vulnerability is complex because it involves many characteristics of people and groups that expose them to harm and limit their ability to anticipate, cope with, and recover from harm. The subject is also complex because workers in many disciplines such as public health, psychology, geography, and development studies (among others) have different ways of defining, measuring, and assessing vulnerability. Some of these practitioners focus on the short-term identification of vulnerability, so that maps and lists of people living “at risk” can be generated and used by authorities. Others are more concerned with reasons why some people are more vulnerable when facing a hazard or threat than others. Professionals working at the scale of localities are interested in methods that bring out residents’ own knowledge of hazards and help them to cooperate with each other to find ways of reducing risk. There are some interpretations of vulnerability that seek its root cause in the creation of risk by political and economic systems that make investment and locational decisions for the benefit of small elites without regard for how these decisions affect the majority. Finally, whatever success there may be in treating vulnerability in any of the ways just mentioned, it will always be a part of the human condition, and this fact in itself is puzzling.
Remote Sensing and Physical Modeling of Fires, Floods, and Landslides
Authors: Prakash Mahesh , Hilton James , Miller Claire , Lemiale Vincent , Cohen Raymond , Wang Yunze
Published: May 2016

Remotely sensed data for the observation and analysis of natural hazards is becoming increasingly commonplace and accessible. Furthermore, the accuracy and coverage of such data is rapidly improving. In parallel with this growth are ongoing developments in computational methods to store, process, and analyze these data for a variety of geospatial needs. One such use of this geospatial data is for input and calibration for the modeling of natural hazards, such as the spread of wildfires, flooding, tidal inundation, and landslides. Computational models for natural hazards show increasing real-world applicability, and it is only recently that the full potential of using remotely sensed data in these models is being understood and investigated. Some examples of geospatial data required for natural hazard modeling include:

• elevation models derived from RADAR and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) techniques for flooding, landslide, and wildfire spread models

• accurate vertical datum calculations from geodetic measurements for flooding and tidal inundation models

• multispectral imaging techniques to provide land cover information for fuel types in wildfire models or roughness maps for flood inundation studies

Accurate modeling of such natural hazards allows a qualitative and quantitative estimate of risks associated with such events. With increasing spatial and temporal resolution, there is also an opportunity to investigate further value-added usage of remotely sensed data in the disaster modeling context. Improving spatial data resolution allows greater fidelity in models allowing, for example, the impact of fires or flooding on individual households to be determined. Improving temporal data allows short and long-term trends to be incorporated into models, such as the changing conditions through a fire season or the changing depth and meander of a water channel.
Psychological Strategies and Challenges in Disaster Recovery
Authors: Dass-Brailsford Priscilla
Published: May 2016

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Natural Hazard Science. Please check back later for the full article.

Natural disasters have increased dramatically in the twenty-first century. An estimated 217 million people are affected by natural disasters each year. Recent disasters, both nationally and globally, provide insight into how the degree of destruction and number of fatalities can negatively affect survivors. Cultural, political, and geographic factors may increase risk of trauma and negative mental health outcomes. Understanding these risks is critical to helping survivors recover in the aftermath of disasters. Different disasters pose different risks, and some communities are chronically affected. How to support these communities psychologically in the face of ongoing threats of destruction is an important question.

Recent years have also seen major advances in technology that provide new and innovative ways to manage disasters. Technological strategies can be harnessed to better serve the interests of disaster-affected communities. For example, warning times for disasters have increased because of better instrumentation and the ability to send messages sooner to communities that may be in the path of a disaster. These increased warning times may allow for psychological preparation before a disaster that can support positive mental health outcomes in recovery. Demands for evidence-based mental health interventions require an understanding of best practices in disaster response, challenges to past relief efforts, and the strategies and factors that can enhance effective future efforts.
Debris-Flow Risk Assessment
Authors: Jakob Matthias , Holm Kris , McDougall Scott
Published: May 2016

Debris flows are one of the most destructive landslide processes worldwide, given their ubiquity in mountainous areas occupied by human settlement or industrial facilities around the world. Given the episodic nature of debris flows, these hazards are often un- or under-recognized.

