bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Exploring Post-National Natures: Nature in the Shadow of the State
Authors: Whitehead Mark , Jones Rhys , Jones Martin
Published: November 2020

From the beginning of this book we have consistently emphasized that our multi-faceted understanding of states cannot be simplistically equated with a nationally scaled and territorially bound institution. Despite this stated aim, in many of the preceding chapters we have described a series of ways in which state natures have been produced at a national level. Whether it has been through water supply networks, national mapping and land-use surveys, nationalized pollution monitoring networks, or nationwide judicial frameworks, we have described how nature has been framed at a distinctly national scale. While exploring the national framing of nature we have seen how the national centralization of ecological knowledge and the territorial framing of the natural world have transformed the social experience, understanding, and ability to transform nature. A closer inspection of our descriptions of the nationalization of nature within the modern state, however, revels that the process of nationalization is never quite as national as it may seem. Attempts to produce a national picture or vision of nature are always based upon more localized practices and conventions than may be immediately apparent. It is our contention that attempts to manage and regulate nature through the multifarious processes of nationalization are best conceived of as the unfulfilled desire of numerous state regimes. This statement has two implications. First, it indicates that nationally based strategies for the control and regulation of nature are only one among a series of scales in and through which states can potentially manage nature. Secondly, it suggests that states could develop other (non-national) territorial strategies in their evolving historical relationships with the natural world. This final chapter is devoted to exploring these alterative sites and moments of contemporary state–nature relations. We begin by considering the rise of sustainable cities as alterative (‘post-national’) territorial strategies in and through which states are attempting to manage contemporary social relations with nature. As sub-national, decentralized territorial units, sustainable cities provide an interesting spatial and institutional perspective on contemporary manifestations of state nature. Drawing on the example of Australia’s Sustainable Cities Inquiry, we consider how states attempt to regulate nature through the control and administration of urban space.
Introduction
Authors: Ball Warwick
Published: November 2020

The background to the present work lies in the exciting archaeological climate of Afghanistan in the 1970s. Increasing numbers of foreign archaeological missions were engaged in fieldwork: following on from the pioneering work of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) since 1922, British, German, Italian, Japanese, Soviet, and US missions were undertaking active research, as well as the Afghans themselves under the auspices of the Afghan Institute of Archaeology. The latest to establish a permanent presence in Kabul was the British Institute of Afghan Studies, in 1972. To keep abreast of these activities, in 1979 work on compiling a simple card-index file of archaeological sites in Afghanistan was begun for the library of the British Institute. It was designed as a quick, working reference guide to the major sites for the use of researchers who needed further information on a particular site or sites, modelled on those indexes existing at the time in the British School of Archaeology at Athens and the Institute of Archaeology at London University. The value of such a guide soon became apparent, and it was decided to expand this index into a full catalogue encompassing as many of the sites and monuments as possible that could be found from published sources. As such, all known sites, whether they were simply unidentified mounds observed in passing or major monumental and excavated sites, could be referred to quickly and a comprehensive list of publications dealing with each site be consulted, in tandem with expanding the Institute library. In its loose, unbound form it was designed not only to be consulted for reference but also to be constantly enlarged, updated, and improved by its users. As a result of expanding the index into a more comprehensive catalogue, it was suggested that a second version be prepared for publication as a gazetteer, and the original work was conceived. At the same time several colleagues offered to contribute their own unpublished field material for inclusion in the Gazetteer as a means of publishing sites hitherto accessible only in private archives. Chief of these were Jean-Claude Gardin and Bertille Lyonnet, who had recently completed their eastern Bactria surveys.
Forests and Forest Environments
Authors: Fanta Josef
Published: November 2020

North-western Europe has on various counts a very heterogeneous character. Crystalline and metamorphic bedrocks of various ages and Tertiary and Quaternary deposits define its geology and geomorphological features. The area belongs to several climatic zones and parts of it went through quite different processes during their Quaternary development. All these aspects were of essential importance for forests—their origin, development, species composition, structural features, and the character of their environments. During the postglacial period favourable climatic conditions enabled trees to migrate from the refuges in the south and south-east of Europe to the north and north-west. With the exception of extreme conditions all the dry land of north-western Europe was covered with forests whose species composition varied, depending on local conditions of the physical environment. Natural woods and forests, both closed and open and continuously changing in time, contributed greatly to natural landscape diversity. Since the Neolithic and especially in the Middle Ages, human influence becomes the crucial factor of forest development, the impact being superimposed on natural conditions and evolutionary processes. Man not only drastically reduced the forested area in Europe, but the use of forests over several millennia also strongly changed the conditions for the functioning of forests as natural ecosystems. As a result, the man-made forests of today often have little in common with natural forest communities, which once covered the European continent. Nevertheless, even these man-made forests have important functions: they greatly influence the local climate and the hydrological regime of the landscape; they protect steep slopes against erosion and are an important source of biodiversity; and they contribute strongly to the variety of landscape structure as well as to the protection of the environment. This chapter provides a general survey of the phytogeographical, palaeoecological, and environmental aspects of forests in north-western Europe. For a proper insight the following components are taken into consideration: • the abiotic component (the physical environment: topography, climate); • the phytogeographical component (horizontal distribution and altitudinal zonation); • the historical component (postglacial development, early impact of humans on forests); • the ecological component (distribution and ecological properties of trees, main forest types); • the forest use component (organized forestry and its development and the present situation of forests and forestry.
Understanding Foragers
Authors: Barker Graeme
Published: November 2020

