bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Financing Mechanisms to Support Inclusive Practice
Authors: Ebersold Serge , Óskarsdóttir Edda , Watkins Amanda
Published: August 2020

Financing plays a critical role in achieving more inclusive education systems, and most European countries are considering how the way they fund education impacts the policy goal of more inclusive practice in schools. The way financing is determined in laws and regulations has a direct impact on decision-making and implementation in relation to identifying learners’ educational needs, diagnostic and assessment procedures that might be used. Crucially it impacts on the placement of learners in different types of provision, including separate special classes or special schools.

Financing inclusive education systems differs from financing special needs education in several important ways. In addition to providing shared educational opportunities for learners with recognised additional needs with their peers in mainstream settings, financing inclusive education systems aims to enable all learners to gain access to the educational support they are legally entitled to. Financing inclusive education systems is also far more complex than financing general education as it relates to a multilevel and multi-stakeholder framework of policy and provision that includes non-educational aspects of educational provision that are needed to ensure all learners access to high-quality inclusive education. These non-educational aspects may cover factors such as accessibility of the physical environment, specialist support, different resources for reducing the functional consequences of different disabilities, as well as financial support for families in meeting the direct and indirect costs of education.

Effective mechanisms for financing inclusive education systems entail the provision of additional funding and resources that encourage mainstream schools to develop inclusive education policies, as well as innovative and flexible learning environments that meet a wider range of learners’ academic and social needs and requirements. A higher amount of funding does not in itself guarantee better learning conditions; the successful implementation of inclusive education policies depends on how funds are allocated and to whom the funds are addressed, rather than solely on how much money is available. Effective inclusive education systems build upon funding mechanisms and strategies that consider and manage the deployment and manipulation of resources at the school level, governance mechanisms, capacity building, and school development approaches. All these strategies must be targeted at achieving the policy goal of more inclusive practice in all schools.
Gender Equitable Education and Technological Innovation
Authors: Jenson Jennifer , de Castell Suzanne
Published: August 2020

The literature on gender equity, education, and technological innovation identifies three primary areas of concern: STEM (collective disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), computer science, and, interestingly enough, reading comprehension. These gendered divides are often framed in public discourse as problems of equality; however, most research and scholarly discussions focus on equity, on fairness. Considerable work by feminists in the social studies of science and technology, demonstrating how innovation and technology are already gendered, has lent strong support to an educational emphasis on how “fairness” might best be achieved.

It remains the case that “gender” in most research studies refers to a binarized conception of sex: either male or female, girls or boys, men or women. However, critical intersectional understandings of gender that take into account age, socioeconomic class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and dis/abilities hold out promise for more nuanced understandings of inequities in education. For example, taking the widest perspective, it is socioeconomic class, not gender, that continues to create the greatest disparities in educational outcomes, whereas within any given socioeconomic context, gender is paramount. For girls and women, equity-focused educational interventions aim to develop better pathways to higher education and jobs in STEM subjects and fields. Female underrepresentation in STEM and computer science is often framed as a gender-specific skills deficit impeding access to and success in globally competitive, technologically innovative, and the most highly remunerated occupations, rather than as a barrier created by differences in expectations, norms, experience, and prior educational provision. Gender equity initiatives for school-aged boys are concentrated in the areas of reading and comprehension skills, with little connection made in the literature to either presumptions about or implications of this underachievement as a deficit that jeopardizes future educational or vocational skills. It may be that evolving conceptions and practices of gender that take better account of both gender diversity and intersectionality will enable educational interventions beyond these stereotypical and binarized educational analyses and initiatives, lending hope that we may yet see women and girls assuming not just an equitable but indeed a transformative role in technological innovation.
Teacher Evaluation
Authors: Mohd Yusoff Nurahimah , Kayode David Jimoh
Published: August 2020

As stipulated in some educational documents, no country can grow beyond the quality of its teachers. Thus, teachers need necessary support in discharging their responsibilities, and teacher evaluation is a valuable tool because of the relevance of teacher evaluation to both the teachers and the stakeholders. Therefore, teacher evaluation in terms of formative and summative assessments helps in determining what is working well in classrooms, identifying areas of improvement for teachers, and providing options for teachers’ professional development to support their continued growth. Stakeholders in education have several roles in ensuring effective teacher-evaluation strategies and in determining how effective teacher evaluation can be achieved. In assessing students, teachers test student knowledge in order to determine what they have learned, what they have not understood, and how effectively the courses are being taught.
Educational Administration in the Middle East
Authors: Arar Khalid
Published: August 2020

