bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Caucus Governance and the Emergence of the Organizational Cartel, 1861–1891
Authors: Jenkins Jeffery A. , Stewart Charles
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the emergence of the organizational cartel based on caucus decision making during the period 1861–1891. It considers how the caucus-induced, organizational arrangement solved the lingering instability that had often plagued speakership decisions during the antebellum era. It also shows how the binding party caucus on organizational matters institutionalized and evolved into an equilibrium institution, with both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party embracing the practice of keeping the organization of the House of Representatives “in the family” rather than risking potential complications on the floor. In short, the majority party had finally become an organizational cartel. The chapter explains how the organizational cartel allowed the majority party to control the election of the Speaker and other House officers, as well as the more general makeup of the chamber.
The Organizational Cartel Persists, 1891–2011
Authors: Jenkins Jeffery A. , Stewart Charles
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines leadership selection after the Reed Rules and the persistence of the organizational cartel in the House of Representatives during the period 1891–2011. It begins by discussing factional divisions and further threats to the caucus organization before considering the progressive Republicans' 1910 revolt against Speaker Joseph G. Cannon as well as the Democrats' return to power and control of the House from the 62nd through 65th Congresses (1911–1919). It then analyzes the rift between progressive and conservative elements in the Republican Party that challenged the party monopoly over the House's makeup. Despite these problematic events and other issues, along with severe regional divisions within the majority Democratic Party, the chapter shows that the binding party caucus and organizational cartel survived and flourished through the present day.
Charles Wolfe, “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna”
Authors: Robson Catherine
Published: November 2017

This chapter resurrects “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Charles Wolfe's poem, a reimagining of the hasty interment of a fallen general after one of the land battles in the Napoleonic wars, was repeatedly quoted by soldiers and other individuals during the American Civil War when they found themselves having to organize, or witness, the burials of dead comrades. In recent years, cultural historians of Great Britain have tried to account for the massive shift in burial and memorial practices for the common soldier that occurred between 1815 and 1915. The chapter argues that the presence of Wolfe's poem in the hearts and minds of ordinary people played its part in creating the social expectations that led to the establishment of the National Cemeteries in the United States, and thus, in due course, the mass memorialization of World War I.
Preliminary Results and Discussion
Authors: Fallat Shaun M. , Johnson Charles R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter lays out a number of basic and fundamental properties of TN matrices along with a compilation of facts and results from core matrix theory that are useful for further development of this topic. Along with the elementary bidiagonal factorization, the rules for manipulating determinants and special determinantal identities constitute the most useful tools for understanding TN matrices. Some of this technology is simply from elementary linear algebra, but the less well-known identities are given here for reference. In addition, other useful background facts are entered into the record, and a few elementary and frequently used facts about TN matrices are presented.
Sign Variation of Vectors and TN Linear Transformations
Authors: Fallat Shaun M. , Johnson Charles R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter develops an array of results about TP/TN matrices and sign variation diminution, along with appropriate converses. If the entries of a vector represent a sampling of consecutive function values, then a change in the sign of consecutive vector entries corresponds to the important event of the (continuous) function passing through zero. It has been known that as a linear transformation, a TP matrix cannot increase the number of sign changes in a vector. The transformations that never increase the number of sign variations are of interest in a variety of applications, including approximation theory and shape preserving transforms, and are of mathematical interest as well.
The Spectral Structure of TN Matrices
Authors: Fallat Shaun M. , Johnson Charles R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter highlights the spectral structure of TN matrices. By “spectral structure” this chapter refers to facts about the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices in a particular class. In view of the well-known Perron-Frobenius theory that describes the spectral structure of general entrywise nonnegative matrices, it is not surprising that TN matrices have an important and interesting special spectral structure. Nonetheless, that spectral structure is remarkably strong, identifying TN matrices as a very special class among nonnegative matrices. All eigenvalues are nonnegative real numbers, and the sign patterns of the entries of the eigenvectors are quite special as well. This spectral structure is most apparent in the case of IITN matrices (that is, the classical oscillatory case originally described by Gantmacher and Krein).
Good Citizens or Selfish Genes?
Authors: Tyrrell Toby
Published: November 2017

