bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Economies of Scale (1848–51)
Authors: Haw Richard
Published: March 2020

Between 1847 and 1852, John built four separate aqueducts for the Delaware and Hudson Canal; moved his home, family, and wire rope factory from western Pennsylvania to Trenton, New Jersey; secured the contract to build a huge railroad bridge over the Kentucky River; and continued to mount substantial campaigns to win contracts to span the Ohio at Wheeling and the Niagara Gorge. The four D&H spans were mini masterpieces of engineering and planning. Each structure was very different; each required new solutions to site-specific problems. One of the spans, the Delaware Aqueduct, exists to this day, the oldest suspension bridge in the United States and one of the oldest “modern” suspension bridges in the world. On the larger projects, John again lost out to his old rival Ellet on both the Wheeling and the Niagara spans.
Securing Niagara (1852–55)
Authors: Haw Richard
Published: March 2020

The Niagara contract was a fitting judgment on John’s career to date, and the bridge itself was a triumph, eliciting praise and admiration from all over the globe, for both its handsome Egyptian architecture and the soundness of its design. It took four years to build and was the world’s first railroad suspension bridge, or at least the first successful one, fully demonstrating the strength and effectiveness of the suspension plan for heavy-going freight. It also compared very favorably with Robert Stephenson’s recently completed Britannia Tubular Bridge, the British engineer’s rival solution to the problem of long-span railroad bridges. A lifelong, committed abolitionist who wrote extensively about the evils of slavery, John also appreciated the impact his bridge had (somewhat incidentally) on the institution of slavery. Harriet Tubman (among others) used John’s bridge numerous times in the late 1850s to lead runaway slaves out of the United States and into British Canada.
And the War Came (1861–65)
Authors: Haw Richard
Published: March 2020

The American Civil War saw the Roebling family engaged in very different pursuits. John’s son Washington enlisted in the Union Army and saw service in battle, as an advance scout, as a bridge builder, and as an aide-de-camp. For John, the Civil War was a confounding period of relative inactivity, and he spent most of the war years churning out essay after essay on a whole host of different topics. His most sustained efforts were in the realm of philosophy. John was driven by the need to design and make things and to create order out of the world. A longtime reader of philosophy, John blended elements of Swedenborgian mysticism, Emersonian spiritualism, Kantian ethics, and Hegelian dialectics, eventually producing a 1,493-page philosophical treatise, “The Truth of Nature,” an eye-opening account of John’s philosophical and spiritual beliefs.
Epilogue
Authors: Haw Richard
Published: March 2020

John’s funeral was held in Trenton and the whole town turned out to say goodbye. Tributes weregiven; respect, love, and admiration were expressed. John’s charitable giving and lifetime achievements were shown. He left a void in the community, in the engineering profession, and at the heart of the East River bridge project, which was quickly filled by his son Washington. John’s life is summed up. He wasn’t particularly interested in happiness. He was a seeker and a believer. He was a thinker and an ideas man, and as such, he always had his eyes fixed on the future and on the opposite shore, not—sadly—on those around him, especially on his son Washington.
Prokofiev and the Soviet Symphony
Authors: Tooke Daniel
Published: March 2020

The contrasting fates of Prokofiev’s last three symphonies vividly illustrate the problematic status of the symphony during the Stalinist period, because of its inherent difficulty in satisfying a key tenet of Socialist Realist aesthetics: that all art should communicate ideological engagement. While t Fifth Symphony (1944) was immediately acclaimed as a major contribution to Soviet symphonism, the Sixth (1945–47) was roundly condemned during the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign of 1948; and although the Seventh (1951–52) won official approval, it was widely regarded as an artistic failure resulting from enforced compromise. That music critics tended to focus primarily on the putative ideological content of abstract instrumental works, and to downplay suggestions of foreign influence, often led them to advance highly questionable interpretations of the music’s import. This chapter draws on a range of contemporary music criticism and archival materials, which have clouded objective perception of both the Soviet symphony and Prokofiev’s later instrumental works.
Prokofiev and Shostakovich
Authors: Medić Ivana
Published: March 2020

Much has been written on the professional and personal trajectories of the two luminaries of Soviet/Russian music, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. Their true relationship, however, has yet to be seriously explored. Many writers have focused on the composers’ alleged personal and professional antagonisms, caused by their supposed individual claims to the title of “the greatest Soviet composer,” referencing anecdotes of questionable reliability. This chapter compares the two composers’ contributions to certain genres; their typical compositional procedures; their collaborations with other highly regarded exponents of Soviet cultural life, and their common predecessors. It also contrasts the two composers’ written assessments of one another’s compositions, and compares their works, in which we can observe not only how Prokofiev influenced his younger contemporary but also how each composer might have inspired the other.
Staging Prokofiev’s Early Ballets
Authors: Pritchard Jane
Published: March 2020