The globalization of education has had a tremendous impact on what is taught and tested in different education systems and on organizational forms of schooling. This information explosion has even affected less developed societies of the Middle East (ME). In the 21st century, ME governments provide varied models of governance and consequent educational policies. Yet, all styles of governance are challenged by the current geo-political upheavals. Although this is an era of rapid global technological development, instability prevails in the ME, engendered by the revolutions of the Arab Spring and civil wars in Syria, Libya, Yemen and their consequences. Due to these crises, spillovers of refugees and economic problems flood neighboring states such as Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan. Over the last decade, the education systems in the ME have been faced with a state of emergency, dealing with enduring dilemmas concerning the provision of education for the masses of children, who have become asylum seekers and refugees (Arar, Örücü, & Ak-Küçükçayır). This tense and dynamic reality poses serious problems for the education policy-makers, practitioners and scholars, who attempt to plan and perform education programs that would meet the needs of both local and refugee student populations. This paper investigates practices in Education Administration (EA) in the Middle-East (ME) following the uprisings of the Arab Spring. It describes the development of EA as a discipline and the way in which EA has developed in the ME, facing the challenges of this volatile region, plagued by rapid political changes, regime instability and wars. The chapter provides new knowledge on EA in a less researched territory, where socio-cultural norms and structures differ significantly from those of the "Western" world, where most EA theories were developed. Implications are drawn for educational leaders and researchers, including the need for critical reconsideration of educational curricula and the need for local culture-relevant initiatives at all school levels. Based on conceptual analysis, this paper identifies current trends, and socio-political forces, asking pertinent questions and indicating directions for future research dealing with education administration in the Middle-East. Implications are drawn for policymakers, educational leaders, practitioners and researchers.
The Big Five Personality Trait Factors
Authors: De Raad Boele , Mlačić Boris
Published: August 2020

The field of dispositional traits of personality is best summarized in terms of five fundamental dimensions: the Big Five personality trait factors, namely Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect. The Big Five find their origin in psycho-lexical work in which the lexicon of a language is scanned for all words that can inform about personality traits. The Big Five factors have emerged most articulately in Indo-European languages in Europe and the United States, and weaker versions have appeared in non-Indo-European languages. The model is most functional and detailed in a format that integrates simple structure and circular representations. Such a format gives the Big Five system great accommodative potential, meaning that many or most of the concepts developed in approaches other than the Big Five can be located in that system, thus enhancing the communication about personality traits in the field. The Big Five model has been applied in virtually all disciplines of psychology, including clinical, social, organizational, and developmental psychology. In particular, the Big Five have been found useful in the field of learning and education where the factor Conscientiousness has been identified as a strong predictor of academic performance, but where other factors of the Big Five also have been demonstrated to play important roles, often in moderating or mediating sense. The Big Five model has faced a number of critical issues, one of which concerns the criteria of inclusion of trait-descriptive words from the lexicon. With relaxed criteria, allowing more than just dispositional trait words (e.g., trait words that are predominantly evaluative in nature), additional dimensions may emerge beyond the Big Five, mostly conveying features of morality. An important issue regards the cross-cultural applicability of trait-descriptive dimensions. With a cross-cultural emphasis, possibly no more than three factors, expressive of traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness, make the best chance for claims of universality. For a good understanding of traits representing the remaining Big Five dimensions, and also dimensions that have sometimes been identified beyond the Big Five, it is not only important to specify their regional applicability, but also to articulate differences in research methodology.
Gifted Girls and Women
Authors: Kerr Barbara A. , Malmsten Robyn N.
Published: August 2020

There are many special characteristics and needs of gifted girls and women throughout the lifespan. As young girls, gifted girls can often be identified by early language development and precocious reading, and often need early admission to schooling, the opportunity for alone time, and encouragement and specialized training in the domains of their greatest interest. Adolescent gifted girls are often bored in school, conflicted about relationships and achievement, and eager for mentoring; they may need to advance through high school and early entry to college course-taking as well as strong relationships with master teachers and mentors. Gifted teens also need clear information about sexuality and sexual identity, particularly about the association of early sexual activity with lower achievement. Gifted women struggle throughout the world with gender relations, that is, the requirements by most societies that they bear an unequal share of the work of marriage and family life. How gifted women negotiate the dual demands of their societies often determines whether or not they will achieve eminence in their fields.

