bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Decision Strategies in Politics
Authors: Lau Richard R.
Published: April 2019

A decision strategy is a set of mental and physical operations that a decision maker uses to reach a choice among two or more alternatives. Once the alternatives have been identified, a decision strategy involves gathering information about at least some of the different alternatives under considerations and making judgments about them. A decision strategy will include a mechanism for selecting the best alternative—for example, select the alternative with the highest probability of success. Decision strategies differ along two primary dimensions: how much information is gathered, and how comparable that information is across alternatives. Four major types of decision strategies include classic rational choice (relatively deep search, equally distributed across alternatives), confirmatory motivated reasoning (relatively deep search, unequally distributed across alternatives), fast and frugal (relatively shallow search, equally distributed across alternatives), and heuristic-based intuitive (shallow search, unequally distributed across alternatives). Although standard rating scales have been developed to help ascertain which strategies a decision maker prefers, the best method for determining which strategy is being employed is to directly observe information gathering while the decision is being made. An important task for future research is to more clearly explicate the situations when different decision strategies perform particularly well or particularly poorly.
Democratic Rollback in Africa
Authors: Rakner Lise
Published: April 2019

There is a global trend of democratic retrenchment across the world, in both new and more established democracies. The African continent is part of the trend, although there are distinct regional variances on the continent. Yet, despite democratic gains in some states and along some dimensions of democratic rights, the overall trend is that the democratic gains won in the period after 1990 are now eroding. Democracy is challenged in ways that pose threats to freedom of speech, association, and information, the ability to choose political leaders, protection of personal integrity and private life, and the rule of law with recourse to independent courts. As part of a global trend of democratic backsliding, African states have adopted legal restrictions on key civil and political rights that form the basis of democratic rule in a range of countries, from dominant party regimes such as Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Tanzania to competitive electoral democracies like Zambia, Senegal, and Malawi. In South Africa, where democracy and rule of law appear deeply institutionalized, the succession battles and exposed levels of corruption under President Zuma, now removed from the leadership of the ANC party, suggest a weakening of the institutions intended to check executive powers. The September 2017 court annulment of the Kenyan elections suggests that the courts were able to perform an important accountability function and safeguard free and fair elections. Yet, the aftermath of the 2017 Kenyan elections culminated in early 2018 with President Uhuru Kenyatta closing down television and radio stations.

Civil society actors, policy makers, and scholars warn against the democratic backlash and its negative implications for domestic and international politics. Internationally, the African democratic backlash challenges global actors who have long pressured developing countries to politically liberalize. Yet, following what appears to be a global trend of democratic backsliding, space for international influence and the spread of liberal norms is closing rapidly. Domestically, the observed backlash against democracy may pose further social and political threats with wide-reaching implications for development. This may, in turn, challenge the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Whereas closing space for civil society impacts first and foremost on voice and participation, restrictions on civil society ultimately may curb even the most seemingly apolitical activities such as humanitarian relief. At present, there is limited understanding of possible response mechanisms to the conscious attempts at democratic rollback from political elites. How do activists come together to advocate for particular rights? When are activists more effective in generating mass citizen support for their campaigns? How can researchers, international actors, and domestic civil society organizations work together to disseminate and use knowledge about organizational resilience in these circumstances? These will be pressing questions for scholars and activists going forward.
Human Aggression
Authors: Groves Christopher , Anderson Craig A.
Published: April 2019

This chapter reviews the history of modern psychological inquiry into human aggression and the development of aggression theory over time. Definitions of aggression-related phenomena are provided along with taxonomies of aggression that are frequently considered by psychological scientists. Modern, domain specific theories of aggression are detailed with emphasis placed on integrative theories of aggression. Special focus is paid to the scientific benefits and recent discoveries that are attributable to the use of integrative theories of aggression. Success in domains that serve as exemplars of systematically examining all known aggressive processes are identified as leaders in the productive future of aggression research.
Creativity and Dance Education Research
Authors: Chappell Kerry , Hathaway Charlotte
Published: April 2019