Hunter-gatherer or forager societies, as the names imply, have been defined first and foremost by their mode of subsistence: ‘hunting of wild animals, gathering of wild plants, and fishing, with no domestication of plants, and no domesticated animals except the dog’ (Lee and Daly, 1999: 3). Another recent survey develops this defining characteristic in the following terms: ‘the absence of direct human control over the reproduction of exploited species, and little or no control over other aspects of population ecology such as the behaviour and distribution of food resources. In essence, hunter-gatherers exercise no deliberate alteration of the gene pool of exploited resources’ (Panter-Brick et al., 2001b: 2, their italics). In addition to this primary characteristic of ‘not being farmers’, there are or have been two other very common features amongst recent and contemporary forager societies, as Lee and DeVore (1968b: 11) commented in their opening essay to the seminal Man the Hunter volume: ‘(1) they live in small groups, and (2) they move around a lot’. At the end of the Pleistocene, forager societies peopled most regions of the world, at most latitudes. By the middle of the second millennium ad, foragers still occupied a third of the globe including all of Australia and most of North America, and large tracts of South America, Africa, North, and North-East Asia. Yet in recent centuries foragers have ‘retreated precipitously in the face of the steamroller ofmodernity’ (Lee and Daly, 1999: 1), occupying only those areas where farmers simply cannot go, or where farming is so marginal as to be uneconomic (Fig. 2.1). Many societies frequently cited in archaeological textbooks as examples of forager societies today, like the !Kung-San of the Kalahari, in fact also practise cultivation or herding on a small scale, and others depend heavily on trade with neighbouring farmers for staple foods. It is extremely difficult to translate foragers’ behaviour as recorded today or in the recent past into theories of general applicability to the world’s prehistoric foraging population prior to farming. The task is all the more complicated by the remoteness of the everyday lives of foragers (present and past) from western Europeans, a remoteness that has given rise to two enduring currents in European philosophical thinking about such societies: that they are alien savages on the one hand, or innocents close to the state of nature on the other (Barnard, 1999).
Africa: Afro-Asiatic Pastoralists and Bantu Farmers?
Authors: Barker Graeme
Published: November 2020

Africa, the cradle of humankind several million years ago, was also where anatomically modern humans first developed over 150,000 years ago. Yet our understanding of how these people eventually became farmers is still very limited. A generation ago Thurston Shaw commented that, in comparison with other parts of the world, ‘Africa lags behind. . . in relation to archaeological research and in knowledge about the beginnings of food production’ (Shaw, 1977: 108). Ann Stahl’s review of the topic a few years later made the same observation: ‘research into the origins of African agriculture lags ten to fifteen years behind studies of early agriculture elsewhere’ (Stahl, 1984: 19). In many regions, archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s were still attempting to establish the most basic chronological framework of artefactual sequences, let alone recover the biological remains that could show when agricultural activities began (Hall, 1996). Many parts of the continent have endured decades of political unrest and military conflict, making archaeological fieldwork impossible for long periods. The equatorial forests are particularly under-researched because of the combination of political unrest, the difficulties of conducting fieldwork in forest, and poor preservation conditions of organic remains. Our understanding of the archaeological history of human settlement in these vast regions is still extremely rudimentary. For countries grappling with tremendous problems of underdevelopment, funding archaeologists in museums and universities can inevitably be a low priority. The number of professional archaeologists engaged in fieldwork on the African continent, indigenous Africans especially, is still extremely small. Distribution maps of archaeological sites are often primarily an indication of where archaeologists have been able to work. Despite these considerable challenges, however, recent studies have started to transformlong-standing ideas about when, how, and why people in Africa started to practise plant and animal husbandry (Fig. 8.1). The northern margins of the continent are Mediterranean in climate and environment, and the beginnings of farming there are best understood as part of the wider settlement history of the Mediterranean basin discussed in the next chapter. The Saharan desert in places reaches right to the coast, for example at Libya’s Gulf of Sirte, but elsewhere the Mediterranean zone can be up to 200 kilometres deep, notably in the mountainous region known as the Maghreb that embraces much of Morocco, northern Algeria, and northern Tunisia.
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
Authors: Harvey David
Published: November 2020

Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
Principles of Monumental Form in Antiquity
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

Roman buildings are among the most impressive and conspicuous legacies of the ancient world. To the millions who visit their ruins and reconstructed forms every year they are an absorbing and fascinating sight, not only because of their physical size and beauty as works of art, but for their historical value as a suggestive reminder of the past. For Edward Gibbon, these architectural remains were evidence of cultural and economic prosperity and supported his conclusion that: ‘[i]f a man were called to fix the period during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian [AD 96] to the accession of Commodus [AD 180].’ Since Gibbon’s time, excavation and scholarly analysis have reinforced this impression. Most regions within the Roman Empire have produced archaeological evidence of imposing buildings from this period. Foundations, scattered finds of building materials and architectural decoration, and building inscriptions, together suggest that the volume of buildings erected at this time was substantially greater than the surviving structures might suggest. This book is about Roman monumental architecture erected under the Antonine emperors, particularly during the reigns of Antoninus Pius (AD 138–61) and Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–80). Although there have been many individual regional and site studies, there has never been a general synthesis which evaluates the architecture of the Antonine period as a whole in the light of the increasing quantity of evidence. The present book does not aim to provide that synthesis in the manner of a conventional art-historical analysis of forms and styles. Nor does it set out to analyse the technologies and materials of Roman buildings, the logistics or practicalities of their construction, or the processes of their design, aspects which have been well studied in recent years. It attempts, rather, to consider the significance of the architecture of this period for contemporaries. Its focus is the question of architectural meaning. In the ancient world, buildings were not only a backdrop and setting for social interaction but also a form of social language.
Patrons and the Monumentality of Architecture
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

Architectural symbolism explains monumentality for only a small number of religious or imperial buildings, in their representations of the divine and the cosmic, or their insinuation of the semi-divine nature of the emperor. But for the majority of patrons of public buildings under the Roman Empire monumentality was not tied to such concepts, but was expressed on a more human level. Architecture contributed to the public image of individual patrons in the same way as did other ‘status symbols’. A Roman aristocrat’s house was a public monument; by contrast, the house of a disgraced man was destroyed. In what follows, I shall argue that the forms of architecture used in public as well as private buildings played an important role in promoting an owner’s social identity, and that they did so because of the ideas they embodied. For Seneca, the squared stone construction of the villa of Scipio Africanus at Liternum, with ‘towers raised on all sides to defend it’, was a physical embodiment of the idea that ‘a man’s home is his castle’. In the same way, the frequent mosaic pattern in private houses at Pompeii and other Roman colonies, especially in southern Gaul and northern Italy, of a labyrinth set within a walled circuit (Fig. 72), had a metaphoric purpose: it signalled that the house was both exclusive and impregnable, the work of a Daedalus-like master architect, and, as the aedificatio of the owner, a statement of his social rank. Because such a mosaic pattern could only be fully comprehended from the top of the building, preferably a high one, it had an inherent association with monumental architecture. Cicero chose a portico on his estates for its ‘dignity’ and a vault for its honour, while the younger Pliny in his villas at Laurentum and Tusci relished forms that he had ‘begun [himself ] or, if already begun, brought to completion and thoroughly adorned’; they included a white marble stibadium, a ‘tetrastyle’ arbour of cipollino columns, and a topiary of box which, like a monumental inscription, spelled his name and that of his architect.
Buildings, Politics, and the Monumentality of Antonine Cities
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