Long-standing controversies concerning sex differences, women’s education, and definitions of eminence continue to have an impact on the educational and career development of gifted girls and women. Moderate sex differences favoring boys and men in sub-factors of cognitive abilities, like spatial-rotation abilities, continue to be highly publicized and are often interpreted to mean that gifted girls and women are less able than men to achieve in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. Differences in adult gifted women’s and men’s STEM achievement are also attributed to preferences, when research shows that the most important variable associated with highest achievements are responsibilities in marriage and child-rearing, or gender relations. Controversies over single-sex education continue, with research both supporting and disputing the superiority of single-sex education for women; it may be that gifted women benefit more that average women from this kind of higher education. Whether single-sex or co-educational, the presence of a mentor may be most important to gifted women’s academic and career development. Finally, the concepts of eminence and genius are increasingly under scrutiny by scholars who claim they are highly gendered, with genius nearly always being associated with male dominated professions. Each of these controversies can affect gifted girls’ self-confidence, engagement, and persistence.
Astrakhan and Orenburg: Russia’s Asian Trade in the 17th and 18th Centuries
Authors: Romaniello Matthew
Published: August 2020

Astrakhan and Orenburg were the Russian Empire’s two “official” entrances from Asia in the early modern era. Russia’s “Asia” was conceived broadly as the expanse of Eurasia from the Ottoman Empire to the shores of the Pacific. Russia’s control of the Volga River, culminating in the conquest of Astrakhan on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the 16th century, was intended to open direct access for Russia’s merchants to reach Asia. Throughout the 17th century, trade with the Middle East and Central Asia increased, followed by an important breakthrough in relations with China culminating in the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. In the 18th century, Russia’s Asian trade increased; Astrakhan’s customs fees collected from Asian trade goods surpassed the revenue generated by Russia’s Baltic ports in the first half of the century. A growing trade with the Central Asian Khanates of Bukhara, Khiva, and Khoqand led to the creation of Orenburg as the entry point for overland trade from the steppe in 1753. In theory, the new outpost separated Russia’s “Asia” into separate zones for increased regulation: Astrakhan for goods arriving from the Caspian Sea, imported from Iran and India, and Orenburg for the increasing steppe traffic. This is not to suggest that increased regulation produced better control over Eurasia’s trade networks, but rather to reveal Russia’s significant investment in profiting from Asia’s trade as much as its competitors in Britain or the Netherlands did. While overland Eurasian trade remains plagued by a historiographical assumption of its decline in the 18th century, Astrakhan and Orenburg were vital centers of Eurasian commerce, revealing the robust overland trade that remained outside of West European observation.
Indian Merchant Migration within the British Empire
Authors: Persaud Alexander
Published: August 2020

Millions of Indians migrated internally within the British Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. While some migrated as labor migrants, many others did so as merchants and other businesspeople. By the start of World War II, more than 200,000 Indians worked in trade outside of India. These merchants played key roles in the British Empire within India and the larger Indian Ocean economy.

Several conditions facilitated and perhaps caused Indian merchant migration within the British Empire. First, precolonial Indian commerce continued and adapted to imperial trade patterns. Second, within India, British rule lowered transaction costs and opened markets. Third, British rule brought preferential access to British colonies outside India, access that was denied to merchants from outside the British Empire.

Internal merchant migration within India shows the importance of distinct religious, caste, and linguistic groups, many of which were active before British control. Gujarati-speaking merchant migrants and Parsis were bulwarks of Bombay’s commercial class. Specific merchant communities migrated within trading networks across India as railroads connected the subcontinent.

Outside India, merchants—often from these same groups—accompanied British expansion in Asia and Africa. In Burma and Malaya, Chettiars from the south formed banking and trading networks that tied these colonies closer to the Indian economy. Chettiar finance was crucial in the development of industry in both Burma and Malaya. Indian businesspeople dominated commerce in East Africa and played key roles in commerce. Indian businesses in Uganda developed local commercial agriculture and industry, and Indians in South Africa played a large role in commerce before legal restrictions reduced their involvement.