Research into creativity and dance education is increasingly in the spotlight as the community of dance education researchers is growing internationally. In the last fifteen years, the field has blossomed to include new cultural perspectives, voices and styles, and a consistently expanding range of definitions, epistemologies, and methodologies for researching the inter-relationship between “dance,” “education,” and “creativity.” Existing scholarship can be built on by exploring the historical perspective, moving to critically and thematically consider recent developments, and then looking ahead. In so doing, a range of definitions of creativity emerge which focus on cognition through to sociocultural perspectives and the post-human turn. Research into the facilitation of creativity is also pertinent and developing, including performativity and creativity pedagogic tensions, incorporation of technology and inclusion within teacher training, as well as a shift toward articulating creative and cultural dance practices themselves as key to understanding and developing creative pedagogy in dance. Also of interest is the range of methodologies that has been employed to research creativity in dance education and future possibilities in this area. Next steps in research include a focus on future influences from the ever-developing field of dance studies and its articulations of choreography and practice; from research into cultural and indigenous dance and emerging new multicultural ideas about creativity; from applications of advances in psychology and technological methods within dance science; and from the post-human turn in educational research shifting us toward more emergent re-organizations of how we think about and practice creativity in dance education.
Ethnographies of Education and Anthropological Knowledge Production
Authors: Pradhan Uma , Valentin Karen
Published: April 2019

From an anthropological perspective, (educational) ethnography is much more than just a method in terms of a set of techniques but a way of taking a place in and grasping the world that ethnographers aim to represent and comprehend. With an imperative of “being there,” the ethnographer travels to specific locations to establish some form of physical presence in the field site. The idea of “location,” therefore, is central to educational ethnography in several ways. Research on education among different categories of people in Nepal, and a vast body of ethnographic literature on education around the world, demonstrates the centrality of “location” in anthropological knowledge production. This article discusses “location” as a conceptual category in order to explore the different analytical levels at which it operates in anthropological knowledge production on education. It does so in three different ways. First, ethnographers’ locations in the field—their biographical trajectories, academic backgrounds, and social positions—lay the ground for the ways in which ethnographers ‘see’ education in the field. Second, the historical context and sociopolitical developments of specific geographic locations, in this case Nepal, draw attention to ways in which existing societal concerns foster particular research interests on education and consequently shape knowledge about a given geographical location. Third, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of spatial sites within and beyond institutions of schooling allows ethnographers to explore the multiple and often conflicting meanings of education. This awareness on the multiplicity of ethnographic locations in educational ethnography promises to deepen our understanding of education, broadly defined, through a rigorous and highly contextualized inquiry that highlights multiple and contested voices and presents subjective modes of perceiving reality.
Bollywood in Africa
Authors: Bertz Ned
Published: April 2019

The presence of Bollywood films in Africa has a long history, one embedded in larger cultural and commodity exchanges between the continent and South Asia. “Bollywood” is a modern signifier for older film industries located in colonial and postcolonial India, with the largest export being commercial Hindi-Urdu movies produced in Bombay. Their circulation played out distinctly in different parts of Africa, based on colonial connections, Indian diasporic networks, regional trading linkages, and audience tastes. East Africa first saw the arrival of Indian films in the 1920s, imported by diasporic Indian entrepreneurs who opened movie theaters and screened Hollywood and British films as well. Indian and African communities both consumed Bombay movies and they increasingly came to lead East African box office shares for decades, even as moviegoing declined toward the end of the 20th century. Bollywood films reached South Africa in the 1930s and later were the preserve of isolated Indian communities under Apartheid in cities like Durban, home to a large South Asian population as a result of colonial indentured labor flows. Hindi and Tamil movies formed a cultural touchstone for settled diasporic populations who engaged with representations from a perceived homeland, although Bollywood films were mainstreamed in South African society in the 1990s.

In West Africa, lacking robust Indian diasporic networks, Lebanese traders introduced Bollywood films in the 1950s. They became immensely popular among African audiences in places like northern Nigeria and Senegal. As in East Africa, West African audiences interpreted foreign films in line with localized cultural and political values. By the 1990s, Nigerians were making some movies that riffed off popular Indian films in a global milieu of cultural mixing. In North Africa, distributors first marketed Indian movies in the 1950s to Egypt, where they attained a cult following. Bollywood stars and paraphernalia gained social prominence, although the public screening of films dwindled in the 1990s, forcing Arab fans to rely on alternate circulations, which continued into the early 21st century throughout the continent thanks to satellite television and other media technologies. The long-standing popularity of Bollywood in Africa should be no surprise given the worldwide spread of Bombay films from their inception, a tradition of exchange between South Asia and Africa, especially across Indian Ocean and imperial worlds, and Africans’ historically vigorous participation in regional and global cultural economies.
South Asia in the Great Divergence Debate
Authors: Yazdani Kaveh
Published: April 2019

