bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
ENIAC Arrives at the Ballistic Research Lab
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

In 1947 ENIAC was unpacked and installed at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in Aberdeen, Maryland. This chapter explores its first fifteen months there, beginning with some context about the mission and organization of the laboratory. It depicts ENIAC as one of several automatic computers in use there, seen at the time as a device with particular strengths and weaknesses but broadly comparably to electromechanical relay computers in its abilities. Drawing on a previously neglected source, the ENIAC Operations log, it reconstructs the challenges and frustrations involved in attempting to work with electronic computers during this era. Discussion focuses on the two main known problems it ran during this period – interpreting flight data from V2 missiles and creating tables for the analysis of statistical outliers.
EDVAC and the First Draft
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

This chapter charts the rapid evolution of thinking about programming and computer architecture among members of the ENIAC team from 1944 onward, as what is usually called the “stored program concept” was formulated with John von Neumann and presented in the “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” Use of archival sources makes this more specific and rigorous in documenting this process than any previous published account, presenting the new approach as an evolution of, and response to, the original ENIAC programming method. The ideas present in the “First Draft” are clearly explained and separated into three distinct clusters: the “EDVAC hardware paradigm,” the “von Neumann architecture paradigm,” and the “modern code paradigm.” The chapter finishes with an exploration of initial understanding and reception of these ideas, reconstructing the late-1940s consensus on what was important about the new approach and why.
Converting ENIAC
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

In spring 1947 a project was launched to convert ENIAC to run code written in the new from introduced with the 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” This was intertwined with the planning of Monte Carlo calculations for Los Alamos. Adele Goldstine worked with a team of contractors led by Jean Bartik and a group of Aberdeen employees under Richard Clippinger to develop a succession of planned “set-ups” to implement a new control mechanism and vocabulary of general purpose instructions for ENIAC. Our analysis focuses particularly on the relationship of this work on concurrent efforts by von Neumann’s team on the design of the Institute for Advanced Studies computer and a series of related reports on programming methods. Accounts by participants and historians have differed dramatically in assigning credit for the conversion and on such basic facts as when the conversion was implemented and what version of the design was used. The conversion was finally implement in March 1948 by Nick Metropolis (of Los Alamos and the University of Chicago) using a variant design he formulated with Klara von Neumann. At this point ENIAC became the first computer ever to execute a program written in the “modern code paradigm.”
ENIAC Tries Its Luck
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

As soon as Metropolis had completed the initial configuration of ENIAC for the new programming method, and before it was working properly, Klara von Neumann arrived to help. She had taken the leading role in converting the flow diagrams into program code, and together they worked around the clock for several weeks to get both program and machine into a usable state and to shuffle tens of thousands of cards in and out of it during Monte Carlo simulation of each exploding fission bomb. This chapter integrates the narrative of this initial “run,” of and a second batch of calculations carried out in late-1948 with analysis of the structure of the program itself. It finishes with an exploration of further Monte Carlo work run on ENIAC, including reactor simulations, simulation of uranium-hydride bombs, and in 1950 simulation of the “Super” concept for a hydrogen weapon.
ENIAC Settles Down to Work
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

ENIAC’s new configuration was stabilized with further tweaks over the summer of 1948. Over the next seven years it ran more than a hundred different applications, and was gradually transformed from an unreliable white elephant that took a month of struggle to provide a single day of usable computing time into a computing workhorse able to run several computations each day. Changes to its hardware continued, including attempts to upgrade its memory with mercury delay lines (unsuccessful) and an early core memory unit (successful). Discussion focuses particularly in its use in 1950 to run the first numerical weather simulations. This pushed ENIAC to its limits, illuminating its capabilities and limitations in comparison to its successor. The authors also document the changing relationship between ENIAC and two newer computers (EDVAC and ORDVAC) that became operational at BRL in 1952 and eventually took over its workload. It was decommissioned in 1955.
ENIAC and Its Contemporaries Meet the “Stored Program Concept”
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

Having explored ENIAC’s actual use and the programs it ran the authors shift to a more abstract analytical level. Previous discussion of the invention of the modern computer has focused on the “stored program concept” as the crucial innovation setting modern computers apart from their more limited predecessors. The authors explore the origins of this phrase and its changing meaning over time. They look in detail at a 1944 document produced by J. Presper Eckert and sometimes claimed as a first statement of this concept, showing that it actually describes an electronic desk calculator. The authors summarize ENIAC’s capabilities after conversion and to compare these on both practical and theoretical levels with the 1945 EDVAC design and with several other early computers. This supports a balanced appraisal of the senses in which the converted ENIAC did and did not constitute an initial implementation of the key ideas from the 1945 design. The chapter argues for an appraisal of early computers better grounded in the historical realities of documented use, and against a widespread fixation on the notion of “universality” based on a school of theoretical computer science that gained prominence years later.
Conclusion
Authors: Haigh Thomas , Priestley Mark , Rope Crispin
Published: May 2017

