bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sailing into the Anthropocene
Authors: Dauvergne Peter
Published: May 2017

Chapters 2–6 survey the political and socioeconomic forces underlying the global sustainability crisis. Understanding the scale and depth of contemporary forces of capitalism and consumerism requires a close look at the consequences of imperialism and colonialism on patterns of violence and exploitation. This chapter begins this process of understanding by sketching the history of ecological imperialism after 1600, seeing this as a reasonable starting date for the beginning of what many scholars are now calling the Anthropocene Epoch (or the age of humans, replacing the geologic epoch of the Holocene beginning 12,000 years ago). It opens with Captain Pedro Fernandes de Queirós’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean in 1605–06 to “discover” modern-day Vanuatu, before turning to look more globally at the devastation of imperialism – and later colonialism – for the South Pacific, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Over this time conquerors enslaved and murdered large numbers of indigenous people; cataclysmic change came as well, however, from the introduction of European diseases, plants, and animals. This chapter’s survey of imperialism, colonialism, and globalization sets the stage for Chapter 3, which explores the devastating history of the South Pacific island of Nauru after 1798.
The Business of More
Authors: Dauvergne Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter pans out from the islands of the Pacific to analyze the forces of unsustainable production and consumption underlying the global sustainability crisis. It demonstrates how, everywhere, inequality is increasing, as is conspicuous, wasteful consumption as companies pursue more sales and more profits. The chapter highlights how advertisers manufacture desires and needs, how big-box retailers and brand manufacturers claiming to be responsible and sustainable are selling inexpensive, nondurable products, and how governments finance infrastructure (e.g., subsidizing roads and bridges) to stimulate even higher levels of consumption. States pursue more consumption in the name of economic growth; multinational corporations for more profits for owners and shareholders; and the world’s billionaires to amass even more wealth. One result, as this chapter documents, is extreme and rising inequality, with 1 percent of the world’s population now controlling approximately half of the world’s wealth. Other results include rising ecological footprints, overexploitation of natural resources, and an escalating global environmental crisis – the themes of the book’s next chapter.
Gambling with the Future
Authors: Dauvergne Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter brings to light the risks – and at times grave costs – for human health and ecosystems of companies introducing new technologies and products to compete for profits and markets. New technologies and products can cast dark ecological shadows onto distant ecosystems, poor communities, and future generations. Sometimes these shadows arise from genuine ignorance, as with chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) drifting skyward from refrigerators, hairsprays, and air conditioners to deplete the ozone layer. But other times these shadows arise from arrogance and intentional risk-taking, as in the 1920s when Thomas Midgley, Jr., working for General Motors and DuPont, put tetraethyl lead into gasoline. As this chapter shows, corporations have a long history of deploying anti-environmental rhetoric to subvert calls for precautionary measures. Since the mid-2000s, however, the executives of multinational corporations have been avoiding straightforward greenwash, preferring a rhetoric of corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility. To some extent this eco-business strategy is improving efficiency and reducing waste (on a per product basis), but it is not translating into a stronger precautionary approach for the introduction of new technologies and products.
Fighting for the Rainforests
Authors: Dauvergne Peter
Published: May 2017

To further the understanding of the diversity and complexity of environmentalism, chapter 8 opens with the story of Bruno Manser, who in the 1980s left Switzerland to live with the Penan people in Sarawak, Malaysia. Before long he had joined with the Penan to oppose the logging of Borneo’s rainforests; in the 1990s he would emerge from Sarawak and bring the plight of the Penan to the world’s attention. Manser fought against the moderating tendencies within rainforest activism. Yet, as is true across the mainstream of environmentalism, these moderating tendencies within rainforest activism have only strengthened since 2000, with increasing support from nongovernmental certification organizations to export rainforest products. Examples include the Forest Stewardship Council (founded 1993) and the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (founded 2004). As Manser worried, however, over the past two decades these market mechanisms have done little to help indigenous forest peoples or end tropical deforestation.
Radicals and Rebels
Authors: Dauvergne Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter adds to the book’s understanding of the shifting nature and great challenges confronting environmentalism, especially more radical strands. A glance at the history of Greenpeace reveals sharp differences as the organization was forming in the 1970s; even today the activism of Paul Watson, who left Greenpeace to spearhead the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, draws the ire of Greenpeace leaders. Since the war on terrorism took root after September 11, 2001, radical activists such as Watson have been increasingly marginalized, with the US government even declaring him an “eco-terrorist.” As this chapter notes, though, many environmentalists who challenge state and business interests face even greater threats, with hundreds murdered over the past two decades. State security agencies are not the only group sidelining radical environmentalists, however; so are business associations, media outlets, and mainstream environmental NGOs.
Million Dollar Pandas
Authors: Dauvergne Peter
Published: May 2017