This chapter assesses whether Gaia arises predictably out of natural selection. It seems that natural selection leads to local regulation of environments only in certain circumstances: either inside or in the nearby environs of single organisms, or inside the living quarters of eusocial colonies, in which individual members are each very closely related. A general theme that emerges is that tight homeostatic regulation is associated with these “islands” of genetic uniformity or similarity. Tight cooperation and regulation of a communal environment only occurs between organisms that are closely related, although it is by no means guaranteed even then. This review of environmental regulation in nature therefore offers no obvious clues as to how regulation at a planetary scale could have been produced by or favored by natural selection.
Temperature Paces Life
Authors: Tyrrell Toby
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the question of optimal temperatures by looking at the evidence from physiological and ecological studies—evidence from studying living organisms. It summarizes what is known about the effects of temperature on growth, metabolic rates, primary production, biomass, and biodiversity. In each case, the overall tendency is a positive correlation with temperature—higher values at higher temperatures, lower values at lower temperatures. There are however plenty of exceptions, such as biomass and primary production in the sea and in deserts, and biodiversity in shallow versus deep seafloor muds. By building toward a mechanistic understanding of temperature effects, this study can overcome the habitat commitment obstacle.
Evolutionary Innovations and Environmental Change
Authors: Tyrrell Toby
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on internally generated changes due to evolutionary inventions of new forms life. These evolutionary inventions include the evolution of oxygen-yielding photosynthesis and the colonization of land by the first forests. Oxygen-dependent photosynthesis and respiration evolved to take advantage of the appearance of oxygen in the biosphere, while anaerobes crashed from preeminence to relative obscurity. Meanwhile, land plants evolved to adapt to the low carbon dioxide and low temperatures that earlier generations had produced, and enormous insects thrived temporarily to take advantage of the transiently abundant oxygen, only to disappear again when oxygen levels subsequently subsided. Eventually, new types of fungi evolved to make use of the new food source. Ultimately, these internally generated events produced some changes that generally improved the global environment for life, but also some that tended to spoil it.
Introduction
Authors: Muncy Robyn
Published: November 2017

This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This biography explains first how Josephine Roche moved from a small town on the Great Plains, where she was born in 1886, to the nation's capital, where she joined Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration in 1934. Especially significant in explaining her achievements were her education at Vassar, mentoring by a progressive reform community in Denver, and the meaning she made of the momentous coal strike in Colorado that culminated in the Ludlow Massacre of 1914. This biography also explains why, having achieved renown in the 1930s, Roche largely disappeared from history and memory, a disappearing act made all the more mysterious by her stunning post-New Deal resume.
Emergence as a Public Leader, 1912–1913
Authors: Muncy Robyn
Published: November 2017

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1912 to 1913. The chance to serve as Denver's first policewoman drew Roche out of graduate school in 1912. She was thrilled to go back west. “I find a certain quality of life here that I hungered for in vain all the time I worked in New York,” she explained, “I think perhaps I can express it by saying I feel more master of myself here.” By “mastery” of herself, Roche did not refer to personal freedom, which New York offered in greater degree than Denver, but to something she craved even more than freedom. That something was power. Only months after taking the police position, Roche transformed it into a command post in the campaign against Denver's notorious political machine. As a policewoman, Roche emerged as a controversial public figure with a stomach for battle.
Migrating to a “Totally New Planet”: Roche Takes Over Rocky Mountain Fuel, 1927–1928
Authors: Muncy Robyn
Published: November 2017

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1927–1928. Orphaned and unemployed in 1927, Roche contemplated her future. Her father's lawyers advised her to sell her stock in the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company and live off the proceeds. She could then follow the conventions of Denver's elite and devote herself to afternoon bridge or fulfill her sense of social responsibility by funding progressive causes. Neither option appealed. In fact, in this midlife moment of decision, Roche defied every sort of convention. In a blazing exhibition of nerve, she amassed enough shares to become the majority stockholder of her father's coal company, kicked out the sitting management, and transformed the mining operation into a progressive enterprise that welcomed organized labor back to the coalfields of Colorado.
Generating a National Debate about Federal Health Policy, 1935–1939
Authors: Muncy Robyn
Published: November 2017

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1935 to 1939. Despite her many other roles, Roche's primary obligation in the New Deal government was oversight of health policy. She fulfilled that obligation in two ways. Within the Treasury Department, she took charge of the Public Health Service at a moment of explosive growth, championing a vastly expanded mandate for the agency and building a more effective public health infrastructure in the states. Outside the Treasury, she spearheaded a campaign to elevate health care to the status of a “basic American right.” In the course of that campaign, Roche patched together a national health plan, which she used to generate a nationwide conversation about the role of the federal government in health care.
Unmoored during Wartime, 1939–1945
Authors: Muncy Robyn
Published: November 2017