As a composer for dance, Prokofiev has an international standing in the twentieth century that was second only to Stravinsky. Both composed specific scores for ballet and both have had other works mined by choreographers for new productions. Yet even now Prokofiev’s reputation as a composer for dance rests largely upon just two scores, both for full-program ballets: Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella. In this, Prokofiev differs from Stravinsky. However, it was as a composer of shorter, more experimental pieces—mostly written for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—that Prokofiev not only learned his craft as a ballet composer but also refined his theatrical and musical idioms. His music for Chout, Trapèze, Le Pas d’Acier, and L’Enfant Prodigue were formative in his stylistic evolution. This chapter traces the development, design, production, and early reception of these relatively unfamiliar works and their later revivals.
“Yea, Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death . . .”
Authors: Savkina Natalia , McAllister Rita , McMinn Maria
Published: March 2020

Images of Thanatos, or death, appear in Prokofiev’s output in a variety of contexts. Thoughts of death threw many shadows over the young composer, despite his naturally happy disposition; but from the 1920s, as a Christian Scientist, he tried to see death as merely a human aberration. His musical works are nonetheless full of death images. Different cultural-historical traditions are drawn upon, reflecting his own life experiences. Ancient mythological and magical beliefs, as well as Christian motives, rub shoulders with positivism and with interpretations of Bolshevism as a secular religion. By exploring concepts of Thanatos in a wide range of Prokofiev’s theater works—from Maddalena, Chout, and The Fiery Angel to Semyon Kotko, Romeo and Juliet, and War and Peace—this chapter casts new light on the composer’s emotional attitudes toward the mysteries of death, as well as revealing special psychological depths in his musical ideas.
A Genealogy of Prokofiev’s Musical Gestures from the Juvenilia to the Later Piano Works
Authors: Guillaumier Christina
Published: March 2020

Prokofiev’s early, unpublished works for piano were composed between 1896 and 1907. They demonstrate the origins of his pianistic idiom, as well as provide us with a genealogy of musical ideas and gestures that were to remain key features of his compositional voice. These early works, in addition to evidence drawn from a number of primary sources, also present us with insights into Prokofiev’s own development as a pianist and his musical personality, shedding light on his technical strengths, his preferences, and his at times unorthodox approach to performance. The chapter concludes with a hermeneutic and analytical discussion of his Toccata, op. 11, composed in 1912, the climactic work of this early period.
The Five Piano Concertos
Authors: Berman Boris
Published: March 2020

Across Prokofiev’s oeuvre, his piano works—and especially his piano concertos—hold a special place. A consummate pianist, he realized early on that, among various performers, he himself was the most persuasive advocate for his music. His appearances as a pianist were opportunities to present his compositions to various international audiences. Each of the piano concertos was a harbinger of important stylistic shifts in the composer’s output in general, and his piano music in particular. This chapter examines each of these works separately, looking into the circumstances of their creation, as well as the changes in Prokofiev’s style demonstrated by each of them. It explores the peculiarities of his writing for piano and the challenges it presents to the performer. By also looking into the changes in Prokofiev’s approach to the instrument as revealed in each concerto, it offers some practical solutions that may be helpful to pianists.
“Things in Themselves”
Authors: McAllister Rita
Published: March 2020

Hidden in the composer’s archives is a series of little music-manuscript notebooks, a bit battered, as if they had been in and out of Prokofiev’s pockets. These he carried around with him, jotting down musical ideas as and when they occurred to him. The contents of such notebooks can reveal quite special aspects of their creator, exposing facets of the imagination which may well lie below the threshold of even that creator’s consciousness. Are the themes notated boldly in ink or tentatively in pencil? How important are indications of tempo or dynamics in comparison with pitches, meters, rhythms, or key signatures? What kind of second thoughts appeared at this early stage? Above all, what are the characteristics that make these themes so distinctively, unmistakably Prokofiev? This study of his thematic sketches opens up entirely new insights into the way he thought, what his compositional priorities were, and how he expressed himself to himself.
Opening Ideas
Authors: Cassidy Parker Elizabeth
Published: March 2020

Chapter 1 introduces several concepts used throughout the book. A discussion of Christopher Small’s musicking begins the chapter. The reader then gets to know the 30 adolescent contributors along with their backgrounds. The chapter explores the concept of being musical as the core of one’s musical identity including one’s musical self-esteem, self-concept, and self-representation. In the interest of further unpacking musical identities, three key ideas are offered including the self as adaptive, identities as complete self-systems, and the influence of individuals and social systems on identity. The end of the chapter calls on the reader to focus on here and now and acquaints the reader with the book’s structure.
Listening and Advocating for Adolescent Musicking
Authors: Cassidy Parker Elizabeth
Published: March 2020