This concluding chapter engages with key ideas from treatments of ENIAC by authors such as Jennifer S. Light and Nathan Ensmenger to explore ENIAC’s legacy in areas such as computer programming, computer center organization, and computer simulation. It is inspired by the treatment of ENIAC’s historiographic role by the late Michael S. Mahoney in his provocative essay “The Histories of Computing(s).” Mahoney challenged the assumed centrality of ENIAC to all history of computing narratives. Having shown in the previous chapter how this perceived position developed over time we can now make a balanced reappraisal, arguing that ENIAC’s influence was profound and underappreciated in some areas but has been overstated or misinterpreted in others. One important topic is the idea that ENIAC’s operators were the “first computer programmers,” a description that distorts their actual relationship to the machines.
Formalizing Measurement and Modeling: The Preinstitutional Society
Authors: Shubik Martin , Smith Eric
Published: May 2017

In this chapter we introduce the concepts of symmetry, dimensions and scaling, which are fundamental to a principled construction and interpretation of minimal models in this book. We also introduce the formal models for production and preferences, which we call the “pre-institutional society”. Society defines the context within which the institutions of the polity and the economy exist. The pre-institutional society is meant to represent the shared layers of constraint within which the different economic institutions must function. Economic life is potentially complex in all its dimensions. In comparison to reality, the space of tractable models is small. The subject of this chapter is to develop criteria for categorizing models and criteria by which to judge the validity of using them as sufficient representations of economic phenomena.
Supporting Attainable Solutions: Symmetry and Complexity in One-Period Exchange Mechanisms
Authors: Shubik Martin , Smith Eric
Published: May 2017

In this chapter we compare economies at the least-structured level of dynamics: market systems characterized by one-shot clearing and hence a single timescale for strategic choices. We choose that timescale to coincide with the social “day” that is the natural cycle of production and consumption. We compare different clearing mechanisms according to a number of structural properties that can be used as a measure of complexity. We use a measure of allocative efficiency to illustrate distortions from competitive equilibrium for each mechanism. Much of the importance of process analysis can be illustrated with a single dilemma: the meaning and determination of the value of the numéraire for exchange. This is explored here. Six market models are presented to illustrate the constraints on rational action from asymmetry of the market mechanism or from strategically ambiguous degrees of freedom. The models have sufficiently many shared features that they roughly represent successive stages in the elaboration of a few common ideas. These are laid out in the chapter.
Endogenizing the Choice of a Monetary System1
Authors: Shubik Martin , Smith Eric
Published: May 2017

In this chapter we introduce our first multi-timescale models of an economy. Longer timescales are associated with commitment to product specialization and to discounting and depreciation of durable goods. We compare an economy mediated by a durable commodity money, such as gold, with one with a fiat money implemented through a bureaucracy. The inefficiency costs associated with asymmetric strategic roles between money-providers and producers of consumption goods are compared with explicit losses of material productivity due to labor costs required to maintain a bureaucracy needed to manage a fiat money system. It is shown how a stable trade system can emerge. We discuss material and institutional capital stock in an economy and note that capital stock acts much like the stock of catalysts used to enable chemical reactions. In a framework such as General Equilibrium, capital stock vanishes from the net input-output relations in an abstract production correspondence.
Innovation And Breaking The Circular Flow
Authors: Shubik Martin , Smith Eric
Published: May 2017

Chapter 9 has a basic theme that even the simplest venture into innovation takes us into the realms of disequilibrium where the study of behaviour in transient states of any length is unavoidable, even if one sticks to the mantra of the rational economic agent. The very nature of the complexity involved in the study of innovation provides the curse of high dimensions. It is our belief that the utilization of low dimensional models in order to be able to obtain some analytical results, while of great value for exploration of basic problems, must be viewed in application as dealing with parable and metaphor intermixed with applied macroeconomics. Even with the gross behavioral simplifications of rational expectations these models can provide answers or at least raise precise questions in economic theory that remove the mystery from items such as “Bills only” by requiring specification of details such as grid size.
Innovation and Evolution: Growth and Control
Authors: Shubik Martin , Smith Eric
Published: May 2017