This chapter details events in Josephine Roche's life from 1939 to 1945. World War II created new difficulties for Roche with Franklin D. Roosevelt. As during World War I, U.S. involvement in this new global conflict funneled fresh resources to both progressives and their opponents, leaving the outcome of their competition to the postwar period. Roche's experience provided glimpses of both the war's progressive and conservative tendencies as well as the dilemmas generated within progressive souls. Difficulties at Rocky Mountain Fuel, however, gave World War II an even more discouraging cast for Roche than World War I had. Indeed, miseries fueled by her coal company eroded her connection to the Democratic Party and weakened her confidence in government as an ally in the cause of diminishing inequality. These losses set Roche slightly out of sync with the larger progressive movement and left her by war's end institutionally unmoored.
The Enculturated Gene
Authors: Fullwiley Duana
Published: November 2017

In the 1980s, a research team led by Parisian scientists identified several unique DNA sequences, or haplotypes, linked to sickle cell anemia in African populations. After casual observations of how patients managed this painful blood disorder, the researchers in question postulated that the Senegalese type was less severe. This book traces how this genetic discourse has blotted from view the roles that Senegalese patients and doctors have played in making sickle cell “mild” in a social setting where public health priorities and economic austerity programs have forced people to improvise informal strategies of care. The book shows how geneticists, who were fixated on population differences, never investigated the various modalities of self-care that people developed in this context of biomedical scarcity, and how local doctors, confronted with dire cuts in Senegal's health sector, wittingly accepted the genetic prognosis of better-than-expected health outcomes. Unlike most genetic determinisms that highlight the absoluteness of disease, DNA haplotypes for sickle cell in Senegal did the opposite. As the book demonstrates, they allowed the condition to remain officially invisible, never to materialize as a health priority. At the same time, scientists' attribution of a less severe form of Senegalese sickle cell to isolated DNA sequences closed off other explanations of this population's measured biological success. This book reveals how the notion of an advantageous form of sickle cell in this part of West Africa has defined—and obscured—the nature of this illness in Senegal today.
Attitudes of Care
Authors: Fullwiley Duana
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how Senegalese French-trained research-physicians in Dakar have adopted similar low-tech strategies and health interventions within the biomedical realm. It focuses on how doctors rationalize economically triaged care, while chronicling their methods for doing so in Dakar's principal sickle cell clinics. These are the pediatric care site at Albert Royer Children's Hospital and the Centre nationale de transfusion sanguine (CNTS), or the National Blood Transfusion Center, where most adult patients are followed. Although physicians often take cues from the social realities that define their patients' lived experiences with this disease, their own clinical limits and technological constraints also inform the alternative assemblages of care they construct.
Ordering Illness: Heterozygous “Trait” Suffering in the Land of the Mild Disease
Authors: Fullwiley Duana
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores how “culture,” in the form of “Senegalese attitudes” that are seen as less than buoyant, has sometimes proven to be a barrier that Senegalese biomedical professionals propose as contrary to science on the sickle cell “trait” (heterozygous sickle cell, or HbAS). Yet they also see culture as mutable, or less than absolute, since they are attempting to “correct” people's thinking that the sickle cell trait also constitutes an illness state. In the biomedical parlance of the United States and France, they hope to convince people with the trait that they are simply (healthy) “carriers.” At many points in the field, it became clear that contrary to majority medical opinion in the United States, most Senegalese think of the heterozygous sickle cell trait as a potential disease and thus live with, and treat it, accordingly.
The Work of Patient Advocacy
Authors: Fullwiley Duana
Published: November 2017