Chapter 9 focuses on music educators’ roles in listening and advocating for adolescent music-making. Adolescents shared advice for music educators, which is communicated to the reader in three themes: (a) challenging adolescents to become themselves, (b) helping through transitions and providing a bridge between experiences, and (c) extending educators’ reach. Roger Gould and Roberto Fernandez’s work on brokering is presented as an example of a potential direction for educators to extend their reach and bridge gaps in social structures. At the end of the chapter, Sandra Stauffer’s radical listening is introduced for reflection. Educators are challenged to consider dynamic possibilities for adolescents in their lives.
China and the New Geopolitics of Eurasia
Authors: Markey Daniel S.
Published: March 2020

This chapter introduces China’s new global initiatives like the vaunted “Belt and Road” and previews how the political and economic interests of other states in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East tend to set the conditions for Chinese activities and shape regional outcomes. It leads with the history of China’s involvement in Pakistan’s Gwadar port. It then identifies ways in which Eurasia’s powerful and privileged groups often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, it foreshadows how statesmen across Eurasia are scrambling to harness China’s energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investments to outdo strategic competitors, like India and Saudi Arabia, while negotiating relations with Russia and the United States. This chapter introduces the book’s subsequent chapters on China’s Eurasian aspirations, South Asia and China, Central Asia and China, the Middle East and China, and the American policy response.
South Asian Entanglements
Authors: Markey Daniel S.
Published: March 2020

This chapter describes the intersection of Chinese, Pakistani, and Indian economic, political, and security interests in South Asia. It introduces a brief history of China’s interaction with South Asia and explains how China now perceives its economic, security, and diplomatic goals in the region. It shows how Pakistanis are divided in their perceptions of China and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, and explains how the military and other establishment figures are likely to gain from closer ties, while liberals and other opposition groups stand to lose. It details how Pakistan benefits from its military ties to China, especially in the areas of nuclear weapons, missiles, and drone technologies, and how China’s diplomatic support shields Pakistan from international pressure. It evaluates that on balance, China’s deepened regional presence and economic, military, and diplomatic assistance to Pakistan will tend to raise tensions with India.
Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative
Authors: Davis Mark , Lohm Davina
Published: March 2020

Pandemics, Publics, and Narrative explores how members of the general public experienced the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It examines the stories related to us by individuals about what happened to them in 2009, their reflections on news and expert advice given to them, and how they considered vaccination, social isolation, and other infection control measures. The book charts also the storytelling of public life, including the “be alert, not alarmed” messages from the beginning of the outbreak through to the “boy who cried wolf” problem that emerged later in the outbreak when the virus turned out to be less serious than first thought for most people. Key themes of the book are the significance of personal immunity for people as they reflected on how to respond to the threat of an influenza virus and the ways in which universal public health advice was interpreted quite differently by people according to their medical and biographical situation. The book provides unprecedented insight into the lives of ordinary people during 2009, some affected profoundly and others hardly affected at all. By drawing on currents in sociocultural scholarship of narrative, illness narrative, and narrative medicine, it develops a novel “narrative public health” approach that bridges health communications and narrative. The book provides therefore important new insights for health communicators and researchers across the social and health sciences.
Renewable Cities
Authors: Fitzgerald Joan
Published: March 2020

While the policy needed to expand renewable energy mostly lies at the federal and state level, cities have a role to play. Cities can require or promote renewable energy adoption, aggregate demand, and facilitate expansion that is ongoing through state and federal policies. This chapter starts by examining the role of cities in developing renewable resources. It then discusses various cities that have committed to obtaining 100 percent of their electricity from renewable energy, with particular emphasis on solar. For instance, cities that own their own utilities, such as Austin, Texas, can require them to adopt renewables in the same way states can. A pathway some cities are taking, particularly in Europe, is remunicipalizing their utilities. In Hamburg, Germany, there is a citizen-led campaign to buy back its utility. This has put the city on a pathway to 100 percent renewable energy.
Electrifying Transportation
Authors: Fitzgerald Joan
Published: March 2020

Cities have a key role in accelerating the adoption of electric vehicles, particularly in building charging infrastructure. This chapter examines the efforts of five leading cities—three European cities and two in the United States—each with a different set of challenges. It shows that they have different strategies for addressing regulatory and planning issues that determine what types of charging stations can be placed where and how to charge for electricity. Some cities are electrifying their bus fleets and supporting the transition of taxi fleets and delivery vehicles to electric. Several are examining ways to charge using renewable power. And a few cities are pursuing vehicle-to-grid integration—two-way interaction in which cars can push power back into the grid during periods of peak demand. The electrified transportation experiments in these five cities have met largely with success, and their innovations are already spreading to others.
How Eco-innovation Districts Can Accelerate Urban Climate Action
Authors: Fitzgerald Joan
Published: March 2020