Since the seminal publication of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000), there has been a continuing upsurge of writings on the possible reasons behind the rise of the West from a “global perspective.” Most of these studies focus on comparisons between Western Europe and China. Yet, in recent years works on India and the great divergence have followed suit, taking up research questions that have not been as prominent since the proliferation of debates on the subcontinent’s pre-colonial potentialities for capitalist development in the 1960s and 1970s. As of now, the paucity of quantitative data complicates endeavors to compare pre-colonial India with Europe and explore the underlying reasons behind the great divergence. Case studies examining the socio-economic history of a number of South Asian regions are still needed in order to conduct systematic comparisons between both advanced and underdeveloped regions of the subcontinent and those of Europe. The existing evidence, however, suggests that some of the "core areas" of 16th- to 18th-century India had more or less comparable levels of agricultural productivity, transport facilities (during the dry season), military capabilities in terms of ground forces (e.g., Mysore and the Marathas), commercial and manufacturing capacities (especially in textile, ship, and metal production), and social mobility of merchants (e.g., in Gujarat). Moreover, Indian rulers and artisans did not shy away from adopting European know-how (e.g., in weapon and ship production) when it redounded to their advantage. On the other hand, South Asia possessed some geo-climatic disadvantages vis-à-vis Western Europe that also impeded investments in infrastructure. India seems to have had a lower degree of consumer demand and lagged behind Western Europe in a number of fields such as mechanical engineering, the level of productive forces, higher education, circulation of useful knowledge, institutional efficiency, upper-class property rights, the nascent bourgeois class consciousness, and inter-communal and proto-national identity formations.
Unfree Labor in Colonial South Asia
Authors: Major Andrea
Published: April 2019

Various forms of labor obligation, coercion, and oppression existed in colonial India, but the supposed dichotomy between “free” and “unfree” labor was rarely absolute. European slave-trafficking, internal trades in women and children, domestic slavery, caste-based obligations for agricultural and other labor, and capitalist systems such as indenture represented distinct but overlapping forms of “unfree” labor in the South Asian context. Enslaved Indians were exported to various European colonial possessions in the 17th and 18th century or provided domestic services within the homes of both the European and Indian elites. Meanwhile, various preexisting local labor relationships such as begar, caste-based obligation, and debt bondage involved elements of coercion, control, and ownership that mirrored some of the characteristics of slavery. These underwent significant changes in the colonial period, as the colonial state both tapped into and sought to reshape the Indian labor market to suit the needs of the imperial capitalist economy.
The Kazakh Khanate
Authors: Lee Joo-Yup
Published: April 2019

The Kazakh Khanate was a Chinggisid nomadic state that ruled the eastern Qipchaq Steppe (Dasht-i Qipchāq), a steppe zone that roughly corresponds to modern-day Kazakhstan, during the post-Mongol period as one of the most important successor states of the Mongol Empire and the last reigning dynasty of the Chinggisids. The Kazakh Khanate branched off from the Ulus of Jochi, whose people (ulus) were called Uzbeks in 15th-century Central Asia. The Kazakh Khanate was founded by the Uzbeks led by Jānībeg Khan and Girāy Khan, two Jochid princes who sometime in the 1450s had broken away from Abū al-Khair Khan, the Jochid ruler of the eastern Qipchaq Steppe. In the 16th century, like other Chinggisid states such as the Crimean Khanate, the Northern Yuan, and the Shibanid Uzbek Khanate that emerged as regional empires in the territories of the former Mongol Empire, the Kazakh Khanate was transformed into a nomadic empire. During the reigns of Qāsim Khan (r. c. 1512–1521) and his successors Ḥaqq Naẓar Khan (r. c. 1538–1581) and Tawakkul Khan (r. c. 1582–1598), the Kazakh Khanate expanded westward to reach the Yayïq (Ural) River and eastward the Tienshan Mountains. The Kazakh Khanate entered a period of sharp decline at the turn of the 18th century due to the Zunghar Oirat onslaught. As a result, the Kazakh khans and sultans became nominal vassals of the Russian Empire and the Manchu Qing Dynasty. The Kazakh Khanate was annexed by the Russian Empire in the early 19th century, which brought to an end the six-centuries-long reign of the Chinggisids.
Financial History of Japan in Global Context, 19th and 20th Centuries
Authors: Schiltz Michael
Published: April 2019