We have seen how the forms of individual buildings under the Antonines reflected the desires of patrons or architects to achieve what we might call ‘monumentality’, often at the expense of other, less imposing buildings around them. But as these were public buildings they also reflected on the dignity of the city. Every town in the Roman Empire was an amalgam of many different single constructions that each represented the aspirations of their builders. So how far did entire Roman cities possess ‘monumentality’ in their own right, and how much did individual monumental buildings contribute to it? Did the monumentality of the city amount to more than the sum of its parts? And to what extent did monumental architecture, which for individual patrons and architects involved self-assertion and rivalry with others, express a spirit of inter-city rivalry that threatened the unity of Empire? Buildings have political meaning in many ways. Various facets of the political aspect of architecture in the ancient world have been set out by Wolfgang Sonne. First, the erection of a public building is itself a political and public activity, because it is a highly visible process and involves large numbers of workmen. The impact of this factor on popular awareness of architecture is often neglected, but the monuments of contractors employed during the building boom in Flavian and Trajanic Rome suggest that the physical aspects of construction, such as huge cranes and scaffolding structures, had themselves a certain monumentality. Second, the visual layout of public architecture can have political implications, especially the relative amounts of space given to public and private buildings and their distribution and size. In this way architecture shows how power is shared in a community. Third, some buildings are political in function, not only assemblybuildings like the Roman Curia Julia, but also audience-halls, public precincts, temples, theatres, and amphitheatres housing imperial rituals. Finally, architecture can be used as a medium of political propaganda: for example, public spaces like the Fora of Augustus and Trajan, adorned with deliberately chosen political statuary, or the imperial palaces of Augustus or Domitian.
The Architectural Descriptions of Lucian of Samosata
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

In addition to public speeches, rhetors of the second century also composed shorter, less formal exercises, ‘introductions’, prolaliai, or, more generally, dialexeis, ‘discourses’, as initial remarks on a topic or substitutes for longer orations. One writer who favoured this medium was the sophist Lucian, who flourished during the 160s and 170s. But his examples of the genre are not straightforward, since, as John Dryden observed, ‘[n]o man is so great a master of irony as our author’. Even that may be an oversimplification. Perhaps more accurate is the recent claim, about one of Lucian’s works, that it ‘treads along a knife-edge line between sincerity and irony’. Because of the satirical position he adopts, Lucian’s works provide a valuable source of contemporary social attitudes. On repeated occasions in his dialogues and stories, this Hellenized Syrian, sufficiently detached from the assumptions of Greek and Roman sophistic culture to be able to offer an independent perspective, observes how individuals regarded as innately superior could provoke speechless awe (thauma) in their ignorant audiences, whether at wonderful objects, like the possessions of the rich, or at abstract concepts and admirable philosophical principles, like the prize of happiness, political proposals, poetic fictions, or intellectual ideas. The amazement often rests on the achievement of a paradox. Architecture too was an object of wonder. The science of geometry, on which architects like Nicon prided themselves, seemed ‘miraculous’ to the ignorant. Nicon’s model Socrates was the archetype of these shaman-like characters, who, after creating aporia as a result of an impressive paradox, left their companions expressing disbelief. In matters of philosophy, science, religion, or higher culture, the layman could only address the expert as ‘O wondrous one’ (ō thaumasie). The satirical Lucian sees through such conventions, which are invariably betrayed by hypocritical behaviour, but this did not prevent their being taken seriously by contemporary audiences. In short, the picture that Lucian paints of these performances by sophists and sensationalists is one of an elite group or culture using their superior education or supposed access to hidden secrets to pull the wool over the eyes of those outside their group.
Semantic Web services
Authors: Walton Christopher
Published: November 2020

In this book we have been consistently directed by the vision of the Semantic Web. This vision can be summarized as the ability for computers to automatically use information on the Web in a similar way to humans. In particular, we want to be able to retrieve, comprehend, and exchange knowledge using automated techniques. At this point we have defined all of the main techniques that can be used to realize these goals. A summary of the four key techniques that we now have at our disposal is presented below: 1. We have the ability to represent knowledge in a form suitable for automated processing. This ability is provided by the definition of ontologies, which provide structure to knowledge. 2. We can construct entities, called agents, which act on behalf of humans and solve specific goals. We have presented many different techniques that can be used to construct these agents, dependent on the purpose for that the agents to be applied. 3. We can reason about the knowledge that we represent to answer specific questions. This can be accomplished by query answering techniques, or by complex inferences over the knowledge, guided by the ontology. 4. Our agents can communicate with other agents, and form societies based on common interests. Within these societies, agents can collaborate towards the resolution of common goals, which could not be accomplished by individual agents alone. The purpose of this penultimate chapter is to show how we can harness and combine these four key techniques to build systems and applications for the Semantic Web. As stated in Chapter 1, Semantic Web applications are not constructed statically in the traditional manner. Instead, these applications are constructed dynamically, at run-time, from combinations of services, termed knowledge services. Our presentation is designed to answer the two key questions below: 1. How can we construct knowledge services that encompass the various capabilities that we have available? 2. How do we compose knowledge services into applications that can accomplish specific tasks?
The Historical Background to the Discovery of Cave Art at Creswell Crags
Authors: Bahn Paul G.
Published: November 2020