Distant colonies in which indentureship was the dominant form of migration experienced a transition from labor to trade, with merchant migration playing a smaller role. These colonies do not fit the pattern of merchant migration seen in India and the larger Indian Ocean economy, but they illustrate the role of Indian tradespeople outside India.
Structural Vector Autoregressive Models
Authors: Gambetti Luca
Published: August 2020

Structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) represent a prominent class of time series models used for macroeconomic analysis. The model consists of a set of multivariate linear autoregressive equations characterizing the joint dynamics of economic variables. The residuals of these equations are combinations of the underlying structural economic shocks, assumed to be orthogonal to each other. Using a minimal set of restrictions, these relations can be estimated—the so-called shock identification—and the variables can be expressed as linear functions of current and past structural shocks. The coefficients of these equations, called impulse response functions, represent the dynamic response of model variables to shocks. Several ways of identifying structural shocks have been proposed in the literature: short-run restrictions, long-run restrictions, and sign restrictions, to mention a few.

SVAR models have been extensively employed to study the transmission mechanisms of macroeconomic shocks and test economic theories. Special attention has been paid to monetary and fiscal policy shocks as well as other nonpolicy shocks like technology and financial shocks.

In recent years, many advances have been made both in terms of theory and empirical strategies. Several works have contributed to extend the standard model in order to incorporate new features like large information sets, nonlinearities, and time-varying coefficients. New strategies to identify structural shocks have been designed, and new methods to do inference have been introduced.
Early and Medieval Periods in German Economic History
Authors: Huning Thilo R. , Wahl Fabian
Published: August 2020

The study of the Holy Roman Empire, a medieval state on the territory of modern-day Germany and Central Europe, has attracted generations of qualitative economic historians and quantitative scholars from various fields. Its bordering position between Roman and Germanic legacies, its Carolingian inheritance, and the numerous small states emerging from 1150 onward, on the one hand, are suspected to have hindered market integration, and on the other, allowed states to compete. This has inspired many research questions around differences and communalities in culture, the origin of the state, the integration of good and financial markets, and technology inventions, such the printing press. While little is still known about the economy of the rural population, cities and their economic conditions have been extensively studied from the angles of economic geography, institutionalism, and for their influence on early human capital accumulation. The literature has stressed that Germany at this time cannot be seen as a closed economy, but only in the context of Europe and the wider world. Global events, such as the Black Death, and European particularities, such as the Catholic Church, never stopped at countries’ borders. As such, the literature provides an understanding for the prelude to radical changes, such as the Lutheran Reformation, religious wars, and the coming of the modern age with its economic innovations.
Long-Distance Trade from the Voyages of Discovery to the First World War, 1500–1914
Authors: Harley C. Knick
Published: August 2020

The highly integrated world economy at the outbreak of World War I emerged from discoveries and technological change in previous centuries. Territories unknown to the economy of Eurasia offered profitable opportunities if capital and labor could be mobilized to cheaply produce products that could bear the high cost of transportation that prevailed before industrialization. In the 16th century, American monetary metals mined using European technology and local labor, and sold worldwide, had major repercussions, including increasing trade between Europe and Asia. From the mid-17th century, sugar and tobacco in the Americas, developed on the backs of imported African slaves, produced an Atlantic economy that included the mainland colonies of British America. In the 19th century, technological innovation became the main driving force. First, it cheapened textile production in Britain and creating a massive demand for raw cotton. Then technology radically reduced the cost of transportation on both land and sea. Lower transportation costs spurred greater international specialization and, equally importantly, brought frontiers in continental interiors into the world economy. During the later 19th century, commercial and financial institutions arose that supported increased global economic integration.
Mergers and Acquisitions: Long-Run Performance and Success Factors
Authors: Renneboog Luc , Vansteenkiste Cara
Published: August 2020

Despite the aggregate value of M&A market transactions amounting to several trillions dollars on an annual basis, acquiring firms often underperform relative to non-acquiring firms, especially in public takeovers. Although hundreds of academic studies have investigated the deal- and firm-level factors associated with M&A announcement returns, many factors that increase M&A performance in the short run fail to relate to sustained long-run returns. In order to understand value creation in M&As, it is key to identify the firm and deal characteristics that can reliably predict long-run performance.

Broadly speaking, long-run underperformance in M&A deals results from poor acquirer governance (reflected by CEO overconfidence and a lack of (institutional) shareholder monitoring) as well as from poor merger execution and integration (as captured by the degree of acquirer-target relatedness in the post-merger integration process). Although many more dimensions affect immediate deal transaction success, their effect on long-run performance is non-existent, or mixed at best.
Detection and Characterization Methods of Exoplanets
Authors: Santos Nuno C. , Barros Susana C.C. , Demangeon Olivier D.S. , Faria João P.
Published: August 2020

Is the Solar System unique, or are planets ubiquitous in the universe? The answer to this long-standing question implies the understanding of planet formation, but perhaps more relevant, the observational assessment of the existence of other worlds and their frequency in the galaxy.