Japan’s experience with modern capitalism and finance is characterized by a remarkable combination of shocks and adaptation. After being steamrolled by Western institutions and financial technologies, the country attempted to retaliate against this intrusion. However, regaining financial sovereignty proved a protracted process of trial and error. In the 1880s and 1890s, under the auspices of Matsukata Masayoshi, Tokyo seemed to get it right. The establishment of the Bank of Japan and related institutions, on the one hand, and the adoption of the gold standard, on the other, appeared designed to lift Japan out of its peripheral status. In reality, however, they mostly served to emphasize its role as an enabler of the British-led international order. Only in the 1930s, during the worldwide Great Depression, would it break with this role, if only to find that its autonomy had been compromised from the very beginning. Japan’s disastrous loss in World War II drove the country into the arms of the newly arisen global hegemon: the United States. In the early 21st-century, Japan remains a linchpin in the still surviving American-led world order and the corollary “dollar standard.”
Health Policy and Finance Challenges in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Economic Perspective
Authors: Medici André , Lewis Maureen
Published: April 2019

Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries have experienced a long-term process of improvement in populational health conditions, shifting their health priorities from child–mother care and transmissible diseases to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). However, persistent socioeconomic inequalities create barriers to achieve universal health coverage (UHC). Despite a high level of governmental commitment to UHC, and rising coverage, approximately 25% of the population does not have access to healthcare, particularly in rural and outlying areas.

Health system quality issues have been largely ignored, and inefficiency, from health financing to health delivery, is not on the policy agenda. The use of incentives to improve performance are rare in LAC health systems and there are political barriers to introduce reforms in payment systems in the public sector, though the private sector has opportunity to adapt change.

Fragmentation in the financing of healthcare is a common theme in the region. Most systems retain social health insurance (SHI) schemes, mostly for the formal sector, and in some cases have more than one; and parallel National Health System (NHS)-type arrangements for the poor and those in the informal labor market. The cost and inefficiency in delivery and financing is considerable.

Regional health economics literature stresses inadequate funding—despite the fact that the region has the highest inequality in access and spends the most on healthcare across the regions—and analyzes multiple aspects of health equity. The agenda needs to move from these debates to designing and leveraging delivery and payment systems that target performance and efficiency.

The absence of research on payment arrangements and performance is a symptom of a health management culture based on processes rather than results. Indeed, health services in the region remain rooted in a culture of fee-for-service and supply-driven models, where expenditures are independent of outcomes.

Health policy reforms in LAC need to address efficiency rather than equity, integrate healthcare delivery, and tackle provider payment reforms. The integration of medical records, adherence to protocols and clinical pathways, establishment of health networks built around primary healthcare, along with harmonized incentives and payment systems, offer a direction for reforms that allow adapting to existing circumstances and institutions. This offers the best path for sustainable UHC in the region.
Data Revisions and Real-Time Forecasting
Authors: Clements Michael P. , Galvão Ana Beatriz
Published: April 2019

At a given point in time, a forecaster will have access to data on macroeconomic variables that have been subject to different numbers of rounds of revisions, leading to varying degrees of data maturity. Observations referring to the very recent past will be first-release data, or data which has as yet been revised only a few times. Observations referring to a decade ago will typically have been subject to many rounds of revisions. How should the forecaster use the data to generate forecasts of the future? The conventional approach would be to estimate the forecasting model using the latest vintage of data available at that time, implicitly ignoring the differences in data maturity across observations.

The conventional approach for real-time forecasting treats the data as given, that is, it ignores the fact that it will be revised. In some cases, the costs of this approach are point predictions and assessments of forecasting uncertainty that are less accurate than approaches to forecasting that explicitly allow for data revisions. There are several ways to “allow for data revisions,” including modeling the data revisions explicitly, an agnostic or reduced-form approach, and using only largely unrevised data. The choice of method partly depends on whether the aim is to forecast an earlier release or the fully revised values.
The Economics of Informal Care
Authors: Van Houtven Courtney , Carmichael Fiona , Jacobs Josephine , Coyte Peter C.
Published: April 2019

Across the globe, the most common means of supporting older disabled adults in their homes is through “informal care.” An informal carer is a family member or friend, including children or adults, who help another person because of their illness, frailty, or disability. There is a rich economics literature on the direct benefits of caregiving, including allowing the care recipient to remain at home for longer than if there was no informal care provided. There is also a growing literature outlining the associated costs of care provision. Although informal care helps individuals with disabilities to remain at home and is rewarding to many carers, there are often negative effects such as depression and lost labor market earnings that may offset some of these rewards. Economists have taken several approaches to quantify the net societal benefit of informal care that consider the degree of choice in caregiving decisions and all direct and indirect benefits and costs of informal care.
Choice Inconsistencies in the Demand for Private Health Insurance
Authors: Stavrunova Olena
Published: April 2019

In many countries of the world, consumers choose their health insurance coverage from a large menu of often complex options supplied by private insurance companies. Economic benefits of the wide choice of health insurance options depend on the extent to which the consumers are active, well informed, and sophisticated decision makers capable of choosing plans that are well-suited to their individual circumstances.