This chapter further explores issues of patients' tenacity to shape science, through advocacy on an international level, and investigates the ways that making a disease public in Africa often entails locating it within discourses of humanitarian “crisis,” emergency, and global health prioritization. In this way, tireless patient advocates of African origin living in France created the sickle cell disease umbrella organization of the International Organization for the Fight against Sickle Cell (OILD), which succeeded in getting sickle cell anemia the attention of the World Health Organization and the United Nations in 2008. The OILD's strategy of making sickle cell visible to these multilateral institutions consisted of linking the disease to other pressing global health problems for development through means that often deployed uncertainty as “data.”
Introduction
Authors: Mandel Maud S.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter discusses the roots of the conflict between Muslim and Jews in France. It reviews the cultural and historical connections linking these two populations. It describes the vastly different levels of Muslim and Jewish communal development in the metropole that created sharply divergent processes of integration. By the early twenty-first century, Jews proved more economically mobile, better educated, and professionally better placed than the general population and certainly than French Muslims. However, the organized community was often criticized for failing to defend Jewish interests successfully, particularly with regard to foreign policy around Israel. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Location Decisions of Firms and Social Interactions
Authors: Ioannides Yannis M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the impact of social interactions on firms' location decisions, focusing on the effects of proximity to other firms, the size of the total urban economy, the availability of a suitable labor force, and risk pooling. It first introduces models that take into account the location of firms under uncertainty, with particular emphasis on the role of site rents in guiding location decisions and the problems that site rents encounter in the presence of more complex economic geography. The model is expanded to allow for randomness in firms' evaluations of alternative sites and for interdependence among firms' location decisions. The model is also extended to a framework for defining empirical measures of agglomeration, and the chapter concludes with a review of empirical studies that explore localization or urbanization effects via the measurement of total factor productivity at the plant level.
Social Interactions and Urban Spatial Equilibrium
Authors: Ioannides Yannis M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores what the interactions of individuals and firms in their vicinity and in broader communities reveal about the spatial structure of cities as self-organization by agents. It first introduces a benchmark, the Alonso–Mills–Muth model of a city in its bare essentials, and examines its implications for urban density and the associated pattern of land prices in the case with a predetermined center, the central business district (CBD). It then considers the geometry of spatial equilibrium when there is no predetermined center and social interactions are dispersed, along with the location decisions of firms in urban space, monocentric versus polycentric models of the urban economy, and the Lucas–Rossi-Hansberg models of urban spatial structure with productive externalities. It also analyzes neighborhood effects, urban equilibrium when proximity is a conduit for the transmission of job-related information, and the link between choice of job matching and spatial structure.
Specialization, Intercity Trade, and Urban Structure
Authors: Ioannides Yannis M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the consequences of urban specialization and diversification for urban structure and intercity trade. It first reviews the empirical evidence on urban specialization and diversification, including the results of Black and Henderson (2003), before discussing the simple economics of urban specialization. In particular, it considers the interrelationships between city geometry, productivity, and city size as well as equilibrium in a system of fully autarkic cities versus partly autarkic cities. The chapter proceeds by analyzing urban structure when intermediates and final goods are traded among cities, the effect of shipping costs on geography, and labor market frictions in the presence of Krugman diversification. Finally, it highlights some lessons that can be derived from the empirics of urban specialization and diversification in relation to intercity trade.
Urban Magic: Concluding Remarks
Authors: Ioannides Yannis M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the prospect of a deeper understanding of social interactions in urban settings as well as their significance for the functioning and future role of cities and regions. It introduces broader sets of tools for exploring the properties of urban networks, from the lowest microscale up to the highest levels of aggregation. Graph theory, for example, offers a promising means of elucidating the urban social fabric and the interactions that define it, and more specifically the link between urban infrastructure and aspatial social networks. The chapter also compares individuals and their social interactions to an archipelago, a metaphor that offers a picture of the magic of the city. It concludes by emphasizing the interdependence between the creation of cities over physical space, on the one hand, and the urban archipelago and its internal social and economic structures, which are man-made, on the other.
Liberalism and the Family
Authors: Brighouse Harry , Swift Adam
Published: November 2017

This chapter sets out the ways in which the family might be thought to pose problems for the liberal framework, and defends the adoption of that framework from the objection that it simply cannot do justice to—or, perhaps, fails adequately to care about—the ethically significant phenomena attending parent–child relationships. On the one hand, liberalism takes individuals to be the fundamental objects of moral concern, and the rights it claims people have are primarily rights of individuals over their own lives: the core liberal idea is that it is important for individuals to exercise their own judgment about how they are to live. On the other hand, parental rights are rights over others, they are rights over others who have no realistic exit option, and they are rights over others whose capacity to make their own judgments about how they are to live their lives is no less important than that of the adults raising them.
Children
Authors: Brighouse Harry , Swift Adam
Published: November 2017

The family is justified because it produces certain goods that would otherwise not be available, or, in some cases, would be much more difficult to produce. These goods—familial relationship goods—are enjoyed by children and by the adults who are their parents. This chapter focuses on the goods it produces for children, arguing that their interests are such as to support the claim that children have a right to be raised by parents—in families. First, it defines what we mean by children and childhood. It then explains what interests are, and describes the interests that children may have. Next, it makes the argument that children have a right to a parent, which involves three claims: children have rights; children are appropriate objects of paternalistic care; and for a child's vital interests to be met, she must be cared for, consistently, by only a small number of people. The chapter goes on to discuss how a biological connection between parent and child relates to our account of children's right to a parent, and concludes by looking, briefly, at the implied duty to parent.
Adults
Authors: Brighouse Harry , Swift Adam
Published: November 2017