This chapter analyzes the turn within mainstream environmentalism toward business partnerships, cause marketing, professional fundraising, and the co-branding of products. The chapter further examines the role of nongovernmental organizations in setting up and running eco-labeling and eco-certification organizations. WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wide Fund for Nature, is a leader in the nongovernmental embrace of business, markets, and certification as ways to conserve nature and improve environmental conditions. Certification standards, such as those of the Marine Stewardship Council and the Round Table on Responsible Soy, are creating some modest reforms to business practices. NGO-business partnerships, such as the one between WWF and Coca-Cola, are also producing some small-scale benefits. But partnering with business and relying on market solutions risks legitimizing business as usual as well as shifting responsibility for global environmental problems onto consumers, a weak global force of change compared to the forces of unsustainability.
Introduction: The Rise of Memetic Media
Authors: Milner Ryan M.
Published: May 2017

This book is about emerging patterns in public conversations, and about the social participation essential to those conversations. It focuses on internet memes—the linguistic, image, audio, and video texts created, circulated, and transformed by countless cultural participants across vast networks and collectives. Internet memes take the form of pictures captioned on Reddit, puns hashtagged on Twitter, and videos mashed up on YouTube. They can be widely shared catchphrases, Auto-Tuned songs, manipulated stock photos, or recordings of physical performances. They’re used to make jokes, argue points, and connect friends. The concept has risen in prominence over the last twenty years, emerging from the esoteric forums and message boards where participants first linked Richard Dawkins’s (...
Grammar: Structures for Making Statements and Making Do
Authors: Milner Ryan M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the complex multimodal reappropriation at the heart of memetic media, outlining the socially-situated grammar that connects participants as they employ memetic media in their conversations. This grammar is premised on bricolage and poaching, on participants “making do” by transforming media texts they didn’t narrowly create and don’t narrowly own. It addresses the tensions between imitation and transformation in this process, arguing that the bricolage and poaching at the heart of memetic media are creative, expressive acts. As it outlines the formal and social dimensions underscoring memetic media, it builds a case for the persistent power of memetic logics as a lingua franca for public conversation.
Antagonism: Race, Gender, and Counterpublic Contestation
Authors: Milner Ryan M.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the everyday antagonisms that are perpetuated through memetic participation, specifically regarding race and gender identities. However, it also argues that memetic participation can be employed for the counterpublic contestation of those same antagonisms. The memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular introduced in the first half of the book are tools employed for both silencing marginalization and vocal pushback of that marginalization. The nature of this counterpublic engagement is ambivalent though, given that memetic media are often fraught with ambiguous irony and ambivalent humor. Genuine antagonisms and marginalizations can thrive under the “just joking” frame. But—even in the midst of this ambivalent system—there is value to the agonistic counterpublic engagement occurring through memetic media. Voice exists, even in the midst of the tensions evident throughout this discussion.
The End of Ownership
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

The digital economy has great potential, but it also entails risks. The notion of personal property and ownership is under threat because of the shift to digital distribution and ubiquitous embedded software. This book makes a case for the importance of ownership in the digital age. It argues that the rights associated with ownership serve critical functions of promoting cultural preservation and innovation as well as protecting consumer autonomy. Technological developments and the aggressive efforts of IP rights holders, however, are gradually eroding the concept of ownership. There has been a disconcerting trend of courts bypassing the default rules of property law; the rights acquired by consumers through purchase are defined instead by license agreements drafted by IP rights holders or retailers. In addition to license agreements, IP rights holders also employ technological methods such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to restrict consumer use and protect their intellectual property. The matter is made worse by online retailers’ insufficient disclosure, which frequently uses words like “buy” or “own” to offer false promises of ownership. The loss of personal property rights has serious consequence not just for individual consumers; an important institutional actor – the public library – is also struggling to deal with the shift to digital collections and the corresponding restrictions imposed by IP rights holders. In response to these threats to ownership, the book explores legal as well as technological solutions, and presents a powerful argument for informed consumer choice in the digital marketplace.
The Internet of Things You Don’t Own
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