There are many possible ways how consumers’ actual decision making in the health insurance domain can depart from the standard model of health insurance demand of a rational risk-averse consumer. For example, consumers can have inaccurate subjective beliefs about characteristics of alternative plans in their choice set or about the distribution of health expenditure risk because of cognitive or informational constraints; or they can prefer to rely on heuristics when the plan choice problem features a large number of options with complex cost-sharing design.

The second decade of the 21st century has seen a burgeoning number of studies assessing the quality of consumer choices of health insurance, both in the lab and in the field, and financial and welfare consequences of poor choices in this context. These studies demonstrate that consumers often find it difficult to make efficient choices of private health insurance due to reasons such as inertia, misinformation, and the lack of basic insurance literacy. These findings challenge the conventional rationality assumptions of the standard economic model of insurance choice and call for policies that can enhance the quality of consumer choices in the health insurance domain.
Incentives in Healthcare Payment Systems
Authors: Ma Ching-to Albert , Mak Henry Y.
Published: April 2019

Health services providers receive payments mostly from private or public insurers rather than patients. Provider incentive problems arise because an insurer misses information about the provider and patients, and has imperfect control over the provider’s treatment, quality, and cost decisions. Different provider payment systems, such as prospective payment, capitation, cost reimbursement, fee-for-service, and value-based payment, generate different treatment quality and cost incentives. The important issue is that a payment system implements an efficient quality-cost outcome if and only if it makes the provider internalize the social benefits and costs of services. Thus, the internalization principle can be used to evaluate payment systems across different settings.

The most common payment systems are prospective payment, which pays a fixed price for service rendered, and cost reimbursement, which pays according to costs of service rendered. In a setting where the provider chooses health service quality and cost reduction effort, prospective payment satisfies the internalization principle but cost reimbursement does not. The reason is that prospective payment forces the provider to be responsible for cost, but cost reimbursement relieves the provider of the cost responsibility. Beyond this simple setting, the provider may select patients based on patients’ cost heterogeneity. Then neither prospective payment nor cost reimbursement achieves efficient quality and cost incentives. A mixed system that combines prospective payment and cost reimbursement performs better than each of its components alone.

In general, the provider’s preferences and available strategies determine if a payment system may achieve internalization. If the provider is altruistic toward patients, prospective payment can be adjusted to accommodate altruism when the provider’s degree of altruism is known to the insurer. However, when the degree of altruism is unknown, even a mixed system may fail the internalization principle. Also, the internalization principle fails under prospective payment when the provider can upcode patient diagnoses for more favorable prices. Cost reimbursement attenuates the upcoding incentive. Finally, when the provider can choose many qualities, either prospective payment and cost reimbursement should be combined with the insurer’s disclosure on quality and cost information to satisfy the internalization principle.

When good healthcare quality is interpreted as a good match between patients and treatments, payment design is to promote good matches. The internalization principle now requires the provider to bear benefits and costs of diagnosis effort and treatment choice. A mixed system may deliver efficient matching incentives. Payment systems necessarily interact with other incentive mechanisms such as patients’ reactions against the provider’s quality choice and other providers’ competitive strategies. Payment systems then become part of organizational incentives.
“One Health” From Concept to Application in the Global World
Authors: Schneider Maria Cristina , Munoz-Zanzi Claudia , Min Kyung-duk , Aldighieri Sylvain
Published: April 2019

The vision that everything is connected in this world is not new. However, to respond to the current challenges that the world is facing, the integrated vision that humans, animals, and the environment are linked is more important than ever. Collaboration among multiple disciplines is crucial, and this approach is fundamental to understanding the One Health concept.

A transdisciplinary definition of One Health views animals, humans, and their shared settings or environment as linked and affected by the socioeconomic interest of humans and external pressures. A One Health concept calls for various disciplines to work together to provide new methods and tools for research and implementation of effective services to support the formulation of norms, regulations, and policies to the benefit of humanity, animals, and the environment for current and future generations. This will improve the understanding of health and disease processes as well as prediction, detection, prevention, and control of infectious hazards and other issues affecting health and well-being in the human-animal-ecosystem interface, contributing to sustainable development goals, and to improving equity in the world.
The Moon and Planets in Indigenous California
Authors: Krupp E.C.
Published: April 2019

Anthropologists distinguish the U.S. State of California as a primary zone of prehistoric and tribal North America—it was one of the most linguistically and cultural diverse regions on earth. The original population of Native California and traditional cultures were decimated by the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Anglos, who successively settled California and transformed it. For that reason, knowledge of the character and function of astronomy in what is now California prior to European contact in the 16th century is incomplete and fragmented. Traditional astronomical lore is preserved in a few ethnohistoric commentaries, in some archaeological remains, and in ethnographic research conducted primarily in the early 20th century, when elements of indigenous knowledge still survived.