Eco-innovation districts are defined areas in which cities concentrate state-of-the-art technologies in green building, smart infrastructure, and renewable energy to create sustainable, resilient, and inclusive districts that accelerate action on climate change and sustainability. This chapter addresses four questions: Does the district perform better than or as well as the rest of the city on per capita carbon emissions? How well does the district serve as a test bed for green technologies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Does the city employ a deliberate process of organizational learning that allows city planners and elected officials to apply effective practices and lessons learned from district-scale experimentation? What measures have been put in place to ensure a diversity of income levels? It also examines whether the experimentation undertaken in European eco-innovation districts can be replicated in the United States.
“Written in fair Arabic Characters”
Authors: Einboden Jeffrey
Published: March 2020

This chapter details Thomas Jefferson’s dealings with Ezra Stiles, President of Yale and New England’s leading intellectual. Stiles became Jefferson’s confidant in 1786. Meeting only a month before Jefferson embarked overseas from Boston on July 5, 1784, the two men enjoyed an immediate connection, despite their divergent roles and regions. A master of many disciplines, Stiles was most distinguished by a single interest in particular: his facility with Middle Eastern languages. Jefferson shared anxieties with Stiles concerning Muslim captivity—captivity not of a single person, however, but of an entire nation, sharply criticizing Ottoman occupation of Greece. Anticipating future experiences of his new friend and a later U.S. President, Stiles also gained access to manuscripts arising from Muslim captivity and Arabic documents written by African slaves.
“Go to Mecca; and God will Render you Victorious”
Authors: Einboden Jeffrey
Published: March 2020

This chapter details Thomas Jefferson’s role on translating Comte de Volney’s highly-charged political text Ruins. The Ruins formed not only a revolutionary work but also a critique of divine revelation, offering a “lesson of religion’s tyranny”—a “lesson” which Volney set in Muslim lands. A fanciful meditation on the imperial past, and the promises of human progress, Volney’s Ruins opens with an unnamed traveler, who narrates his arrival to Palmyra, in modern-day Syria, where he marvels at the ancient debris of this Middle Eastern city. In the English rendition that Jefferson would fashion, this work’s initial chapter entitled simply “Voyage”—begins with its narrator’s passage eastward, traversing exotic places. Giving new life to a fugitive in Muslim lands, Jefferson becomes a linguistic pilgrim via translation, his first-person English carrying forward this Middle Eastern narrative.
“Slave of the Most Merciful”
Authors: Einboden Jeffrey
Published: March 2020

This chapter details events that occurred in 1819. In the opening days of the year, Jefferson witnessed his life’s last major achievement. After years of preparation, the University of Virginia was approved, its charter passed by the state’s General Assembly on January 25. Officially instituted, Jefferson’s university yet still seemed somewhat aspirational in 1819. Much remained to do down below in Charlottesville. It would take time to attract sufficient students, and the construction of adequate buildings would extend through 1826, the same year that Jefferson died. Overseeing the school’s staggered start, Jefferson ensured that the end of his life also helped to advertise his fledgling university. His memorial, planted on Monticello’s own grounds, would proudly commemorate the college.
Evidence from Audition
Authors: Purves Dale
Published: March 2020

The reason for using vision as an example in the previous three chapters is that more is known about the human visual system and visual psychophysics than about other neural systems. But this choice begs the question of whether other systems corroborate the evidence drawn from vision. Is the same empirical strategy used in other sensory systems to contend with the same problem (i.e., the inability of animals to measure the actual properties of the world)? Based on accumulated anatomical, physiological, and psychophysical information, audition is the best bet in addressing this question in another modality. This chapter examines whether the perception of sound can also be explained empirically as a way to deal with a world in which the physical parameters of sound sources can’t be apprehended.
The Major Options
Authors: Purves Dale
Published: March 2020

Given the argument and evidence that the operating principle of nervous systems is to generate neural associations on a wholly empirical basis, it makes sense to compare this framework with other ideas that neuroscientists have proposed for understanding brain function. These concepts fall into several broad categories: (1) neural operation based on detecting, computing, and representing stimulus features as such; (2) neural computation and representation based on statistical inferences about physical reality; and (3) neural operation based on efficient and/or predictive coding. Another concept pertinent to all these ideas, including neural operation as empirical association, is whether nervous systems are carrying out computations. This section reviews these conceptual options and some implications that follow.
Grandstanding
Authors: Tosi Justin , Warmke Brandon
Published: March 2020