On 14 April 2003, we made the first discovery of Palaeolithic cave art in Britain. Since portable art of the period had long been known in this country (Sieveking 1972; Campbell 1977: vol. 2, figs. 102, 105, 143), it had always seemed probable that parietal art must also have existed. It was fairly obvious that paintings were unlikely to be discovered—barring the finding of a totally unknown cave or a new chamber within a known cave—since paintings tend to be quite visible, and somebody (whether owner, speleologist, or tourist) would probably have reported them by now. Engravings, in contrast, can be extraordinarily difficult to see without a practised eye, oblique lighting, and, often, a great deal of luck. Such was the purpose of our initial survey and, sure enough, we rapidly encountered engraved marks in a number of caves, which we will be investigating more fully and systematically in the near future. At the well-known sites of Creswell Crags, on the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border, we found both figurative and non-figurative engravings of the period. This was third time lucky for British cave art, following two false alarms. In the first, in 1912 the abbé Henri Breuil and W. J. Sollas claimed that ten wide red parallel horizontal painted stripes under calcite in the Welsh coastal cave of Bacon Hole (east of Paviland) were ‘the first example in Great Britain of prehistoric cave painting’ (see The Times, 14 Oct. 1912, p. 10; Sollas 1924: 530–1; Garrod 1926: 70; Grigson 1957: 43–4); but Breuil later stated (1952: 25) that their age could not be fixed. Subsequently, these marks rapidly faded, and are now thought to have been natural or to have been left by a nineteenthcentury sailor cleaning his paint brush (Morgan 1913; Garrod 1926; Houlder 1974: 159; Daniel 1981: 81) In 1981, the Illustrated London News rashly published—without verification of any kind—an ‘exclusive’ claiming the discovery of Palaeolithic animal engravings in the small cave of Symonds Yat in the Wye Valley (Rogers et al. 1981; Rogers 1981). Subsequent investigation showed that the marks were entirely natural, and that the claim was utterly groundless (Daniel 1981: 81–2; Sieveking 1982; Sieveking and Sieveking 1981; and, for a grudging retraction, Illustrated London News, May 1981, p. 24).
3D Laser Scanning at Church Hole, Creswell Crags
Authors: Carty Alistair
Published: November 2020

The process of recording in situ archaeological art can be a time-consuming and complex task, especially on inaccessible and non-planar surfaces such as those found in Church Hole, Creswell Crags. There are considerable challenges to the recorder, including the accurate positioning and fixing of survey frames, the physical discomfort of sitting, crouching, or even lying down for long periods of time in cramped surroundings, and, ultimately, the difficulty in interpreting the panels to enable accurate recording. Furthermore, the more accurate forms of traditional recording include the taking of rubbings of the carvings, a process known to increase the potential of damage to already fragile artworks. 3D laser scanning offers solutions to most of these problems by quickly producing a highly dense fully three-dimensional surface map of the art which can be studied in more conducive circumstances by researchers at a later date. Furthermore, powerful visualization techniques can be applied to the 3D surface map to extract and enhance detail that might be virtually invisible to the naked eye. Over-arching the visualization and interpretational aspects of 3D laser scanning is the potential to use the acquired 3D surface map to monitor any change in the surface through repeated scanning over a period of time. This technique is suitable for detecting minute differences in the surface over time, including both erosion due to natural processes or vandalism and accretion through build-up of deposits on the surface of the art. The most complex aspect of three-dimensional recording, no matter what the subject matter, is that of the third dimension. People have an almost schizophrenic way of looking at the world. For example, if you were to place two identical objects a distance apart, it is simple to state that one object is further away than the other due to our perception of depth and the ability to walk around the two objects. However, if you were to take a photograph or make a drawing of the scene from one point of view, it becomes difficult to tell whether two identical objects are placed some distance apart, or if two differently sized objects sit beside one another. The three-dimensionality of the scene is now lost and is available by inference only.
Zoological Perspectives on the Late Glacial
Authors: Yalden D. W.
Published: November 2020