Throughout Native California, the moon’s conspicuous brightness, movement, and systematically changing appearance prompted its affiliation with seasonal change, the passage of time, and cyclical renewal, and most California tribes monitored and counted lunations in one way or another, but not necessarily throughout the entire year. In some cases, individual lunations were affiliated with and named for seasonal circumstances.

There is little evidence, however, for even minimal interest in or recognition of the planets visible to the unaided eye, with the exception of Venus as the “Morning Star” or “Evening Star.” Venus, like the moon and other celestial objects, was personified and regarded as a fundamental and active agent of the cosmos. There is no evidence, however, for detailed monitoring of Venus and quantitative knowledge of its synodic behavior.
Poststructuralist Ethics and International Relations
Authors: Nabers Dirk
Published: April 2019

Ethical considerations in International Relations (IR) usually follow from the sovereignty and anarchy distinction. The ethical implications arising from these classic twin IR banners shift the focus toward relations of inside and outside, while morality remains restricted to the national level, where reciprocal moral obligation is legally secured through citizenship, while the international continues to be branded by a constant struggle for power and the elusiveness of any moral rules. In contrast, the poststructuralist notion of difference engenders a democratic ethos of immanent critique, which regards itself as a necessary corrective in contexts where liberal discourses are prevalent, but exposes a tendency of discounting the inherently political nature of the social. A poststructuralist ethics accentuates the radical political institution of society, the aporia of justice, and the contingency of a particular morality.
Historical Theories of International Relations
Authors: MacKay Joseph , LaRoche Christopher David
Published: April 2019

History has provided a site of theoretical inquiry for scholars of International Relations since the discipline’s inception. However, serious and sustained historical inquiry has only returned to the foreground of international studies in the last two decades or so, after a prolonged period of postwar uninterest. How can scholars identify moments or processes of systematic change? Does history have a long run structure or trajectory? Moreover, scholars have begun to take seriously the epistemological problem of historicism. International relations scholarship on history during this period addresses the intersection of theory and history in four broad ways. The first encompasses substantive historical studies that take history as a site of theory building about world politics. Here, accounts of early modern Europe, ancient China, precolonial South Asia, European colonial expansion, and other settings have challenged previous historical narratives that assert or assume linear progress or realist cyclicality alike. A second category follows on the first, comprising a plurality of methodological turns. Here, scholars have developed ways of inquiring into history, ranging across macrohistorical or structural analysis, rationalist accounts of international-system building, relational accounts of international hierarchies, discursive accounts of colonialism and resistance, and others. A third focuses directly on theoretical questions drawn from philosophy of history. These works aim to provide not methods of historical inquiry so much as theoretical tools for thinking philosophically about the historical long run itself. Fourth and finally, scholars of the history of international thought have developed contextualist accounts of the intellectual history of international theory. These approaches rethink how theory interfaces with history by interrogating international thought itself.
Religion and the Great Depression
Authors: Greene Alison
Published: April 2019

The Great Depression of 1929–1941 brought not only economic and social crisis, but also forced families, churches, and religious organizations to reckon with individual and social suffering in ways that they had not done in the United States since the Civil War. This reckoning introduced a period of both theological and institutional transformation. Theologians wrestled not only with the domestic depression, but also with international instability as they faced questions about pacifism, economic and racial justice, and religious persecution. Ordinary people prayed for rain and revival. Many turned to their religious communities to wrestle together with the troubles they faced, or turned from those communities in disappointment and despair.

During the decades before the Great Depression, religious institutions across the United States had expanded their charitable efforts and their social reform campaigns, but the Depression wiped out the support for that work just as Americans needed it most. The New Deal brought a new set of questions about the relative roles of church and state in welfare and reform and introduced a period of religious ferment and church–state realignment. At the same time, the discontent and dislocation that the Great Depression wrought on local communities meant that individuals, families, and communities wrestled with deep theological questions together, often in ways that fractured old religious alliances and forged new ones. For American Jews and some Catholics, events in Europe proved even more troubling than those at home, and local communities reorganized around international activism and engagement.
Japan-US Relations
Authors: Miller Jennifer M.
Published: April 2019