The smart devices that make up the Internet of Things induce consumers to cede control over the products they buy. Devices like smartphones offer real benefits, but combined with embedded software, network connectivity, microscopic sensors and large-scale data analytics, they pose serious threats to ownership and consumer welfare. From coffee makers and toys to cars and medical devices, the products we buy are defined by software. That code gives device makers an increasing degree of control over how, when, and whether those products can be used even after consumers buy them. That shift of control has profound implications for ownership.
Patents and the Ordinary Pursuits of Life
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the battle for control between patent owners and purchasers of patented devices. By proclaiming users who violated the use restrictions as patent infringers, patent owners impose various kinds of conditions on purchasers’ use of their devices. The Supreme Court adhered to the principle of patent exhaustion and held in an 1852 case that once a patented good was sold, the patent owner could not interfere with the rights of purchasers to use it in the “ordinary pursuits of life.” While the Court stood firmly behind this principle for over 150 years, in recent years, with technological innovations like self-replicating technologies and with the development of international commerce, the common law principle of patent exhaustion is under attack. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will address the issue of patent exhaustion in future cases.
Ownership’s Uncertain Future
Authors: Perzanowski Aaron , Schultz Jason
Published: May 2017

This chapter begins by considering the emergence of the sharing economy, which brings consumers cheaper access and convenience. But it also deprives consumers of some rights that are commonly associated with property ownership. This chapter then proposes several ways to combat the erosion of ownership. Legal reform faces many hurdles, but there are still several steps legislators and courts can take: first, false claims of ownership such as “buy now” or “own” should be targeted to improve consumer information; second, the pervasive use of form contracts needs to be curbed; third, consumers need to be freed from the restrictions imposed by DRM; lastly, courts also need to reinvigorate the principle of patent exhaustion and reform copyright law. Technological developments, including using block chain technology to record ownership interests in digital assets, can also help ensure meaningful personal property rights.
Introduction and Overview
Authors: Halpern Joseph Y.
Published: May 2017

The basic intuitions of causality defined in terms of counterfactuals are introduced, and a brief overview of the key ideas of the book – including responsibility, blame, normality, and explanation -- is provided.
Complexity and Axiomatization
Authors: Halpern Joseph Y.
Published: May 2017

Causal models are potentially quite large and difficult to describe, especially once they include information about normality and typicality. In this chapter it is shown that it is often possible to achieve a compact representation of causal models without losing any information. In addition, a complete axiomatization of a language for reasoning about causality is provided.
Introduction
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

The introduction places the book in the historical tradition of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault of taking fascism as biopolitics. It stresses the fact that the biological dimension of fascist regimes was not limited to human bodies but it included as well animals and plants bred by geneticists for food production. The focus on food as central component of fascist organic nationalism overcomes apparent contradictions between fascist obsession with the national soil and the modernist nature of fascism. Delving into the making and growing of technoscientific organisms, reveals their importance in the building of fascist alternative modernity. The introduction presents the narrative as a fascist ontology, a bestiary combining historians of science and technology and STS scholars’ organism centered narratives with political and cultural historians general concern for the nature of fascism.
Wheat: Food Battles, Elite Breeds, and Mussolini’s Fascist Regime
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the design of new wheat breeds by the Italian geneticist Nazareno Strampelli and their role in the Battle of Wheat, the first mass mobilization of Mussolini’s fascist regime. The combination in Strampelli’s most successful breed – Ardito – of immunity to rust and resistance to lodging leading to increased use of chemical fertilizers, an early version of the Green Revolution, made seem plausible fascist dreams of the national soil feeding the national community. More than that, Strampelli’s Ardito performed the fascist permanent mobilization of the nation, blurring peace and war, transforming every Italian involved in the campaign for wheat autarky into a defender of the Fatherland, a human Ardito, the name of the Italian storm troopers of First World War and the basis of Mussolini’s paramilitary black shirts.
Wheat: The Integral Nation, Genetics, and Salazar’s Corporatist Fascist State
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

This chapter follows the historical trajectory of Strampelli’s Ardito wheat into Portugal to participate in the Wheat Campaign of Salazar’s fascist regime. When examining the Portuguese case, the narrative explores how new standardized forms of wheat contributed to the development of all embracing corporatist state agencies, a critical subject in the new fascist social order: corporatism promised a society built on organic units and “economic solidarities” in contrast to the alleged artificiality of liberal ideology based on individuals as well as to the Bolshevik obsession with social classes. The technoscientific organisms produced at the National Agricultural Experiment Station (EAN) led by the geneticist António Sousa da Câmara, the executive head of the Wheat Campaign, promised to sustain the futurism of the past announced by the propaganda of the Portuguese corporatist New State.
Coffee, Rubber, and Cotton: Cash Crops, Forced Labor, and Fascist Imperialism in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Eastern Europe
Authors: Saraiva Tiago
Published: May 2017