Three fundamental components of debris-flow risk assessments include frequency-magnitude analysis, numerical scenario modeling, and consequence analysis to estimate the severity of damage and loss. Recent advances in frequency-magnitude analysis take advantage of developments in methods to estimate the age of deposits and size of past and potential future events. Notwithstanding, creating reliable frequency-magnitude relationships is often challenged by practical limitations to investigate and statistically analyze past debris-flow events that are often discontinuous, as well as temporally and spatially censored. To estimate flow runout and destructive potential, several models are used worldwide. Simple empirical models have been developed based on statistical geometric correlations, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional numerical models are commercially available. Quantitative risk assessment (QRA) methods for assessing public safety were developed for the nuclear industry in the 1970s and have been applied to landslide risk in Hong Kong starting in 1998. Debris-flow risk analyses estimate the likelihood of a variety of consequences. Quantitative approaches involve prediction of the annual probability of loss of life to individuals or groups and estimates of annualized economic losses. Recent progress in quantitative debris-flow risk analyses include improved methods to characterize elements at risk within a GIS environment and estimates of their vulnerability to impact. Improvements have also been made in how these risks are communicated to decision makers and stakeholders, including graphic display on conventional and interactive online maps. Substantial limitations remain, including the practical impossibility of estimating every direct and indirect risk associated with debris flows and a shortage of data to estimate vulnerabilities to debris-flow impact. Despite these limitations, quantitative debris-flow risk assessment is becoming a preferred framework for decision makers in some jurisdictions, to compare risks to defined risk tolerance thresholds, support decisions to reduce risk, and quantify the residual risk remaining following implementation of risk reduction measures.
The Impact of Moisture and Temperature on Human Health in Heat Waves
Authors: Wehner Michael , Castillo Federico , Stone Dáithí
Published: May 2016

Extremely high air temperatures are uncomfortable for everyone. For some segments of the population, they can be deadly. Both the physical and societal aspects of intense heat waves in a changing climate warrant close study. The large-scale meteorological patterns leading to such events lay the framework for understanding their underlying causal mechanisms, while several methods of quantifying the combination of heat and humidity can be used to determine when these patterns result in stressful conditions. We examine four historic heat waves as case studies to illustrate differences in the structure of heat waves and the variety of effects of extreme heat on humans, which are characterized in terms of demographic, geographic, and socioeconomic impacts, including mortality and economic ramifications.

Weather station data and climate model projections for the future point to an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat waves as the overall climate gets warmer. Changes in the radiative energy balance of the planet are the principal culprit behind this increase. Quantifying changes in the statistics of extreme heat waves allows for examination of changes in their potential contribution to human health risk. Large-scale mortality during heat waves always occurs within a context of other factors, including public health policy, rural and urban management and planning, and cultural practices. Consequently, the impacts of heat waves can be reduced, and may in many places be manageable into the future, through implementation of such measures as public health warning systems, effective land management, penetration of air conditioning, and increased monitoring of vulnerable or exposed individuals. Given the potential for severe impacts of the more intense heat waves that are virtually certain to occur in the warmer future, it is critical that both the physical and social sciences be considered together to enable society to adapt to these conditions.
Socioeconomic Impacts of Infrastructure Disruptions
Authors: Chang Stephanie E.
Published: May 2016

Infrastructure systems—sometimes referred to as critical infrastructure or lifelines—provide services such as energy, water, sanitation, transportation, and communications that are essential for social and economic activities. Moreover, these systems typically serve large populations and comprise geographically extensive networks. They are also highly interdependent, so outages in one system such as electric power or telecommunications often affect other systems. As a consequence, when infrastructure systems are damaged in disasters, the ensuing losses are often substantial and disproportionately large. Collapse of a single major bridge, for example, can disrupt traffic flows over a broad region and impede emergency response, evacuation, commuting, freight movement, and economic recovery. Power outages in storms and other hazard events can affect millions of people, shut down businesses, and even cause fatalities. Infrastructure outages typically last from hours to weeks but can extend for months or even years. Minimizing disruptions to infrastructure services is thus key to enhancing communities’ disaster resilience.