Over the past 150 years, the United States and Japan have developed one of the United States’ most significant international relationships, marked by a potent mix of cooperation and rivalry. After a devastating war, these two states built a lasting alliance that stands at the center of US diplomacy, security, and economic policy in the Pacific and beyond. Yet this relationship is not simply the product of economic or strategic calculations. Japan has repeatedly shaped American understandings of empire, hegemony, race, democracy, and globalization, because these two states have often developed in remarkable parallel with one another. From the edges of the international order in the 1850s and 1860s, both entered a period of intense state-building at home and imperial expansion abroad in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These imperial ambitions violently collided in the 1940s in an epic contest to determine the Pacific geopolitical order. After its victory in World War II, the United States embarked on an unprecedented occupation designed to transform Japan into a stable and internationally cooperative democracy. The two countries also forged a diplomatic and security alliance that offered crucial logistical, political, and economic support to the United States’ Cold War quest to prevent the spread of communism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japan’s rise as the globe’s second-largest economy caused significant tension in this relationship and forced Americans to confront the changing nature of national power and economic growth in a globalizing world. However, in recent decades, rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific have served to focus this alliance on the construction of a stable trans-Pacific economic and geopolitical order.
magic, Greek
Authors: Edmonds Radcliffe G.
Published: April 2019

Greek magic is the discourse of magic within the ancient Greek world. Greek magic includes a range of practices, from malevolent curses to benevolent protections, from divinatory practices to alchemical procedures, but what is labelled magic depends on who is doing the labelling and the circumstances in which the label is applied. The discourse of magic pertains to non-normative ritualized activity, in which the deviation from the norm is most often marked in terms of the perceived efficacy of the act, the familiarity of the performance within the cultural tradition, the ends for which the act is performed, or the social location of the performer. Magic is thus a construct of subjective labelling, rather than an objectively existing category. Rituals whose efficacy is perceived as extraordinary (in either a positive or negative sense) or that are performed in unfamiliar ways, for questionable ends, or by performers whose status is out of the ordinary might be labelled (by others or by oneself) as magic in antiquity.
Cayster River
Authors: Ricl Marijana
Published: April 2019

The Cayster River flows through Southern Lydia and empties into the Aegean Sea NW of Ephesus. The lower part of its fertile valley belonged to Ephesus in the Hellenistic and Roman period, as is amply attested by inscriptions. A substantial part of this region belonged to Ephesian Artemis. East of ancient Thyaira (modern Tire) began the Caystrian plain known for its urban centres Hypaipa and Dios Hieron. Hypaipa and its venerable sanctuary of Persian Artemis often feature in ancient literary and documentary sources. The Cilbian plain was the easternmost and the least urbanized part of the valley, no less fertile and populated than the rest. The prevalent type of community throughout the valley were village settlements (komai/katoikiai) or varying size and population.
Vibius Sequester
Authors: Paniagua David
Published: April 2019

Vibius Sequester is the author of the De fluminibus, fontibus, lacubus, nemoribus, paludibus, montibus, gentibus per litteras, a short repertoire of geographical names mentioned by Virgil, Silius, Lucan and Ovid. The text, written at the end of the 4th or in the 5th century ce for the author’s son, Vergilianus, was likely intended to be used at school as an instrument providing basic information about the collected toponyms and ethnonyms. Despite the occasional mistakes in the text, Sequester’s repertoire represent a fine instance of school culture in Western Late Antiquity. The work was much appreciated by Italian humanists, which explains that it was copied in nearly 50 recentiores manuscripts; all of them, however, descend from a second-half of the 9th century manuscript (Vat. Lat. 4929).
Syntactic Features
Authors: Svenonius Peter
Published: April 2019

Syntactic features are formal properties of syntactic objects which determine how they behave with respect to syntactic constraints and operations (such as selection, licensing, agreement, and movement). Syntactic features can be contrasted with properties which are purely phonological, morphological, or semantic, but many features are relevant both to syntax and morphology, or to syntax and semantics, or to all three components.

The formal theory of syntactic features builds on the theory of phonological features, and normally takes morphosyntactic features (those expressed in morphology) to be the central case, with other, possibly more abstract features being modeled on the morphosyntactic ones.