In connecting Walras and modern General Equilibrium theory with Keynes and Schumpeter we have confined ourselves to 1-ply games with government and a central bank and initial and terminal conditions specified. Pandora’s Box is opened at 2-ply or more. Then the whole world of learning, teaching, signalling, non-symmetric information and habit, herd and rule-of-thumb behavior open up . In this chapter previous approaches are noted, including large econometric models, simulations and possible operational games. Innovation in an asset rich economy is considered. The need for at least three levels of banking and a national debt is discussed. The institutions required are a central bank, commercial banks, and investment financiers, and a treasury or other named manager of a national debt. The chapter ends with a consideration of related complexities in biology and economic dynamics.
The Personal Computer and Social Media
Authors: Ceruzzi Paul E.
Published: May 2017

The use of digital computers to facilitate social interaction has not eclipsed the uses for which they were invented, but it often seems that way. That use requires an ability to network computers to one another, a capability that took several decades after the computer's invention to be realized. The Internet, which emerged out of military-sponsored research done in the 1970s, enabled the creation of sophisticated forms of social interaction. But the personal computer phenomenon was evolving in a parallel universe, with little communication between the two camps. This chapter argues that important first steps toward social media were taken in the arena of the personal computer, which also emerged in the 1970s, but from a different direction. Using devices to connect PCs to the telephone network, and developing so-called “bulletin board” software, personal computer enthusiasts created a framework on which the current Internet-based social world resides.
Community Memory: The First Public-Access Social Media System
Authors: Felsenstein Lee
Published: May 2017

Community Memory was the first public-access social media system, opening without advance notice on August 8, 1973 in Berkeley, California. Designed and programmed by members of a nonprofit company established to bring the power of computers to the counterculture, it ran on a mainframe computer and was well received by those who tried it. This chapter discusses the history of the project, contributions of some of its members, and ways in which it succeeded and ultimately failed to sustain itself. Pre-dating the personal computer, it was designed to provide terminals that nucleated neighborhood information-exchange points. Community Memory spun out from its parent organization, Resource One, Inc. to form its own nonprofit -- The Community Memory Project -- in 1977. The design underwent three generations, culminating in a network of text-based browsers running on basic IBM PCs accessing a Unix server. It was never connected to the Internet, and closed in 1992.
alt.hypertext: An Early Social Medium
Authors: Blustein James , Graff Ann-Barbara
Published: May 2017

Usenet's alt.hypertext newsgroup was a “place” for the discussion of hypertext. alt.hypertext hosted discussion of hypertext in general -- its possibilities and promise. Announcements of meetings and systems were frequent. Some of the discussion was of how to best use and develop what were becoming dominant conventions of hypertextual documents. The purpose of alt.hypertext came from the loose community of people who regularly posted there. Presumably alt.hypertext was chosen for the announcement of the WWW, and later the Mosaic browser, because its community was recognized as the most likely to understand and appreciate the importance and potential of the nascent WWW.
Dictation: A Canadian Perspective on the History of Telematic Art
Authors: Bull Hank
Published: May 2017

Canada, with its vast distances, was an early adopter of communications technologies. Starting in the 1970s, Canadian artists pursued the aesthetic strategies of correspondence art, video, telecommunications, and artist-run centers. Beginning with Bill Bartlett's Brechtian credo that real communication must be interactive, and noting Robert Filliou's influential concept of the “Eternal Network,” Hank Bull tells the story of a small group of artists who tested the potentials and implications of telecommunications art. He discusses radio, slowscan video, electronic mail and fax art, referring to specific projects produced for Ars Electronica (1983), Electra (Paris, 1983) and the Venice Biennale (1986). More recently, Shanghai Fax (1996), staged by Bull, with artists Shen Fan, Ding Yi, and Shi Yong, was one of the first international group exhibitions to take place in China since the revolution. In conclusion Bull emphasizes sympathetic listening in this new territory, where unfamiliar noises clash as new rhythms sound.
System X: Interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee
Authors: Crowley Amanda McDonald
Published: May 2017

System X was an Australian-based dial up BBS, where users created a community of interest with both a variety of text-based conversations and a virtual gallery of images and sound that invited visual and sound artists and musicians to share work and collaborate. System X also sought to originate critical thought about information storage and control, data networks, and art practice in this media. Importantly, it provided a context for community members to upload their own content and to share that content not only with a Sydney-based community, but also with the growing international community. In an interview with Founding Sysop Scot McPhee, this chapter documents the roots of System X in the Sydney electronic music community; System X's role as an art project; the importance of uploading, downloading, manipulating and re-uploading music and images; the user community; the audience; and System X's legacy in the Australian digital arts community.
In Search of Identities in the Digital Humanities: The Early History of Humanist
Authors: Nyhan Julianne
Published: May 2017