Enough mammal specimens of Late Glacial date from the British Isles have been subjected to radiocarbon dating to provide a reliable outline of the likely large mammal fauna of the time, though the accompanying fauna of small mammals has mostly been assigned to this period on associative, rather than direct, dating. These give an adequate zoological background against which to examine the suggested identities of the large mammals depicted at Church Hole, Creswell Crags. This background information is reviewed in this chapter. While Bison priscus was certainly present earlier in the Devensian, there is no evidence that Bison returned to Britain in the Late Glacial, but aurochs (Bos primigenius) did so, and must be considered a more probable identification. The evidence that ibex (Capra ibex) ever occurred in Britain is very dubious, which cast serious doubt on the original identification of the Church Hole Panel III engraving as being of this species. In this case, discussion and reinterpretation of the engravings during the course of the conference suggested a better resolution than the zoological one suggested at the time. The ice of the Devensian glacial maximum, at about 20–18 ka BP, is believed to have covered all of northern Great Britain and Ireland, leaving smaller areas of the south of each island free of ice but occupied by tundra, permafrost, conditions. It is most unlikely that any of the present mammal fauna could have survived here then, though the possibilities that mountain hare (Lepus timidus) and stoat (Mustela erminea) did so must be conceded—both range well into the Arctic at the present day. The severity of the climate, and the likely nature of the mammal fauna, is indicated by the presence of musk ox (Ovibos moschatus) (Fisherton, Wiltshire, but undated) and the possible polar bear (Ursus maritimus) (Creag nan Uamh, Sutherland, 18.9 ka: Kitchener and Bonsall 1997) that date to this time. Barnwell Station, Cambridge, has a14 C date on peat of 19.5 ka BP, and a fauna including woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), and horse (Equus ferus). Dated specimens fromsouthern Ireland are also relevant: collared lemming (Dicrostonyx torquatus) at20.3 ka BP, woolly mammoth at 20.36 ka BP and Arctic fox (Alopex lagopus) at 19.95 ka BP, all from Castlepook Cave, Cork (Woodman et al. 1997).
Leibniz’s Theme, Babbage’s Dream
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

The German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is perhaps best remembered in science as the co-inventor (with Newton) of the differential calculus. In our story, however, he has a presence not so much because, like his great French contemporary the philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), he built a calculating machine—in Pascal’s case, the machine could add and subtract, whereas Leibniz’s machine also performed multiplication and division—but for something he wrote vis-à-vis calculating machines. He wished that astronomers could devote their time strictly to astronomical matters and leave the drudgery of computation to machines, if such machines were available. Let us call this Leibniz’s theme, and the story I will tell here is a history of human creativity built around this theme. The goal of computer science, long before it came to be called by this name, was to delegate the mental labor of computation to the machine. Leibniz died well before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, circa 1760s, when the cult and cultivation of the machine would transform societies, economies, and mentalities. The pivot of this remarkable historical event was steam power. Although the use of steam to move machines automatically began with the English ironmonger and artisan Thomas Newcomen (1663–1727) and his invention of the atmospheric steam engine in 1712, just 4 years before Leibniz’s passing, the steam engine as an efficient source of mechanical power, as an efficient means of automating machinery, as a substitute for human, animal, and water power properly came into being with the invention of the separate condenser in 1765 by Scottish instrument maker, engineer, and entrepreneur James Watt (1738–1819)—a mechanism that greatly improved the efficiency of Newcomen’s engine. The steam engine became, so to speak, the alpha and omega of machine power. It was the prime mover of ancient Greek thought materialized. And Leibniz’s theme conjoined with the steam engine gave rise, in the minds of some 19th-century thinkers, to a desire to automate calculation or computation and to free humans of this mentally tedious labor.
A Tangled Web of Inventions
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

On February 15, 1946, a giant of a machine called the ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was commissioned at a ceremony at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The name is noteworthy. We see that the word computer—to mean the machine and not the person—had cautiously entered the emerging vocabulary of computer culture. Bell Laboratories named one of its machines Complex Computer; another, Ballistic Computer (see Chapter 5, Section I ). Still, the embryonic world of computing was hesitant; the terms “calculator”, “calculating machine”, “computing machine”, and “computing engine” still prevailed. The ENIAC’s full name (which, of course, would never be used after the acronym was established) seemed, at last, to flaunt the fact that this machine had a definite identity, that it was a computer. The tale of the ENIAC is a fascinating tale in its own right, but it is also a very important tale. Computer scientists and engineers of later times may be ignorant about the Bell Laboratories machines, they may be hazy about the Harvard Mark series, they may have only an inkling about Babbage’s dream machines, but they will more than likely have heard about the ENIAC. Why was this so? What was it about the ENIAC that admits its story into the larger story? It was not the first electronic computer; the Colossus preceded the ENIAC by 2 years. True, no one outside the Bletchley Park community knew about the Colossus, but from a historical perspective, for historians writing about the state of computing in the 1940s, the Colossus clearly took precedence over the ENIAC. In fact (as we will soon see), there was another electronic computer built in America that preceded the ENIAC. Nor was the ENIAC the first programmable computer. Zuse’s Z3 and Aiken’s Harvard Mark I, as well as the Colossus, well preceded the ENIAC in this realm. As for that other Holy Grail, general purposeness, this was, as we have noted, an elusive target (see Chapter 6, Section III).
I Compute, Therefore I Am
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