The right to be a parent is a right to a relationship with a child in which one has certain rights with respect to that child. But what are the rights that the right to parent is a right to exercise? Does respecting that right require that parents be permitted to pursue their children's material interests in ways that harm the interests of other children? If so, in which ways and to what extent? This chapter describes this relationship and the goods it contributes to adult lives in enough detail to support the claim that adults have a right to it, but without getting into the details of what precisely the relationship consists in.
Shaping Values
Authors: Brighouse Harry , Swift Adam
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the need to protect children from excessive parental influence, while respecting the interest that both parents and children have in the right kind of parent–child relationship. It challenges widespread views about the extent of parents' rights to influence their children's emerging views of the world and what matters in it. Children are separate people, with their own lives to lead, and the right to make, and act on, their own judgments about how they are to live those lives. They are not the property of their parents. And because they are not property, and yet parents are accorded such power over them, it is wrong for parents to treat them as vehicles for their own self-expression, or as means to the realization of their own views on controversial questions about how to live. The desire to extend oneself into the future, and to influence the shape that future takes, can be satisfied in other ways, without a parent relying on that authority over her children that is justified on other grounds.
The Making of Oriental Religion
Authors: van der Veer Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the making of oriental religion. It analyzes the emerging field of oriental studies and comparative religion, especially the project of Sacred Books of the East, headed by Friedrich Max Müller. It goes beyond the study of orientalist scholarship by examining the role of the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. The major analytical issue is the extent to which these products of Western scholarship and imagination have produced forms of religious categorization that have had an actual impact on religious belief and practice in India and China. The modern moralization of indigenous traditions as part of attempts to create religions that are at the same time universally respected (world religions) and national religions could only be done owing to orientalist interpretations of these traditions.
Secularism’s Magic
Authors: van der Veer Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the question of “popular religion” and the relation between religion and magic in India and China. The categories of popular belief, superstition, and magic have been used by modernizers in India and China to intervene in people's daily practices and remove obstacles to the total transformation of their communities. These attempts have developed in different ways in India and China, but in neither case have they been entirely successful. After a historical discussion of heterodoxy, messianic movements, and political protest, the chapter delineates the transformation of popular religion in India and China under the influence of liberalization of the economy and globalization.
“Smash Temples, Build Schools”: Comparing Secularism in India and China
Authors: van der Veer Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses secularism as a political project with its own utopian elements. Secularism refers to the growing importance of scientific knowledge that is not constrained by religious authority. Religion is sometimes taken to be an obstacle for scientific progress and secularism demands its removal for the benefit of societal development that is guided by scientific discovery and technological innovation. Secularization was seen by sociologists as an intrinsic and inescapable part of the modernization of Western society, with the assumption that this was something all societies had to go through. An alternative to post-Weberian arguments in sociology about religion and secularity is offered by theories that emphasize individual, rational choice in religious markets.
Conclusion
Authors: van der Veer Peter
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter explains the significance of comparing the social location of religion, spirituality, magic, and secularity in India and China. Such a comparison shows the differential impact of Western imperialism on India and China. Of course Indian and Chinese societies have deep histories, and these histories have resulted in fundamental differences, but in both cases modernity has been mediated by imperialism. India was colonized for a century, while China was under imperial pressure but not made into a colony. This difference in the nature of imperial interactions can be conceptualized as a difference in state formation and in what Foucault calls “governmentality.” However, while state formation is a crucial historical process, one cannot simply see cultural processes as straightforwardly resulting from state formation.
Introduction
Authors: Saint-Paul Gilles
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides a background to the rise of paternalistic policies. The recent development of paternalism is not devoid of intellectual apparatus. Of all the social sciences, economics is the one that has traditionally stuck to the individualistic values of the Enlightenment. However, in recent years, a new brand of economics (labeled “behavioral”) departs from those foundations and brings new ammunition to state involvement in private lives. The aim of this book is to explain what behavioral economics is and whether it is dangerous for those who believe in individual freedom and limited government. The chapter also explains utilitarianism. Utilitarianism states that “society” should be organized so as to yield the greatest possible level of welfare, where it is assumed that there is some way of comparing and adding welfare across individuals.
The Modern Paternalistic State
Authors: Saint-Paul Gilles
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines modern paternalism through a number of examples and relates it to the intellectual apparatus analyzed in the previous chapters. An important point here is that only a fraction of the paternalistic interventions observed are grounded on the intellectual apparatus described in the preceding chapters. Conversely, many proponents of behavioral economics are in favor of a moderate dose of paternalism and would not approve of all the policies that the chapter discusses. However, this does not invalidate the point that by becoming behavioral, economics is no longer capable of providing an intellectual safeguard against excess government intrusion in private matters. The chapter then looks at the numerous challenges and contradictions that opened the door for wide-ranging government involvement in private matters.
Where to Go?
Authors: Saint-Paul Gilles
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter discusses two arguments that make the case that empirical relevance of behavioral biases cannot be used to justify an extension of government control over private lives. One general argument against paternalistic policies is that even though people have behavioral problems, they are mature enough to solve them on their own. This argument has two faces. One version is that current incarnations can control the behavior of future ones, specifically by using appropriate contracts that commit those incarnations. Another version is the so-called Coasian view, that incarnations that coexist within the same individual may achieve an efficient outcome by bargaining between themselves. Meanwhile, another class of arguments builds on the political economy critique. It states that while paternalism may help solve behavioral biases on paper, it ignores the actual working of governments.
Mafia Transplantation
Authors: Varese Federico
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the factors that determine the success of mafia transplantation. It first sets out several theoretical insights into why mafias find it difficult to become entrenched in foreign countries. It then discusses the conditions under which mafiosi succeed in become entrenched once they find themselves in the new territory. For some authors, the level of generalized trust (trust in others whom we do not know) in the new land is an important variable that could explain the entrenchment of mafias. The presence of a genuine demand for criminal protection, the core activity of mafias, also leads to long-term transplantation.
The Russian Mafia in Rome and Budapest
Authors: Varese Federico
Published: November 2017