Humanist is an online, international seminar on digital humanities that was set up in 1987 by Willard McCarty. Since its inception, it has taken the form of an electronic mailing list and, within the context of the history of computing in the humanities, can be viewed as a proto-social media platform. Newer and slicker social media and crowd-driven platforms may have come (and, in some cases, gone) but Humanist has endured. Indeed, it arguably remains digital humanities’ most vital locus of questioning, imagining and reflecting on and about itself and its many interdisciplinary intersections. In this paper, the author discusses conversations conducted via Humanist in its inaugural year in order to identify and analyze references to disciplinary identity. After focusing on the contradictions that emerge, she reflects on what they might reveal about longer-term dynamics of Digital Humanities’ disciplinary formation and emphasizes the value of Humanist archives in such research.
Echo
Authors: Horn Stacy
Published: May 2017

An early Internet developer takes a personal look back at the 1990 start-up of one of the early social networks, Echo. Horn discusses the challenges she faced building an online community at a time when if people had even heard of the Internet, they thought it was something to do with computers and only of interest to socially challenged geeks. She talks about coming up with ways to deal with all the problems that continue to plague the Internet today: trolls, harassment, bullying, basically all the evils of society. Horn also covers how she got women online when the Internet was 90% male, or large institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, when talk on the net was mostly tech.
MOOs and Participatory Media
Authors: Grigar Dene
Published: May 2017

This essay revisits the online defense that took place in LinguaMOO in July 1995, tying it to theories and current practice of social media. In doing so, it situates MOOs in a historical, cultural context as an early form of participatory media related to social media environments prevalent today and establishes that popular social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, are not new but, rather, are part of an evolution of technologies that foster the human impetus to connect with one another across any mode of communication.
Arts Wire: The Nonprofit Arts Online
Authors: Malloy Judy
Published: May 2017

Beginning in 1992, Arts Wire, a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts, was a social media platform and Internet presence provider, that provided access to news, information, and dialogue on the social, economic, philosophical, intellectual, and political conditions affecting the arts and artists. Initially led by Anne Focke and then by poet, Joe Matuzak, Arts Wire participants included individual artists, arts administrators, arts organizations and funders. This chapter focuses on Arts Wire's social media aspects, such as discussion and projects, including among others: AIDSwire, an online AIDS information resource; the online component of the Fourth National Black Writers Conference; the Native Arts Network Association; ProjectArtNet that brought children from immigrant neighborhoods online to create a community history; NewMusNet, a virtual place for experimental music; and Interactive, an online laboratory for interactive art. It also documents the history of the e-newsletter, Arts Wire Current (later NYFA Current).
Electronic Literature Organization Chats on LinguaMOO
Authors: Larsen Deena
Published: May 2017

On LinguaMOO, hosted at the University of Texas at Dallas from circa 1999 to 2003, the author conducted a series of online chats from her apartment in Colorado -- at first, on her own, and then sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). She invited lecturers and the electronic literature community; served virtual tea, coffee and pastry; introduced guests and suggested topics. Discussions included archiving, tools, the differences between print literature and electronic literature, the definition of electronic literature, readers of electronic literature, and the future of electronic literature. Participants included Jane Yellowlees Douglas, Robert Kendall, Talan Memmott, Jennifer Ley, Nick Monfort, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Stuart Moulthrop, M.D. Coverley, Stephanie Strickland, John McDaid, Bill Bly, Sue Thomas, and Katherine Hayles, among many others. In addition to discussions and participants, this chapter also details the use of MOOs for online discussion and the creation of archives for the ELO Chats.
trAce Online Writing Centre, Nottingham Trent University, UK
Authors: Carpenter J. R.
Published: May 2017

The trAce Online Writing Centre was founded in 1995 by Sue Thomas at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Over the next decade trAce expanded along with the web, evolving organically and somewhat haphazardly into a vast interlinked network created by many different artists, authors and researchers, during a period of rapid technological change. What emerged was one of the web’s earliest and most influential international creative communities. This chapter outlines the historical context, complex media ecology, diverse membership, wide-ranging influences, and vast and varied output of trAce, much of which has been collected together in a unique archive which can be explored online here: 
A Conversation and Two Epilogues
Authors: Malloy Judy
Published: May 2017

When Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz arrived in Telluride for Tele-Community in the summer of 1993, it seemed as if the whole town joined them on Main Street, as using slow scan video they connected townspeople and visiting digerati with artists, universities, and cultural centers around the world. Their Electronic Café had already presented New York City pedestrians with display windows of people waving and talking real time from Los Angeles (...
Expanding on “What Is the Social in Social Media?”: A Conversation with Geert Lovink
Authors: Malloy Judy
Published: May 2017

In 1995, Geert Lovink started  with Pit Schultz. It expanded into many lists and languages and in the process demonstrated that English language and American-centric platforms do not have to be the lingua franca of the Internet. Lovink's contemporary work with the Institute of Network Cultures and its research networks, such as Unlike Us, has shaped a coalition that explores network architectures, the role of collective production, aesthetic tactics, and diverse, open information exchange. This introduction to the Epilogues focuses on his 2012 essay in e-flux -- “What Is the Social in Social Media?” -- asking three questions: Can you expand on what roles you envision for artists and writers in contemporary social media? How can we teach students to create in a difficult medium that so beautifully (and relentlessly) combines text, image, design, interactivity and collaboration? And how do you envision a social media of the future?
Epilogue: Slow Machines and Utopian Dreams
Authors: Donath Judith
Published: May 2017

The early days of social media saw tremendous optimism about the transformations that connecting people via networked computers would bring. This chapter, the book’s epilogue, analyses the nostalgia that permeates the preceding chapters, in which the pioneers of the field write with nostalgia for creative freedom, the pre-commercial internet and the hopeful time when people believed that computing would change humanity for the better. The world of dial-up modems and floppy disks and ASCII bulletin board systems seems very long ago. But the ideals of that time, in spite of their naiveté, indeed because of it, are very valuable. Untainted by cynicism or corrupted by practicalities, they remind us of what the social net ought to be; they remind of the direction to head in, even if we will not quite get there. By inculcating ideals into mythic origin stories, nostalgia weaves them into a culture: we create the past that we want to live up to.
From Archaeology to Architecture: Building a Place for Noncommercial Culture Online
Authors: Larson Gary O.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines various approaches to ensuring a place for nonprofit culture online, drawing from the various noncommercial networking projects discussed elsewhere in the anthology, as well as the 1990’s National Information Infrastructure policy debates in the U.S. and subsequent private-sector efforts. It discusses the key elements required for a broadly collaborative effort to (1) identify, cultivate, and promote the digital art resources that already exist; (2) develop new online projects; and (3) weave these resources together in a fashion that allows both online and offline arts activities to receive the serious attention to study they deserve. In addition to enhanced public sector leadership and expanded private sector support, the chapter calls for a more systematic application of curatorial expertise to the online sector, along with substantial grassroots participation in identifying the most reliable cultural resources that are too often lost in the vast expanses of the commercialized Internet today.
Gene × Environment Interaction in Obesity: The Contribution of Randomized Clinical Trials
Authors: McCaffery Jeanne M. , Doyle Caroline Y.
Published: May 2017

Gene x environment (GxE) interaction is most commonly examined in epidemiologic studies.Yet randomized, controlled trials permit several methodological advantages to the detection of GxE.Primary among these is randomization of the “environmental exposure”, reducing measurement error for the environmental variable as well as confounding due to differences in the exposed relative to unexposed groups, including gene-environment correlation.To the extent that the trial was successful, the exposure exerts a demonstrated environmental main effect on the outcome of interest, providing a fertile ground to detect GxE.In addition, randomized, controlled trials provide the opportunity to look at novel phenotypes critical in the era a Precision Medicine, most notably genetic influences on response to a given treatment.In this chapter, we illustrate the use of randomized, controlled trials to detect GxE with evidence-based behavioral weight loss intervention clinical trials as a prototype.
Cumulative Gene × Environment Influences on Neurobehavioral Development in Humans and Nonhuman Primates
Authors: Ahmed Fatima Umber , Kinnally Erin Loraine
Published: May 2017

In this chapter Ahmed and Kinnally provide some longitudinal examples and illustrations of how G x E influences may be studied with regard to neurobehavioral (brain) development in human and non-human primates. The chapter provides keen insight into two significant conceptual and methodological issues in the study of G X E interactions. First, is the importance of considering the findings from both human and non-human studies on genes and environment, thereby suggesting a more integrative lens for thinking about, planning, and interpreting research findings in G X E research. Second, they propose the use of multiple methods to investigate G X E interactions, including in their applications the use of both SNP-based and micro-array-based methods. With the quite massive increases in available large data sources (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics), there will be clear benefits in future research to incorporate different methods or sources of data toward identifying underlying biological mechanisms. Furthermore, the use of longitudinal research designs to study G X E interactions for time-ordered change phenomena such as neurobehavioral development provides a promising approach to identify and translate basic research findings into practice.
Complex Phenotypes and the Use of Polygenic Scores to Investigate Gene × Environment Interactions for Substance Use
Authors: Windle Michael
Published: May 2017