Research on infrastructure systems in natural hazards has been growing, especially as major disasters provide new data, insights, and urgency to the problem. Engineering advances have been made in understanding how hazard stresses may damage the physical components of infrastructure systems such as pipes and bridges, as well as how these elements can be designed to better withstand hazards. Modeling studies have assessed how physical damage disrupts the provision of services—for example, by indicating which neighborhoods in an urban area may be without potable water—and how disruption can be reduced through engineering and planning. The topic of infrastructure interdependencies has commanded substantial research interest.

Alongside these developments, social science and interdisciplinary research has also been growing on the important topic of how infrastructure disruption in disasters has affected populations and economies. Insights into these impacts derive from a variety of information sources, including surveys, field observations, analysis of secondary data, and computational models. Such research has established the criticality of electric power and water services, for example, and the heightened vulnerability of certain population groups to infrastructure disruption. Omitting the socioeconomic impacts of infrastructure disruptions can lead to underinvestment in disaster mitigation. While the importance of understanding and reducing infrastructure disruption impacts is well-established, many important research gaps remain.
Ecological Effects of Environmental Stressors
Authors: Freedman Bill
Published: May 2016

Regimes of environmental stress are exceedingly complex. Particular stressors exist within continua of intensity of environmental factors. Those factors interact with each other, and their detrimental effects on organisms are manifest only at relatively high or low strengths of exposure—in fact, many of them are beneficial at intermediate levels of intensity. Although a diversity of environmental factors is manifest at any time and place, only one or a few of them tend to be dominant as stressors. It is useful to distinguish between stressors that occur as severe events (disturbances) and those that are chronic in their exposure, and to aggregate the kinds of stressors into categories (while noting some degree of overlap among them).

Climatic stressors are associated with extremes of temperature, solar radiation, wind, moisture, and combinations of these factors. They act as stressors if their condition is either insufficient or excessive, in comparison with the needs and comfort zones of organisms or ecosystem processes. Chemical stressors involve environments in which the availability of certain substances is too low to satisfy biological needs, or high enough to cause toxicity or another physiological detriment to organisms or to higher-level attributes of ecosystems. Wildfire is a disturbance that involves the combustion of much of the biomass of an ecosystem, affecting organisms by heat, physical damage, and toxic substances. Physical stress is a disturbance in which an exposure to kinetic energy is intense enough to damage organisms and ecosystems (such as a volcanic blast, seismic sea wave, ice scouring, or anthropogenic explosion or trampling).

Biological stressors are associated with interactions occurring among organisms. They may be directly caused by such trophic interactions as herbivory, predation, and parasitism. They may also indirectly affect the intensity of physical or chemical stressors, as when competition affects the availability of nutrients, moisture, or space.

Extreme environments are characterized by severe regimes of stressors, which result in relatively impoverished ecosystem development. This may be a consequence of either natural or anthropogenic stressors. If a regime of environmental stress intensifies, the resulting responses include a degradation of the structure and function of affected ecosystems and of ecological integrity more generally. In contrast, a relaxation of environmental stress allows some degree of ecosystem recovery.
Sentinel Species of Marine Ecosystems
Authors: Fossi Maria Cristina , Panti Cristina
Published: May 2016

A vigorous effort to identify and study sentinel species of marine ecosystem in the world’s oceans has developed over the past 50 years. The One Health concept recognizes that the health of humans is connected to the health of animals and the environment. Species ranging from invertebrate to large marine vertebrates have acted as “sentinels” of the exposure to environmental stressors and health impacts on the environment that may also affect human health. Sentinel species can signal warnings, at different levels, about the potential impacts on a specific ecosystem. These warnings can help manage the abiotic and anthropogenic stressors (e.g., climate change, chemical and microbial pollutants, marine litter) affecting ecosystems, biota, and human health.

The effects of exposure to multiple stressors, including pollutants, in the marine environment may be seen at multiple trophic levels of the ecosystem. Attention has focused on the large marine vertebrates, for several reasons. In the past, the use of large marine vertebrates in monitoring and assessing the marine ecosystem has been criticized. The fact that these species are pelagic and highly mobile has led to the suggestion that they are not useful indicators or sentinel species. In recent years, however, an alternative view has emerged: when we have a sufficient understanding of differences in species distribution and behavior in space and time, these species can be extremely valuable sentinels of environmental quality.