People used to hold out great hope for a public square in which individuals put petty disputes aside and engage in rational discussion about important issues. Unfortunately, public discourse today—especially on the internet—is full of adults behaving like poorly socialized children, acting out to show off for people they want to impress. In short, they engage in moral grandstanding, or the use of moral talk for self-promotion. Drawing from work in psychology, economics, and political science, this book develops an explanation of why people grandstand when they talk about morality and politics. Using the tools of moral philosophy, it argues that grandstanding is not just annoying, but morally bad. And finally, it explains what we can do to encourage people to support a public square worth participating in, by avoiding grandstanding.
The Promise of Space Revisited
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

Across the twentieth century, an international network of thinkers has created an astounding vision of human movement into the cosmos. Everything done in space was first anticipated by these space expansionists, but only tiny parts of their vision have been realized. Space expansionism is the ideology of the global pro-space movement and offers a Big History narrative of the human past, present, and future, centered on technological advance and habitat enlargement. Advocates claim that their projects to build large orbital infrastructures, colonize celestial bodies, and alter asteroidal orbits can solve global energy and resource problems and ensure humanity’s survival from major Earth disasters. But the actual and prospective consequences of their projects are far darker then recognized. Space activities have increased the probability of nuclear war. Space colonization is likely to result in human extinction and should be avoided.
Questions, Debates, and Frameworks
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

No general assessment of space activities, actual and prospective, exists. Space thinking falls into three broad competing programs: military, habitat, and planetary security expansionisms. Habitat expansionism is most ambitious, with cosmic scope, but largely unrealized. Military and planetary security approaches are opposites, each partially realized, and focused (so far) on near-Earth space. Space-political questions are entangled in seven great debates about contemporary Planetary Earth. Will accelerating technology produce utopia or oblivion? Should world government replace international anarchy? Can new frontiers escape closure, or must a steady state emerge? Who will control global information systems? Are freedom, democracy, and capitalism still viable? Will humanity be replaced by superhumans or advanced computers? Which understanding of the relations between technology, politics, and humanity is superior? What happens in space will decisively shape outcomes of these debates. Space arguments rely heavily on claims about geography, geopolitics, and geohistory, which provide a focus for comprehensive and even-handed assessment. An ancient story about the astronomer Thales captures the overall argument.
New Heavens, New Earth
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

Humans have always attributed enormous importance to occurrences in the heavens. Over the past several centuries modern astronomy has revealed a cosmos of staggering size, filled with trillions of worlds. Its vacuum, weightlessness, lethal radiations, and fantastic speeds make space harshly inhospitable to human life. To access orbital space requires velocities some thirty-four times as fast as jet aircraft, climbing out of steep gravity wells. Of the many bodies mapped by science in this solar system, asteroids are most practically important because they sometimes collide with great violence, profoundly shaping Earth’s deep history. As knowledge of the cosmos has grown, anticipations of nearby intelligent life have dramatically shrunk. The Space Age has also witnessed a far-reaching revolution in understanding the Earth System. Marked by complexity, chaos, and emergence, life on Earth is incompletely understood and inventoried and much less subject to human control than previously assumed, reducing the feasibility of expansionist visions.
Technological Imaginaries, Feasibilities, Syndromes, and Catastrophes
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

Space expansionism, science fiction, and space developments are intimately linked. SF from Verne, Wells, and others inspires space expansionists, and SF is shaped by space discoveries. SF makes space expansionism seem plausible but is often unbound by scientific possibility. An assessment of building block, life-engineering, and transformative technologies reveals that large-scale space activities are becoming more feasible, but creating enclosed ecologies, geo-engineering and terraforming remain doubtful. Anticipating the consequences of new technologies (technology assessment) remains difficult. Technology governance is plagued by recalcitrant syndromes. Theorists of catastrophic and existential risk view space colonization as necessary to escape a long list of possible major calamities (including hostile artificial superintelligence and misused genetic engineering for improved humans, called transhumanism). Human survival increasingly depends on competent futurism and social capacities to steer technology with reversals, regulations, and relinquishments, but these are difficult to establish and maintain. Can vital arrangements of restraint survive large-scale space expansion?
Absolute Weapons, Lightning Wars, and Ultimate Positions
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

The initial development of large rockets was driven by military rivalry. The von Braun programs of military space expansionism are a ladder of projects starting with bombardment and culminating in planetary dominance, each considered in detail in this chapter. Ballistic missiles hurling nuclear weapons at intercontinental distances are commonly not considered space weapons but inherently are because they employ the frictionless vacuum of space to achieve their distinctive high speed. This means humanity’s largest and most consequential space program is hiding in plain sight, an unknown known. Information satellite force multipliers increase the potency of other weapons. There are many ways to destroy satellites, and an antisatellite race is starting. Shooting down ballistic missiles remains largely impossible, despite vast expenditures. Wrapping orbital space with hundreds of satellite battle stations, an “Earth Net,” might roll back the nuclear revolution and establish planetary hegemony. Visionary astro-Archimedeans propose stationing nuclear weapons in deep space, and using asteroids as planetoid bombs.
Geography, Geopolitics, and Geohistory
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