The 1940s witnessed the appearance of a handful of scientists who, defying the specialism characteristic of most of 20th-century science, strode easily across borders erected to protect disciplinary territories. They were people who, had they been familiar with the poetry of the Nobel laureate Indian poet–philosopher Rabindranath Tagore (1861– 1941), would have shared his vision of a “heaven of freedom”: . . .Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls. . . . Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), logician, mathematician, and prodigy, who was awarded a PhD by Harvard at age 17, certainly yearned for this heaven of freedom in the realm of science as the war-weary first half of the 20th century came to an end. He would write that he and his fellow scientist and collaborator Arturo Rosenbluth (1900–1970) had long shared a belief that, although during the past two centuries scientific investigations became increasingly specialized, the most “fruitful” arenas lay in the “no-man’s land” between the established fields of science. There were scientific fields, Wiener remarked, that had been studied from different sides, each bestowing its own name to the field, each ignorant of what others had discovered, thus creating work that was “triplicated or quadruplicated” because of mutual ignorance or incomprehension. Wiener, no respecter of “narrow domestic walls” would inhabit such “boundary regions” between mathematics, engineering, biology, and sociology, and create cybernetics, a science devoted to the study of feedback systems common to living organisms, machines, and social systems. Here was a science that straddled the no-man’s land between the traditionally separate domains of the natural and the artificial. Wiener’s invention of cybernetics after the end of World War II was a marker of a certain spirit of the times when, in the manner in which Wiener expressed his yearning, scientists began to create serious links between nature and artifact. It is inevitable that this no-man’s land between the natural and the artificial should be part of this story.
Aesthetica
Authors: Dasgupta Subrata
Published: November 2020

In 1965, the Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra (1930–2002), then professor of mathematics at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (THE) in the Netherlands, wrote a paper titled “Programming Considered as a Human Activity” and thereby announced the birth of a movement to which he gave the name structured programming a few years later. Within the next 10 years, the movement would cause so much upheaval in the realm of programming, some came to call it a revolution—the structured programming revolution—and Dijkstra was viewed as its originator. The movement did not precipitate an overthrow of the stored-program computing paradigm as a whole, but insofar as designing and building soft ware systems was a major component of this paradigm, structured programming altered the very essence of the subparadigm in computer science that came to be called programming methodology. It brought about a new mentality concerning programming and its methodology. A major part of this mini-revolution actually occurred during the 1970s, but its foundations were laid during the second half of the 1960s by just a handful of publications. And Edsger Dijkstra was the revolutionary-in-chief. He laid out the gospel. Dijkstra’s undergraduate training was in mathematics and physics at the University of Leyden; he went on to obtain a PhD in computing in 1959 from the Mathematics Centrum in the University of Amsterdam and worked there until 1962 before accepting a chair in mathematics at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. As a computer scientist, mathematics was a source of inspiration for him, not only in terms of the method-of-proof construction, but also in the mathematician’s search for beauty in mathematical reasoning. He quoted 19th-century English logician and mathematician George Boole, who spoke of perfectness in mathematical reasoning not just in terms of efficiency, but also in whether a method exhibited “a certain unity and harmony.” And he tells us that contrary to the tacit assumption on the part of many that such aesthetic considerations as harmony and elegance were unaffordable luxuries in the hurly-burly world of programming, it actually paid to cultivate elegance. This became a mantra for him.
Where Our Energy Comes From
Authors: Fox Michael H.
Published: November 2020

Energy and human history go hand in hand. For most of the time that humans have been on earth, energy was used at a very low level, mostly by burning wood for cooking and warmth. This is still the case for large areas of the planet, especially in much of Africa and parts of Asia and South America. As human populations grew, forests were decimated to obtain fuel, resulting in the collapse of several societies (1). Coal was discovered in England in the thirteenth century and began to be used extensively beginning in the 1500s. Between 1570 and 1603, during the reign of Elizabeth I, coal became the main source of fuel for England (2). This was, not coincidentally, also during the time of the Little Ice Age, when there was a great need for fuel to keep warm. Coal transformed England, for better and for worse. The development of the coal-based steam engine by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, with further critical developments by James Watt and Matthew Boulton, led to the Industrial Revolution beginning in about 1780. Coal built England into the world’s most powerful country during the nineteenth century. At the same time, it brought about unbelievable pollution, which drastically shortened lives, and it led to child slave labor in factories and mines. Coal had been discovered even earlier in China and was being used for iron production in the eleventh century (2). Coal was discovered in Appalachia in the United States in the mid-eighteenth century and quickly became its most abundant source of energy. This led to the industrial development of the United States, the building of canals to transport coal, and the construction of railroads to connect the far reaches of the country. Wherever large sources of coal were found, societies were transformed. Coal was fine for running steam engines and cooking or keeping warm, but what people wanted desperately was a better source of light for their homes and businesses.
Back to the Future: Nuclear Power
Authors: Fox Michael H.
Published: November 2020