The “Solntsevo fraternity” (Solntsevskaya bratva) is the mightiest organized crime group to emerge from the wreckage of the Soviet Union. Estimates of the size of the brotherhood (possibly exaggerated) range from five to nine thousand members. The group comprises no fewer than ten semiautonomous brigades (brigady), which operate under the umbrella name of Solntsevskaya. The Russian police claim that it controls various banks along with about a hundred small and medium-size enterprises. Although little is known of the inner workings of the group, former members have claimed that the organization is governed by a council of twelve individuals, who meet regularly in different parts of the world, often disguising their meetings as festive occasions. This chapter examines efforts by the Solntsevskaya to create subsidiaries in Rome and Budapest.
Why Pollination Is Interesting
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces some of the book’s central themes on animal pollination, beginning with a discussion of animals that visit flowers. At least 130,000 species of animals, and probably up to 300,000, are regular flower visitors and potential pollinators. At least 25,000 species of bees are included in this total, all of them obligate flower visitors and often the most important pollinators in a given habitat. There are currently about 260,000 species of angiosperms and it has been traditional to link particular kinds of flowers to particular groups of pollinators. The chapter proceeds by explaining why animals visit flowers, how flowers encourage animal visitors, and what makes a visitor a good pollinator. It also considers the costs, benefits, and conflicts in animal pollination before concluding with an enumeration of reasons why pollination is worth studying.
Pollination, Mating, and Reproduction in Plants
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines pollination, mating, and reproduction in plants. Plant reproduction can be either sexual or asexual, but the generation of new variants (which is the underlying necessity for adaptation to new or changing conditions and for evolutionary change) requires that at some point in the life cycle sexual reproduction occurs. In the case of angiosperms, the pollen grain is the male gamete, the equivalent of a spore in simpler plants. The ovule (egg) contains the female gamete. The chapter first provides an overview of plant fertilization before discussing plant sex and plant mating systems. It then considers the benefits of cross-fertilization and self-fertilization in plants, along with methods for avoiding selfing within a flower. It also describes methods for avoiding selfing between flowers within a plant and concludes with an analysis of methods for ensuring selfing.
Rewards 1: The Biology of Pollen
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the biology of pollen, the primary reward for flowers in an evolutionary sense and probably the resource for which animals first went to flowers. The inherent characteristics of pollen make it a useful resource to exploit as food, potentially collectable by almost any animal. It remains a crucial reward for pollen-eating and pollen-gathering visitors, such as some flies, some beetles, and virtually all bees. Pollen’s function as a reward of visitors is mutually incompatible with its function in reproduction. The chapter first describes the characteristics of pollen grains before discussing the storage and delivery of pollen in the plant. It then considers pollen packaging, pollen gathering by animals, pollen as food, and pollen preferences. It also explores the longevity and viability of pollen, pollen-only flowers, and pollen competition. Finally, it reflects on the question of how much pollen a plant “should” produce.
Other Floral Rewards
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines a variety of rewards that can be obtained by pollinators from flower visits, including oils, waxes, scents, and resins and gums. Fatty oils as an offering in flowers are now known from at least eighty genera across several families and from nearly 1 per cent of flowering plant species. Floral resins have been reported in occasional genera that are abundant in the tropics. The chapter also considers stigmatic exudates, which provide a good oily food source that sometimes can be the primary reward; examples of fragrance as a reward; floral tissues; and other possible nonfood rewards such as brood sites, microclimatic protection and warmth, and meeting places. Most of the rewards discussed in this chapter may be the key to some particularly fascinating pollination systems and open up possibilities for new dimensions in animal–flower interactions.
Types of Flower Visitors: Syndromes, Constancy, and Effectiveness
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines pollination syndromes, floral constancy, and pollinator effectiveness. Flowers show enormous adaptive radiation, but the same kind of flower reappears by convergent evolution in many different families. Thus many families produce rather similar, simple bowl-shaped flowers like buttercups; many produce similar zygomorphic tubular lipped flowers; and many produce fluffy flower heads of massed (often white) florets. These broad flower types are the basis of the idea of pollination syndromes—the flowers have converged on certain morphologies and reward patterns because they are exploiting the abilities and preferences of particular kinds of visitor. After providing an overview of pollination syndromes, the chapter explains why pollination syndromes can be defended. It then considers flower constancy, along with the distinction between flower visitors and effective pollinators. It concludes with some observations on how flower visitors can contribute to speciation of plants through specialization and through their constancy.