Expansionist anticipations rest on claims about geography, geopolitics, and geohistory but are error-filled, slanted, and misleading. Geography errors arise from confusing physical with practical geography. Earth-space analogies frequently suggest misleading similarities while hiding actual dissimilarities. Ascentionism, the deep-seated human tendency to view elevations as improvements, makes space expansions seem desirable. Geopolitics analyzes the relations between politics, particularly violence and security, and geography and technology. Geopolitics maps proclivities, not inevitabilities, and indicates which political arrangements are necessary, feasible, and likely. The main ideas of geopolitics are summarized and boiled down to twelve propositions. The main geopolitical factor, violence interdependence, measures capacities of actors to inflict damage upon one another. When violence interdependence is intense, actors can readily destroy one another, and security requires ending anarchy and establishing governments, which vary from republican to hierarchical. Geopolitics also offers propositions about special places, consolidation tendencies, and frontiers. Earth geohistory, across Archipelago, Global, and Planetary Earths, supports geopolitical claims.
Solar Space, Island Earth, and the Ends of Humanity
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

Solar colonization, occurring in four stages, faces daunting obstacles and is unlikely soon. A colony able to preserve humanity from Earth disasters is likely to be politically independent. Analogies with successful terrestrial expansions are significantly misleading. The applied propositions of geopolitics predict a solar anarchy primed for large-scale wars. The Solar Archipelago will be geopolitically malefic, combining the worst features of Archipelago and Planetary Earths. Because of the immense violence potentials of asteroidal bombardment, violence interdependence will remain intense despite large effective distances. Asteroid-island analogies hide asteroid movement, collisions, and movability. Establishing a common government will be necessary but nearly impossible. Space polities will become very different, making mutual restraints difficult. Biological species radiation will make interplanetary war xenocidal. Protecting militarily disadvantaged Island Earth will require hierarchical world government. Sustaining restraints on artificial superintelligence and bioengineering will be very difficult. Because solar space colonization probably will cause human extinction (astrocide), it should be avoided.
Conclusion
Authors: Deudney Daniel
Published: March 2020

Tsiolkovsky’s famous statement of humanity being in its “cradle” unintentionally points to humanity’s infantile approach to space and technogenic threats. Illusions and errors afflict space expansionism. Space activities have made nuclear war more likely. Space colonization poses catastrophic and existential threats and will produce a hierarchic world government. An Earth-oriented space program, heavy on restraints, is needed. Not Off Planet Earth measures must join the environmentalist Not On Planet Earth list, making a double NOPE agenda. Space and nuclear arms control is necessary. The Outer Space Treaty should be strengthened. Large orbital infrastructures should be avoided. Only an international consortium should alter asteroid orbits. Space cooperation, Earth-monitoring, and science should be expanded. Most important, the goal of space colonization should be abandoned. Manias of the moment, privatization and space tourism, are trivial pursuits. Protecting Oasis Earth must be humanity’s prime vocation. Human survival requires rejection of seductive but perilous technological visions.
Making it Personal
Authors: Kant Tanya
Published: March 2020

The encounter of “personalized experiences”—targeted advertisements, tailored information feeds, and “recommended” content, among other things—is now a common and somewhat inescapable component of digital life. More often than not however, “you” the user are not primarily responsible for personalizing your web engagements: instead, with the help of your search, browsing, and purchase histories, your “likes,” your click-throughs, and a multitude of other data you produce as you go about your day, your experience can “conveniently”—and computationally—be personalized on your behalf. This book explores a host of new questions that emerge from web users’ encounters with these forms of algorithmic personalization. What do users “know” about the algorithms that apparently “know” them? If personalization practices seek to act on users’ behalf (for instance, by deciding what content is personally relevant), then how do users retain or relinquish their autonomy? Indeed, what kinds of selfhoods are made possible when personalization algorithms intervene in identity construction? Making It Personal is the first full-length monograph to critically analyze the sociocultural implications of algorithmic personalization through the accounts and testimonies of web users themselves. At the heart of the book are interviews and focus groups with web users who—through a myriad of resistant, tactical, resigned, or trusting engagements—encounter algorithmic personalization as part of their lived experience on the web. The book proposes that for those who encounter it, algorithmic personalization creates new implications for knowledge production, autonomy, cultural capital, and formations of self.
Me, Myself, and the Algorithm
Authors: Kant Tanya
Published: March 2020