The detection of planets orbiting other suns has always been a challenging task. Fortunately, technological progress together with significant development in data reduction and analysis processes allowed astronomers to finally succeed. The methods used so far are mostly based on indirect approaches, able to detect the influence of the planets on the stellar motion (dynamical methods) or the planet’s shadow as it crosses the stellar disk (transit method). For a growing number of favorable cases, direct imaging has also been successful. The combination of different methods also allowed probing planet interiors, composition, temperature, atmospheres, and orbital architecture. Overall, one can confidently state that planets are common around solar-type stars, low mass planets being the most frequent among them.

Despite all the progress, the discovery and characterization of temperate Earth-like worlds, similar to the Earth in both mass and composition and thus potential islands of life in the universe, is still a challenging task. Their low amplitude signals are difficult to detect and are often submerged by the noise produced by different instrumentation sources and astrophysical processes. However, the dawn of a new generation of ground and space-based instruments and missions is promising a new era in this domain.
The Moon and Planets Among the Incas and Other Pre-Hispanic Andean Peoples
Authors: Ziółkowski Mariusz
Published: August 2020

Although the Inca state (ca. 1200–1572 ce) was called the Empire of the Sun, the Moon was, in some respects, an equally important divinity in the official state cult. The regulatory function of the phases of the synodic cycle of the Moon in different kinds of social activities, especially those framed in calendrical systems but also military campaigns, is well documented. As far as the orientation of architectural structures is concerned, the researchers focus their attention almost entirely on the position of the Sun. However, a more accurate analysis of two well-known sites—the caves of Intimachay and Inkaraqay—may provide evidence of their function as observatories of the lunar 18.6-year cycle. Those results may confirm the hypothesis, presented some years ago, that the Incas had elaborated a rudimentary method of predicting lunar eclipses.

The determination of the exact role of Venus and other planets in the Inca worldview encounters a serious limitation: in contrast to Mesoamerica, in Tahuantinsuyu and the Andes, there are no important “first-hand” sources such as the calendrical-astronomical data of the Maya or the Aztecs. Only Venus seems to have enjoyed a cult of Pan-American range. The morning appearance of Venus was apparently related to the puberty initiation rites of male adolescents, while its appearance as Evening Star seems to have been closely symbolically related to the Inca sovereign and his military activities. Putting aside the information available on Venus and its cult, there is an almost complete lack of data on the other planets.

Another problem must be considered: To what extent did the Incas inherit their knowledge from their predecessors, the Chimus, or even earlier cultures?
Salt Production, Use, and Trade
Authors: Antonites Alexander
Published: August 2020

Salt was an important commodity throughout the human past. Although salt (sodium chloride) is essential to human health, the desire for salt in humans cannot be explained by physiological need alone. Instead, both biology and culture drive the taste for salt. The result is that salt was frequently highly valued, with its production and trade important in economic, social, and political systems of the past. Despite this importance, salt is an elusive item to study since it does not preserve well and is mostly consumed. Production sites are often the only places with any discernible remains related to salt use. However, historical and ethnographic material are rich sources of analogies of how salt was produced and traded in preindustrial societies. There are frequently large-scale similarities in traditional salt-making practices despite tremendous technological, organizational, and environmental contexts. These show that salt production technology is mostly robust and fairly simple and that salt can be made with very little investment in infrastructure. As a result, many communities with access to salt sources could be self-sufficient. In the absence of readily available salt, trade networks developed around its distribution over medium and long distances. Consequently, control over this spatially restricted resource was often an important factor in regional politics, and in several cases played an important role in the development of hierarchical systems of power. It is, however, important to discern between specialization production for trade by a small group of producers and production by multiple small-scale producers for their own use, since the archaeological remains of these two different production strategies may look very similar. As a result, archaeologists need to employ multiple lines of evidence in discerning the organization of production.
Magnetohydrodynamic Waves
Authors: Nakariakov V.M.
Published: August 2020