The Timing and Patterning of Flowering
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the factors that affect the timing and patterning of flowering, as well as the effects of different flowering patterns on pollination outcomes. Plants should flower in ways that maximize their own reproductive success. The “flowering pattern” is a composite of the timing and frequency of individual flowers opening, and also of floral longevity. These phenological factors vary between and within species. Flowering phenology can influence the plant’s manipulation of its visitors in ways that should increase either or both of pollen transfer and pollen receipt. The chapter first considers the frequency of flowering and the shape of the flowering period before discussing flower longevity and flowering period. It also explores the question of how big a flower should be, how many flowers a plant should have at any one time, what determines the phenological parameters for a particular plant species, and where the flowers should be placed.
Cheating by Flowers: Cheating the Visitors and Cheating Other Flowers
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how flowers cheat visitors and other flowers. Pollination is not an altruistic exercise; there is a conflict of needs that makes both plants and pollinators liable to cheat to their own benefit. Deception is very common in pollination biology. For a plant, this essentially means getting pollinated and hence fertilized without giving up any reward or resources. This can commonly be achieved by resembling a rewarding species. For a visiting animal, cheating involves extracting nectar or pollen in ways that do not carry any pollen to another flower. The chapter discusses mimicry in flowers and aids to mimicry, including pseudoflowers, pseudonectar, and pseudopollen and pseudoanthers. It also looks at empty flowers as mimics and cheats before concluding with an analysis of mimicry of objects other than flowers, such as reproductive mimicry of brood sites and potential mates (pseudocopulation).
The Interactions of Pollination and Herbivory
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the effects of pollination on herbivory and vice versa. When herbivores and pollinators are both active on plants, there is much scope for differential selection on plant traits, and pollinator-mediated selection can sometimes be overwhelmed by opposing selective forces operating due to herbivory. This can result in increased genetic variation and a compromise phenotype and could potentially promote generalization in the flowers. The chapter examines the balance between these potentially conflicting selective influences on a flowering plant, from both florivores and more general herbivores, and some ways in which the conflicts can be resolved. It first considers the effects of florivory on pollinators and the effects of herbivory on flowering and pollination before discussing defenses against florivory and herbivory affecting flowers.
Pollination Using Florivores: From Brood Site Mutualism to Active Pollination
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines brood site mutualisms, where the pollinators are florivores. In brood site mutualisms, the pollinators are sometimes referred to as nursery pollinators. Here pollination success affects not only plant fitness but also pollinator fitness, and the balance between costs and benefits may be highly variable from place to place and across seasons. There are at least thirteen known nursery pollination systems, and this phenomenon can be divided into three categories. Two of these are relatively unspecialized, where beetle or lepidopteran larvae develop in decomposing flower heads, or where thrips feed in flowers as pollen parasites. The third category is termed “active pollination,” also known as “seed-eating pollination syndrome.” The chapter first considers nursery pollination and thrips as pollen parasites before discussing active pollination, where active pollen transfer occurs and a clear mutualism results.
The Pollination of Crops
Authors: Willmer Pat
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the pollination of crops. Animal pollination is important to the large majority of important crops, including those directly eaten by humans. However, there are differing absolute and relative needs for pollination. The chapter begins with a discussion of food crop types that need animal pollination, including wheat, oats, rice, maize, rye, barley, peanut, potato, cassava, sugarcane, and banana. It then considers a fairly standard set of tests that should be applied to determine what a good pollinator will be. It also provides examples that illustrate particular problems of crop productivity or crop management, from plants grown intensively or on a small and local scale, and in a wide range of habitats. Finally, it examines general approaches to encouraging pollination, along with problems associated with hybrid crops, seed crops, and crop breeding.
Matrix Completions, Moments, and Sums of Hermitian Squares
Authors: Bakonyi Mihály , Woerdeman Hugo J.
Published: November 2017