Knowledge of the status of large vertebrate populations is crucial for understanding the health of the ecosystem and instigating mitigation measures for the conservation of large vertebrates. For example, it is well known that the various cetacean species exhibit different home ranges and occupy different habitats. This knowledge can be used in “hot spot” areas, such as the Mediterranean Basin, where different species can serve as sentinels of marine environmental quality. Organisms that have relatively long life spans (such as cetaceans) allow for the study of chronic diseases, including reproductive alterations, abnormalities in growth and development, and cancer. As apex predators, marine mammals feed at or near the top of the food chain. As the result of biomagnification, the levels of anthropogenic contaminants found in the tissues of top predators and long-living species are typically high. Finally, the application of consistent examination procedures and biochemical, immunological, and microbiological techniques, combined with pathological examination and behavioral analysis, has led to the development of health assessment methods at the individual and population levels in wild marine mammals. With these tools in hand, investigators have begun to explore and understand the relationships between exposures to environmental stressors and a range of disease end points in sentinel species (ranging from invertebrates to marine mammals) as an indicator of ecosystem health and a harbinger of human health and well-being.
Subsurface Flow of Water in Soils and Geological Formations
Authors: de Rooij Gerrit
Published: May 2016

Henry Darcy was an engineer who built the drinking water supply system of the French city of Dijon in the mid-19th century. In doing so, he developed an interest in the flow of water through sands, and, together with Charles Ritter, he experimented (in a hospital, for unclear reasons) with water flow in a vertical cylinder filled with different sands to determine the laws of flow of water through sand. The results were published in an appendix to Darcy’s report on his work on Dijon’s water supply. Darcy and Ritter installed mercury manometers at the bottom and near the top of the cylinder, and they observed that the water flux density through the sand was proportional to the difference between the mercury levels. After mercury levels are converted to equivalent water levels and recast in differential form, this relationship is known as Darcy’s Law, and until this day it is the cornerstone of the theory of water flow in porous media. The development of groundwater hydrology and soil water hydrology that originated with Darcy’s Law is tracked through seminal contributions over the past 160 years.

Darcy’s Law was quickly adopted for calculating groundwater flow, which blossomed after the introduction of a few very useful simplifying assumptions that permitted a host of analytical solutions to groundwater problems, including flows toward pumped drinking water wells and toward drain tubes. Computers have made possible ever more advanced numerical solutions based on Darcy’s Law, which have allowed tailor-made computations for specific areas. In soil hydrology, Darcy’s Law itself required modification to facilitate its application for different soil water contents. The understanding of the relationship between the potential energy of soil water and the soil water content emerged early in the 20th century. The mathematical formalization of the consequences for the flow rate and storage change of soil water was established in the 1930s, but only after the 1970s did computers become powerful enough to tackle unsaturated flows head-on. In combination with crop growth models, this allowed Darcy-based models to aid in the setup of irrigation practices and to optimize drainage designs. In the past decades, spatial variation of the hydraulic properties of aquifers and soils has been shown to affect the transfer of solutes from soils to groundwater and from groundwater to surface water. More recently, regional and continental-scale hydrology have been required to quantify the role of the terrestrial hydrological cycle in relation to climate change. Both developments may pose new areas of application, or show the limits of applicability, of a law derived from a few experiments on a cylinder filled with sand in the 1850s.
International Water Law and Its Developing Role in Conflict and Cooperation Over Transboundary Water Resources
Authors: Schmeier Susanne
Published: May 2016

International water law plays a key role in guiding states’ behavior over water resources they share. Substantive and procedural principles provide an ex ante framework based on which states can interact in a manner that prevents or mitigates potential conflicts and fosters cooperation and its benefits while supporting the sustainable use and management of these transboundary resources. Through the international water law regime, cooperation has largely prevailed over conflict in the world’s transboundary basins. Nonetheless, international water law—and thus also its role in conflict prevention and cooperation promotion—faces various challenges as populations and economies grow, the climate changes, and states seem to increasingly value short-term unilateral considerations over long-term multilateralism gains. This will challenge key principles, such as the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization and the principle of no significant harm, and their implementation in different basins, possibly triggering new disagreements between riparian states. It will therefore be important for international water law to remain adaptive to change and ensure the long-term cooperative and sustainable governance of water resources shared between states.
Transdisciplinary and Translational Research
Authors: Nurius Paula S. , Kemp Susan
Published: May 2016