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves represent one of the macroscopic processes responsible for the transfer of the energy and information in plasmas. The existence of MHD waves is due to the elastic and compressible nature of the plasma, and by the effect of the frozen-in magnetic field. Basic properties of MHD waves are examined in the ideal MHD approximation, including effects of plasma nonuniformity and nonlinearity. In a uniform medium, there are four types of MHD wave or mode: the incompressive Alfvén wave, compressive fast and slow magnetoacoustic waves, and non-propagating entropy waves. MHD waves are essentially anisotropic, with the properties highly dependent on the direction of the wave vector with respect to the equilibrium magnetic field. All of these waves are dispersionless. A nonuniformity of the plasma may act as an MHD waveguide, which is exemplified by a field-aligned plasma cylinder that has a number of dispersive MHD modes with different properties. In addition, a smooth nonuniformity of the Alfvén speed across the field leads to mode coupling, the appearance of the Alfvén continuum, and Alfvén wave phase mixing. Interaction and self-interaction of weakly nonlinear MHD waves are discussed in terms of evolutionary equations. Applications of MHD wave theory are illustrated by kink and longitudinal waves in the corona of the Sun.
Postbellum Banking
Authors: Wright Robert
Published: August 2020

Between passage of the National Banking Acts near the end of the US Civil War and the outbreak of the Great War and implementation of the Federal Reserve System in 1914, a large, vibrant financial system based on the gold standard and composed of markets and intermediaries supported the rapid growth and development of the American economy. Markets included over-the-counter markets and formal exchanges for financial securities, including bills of exchange (foreign currencies), cash (short-term debt), debt (corporate and government bonds), and equities (ownership shares in corporations), initial issuance of which increasingly fell to investment banks. Intermediaries included various types of insurers (marine, fire, and life, plus myriad specialists like accident and wind insurers) and true depository institutions, which included trust companies, mutual and stock savings banks, and state- and federally-chartered commercial banks. Nominal depository institutions also operated, and included building and loan associations and, eventually, credit unions and Morris Plan and other industrial banks. Non-depository lenders included finance and mortgage companies, provident loan societies, pawn brokers, and sundry other small loan brokers. Each type of “bank,” broadly construed, catered to customers differentiated by their credit characteristics, gender, race/ethnicity, country of birth, religion, and/or socioeconomic class, had distinctive balance sheets and loan application and other operating procedures, and reacted differently to the three major postbellum financial crises in 1873, 1892, and 1907.
Toward a History of Carnival
Authors: Abreu Martha , Brasil Eric
Published: August 2020

Carnival is one of the most powerful images of Brazil in the contemporary world, a party marketed by tourism agencies as a unique spectacle, filled with rhythm, humor, fun, and free spirits that brings the entire population together, marked by infectious joy, sensuality, and irresistible samba. This perception of the party, however, is far from its history since colonial times. While Carnival has always been present in large cities and small towns from one end of Brazil to the other, it has taken many forms and included many sounds, meanings, traditions, and social subjects. To understand the history of Carnival in Brazil, one must take another approach: the celebration of Carnival as an expression of many differences, a variety of forms, and numerous conflicts.

For many years, interpretations viewed Carnival as a space in which Brazilians come together to celebrate commonly held cultural traditions or as an effective escape valve allowing common people to forget the woes of everyday life. More recently, historians and anthropologists have studied Carnival celebrations as windows that offer a glimpse of the tensions, rivalries, and alliances of an entire year, brought to the fore, magnified and played out in public on the festival days. Whether through masks, costumes, and individual hijinks or through Carnival associations, various social groups have taken advantage of Carnival in various historical contexts of Brazilian society to assert their identity and take action on various political projects that aim to transform (or subvert) current reality and debate the very history of Brazil.

The study of the history of Brazilian Carnival, or rather Carnivals, thus provides an innovative and original epistemological approach to understanding social transformations and the meanings of Carnival revelers’ political actions at various times in history, whether they be members of the economic and intellectual elite or urban workers, enslaved people, freed people, and free people.

The article prioritizes the period between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, when Carnivals came to more closely resemble their modern form through intense disputes between those who sought to civilize the festivities and revelers who sought to act out their traditions and customs. The history of Carnival the article intends to tell engages in intense dialogue with struggles for black people’s citizenship before and after the abolition of slavery, stretching into the second half of the 20th century, when Samba Schools emerged as one of the principal features of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro and, by extension, throughout Brazil.
World War II and Brazil
Authors: McCann Frank D.
Published: August 2020

World War II produced great change in Brazil. Its war effort improved its port facilities, left it with new modern airfields from Belém to Rio de Janeiro, as well as refurbished railroads, and stimulated manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and a burgeoning steel complex. Its army, air force, and navy gained combat experience and the latest equipment. Its international stature had reached new heights and its leaders foresaw an ever-greater role in world politics. The war era laid the foundations upon which Brazil’s remarkable development in the next half century took place. The Brazilian leadership prior to the war had linked national development and security with international trade and finance, and they were concerned not to endanger the country, but they saw themselves naturally on the side of the liberal powers, particularly the United States.