Nuclear power is considered by many to be an old technology locked in the past— they say the future is with solar and wind. Commercial nuclear power began in 1951 when Russia built the first civilian nuclear power reactor, followed by the British in 1956 and the Americans in 1957. In the 1960s and 1970s, nuclear power plants blossomed all over the world. There were 42 reactors in the United States in 1973; by 1990 there were 112. Some of these were closed, so by 1998 there were 104 operating nuclear reactors (the same number operating at the end of 2012) providing about 100 GWe (gigawatts electric ) to the grid. Worldwide, there were 432 operating nuclear reactors as of mid-2013. Nuclear reactors have been providing about 20% of the electricity in the United States for over 20 years, with no emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2 ). France gets nearly 75% of its electricity from nuclear power, the highest proportion of any nation. Germany and Japan each got more than 25% of their electricity from nuclear power in 2010; though Germany shut down about half of its reactors, Japan temporarily shut down all of its reactors, and both are considering permanently closing down their reactors after the accident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. So nuclear power has been providing electricity for over 50 years and plays a major role in the energy mix for a number of countries. But nuclear power is also critically important for an energy future that will meet our electrical power needs with minimal production of greenhouse gases and benign effects on the environment. We must go back to the future if we want to make serious inroads into reducing greenhouse gases and global warming. To see why nuclear power is critical for the future, let’s begin our journey by touring a nuclear power plant. The Wolf Creek nuclear power plant sits on the flat plains of Kansas about 60 miles south of Topeka and 4 miles from Burlington, about 200 miles east of the wheat fields I farmed as a kid. A 5,090-acre lake filled with crappie, walleye, large and smallmouth bass, and other game fish provides cooling water for the reactor and also provides a fishing mecca for Kansans. The 10,500-acre site, including the reactor complex and the lake, has about 1,500 acres of wildlife habitat, and about one-third is leased to area farmers and ranchers. The plant itself takes up less than half a square mile. The lake provides habitat for waterfowl, as well as for bald eagles and osprey. It is hard to imagine that electricity for 800,000 people is generated in this pristine area of farmland and nature preserve.
Beyond Malthus
Authors: Araújo Kathleen
Published: November 2020

This chapter explores the evolving understanding of carbon and sustainability since the 18th and 19th centuries. Relevant applications of influential ideas are then identified with respect to knowledge, innovation, policy, and meta-level change. More than 100 years ago, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius hypothesized about the onset of ice ages and interglacial periods by considering high latitude temperature shifts (NASA Earth Observatory, n.d.). Applying an energy budget model and ideas of other scientists, like John Tyndall, Arrhenius argued that changes in trace atmospheric constituents, particularly carbon dioxide, could significantly alter the Earth’s heat budget (Arrhenius, 1896, 1897; NASA Earth Observatory, n.d.). Today, science indicates that the global, average surface temperature has continued to rise alongside the increase in greenhouse gases. Among global GHGs, CO2 emissions have increased by more than a factor of 1,000 in absolute terms since 1800. During that time, global carbon emissions found in the primary energy supply increased by roughly 6% per year (Grubler, 2008a). This growth in carbon emissions from energy is significant because CO2 from fuel combustion dominates global GHG emissions (IEA, 2015a and 2015b; IPCC, 2013). As noted earlier, 68% of the global GHGs that are attributed to human activity are linked to the energy sector; namely, fuel combustion and fugitive emissions (IEA, 2015a). Within this share, 90% consisted of CO2 (IEA, 2015a). In contrast to the rise in absolute numbers, carbon emissions per unit of output in the global primary energy supply has decreased 36% overall or by slightly less than 0.2% per year over the past two centuries (Grubler, 2008a). This subtle decarbonizing pattern in the energy mix is explained by the faster growth rate of energy use in relation to the rate of carbon emissions from that use. The delinking of energy utilization and carbon emissions occurred in part with the introduction of less carbon-intensive fossil fuel sources, like natural gas, in which a higher hydrogen-to-carbon ratio is evident (Gibbons and Gwin, 2009; Grubler, 2004, citing Marchetti, 1985).