The chapter suggests the need of a “second-generation” candidate gene approach to adapt to first-generation limitations and to strengthen efforts to study GE interactions. The sample sizes associated with many phenotypes and areas of study in the literature (e.g., clinical trials, neuroimaging studies) are unlikely to yield sample sizes in the area of GWA and NGS studies (i.e., 200,000-300,000 participants). However, by building upon prior limitations in the candidate gene literature, using findings from GWA and NGS studies and meta-analyses, using multiple methods of analyses (e.g., gene expression analysis; methylation analysis), and using theory and prior substantive research to guide hypothesis testing, progress can be made on G X E interactions for complex phenotypes. Several illustrative path models were provided in this chapter to provide a visual frame for how we have approached G X E interactions in the past, and how, going forward, we might proceed to investigate multiple polygenic by multiple environmental models. This level of complexity may be necessary to advance the field to address the many exciting research questions of interest, as well as the challenges that confront us as we attempt to move this knowledge from discovery to practice.
Introduction
Authors: Gazzola Michele , Wickström Bengt-Arne
Published: May 2017

In the last decades the world has experienced several major changes that have had an impact on linguistic diversity and on the way language is perceived by individuals. Increasing international economic integration (sometimes referred to as “globalization”) has emphasized the need for companies to look beyond their national borders and domestic markets and to compile new international rules to guide this process. The World Trade Organization, for example, was founded in 1995. Supranational political integration has become stronger. At the European level, the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, followed by other agreements, has deepened the process of European integration, increased the importance of the European Union, improved the mobility of labor on the continent, and led to the monetary union of several European states. In addition, three EU enlargements (2004, 2007, and 2013) have almost doubled the number of member states in less than ten years, and increased the EU population by about 30 percent....
Fifty Years of Economics in Language Policy: Critical Assessment and Priorities
Authors: Grin François
Published: May 2017

This chapter offers a broad-based overview of language economics. Rather than assuming that the field can be characterized derivatively from the observation of “what economists do” when they talk about language, it proposes an analytical definition of language economics, in order to arrive at a theory-based typology of research. This results in a mental map of language economics, highlighting its connections with language policy. Since the first goal of this chapter is to provide orientation in language economics, it aims to be exhaustive in its identification of research directions but it does not discuss the contents of the latter in detail. I then focus on the application of language economics to the selection, design and evaluation of language policy and planning (LPP), emphasizing the need for economic analysis to embody sociolinguistic knowledge as a condition for practical relevance. This chapter also shows that reciprocally, sociolinguistic research, particularly when it is concerned with policy questions, significantly benefits from taking economic dimensions into account, since most LPP issues raise matters of efficiency and fairness that economics is comparatively well-equipped to address. In the closing section, four major research directions are identified as priorities for the future development of language economics.
Distribution of the Benefits and Costs of Canada’s Federal Official Languages Policy: Results for 2001
Authors: Desgagné Maxime Leblanc , Vaillancourt François
Published: May 2017

The chapter is divided in three parts. The first describes the history of the main elements of the federal language policies then turns to the aggregate costs and benefits of the federal official language policy. The second presents the methodology used to allocate the benefits of the availability of French language services and their tax costs to households. The third presents the distribution for the population divided into ten deciles (income based) of the benefits and tax costs of OLA services linked to transfers to individuals and other services. The results combine information for 2001 and 2006 given the availability of data.
Economic Theory and Minority Language
Authors: Uriarte José Ramón , Sperlich Stefan
Published: May 2017

We seek to understand the strategic use bilinguals make of a minority language. We argue that bilinguals have linguistic preferences and face both linguistic coordination and communication optimization tasks. Further, we take into account that anonymous interactions are fairly frequent in present modern multilingual societies, making the linguistic type (bilingual or monolingual) private knowledge. To reach fast language coordination smoothness and communication effectiveness, bilinguals build linguistic conventions. The emergence of those conventions are shaped by the economizing laws and principles of least effort in human communication, politeness strategies, and other elements, all combined in a context of language contact. We show how the strategy hide your linguistic type may become popular among the bilinguals, and thus reduce the use of the minority language.
English as the Lingua franca and the Economic Value of Other Languages: The Case of the Language of Work in the Montreal Labor Market
Authors: Grenier Gilles , Nadeau Serge
Published: May 2017