Intensive research in matrix completions, moments, and sums of Hermitian squares has yielded a multitude of results in recent decades. This book provides a comprehensive account of this quickly developing area of mathematics and applications and gives complete proofs of many recently solved problems. With MATLAB codes and more than two hundred exercises, the book is ideal for a special topics course for graduate or advanced undergraduate students in mathematics or engineering, and will also be a valuable resource for researchers. Often driven by questions from signal processing, control theory, and quantum information, the subject of this book has inspired mathematicians from many subdisciplines, including linear algebra, operator theory, measure theory, and complex function theory. In turn, the applications are being pursued by researchers in areas such as electrical engineering, computer science, and physics. The book is self-contained, has many examples, and for the most part requires only a basic background in undergraduate mathematics, primarily linear algebra and some complex analysis. The book also includes an extensive discussion of the literature, with close to six hundred references from books and journals from a wide variety of disciplines.
Completions of positive semidefinite operator matrices
Authors: Bakonyi Mihály , Woerdeman Hugo J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with positive definite and semidefinite completions of partial operator matrices. It considers the banded case in Section 2.1, the chordal case in Section 2.2, the Toeplitz case in Section 2.3, and the generalized banded case and the operator-valued positive semidefinite chordal case in Section 2.6. Section 2.4 introduces the Schur complement and uses it to derive an operator-valued Fejér–Riesz factorization. Section 2.5 is devoted to describing the structure of positive semidefinite operator matrices. Section 2.7 studies the Hamburger problem based on positive semidefinite completions of Hankel matrices. Finally, Section 2.8 indicates the connection with linear prediction. Exercises and notes are provided at the end of the chapter.
Hermitian and related completion problems
Authors: Bakonyi Mihály , Woerdeman Hugo J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers various completion problems that are in one way or another closely related to positive semidefinite or contractive completion problems. For instance, as a variation on requiring that all eigenvalues of the completion are positive/nonnegative, one can consider the question how many eigenvalues of a Hermitian completion have to be positive/nonnegative. In the solution to the latter problem ranks of off-diagonal parts will play a role, which is why minimal rank completions are also discussed. Related is a question on real measures on the real line. As a variation of the contractive completion problem, the chapter considers the question how many singular values of a completion have to be smaller (or larger) than one. It also looks at completions in classes of normal matrices and distance matrices. As applications it turns to questions regarding Hermitian matrix expressions, a minimal representation problem for discrete systems, and the separability problem that appears in quantum information. Exercises and notes are provided at the end of the chapter.
Introduction and Motivation
Authors: Eshel Gidon
Published: November 2017

This chapter briefly sets out the reasons for analyzing data. The simplest need for data analysis arises most naturally in disciplines addressing phenomena that are, in all likelihood, inherently nondeterministic (e.g., feelings and psychology or stock market behavior). Since such fields of knowledge are not governed by known fundamental equations, the only way to generalize disparate observations into expanded knowledge is to analyze those observations. A more general rationale for analyzing data stems from the complementary relationship of empirical and theoretical science and dominates contexts and disciplines in which the studied phenomena have, at least in principle, fully knowable and usable fundamental governing dynamics. In these contexts, best exemplified by physics, theory and observations both vie for the helm.