Brazil’s contributions to the Allied victory were significant. Brazil hosted, at Natal, the largest US air base outside its own territory, and, at Recife, the US Fourth Fleet; and it tied its economy to the American war machine, sent its navy in pursuit of German U-boats, and provided an expeditionary force and a fighter squadron on the Italian front. It allowed the construction of the air bases before it severed relations with the Axis at the Rio conference in January 1942, and the army lost personnel, equipment, and families to submarine attacks before Brazil entered the war officially in August of that year. Brazil’s expeditionary force that saw combat as part of the US Fifth Army was the only Latin American ground force to fight in World War II. Brazil’s industrial development encouraged and supported by the United States laid the foundation for its post-war industrial transformation.
Sertão and Its Representations
Authors: Lima Nísia Trindade , Rangel Vieira Tamara
Published: August 2020

In Brazilian social thought, the sertão is understood more in a symbolic than a geographic manner and thus does not have a precise spatial characterization. As a result, many places have been identified as such in the history of Brazil. Analyzing the vast repertoire of meanings given to the idea of sertão, the absence of the state can be seen as a characteristic that distinguishes it, irrespective of the period considered. In this sense, the relations between space and social thought or between space and interpretations of Brazil are emphasized, highlighting the sertão–coast dualism which emerged following the publication of Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões as one of the possible ways of understanding the historical formation of the country. This dualism can be observed in distinct periods ranging from the literature about the scientific missions in the early 1900s to the debates about the construction of Brasília in the middle of the same century. Representations of the sertão in medical writings, sociological thought, literature, and film evince the resilience of this category as an ongoing metaphor for understanding Brazil.
Language Contact and the Lexicon of Romance Languages
Authors: Thibault André , LoVecchio Nicholas
Published: August 2020

The Romance languages have been involved in many situations of language contact. While language contact is evident at all levels, the most visible effects on the system of the recipient language concern the lexicon.

The relationship between language contact and the lexicon raises some theoretical issues that are not always adequately addressed, including in etymological lexicography. First is the very notion of what constitutes “language contact.” Contrary to a somewhat dated view, language contact does not necessarily imply physical presence, contemporaneity, and orality: as far as the lexicon is concerned, contact can happen over time and space, particularly through written media. Depending on the kind of extralinguistic circumstances at stake, language contact can be induced by diverse factors, leading to different forms of borrowing.

The misleading terms borrowings or loans mask the reality that these are actually adapted imitations—whether formal, semantic, or both—of a foreign model. Likewise, the common Latin or Greek origins of a huge proportion of the Romance lexicon often obscure the real history of words. As these classical languages have contributed numerous technical and scientific terms, as well as a series of “roots,” words coined in one Romance language can easily be reproduced in any other. However, simply reducing a word’s etymology to the origin of its components (classic or otherwise), ignoring intermediate stages and possibly intermediating languages in the borrowing process, is a distortion of word history. To the extent that it is useful to refer to “internationalisms,” related words in different Romance languages merit careful, often arduous research in the process of identifying the actual origin of a given coining. From a methodological point of view, it is crucial to distinguish between the immediate lending language and the oldest stage that can be identified, with the former being more relevant in a rigorous approach to comparative historical lexicology.

Concrete examples from Ibero-Romania, Gallo-Romania, Italo-Romania, and Balkan-Romania highlight the variety of different Romance loans and reflect the diverse historical factors particular to each linguistic community in which borrowing occurred.
Verbless Predicative Clauses in the Romance Languages: Syntax, Semantics, Variation
Authors: González-Rivera Melvin
Published: August 2020