If “personalization” involves rendering something personally relevant, then how should “personhood” be understood, constituted, and theorized? To explore this question, this chapter scrutinizes not just “algorithmic” identity, but also broader concepts of what is meant by personhood and the self. The chapter looks to understand how users have come to be understood both inside and outside of algorithmic constitution. It argues that it is only through understanding social subjects as performatively constituted by both algorithmic and sociocultural protocols that it is possible to untangle the nuances that algorithmic personalization produces in social interaction. The chapter also considers in more detail how researchers constitute and negotiate the lived experiences of the participant accounts that they draw on.
Job and Career Crafting to Fulfill Individual Career Pathways
Authors: Tims Maria , Akkermans Jos
Published: March 2020

Individuals can proactively craft their careers by shaping both their individual jobs and the series of jobs or roles that comprise their career journeys. This chapter illustrates how being proactive at one’s job (i.e., job crafting) may allow individuals to achieve better jobs for themselves and how being competent with regard to one’s career (i.e., career competencies) may help individuals better proactively navigate their careers, which is referred to as career crafting. Drawing on the parallel with the literatures on job crafting, career competencies, and career self-management, this chapter introduces career crafting as a valuable new variable for career research. Career crafting is defined as proactive behaviors that individuals perform to self-manage their careers to attain optimal person–career fit. The chapter also presents the Career Crafting Survey, which can be used in future research to further accumulate knowledge about how and when career crafting may help individuals achieve successful and fulfilling careers.
Purpose, Meaning, and Career Pathways
Authors: Dik Bryan J. , Alayan Alexandra J. , Reed Kaitlyn A.
Published: March 2020

In addition to providing financial means, work offers an opportunity for individuals to experience meaning and purpose. Meaningful work, defined in this chapter as work that is worthwhile and personally significant, is linked to job satisfaction, work motivation, and psychological well-being. Several vocational psychology theories of career development, along with research on work as a calling and the protean career orientation, have addressed factors that likely influence meaning and purpose in work, either directly or indirectly. This chapter examines the opportunities for career pathways programs and professionals for promoting purpose and meaning in work over the course of a career. Specific strategies related to career choice, choice implementation, career engagement and maintenance/management, as well as retirement, bridge employment, and encore careers are addressed. Future directions for research and practice are also discussed.
Heading for the Exit
Authors: Cooley Alexander , Nexon Daniel
Published: March 2020

After two decades, American global hegemony is almost certainly reaching its expiration date. America will remain a great power, if the not greatest power. But, barring a major shock to emerging powers—and especially China—the world will fully transition to a new global order. This chapter sketches out some possible futures. These include a new bipolar system, perhaps with China and the United States locked in a new Cold War; a multipolar system that maintains the veneer of liberal global governance, but in the service of authoritarianism; and an international system characterized by globalized oligarchy and kleptocracy. There is still time to avoid the worst versions of these orders, and to push back against the full hijacking of liberal institutions in the service of worldwide corruption. But on these, and a number of other matters, American policymakers should assume the window of outsized American influence is fast closing.
Theories of Humor
Authors: Costanzo William V.
Published: March 2020

Chapter 1 offers a survey of humanity’s best efforts to understand humor: what it is, how it works, and why it is important. It examines the most prominent theories and beliefs, describes recent research by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, and applies their findings to a wide sampling of film comedies from around the world. Beginning with the Western distinction between comedy and tragedy, it explores these concepts as two visions of human existence, drawing on key thinkers of the West (Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Bergson, Freud, Bakhtin) and East (Zhuangzi, Confucius, Al-Jahiz, Bharata Muni) as well as modern clinical studies to arrive at a rich, cross-cultural understanding of comedy and what it means for us as biologic and social beings.
Russian Film Comedy
Authors: Costanzo William V.
Published: March 2020

Soviet and Russian cinemas offer unique opportunities to investigate the role of humor as an escape from oppression and an instrument for change. This chapter follows the nation’s filmmakers from the idealistic days of revolution (Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Medvedkin), through Stalin’s repressive regime (Grigory Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyrev) and the chills and thaws of the Cold War (Eldar Ryazanov, Leonid Gaidai, Tengiz Abuladze). It introduces lesser-known talents who made films before (Yevgeny Bauer, Boris Barnet) and after (Yuri Mamin, Kira Muratova, Valery Todorovskiy) the Soviet era. In their own ways, each of these directors contributed to a comic cinema that builds on the ironic sensibility of Chekhov, the satiric caricatures of Gogol, and the archetypes of Russia’s native folklore.
Film Comedy in Scandinavia
Authors: Costanzo William V.
Published: March 2020