This entry provides an overview of the nature of transdisciplinary and translational priorities in the context of changing forms of research and assessments of the relationship of research to societal impact. It first describes shifts away from single disciplinary to more integrative disciplinary approaches to science and discusses emerging forms of integrative research, distinguishing and illustrating multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary approaches. It then turns to describing the social forces behind the acceleration of science into service, illustrating what are referred to as translational gaps and efforts to bridge them. Within social work, methods attentive to adaptation for diverse settings, organizational dissemination and implementation, and community partnership models have become prominent. The entry concludes with attention to the development of an educational pipeline that prepares professionals as well as researchers for capable, confident participation into this environment of transdisciplinary and translational approaches.
Social Work and the United Nations
Authors: Mama Robin S.
Published: May 2016

The profession of social work has a long and rich history of participating in and influencing the work of the United Nations and its affiliate agencies, almost since the inception of the institution. This history includes not only the work of social work or social welfare organizations as accredited nongovernmental organizations, but also of individual social workers who were trailblazers in the field of international work. The founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 played a key role in establishing what has come to be a formal relationship between civil society and the United Nations. Article 71 of the United Nations Charter cemented this relationship by allowing the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to make consultative arrangements with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (United Nations, 2003). The number of NGOs at the founding conference numbered 1,200; at present there are 3,900 NGOs that have consultative status with ECOSOC (Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2014). Three of the leading social work organizations that have consultative status with the United Nations are: International Association of Schools of Social Work (received consultative status in 1947), International Federation of Social Workers—(received consultative status in 1959), and International Council on Social Welfare (received consultative status in 1972).
Economic Security and Family Well-Being
Authors: Cosby Robert , Berry-Edwards Janice
Published: May 2016

Economic security and family well-being remain important issues for communities and for social workers, particularly during economic downturns. Workers in industries such as restaurants, hotels, healthcare, and communications were dramatically affected by the spread of the COVID-19 virus in 2020 and 2021 in the United States. Companies have struggled, many closing during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of those with significant economic capital and potential for growth during this time experienced huge growth opportunities in wealth, but not all. At the same time there were significant racial disparities associated with COVID-19, including disparate access to medical services. Social workers can benefit from understanding the complex issues associated with economic insecurity. The impact of economic insecurity among individuals, families, and communities can ravage their physical, emotional, and mental well-being, and understanding how macro, mezzo, and micro dynamics affect individual and family quality of life is paramount for social workers.
Digital Technology in Social Work
Authors: Reamer Frederic G.
Published: May 2016

Digital, online, and other electronic technology has transformed the nature of social work practice and education. Contemporary social workers can provide services to clients through online counseling, telephone counseling, video counseling, cybertherapy (avatar therapy), self-guided web-based interventions, electronic social networks, e-mail, and text messages. In addition, increasing numbers of social work education programs are using distance education technology to teach their students. Social work administrators store electronic records in the “cloud” and community organizers use online social networking sites to facilitate their work. The introduction of diverse digital, online, and other forms of electronic social services has created a wide range of complex ethical and related risk management issues. This article provides an overview of current technology used in social work, identifies compelling ethical issues, and explores risk management issues. The author identifies relevant standards from the National Association of Social Workers Code of Ethics; model regulatory standards adopted by the Association of Social Work Boards; and practice standards adopted jointly by the National Association of Social Workers, Association of Social Work Boards, Council on Social Work Education, and Clinical Social Work Association
Community Planning
Authors: Sadan Elisheva , Blit-Cohen Edith
Published: May 2016

Community planning is a process of participatory and inclusive organized social change, directed toward community empowerment, building community, and developing members’ capacities to take part in democratic decision making. A three-dimensional model of empowering community planning is presented and discussed. The model focuses on the tasks of community social work in the planning process, and the empowering outcomes they can enable.
Guang, Lu
Authors: Huang Yen Yi , Kao Andy Yung Hsing
Published: May 2016