An important feature of Canada is that it has two official languages, English and French, and that one of them, English, is also the international lingua franca. This situation may have particular policy implications. Within Canada, the Montreal metropolitan area presents an interesting case in point: it has a majority of native French speakers, an important minority of native English speakers, and many immigrants from various linguistic backgrounds who try to make their way into the labor market. Using confidential micro-data from the 2006 Canadian Census, this chapter investigates the determinants and the economic values of the use of different languages at work in Montreal. Workers are divided into three groups: French, English and Other mother tongues, and indices are defined for the use of French, English, and Other languages at work. It is found that the use of English at work by non-English native speakers is positively related to the education level of the workers, while there is no such relationship for the use of French by native English speakers. The returns to using at work a language that is different from one’s mother tongue are analyzed with ordinary least squares and instrumental variables regressions. For the English mother tongue group, using French at work has little or no reward, while using English at work pays a lot for the French mother tongue group. For the Other mother tongues group, there is a high payoff to using an official language at work, especially English. This situation is not due to the inferior economic status of the native French speakers; it is due to the fact that English is the international lingua franca. The policy implications of the above results are discussed.
Bilingualism and Economic Performance
Authors: Aldashev Alisher , Danzer Alexander M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter investigates the economic returns to bilingualism. The analysis is staged in Kazakhstan, a multi-ethnic country with complex ethnic settlement patterns that has recently switched its official state language from Russian to Kazakh. We find a surprising negative effect of bilingualism on earnings and generally low returns to speaking Kazakh. We believe that individuals assess their proficiency in a language relatively to their peers. Hence, bilinguals who rate themselves as “fluent” in Russian and whose peers are Russian speakers are more likely to be genuinely fluent in Russian. In contrast bilinguals who rate themselves as “fluent” in Russian but whose peers are Kazakh speakers are less likely to be genuinely fluent in Russian but rather more fluent than their Kazakh-speaking peers. Thus, the wage penalty for bilingualism is in fact the wage penalty for being less fluent in Russian language which is valued in the labor market in Kazakhstan.
Does Foreign Language Proficiency Foster Migration of Young Individuals within the European Union?
Authors: Aparicio-Fenoll Ainhoa , Kuehn Zoë
Published: May 2017

Speaking the language of the host country eases migrants’ integration and tends to boost their economic success in the country of destination. However, the decision to acquire language skills may in itself be determined by the intention to migrate. In addition, conditional on being a migrant, the relation between language skills and migrants’ integration and economic success goes both ways. Using data on the study of foreign languages during compulsory education in European countries, we test whether and how much language proficiency determines migration flows across Europe. The European Union with basically unlimited labor mobility and pronounced differences in youth unemployment rates provides an ideal testing ground for our hypothesis. We find that speaking the language of a country increases the likelihood to migrate to that country almost fivefold.
Globalization, Language(s), and Mobility
Authors: May Stephen
Published: May 2017

This paper explores the arguments offered in support of a new form of linguistic cosmopolitanism, within which English as the current world language inevitably plays a central/pivotal role. These arguments are illustrated via discussion of the work of three prominent political theorists, Abram de Swaan, Philippe Van Parijs and Daniele Archibugi, all of whom advocate this broad position. The conclusions drawn from their work are demonstrably apparent. In our increasingly globalized world, nation-states must incorporate English as the language of wider international connectedness and trade in a privileged diglossic relation to local languages. For individuals, English must either be a replacing language or, at the least, a key language in any individual’s bi/multilingual repertoire. At both the collective (state) and individual levels, the almost de rigueur assumption is that English is crucial for wider social and economic mobility.
This paper problematizes this increasingly widespread and influential position by highlighting the following key limitations therein: the failure to address issues of power and inequality; the monolithic construction of English; the over-elaboration of the links between language and mobility; the deleterious implications for education; and the wider negative juxtaposition of supposedly local and global linguistic identities upon which these arguments are invariably based.
English on the Rise: Access and Resources in Internationalization
Authors: Zentz Lauren
Published: May 2017