Nonverbal or verbless utterances posit a great deal of challenge to any linguistic theory. Despite its frequency and productivity among many languages, such as Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, Guaraní, Haitian Creole; Hdi, Hebrew, Hungarian, Irish, Korean, Mauritian Creole, Mina, Northern Kurdish, Romandalusí, Russian, Samoan, Turkish, Yucatec Maya, a.o., verbless clauses have received so far relatively little attention from most theoretical frameworks. The study of such clauses in general raises many interesting questions, since they appear to involve main clause structure without overt verbs. Some of the questions that arise when dealing with verbless constructions are the following: (a) are these clauses a projection of T(ense), or some other functional category, (b) do verbless clauses have an overt or null verbal head, (c) are verbless clauses small clauses, and (d) can verbless clauses be interpreted as propositions or statements that are either true or false. In mainstream generative grammar the predominant assumption has been that verbless clauses contain a functional projection that may be specified for tense (Tense Phrase) but need not occur necessarily with a verbal projection or a copula. This is strong evidence against the view that tense needs to co-occur with a verbal head—that is, tense may be universally projected but does not need to co-occur with a verbal head. This proposal departs from previous analyses where the category tense may be specified for categorial verbal or nominal features. Thus, in general, verbless clauses may be considered Tense Phrases (TPs) that dominate a nonverbal predicate. An example of verbless constructions in Romance languages are Predicative Noun Phrases (henceforth, PNPs). PNPs are nonverbal or verbless constructions that exhibit clausal properties.
Articulatory Phonology
Authors: Pouplier Marianne
Published: August 2020

One of the most fundamental problems in research on spoken language is to understand how the categorical, systemic knowledge that speakers have in the form of a phonological grammar maps onto the continuous, high-dimensional physical speech act that transmits the linguistic message. The invariant units of phonological analysis have no invariant analogue in the signal—any given phoneme can manifest itself in many possible variants, depending on context, speech rate, utterance position and the like, and the acoustic cues for a given phoneme are spread out over time across multiple linguistic units. Speakers and listeners are highly knowledgeable about the lawfully structured variation in the signal and they skillfully exploit articulatory and acoustic trading relations when speaking and perceiving. For the scientific description of spoken language understanding this association between abstract, discrete categories and continuous speech dynamics remains a formidable challenge. Articulatory Phonology and the associated Task Dynamic model present one particular proposal on how to step up to this challenge using the mathematics of dynamical systems with the central insight being that spoken language is fundamentally based on the production and perception of linguistically defined patterns of motion. In Articulatory Phonology, primitive units of phonological representation are called gestures. Gestures are defined based on linear second order differential equations, giving them inherent spatial and temporal specifications. Gestures control the vocal tract at a macroscopic level, harnessing the many degrees of freedom in the vocal tract into low-dimensional control units. Phonology, in this model, thus directly governs the spatial and temporal orchestration of vocal tract actions.
Urban Development and Environmental Degradation
Authors: Zipperer Wayne C. , Northrop Robert , Andreu Michael
Published: August 2020

At the beginning of the 21st century more than 50% of the world’s population lived in cities. By 2050, this percentage will exceed 60%, with the majority of growth occurring in Asia and Africa. As of 2020 there are 31 megacities, cities whose population exceeds 10 million, and 987 smaller cities whose populations are greater than 500 thousand but less than 5 million in the world. By 2030 there will be more than 41 megacities and 1290 smaller cities. However, not all cities are growing. In fact, shrinking cities, those whose populations are declining, occur throughout the world. Factors contributing to population decline include changes in the economy, low fertility rates, and catastrophic events. Population growth places extraordinary demand for natural resources and exceptional stress on natural systems. For example, over 13 million hectares of forest land are converted to agriculture, urban land use, and industrial forestry annually. This deforestation significantly affects both hydrologic systems and territorial habitats. Hydrologically, urbanization creates a condition called urban stream syndrome. The increase in storm runoff, caused by urbanization through the addition of impervious surfaces, alters stream flow, morphology, temperature, and water quantity and quality. In addition, leaky sewer lines and septic systems as well as the lack of sanitation systems contribute significant amounts of nutrients and organic contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, caffeine, and detergents. Ecologically, these stressors and contaminants significantly affect aquatic flora and fauna.

Habitat loss is the greatest threat to biodiversity. Urbanization not only destroys and fragments habitats but also alters the environment itself. For example, deforestation and fragmentation of forest lands lead to the degradation and loss of forest interior habitat as well as creating forest edge habitat. These changes shift species composition and abundance from urban avoiders to urban dwellers. In addition, roads and other urban features isolate populations causing local extinctions, limit dispersal among populations, increase mortality rates, and aid in the movement of invasive species. Cities often have higher ambient temperatures than rural areas, a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect. The urban heat island effect alters precipitation patterns, increases ozone production (especially during the summer), modifies biogeochemical processes, and causes stresses on humans and native species.

The negative effect of the expansion and urbanization itself can be minimized through proper planning and design. Planning with nature is not new but it has only recently been recognized that human survival is predicated on coexisting with biodiversity and native communities. How and if cities apply recommendations for sustainability depends entirely on the people themselves.