Lu Guang (1913–2001) spent his career in social work as a government officer and educator in Taiwan, where he devoted his efforts toward community development by organizing university students to initiate projects for underserved communities. He was known especially for his pioneering research in the field of social indicators and quality of life in the 1980s. Professor Lu helped to draft the Volunteer Service Act in 1989 and served as one of the founders of the United Way of Taiwan. He was also in charge of a research project on the code of ethics in 1991, which laid the foundation for the Social Work Code of Ethics in Taiwan.
Community Development in Taiwan
Authors: Lin Wan-I
Published: May 2016

The United Nations has long promoted community development as a way to improve people’s livelihoods and beautify the environment, and the concept was adopted as the main approach to social work in Taiwan between the 1960s and the 1980s. However, the government took a top-down directive approach and violated the principle of community participation, focusing more on physical construction than on human development. With the lifting of martial law in 1987 Taiwanese society has gradually moved in the direction of democracy, providing fertile ground for the concept of community building to take root, a development that will, in time, lead to the displacement of the term community development.
Weick, Ann T.
Authors: Lieberman Alice
Published: May 2016

Ann Weick was the dean of the School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas (1987–2006) and a principal developer of the underlying rationale for the strengths perspective in social work practice.
Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Mood Disorders
Authors: Lee Karen Kyeunghae
Published: May 2016

Depression and bipolar mood disorders are mental disorders that are characterized by mood disturbance combined with decreased functioning of the affected individuals. This entry focuses on major depressive disorder and bipolar I and II disorders among adults in the United States. Bipolar disorder has unique clinical features and intervention options, and so it is discussed in a separate section after depression. Diagnosis, prevalence, comorbidity, risk factors, course, assessment, treatment, service utilization, and international perspectives are reviewed for each disorder. The implications for social work are briefly addressed at the end of this entry.
Evidence-Informed Social Work Practice
Authors: Dodd S. J. , Savage Andrea
Published: May 2016

Evidence-informed practice (EIP) is a model that incorporates best available research evidence; client’s needs, values, and preferences; practitioner wisdom; and theory into the clinical decision-making process filtered through the lens of client, agency, and community culture. The purpose of this article is to define and describe the evidence-informed practice model within social work and to explore the evolution of evidence-informed practice over time. The article distinguishes evidence-informed practice from the more commonly known (and perhaps more popular) evidence-based practice. And, having outlined the essential components of evidence-informed practice, describes the barriers to its effective implementation. Critical contextual factors related to the implementation of evidence-informed practice at the individual level, as well as within social work organizations, are also addressed. Finally, implications both for social work practice and education are explored.
Global Health
Authors: Lee Jessica Euna
Published: May 2016

Within its 150-year history, public health has grown from a focus on local communities to include countrywide, then international, and now global perspectives. Drawing upon the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, this article provides an overview of global public health within the broadest possible context of the world and all of its peoples. Also provided are the global burden of disease as measured in disability-adjusted life years, global health statistics, current health priorities, and recommendations for action by social workers and other health professionals.
Social Work and Indigenous Peoples in Canada
Authors: Baskin Cyndy , Sinclair Danielle
Published: May 2016

This article explores social work with Indigenous Peoples in Canada, beginning with the history of colonization and the role this profession played, as well as outlining promising approaches to helping based on Indigenous worldviews and the challenges of putting these into practice.
Islamophobia
Authors: Husain Altaf
Published: May 2016

Islamophobia is not a new term but it has become commonly used in the United States following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This entry provides an overview of the demographics of the Muslim population in the United States. The historical context in which the use of the term first emerged is then identified, followed by a discussion of the two major approaches to defining Islamophobia. The term connotes either outright anti-Muslim bigotry due to religious intolerance or racism and xenophobia toward people from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia who are Muslim or who have a “Muslim-like” appearance. The history of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States is traced from before the founding of the nation through present times. Implications are presented for social work with Muslim clients, organizations, and communities who may be impacted by anti-Muslim bigotry.