Many aspects of the formal nature of syntactic features are currently unresolved. Some traditions (such as HPSG) make use of rich feature structures as an analytic tool, while others (such as Minimalism) pursue simplicity in feature structures in the interest of descriptive restrictiveness. Nevertheless, features are essential to all explicit analyses.
Public Sector Agencies and Their Formal Legal and Administrative Responsibilities
Authors: Ross Ashley D.
Published: April 2019

Public sector agencies at all levels of government work to mitigate risk, prepare for and respond to emergencies and disasters, and recover from catastrophic events. This action is guided by a national emergency management system that has evolved over time and was most recently reformed post–Hurricane Katrina. There is an extensive set of federal guidelines by the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency that serve to structure the national system of hazard management. These include: the National Preparedness Goal; the National Preparedness System; National Planning Frameworks and accompanying Federal Interagency Operational Plans (FIOPs); the National Preparedness Report; and the Campaign to Build and Sustain Preparedness. Despite the considerable institutional and administrative guidance, there remain critical gaps in public-agency natural hazard management. These include lack of quality planning on the subnational level, insufficient local fiscal and human capital, and inconsistent regulation of the recovery process. While stricter implementation of federal mandates may partly address some of these issues, others will require greater political will in order to enact zoning regulations, create a shift in the acceptance of risk, and ensure that solutions are afforded by partnerships between civil, economic, and public entities.
Soil Tilth and Management
Authors: Munkholm Lars J. , Pulido-Moncada Mansonia , Obour Peter Bilson
Published: April 2019

Soil tilth is a dynamic and multifaceted concept that refers to the suitability of a soil for planting and growing crops. A soil with good tilth is “usually loose, friable and well granulated”; a condition that can also be described as the soil’s having a good “self-mulching” ability. On the other hand soils with poor tilth are usually dense (compacted), with hard, blocky, or massive structural characteristics. Poor soil tilth is generally associated with compaction, induced by wheel traffic, animal trampling, and/or to natural soil consolidation (i.e., so-called hard-setting behavior). The soil-tilth concept dates back to the early days of arable farming and has been addressed in soil-science literature since the 1920s. Soil tilth is generally associated with soil’s physical properties and processes rather than the more holistic concepts of soil quality and soil health. Improved soil tilth has been associated with deep and intensive tillage, as those practices were traditionally considered the primary method for creating a suitable soil condition for plant growth. Therefore, for millennia there has been a strong focus both in practice and in research on developing tillage tools that create suitable growing conditions for different crops, soil types, and climatic conditions. Deep and intensive tillage may be appropriate for producing a good, short-term tilth, but may also lead to severe long-term degradation of the soil structure. The failure of methods relying on physical manipulation as means of sustaining good tilth has increased the recognition given to the important role that soil biota have in soil-structure formation and stabilization. Soil biology has only received substantial attention in soil science during the last few decades. One result of this is that this knowledge is now being used to optimize soil management through strategies such as more diverse rotations, cover crops, and crop-residue management, with these being applied either as single management components or more preferably as part of an integrated system (i.e., either conservation agriculture or organic farming).Traditionally, farmers have evaluated soil tilth qualitatively in the field. However, a number of quantitative or semi-quantitative procedures for assessing soil tilth has been developed over the last 80 years. These procedures vary from simply determining soil cloddiness to more detailed evaluations whereby soil’s physical properties (e.g., porosity, strength, and aggregate characteristics) are combined with its consistency and organic-matter measurements in soil-tilth indices. Semi-quantitative visual soil-evaluation methods have also been developed for field evaluation of soil tilth, and are now used in many countries worldwide.
Shared Musical Experiences
Authors: Polite Brandon
Published: April 2019

In ‘Listening to Music Together’, Nick Zangwill offers three arguments which aim to establish that listening to music can never be a joint activity. If any of these arguments were sound, then our experiences of music, qua object of aesthetic attention, would be essentially private. In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s arguments are unsound and I develop an account of shared musical experience that defends three main conclusions. First, joint listening is not merely possible but a common feature of our socially situated experiences of music. Second, when listening with others our experience of the music and our sense of community with our fellow listeners often reciprocally enhance one another. Third, how deeply and intimately we share a musical experience with others depends upon such factors as our respective backgrounds, interests, and levels of expertise.
Plenty of room left for the Dogmatist
Authors: Raleigh Thomas
Published: April 2019

Barnett (2019) provides an interesting new challenge for Dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. The challenge is that such accounts, by accepting that a perceptual experience can provide a distinctive kind of boost to one’s credences, would lead to a form of diachronic irrationality in cases where one has already learnt in advance that one will have such an experience. I show that this challenge rests on a misleading feature of using the 0–1 interval to express probabilities and show that if we switch to using Odds or (better) Log-Odds, the misleading appearance that there is only ‘a little room’ for one’s credences to increase evaporates. Moreover, there are familiar, independent reasons for taking the Log-Odds scale to provide a clearer picture of the confirmatory effect of evidence. Thus the Dogmatist can after all escape the charge of diachronic irrationality.