In the peculiar world of Nordic comedy, “quirky feel-good” movies and their darker cousins perpetuate an offbeat brand of humor dating back to the Viking sagas. This chapter examines the history of film comedy in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, tracing the shifting forms of humor from the golden-age classics to more modern stories shaped by the region’s landscape, climate, and patterns of state funding. Comedy in this part of the world includes the folklustpel merriment of Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night, the playful parody of Ruben Øvredal’s Trollhunter, and the shadowy cynicism of Lars von Trier’s Dogme-dominated The Boss of It All.
Cultural Relics
Authors: Scott Gregory Adam
Published: March 2020

This final chapter looks at the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China, during which time over a hundred Buddhist sites were repaired or rebuilt. These sites were put to use as showcases for Buddhist culture in New China and as stages for cultural diplomacy with other Asian countries that shared a Buddhist past. Two sites examined in some detail are Guangji Monastery and Yonghe Temple, both in the new capital of Beijing. A key question is how Buddhist monasteries fit into the new bureaucracy; as the cases of these two monasteries demonstrate, the reconstructions were intended to create static monuments to cultural heritage, not living religious communities.
Conclusion
Authors: Scott Gregory Adam
Published: March 2020

This concluding section revisits the main points raised throughout the book and argues that monastery reconstructions introduce innovations and change into what is otherwise a highly stable system. The chapter suggests that the case of monastery reconstructions can provide us with a framework for understanding change and development among Chinese Buddhists during the modern era more generally. Both destruction and reconstruction processes are proven to be ephemeral, and as new threats and disasters arise, efforts to renew monasteries must be undertaken time and time again. As the previous chapters have shown, reconstructions were expected interventions in the lifecycle of a Chinese Buddhist monastery, and records describing such reconstructions typically credit them with helping to revive the Dharma more generally.
Six (or Seven) Ways of Looking at a Lantern Slide
Authors: Crangle Richard
Published: March 2020

This chapter offers a consideration of the magic lantern slide from a series of viewpoints giving overlapping ways of thinking about what it is as an artefact, how it works as a component of a narrative and performance medium, and its significances in historical and contemporary contexts of creative use. With illustrations from the Lucerna web resource, institutional and private collections, and the work of the Million Pictures research project, the chapter considers the physicality of slides as objects; their relative cultural (and financial) valuations; their various roles and motivations in the transference and concealment of knowledge; their relationships with other portions of the projection process; and some parallels between historic usage of slides and modern media practices, especially in the complex mixture of ‘authority’ and ‘freedom’ that determines their use and interpretation. Conventional approaches to what is sometimes called the ‘historical art of projection’ can be prone to dwell on one or two of these aspects, often with an emphasis on the visual content of the slide image or the physical nature of the artefact. However, to begin to understand the overall cultural impact of this largely lost medium we need to open out the discussion beyond its component parts and consider its possible uses, both historical and current. This chapter therefore aims to describe lantern slide projection as an interactive, ephemeral performance medium, elusive and difficult to categorize, but rich in its creative possibilities.
Researching Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Realities
Authors: Head Anthony , Sujir Leila
Published: March 2020

The chapter explores the development of Elastic 3D Spaces as a research group, its span of inquiry, along with developments to date, using old and new technologies, including stereoscopy and augmented and virtual reality. Elastic 3D Spaces alludes to the space in front of a screen where images appear when using stereo to create 3D, where objects pop out of the screen. The perception of depth stretches if the viewer can move, hence elastic space. The chapter explores art projects whilst positioning the subject area involving both arts and science researchers and explains the topics it covers. Elastic 3D Spaces is interested in comparisons between 3D experiences and stereo 3D experiences from projection to virtual reality.
They’ll Take Whatever You Feed Them
Authors: Lund Cornelia
Published: March 2020

This chapter investigates the approaches to projection we find in the field of live audiovisual performance. This field comprises different kinds of performative expressions working with live manipulated sound and image, such as VJ and live cinema performances, as well as many expanded cinema and visual music projects, but also cases of collaborations with artists from other areas such as dance. As different as they may be in their approach to performance and the interconnection of sound and image, they share a similar approach to projection: as opposed to the ‘traditional’ cinematic dispositive, there are no fixed expectations or rules as to how the elements of the projection process should be arranged in a live audiovisual performance. Their set-up has to be decided anew for, and according to, every single performance project. This creative freedom opens up the space for a broad theoretical and practical exploration of the projection process, which, however, often becomes restricted by certain standardizations, as the analysis of performances and performance situations shows. This chapter develops some reflections on projection in this very specific field by, in a first step, discussing theoretical and discursive approaches to projection. In a second step, it analyses the role of projection in concrete situations of live audiovisual performance, relying on the author’s academic research as well as on her experiences with such performances as a curator and a member of the public.