The data presented in this chapter highlight the Indonesian state’s influence on citizens’ access to education as it implements policies that simultaneously aim to secure a national identity through enforcing Indonesian as medium of instruction in public schools and categorizing English as a Foreign Language. The state is in a double bind, and its policies are ineffective: in globalization, English cannot be avoided, but the state lacks the resources needed to meet internationalized standards with language and curriculum content appropriate to the needs of Indonesia’s student populations and the skills of its teachers. Because of these dynamics, the English language is accessed mostly by those who already have access to mobility, wealth, and “international standard” educations. The national categorization of English as a Foreign Language combined with a contradictory rush to get citizens English alone by increasing its distribution throughout educational curricula, promises nothing more than to reinforce levels of English fluency as indicators of individuals’ access to or marginalization from wealth and state-distributed educations. Beliefs that English alone will earn the Indonesian state and its citizens prosperous positions in national and global society act to conflate the English language with the other important material factors alongside which this symbol of wealth “hitchhikes” (Mendoza-Denton, 2011), and this has led to rushed and ineffective policy implementation on many levels.
Linguistic Diversity in India’s Polity and Economy
Authors: Sonntag Selma K.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the linguistic dimension of the tension between India’s democratic politics and its liberalized economy. I argue that there is a divergence between languages used in the polity and languages used in the economy. In the polity, characterized by a semblance of empowerment through the electoral participation of the weaker sections of society, vernacular languages predominate. In contrast, the language of the economy in India, particularly since economic liberalization in 1991, tends to be English. It is in the economy that India’s class and caste chasm manifests itself linguistically: between the English-speaking elite and the vernacular-speaking masses. While the noted Indian economist, Deepak Nayyar, warns of an impending clash between the democratically empowered masses and the economically privileged elite, I suggest that in terms of language use India’s robust democracy may well trump market forces. And while linguists have warned that English as the language of the globalized marketplace can have dire consequences for linguistic diversity, I argue that India’s linguistic diversity, at least in terms of its major regional languages, remains impressive. In the case of India, I conclude, the spread of the language of globalization, English, as the language of the economy, is mediated by the languages used in India’s vibrant democracy.
The Path to Partition
Authors: Harbour Daniel
Published: May 2017

Morphological theory generally takes syncretism to be a key source of evidence about features and natural classes. The current chapter argues against this status quo, showing that there are no categorical constraints on possible versus impossible syncretisms. Partitions, by contrast, offer a means of marshalling the data productively. Defined as the total set of distinctions made by all paradigms within a given grammatical domain, partitions transform person in a categorical problem of the attested versus the unattested. Focusing narrowly on three-person pronominal systems, the chapter shows that the skewed distribution of partitions is not attributable to functional or historical factors and demands a deeper explanation.
The Partition Problem
Authors: Harbour Daniel
Published: May 2017

With the previous chapter having established that partitions are the correct object of fundamental inquiry for the theory of person, the current chapter presents the partition chapter in its most general form: essentially, why only five of fifteen (or more) possible partitions are attested. This empirical basis of the problem involves person partitions of all sizes as well as person-related partitions also of spatial deixis (spaces, objects, paths).
The Partition Problem Solved
Authors: Harbour Daniel
Published: May 2017

This chapter solves the partition problem of the previous chapter. It posits an ontology which is organised into nested power sets, denoted by two features (author, participant) and their host head. Crucially, these features are bivalent and their values denote operations between sets, allowing one set-denoting feature to act on another. The chapter shows that, once the systems can account for the most basic partitions, all and only the others follow, depending on a semantic parameter of order of composition.
Number and the Functional Sequence
Authors: Harbour Daniel
Published: May 2017

A very basic demand on any theory of person is that it interact with a theory of number to yield familiar inventories of pronouns and agreement in a straightforward fashion. This chapter shows that the current theory does so. Specifically, it shows that the theory of Harbour 2014 (Paucity, abundance, and the theory of number, Language) generates singular, dual, trial, paucal, greater paucal, minimal, augmented, unit augmented, and plural, both with and without clusivity contrasts. The chapter also argues for a phrase structure in which number dominates person and applies novel data from person to the question of whether the denotation of plural includes or excludes that of singular.
Introduction
Authors: Raymond Leigh
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the main argument of the book: that the decision in RGGI to “reclaim the atmospheric commons” on behalf of the public by auctioning emissions allowances for the first time was possible due to a new normative frame promoted by environmental advocates. This new “public benefit” frame incorporated polluter pays and egalitarian norms to create a new policy design for auctions that paid greater attention to the distribution of the value of those allowances to the public at large. Taken together, this new frame and associated policy design constituted a new “public benefit model” for climate policy stressing the importance not only of making polluters pay, but also of dedicating those revenues to programs that benefit the public directly, such as subsidies for energy efficiency improvements or direct bill rebates. Using this new public benefit frame and policy design, change advocates were able to promote auctions successfully in RGGI in a surprising policy reversal from long-standing practice of giving such allowances away for free to powerful economic interests.