The fifth chapter takes coffee, rubber and cotton, three typical elements of colonial plantation stories, and delves into Italian occupation of Ethiopia, German imperial rule in Eastern Europe, and Portuguese colonialism in Northern Mozambique. These plantation schemes, which had plant breeders’ artefacts as their material basis, made massive use of forced labor to serve the imperial economy. Without ignoring the different levels of violence unleashed by the three fascisms, the text suggests that one gains significant insight into the history of fascism from treating together their empires. I take seriously Heinrich Himmler’s intention of making Auschwitz the Agriculture Experiment Station for the colonization of the East and compare the work undertaken there on a rubber ersatz with that of the Portuguese Cotton Research Center in Mozambique and its role in the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of forced workers, as well as with Italian coffee experiment stations in Ethiopia.
Can Meditation Enhance Creative Problem-Solving Skills? A Progress Report
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the topics of meditation, creativity, how they are related to creative problem-solving skills, and updates recent research on these topics.
In Zen, What Does It Mean “To Be Enlightened”?
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter address the topic of Zen awakening (enlightenment), kensho and satori.
Turning
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines how turning, to face in a different direction, creates multiple changes in the brain, including different responses in the parahippocampus. These responses can differ, depending on whether one turns clockwise or counterclockwise.
Revisiting Kensho, March 1982
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter re-examines some of the phenomena that occurred during an experience of kensho. Multiple novel circumstances converged. Among them, the act of looking up, out there into the distance, could have correlated with potential shifts into allocentric processing.
A Mondo in Clinical Neurology
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on the complex neural mechanisms involved in simultanagnosia (included in Balint’s Syndrome). It discusses focal processing and global processing with reference to the functions of the superior colliculus. It indicates that a variety of hypotheses have been proposed to account for this disorder of attention.
Paradox: The Maple Leaf Way Up in Ambient Space
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter re-examines some of the phenomena that occurred during an experience of internal absorption. Chapters 5, 6, and 15 have indicated that if the functions of neurons in the parahippocampus and inferior temporal cortex were enhanced, the result could blend these focal and global functions so as to enable an item in the far periphery to be “seen,” in clear focus, in a paradoxical manner.
“Pop-Out”
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter considers the mechanisms responsible for the pop-out phenomenon. The evidence from magnetoencephalography suggests that both dorsal and ventral attention systems participate, simultaneously, when one specific item so captures visual attention. Disengaging attention is also fundamental.
Sometimes, Zen Is “For the Birds”
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts the stories of Peter Coyote and Shoji Hamada. They illustrate how bird songs can capture attention in ways that can generate alternate states of consciousness. They illustrate the principles underlying Avian Zen.
Zen and the Daily-Life Incremental Training of Basho’s Attention
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the evidence in Basho’s poetry and journals that suggests his incremental growth in the practice of an Avian Zen. Basho’s poetic technique favored lightness (karumi).
A Story about Wild Birds, Transformed Attitudes, and a Supervisory Self
Authors: Austin James H.
Published: May 2017

This chapter recounts the story of a non-meditating veterinarian who underwent a kind of transformation of attitudes after she emerged from a triggered alternate state experience. Six months later she also experienced a life-changing, auditory verbal hallucination. Inner word thoughts are common in the general population. White matter connectivities service “the Human Connectome.”
Introduction
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

Many of the political problems of the day—climate change, industrial pollution, nanomaterials, new technologies of surveillance, and the products of molecular biology—involve complex scientific and technological issues that can provoke sharp divisions in public opinion. Often environmentalists and other advocates of change call for policies that address public concerns with new and existing technologies, and often industrial corporations reply that such concerns are unwarranted and that their technologies are safe and broadly beneficial. Legislatures, regulatory agencies, executive offices, the courts, and voters find themselves caught in the middle, and sometimes they also become divided over how best to develop and to regulate industry....
Repression, Ignorance, and Undone Science
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

This chapter builds on two literatures: repression and backfire in social movement studies, and ignorance and suppression in science and technology studies. The chapter then introduces the concepts of undone science and industrial transition movements. Industrial transition movements are mobilized counterpublics of activists, advocates, entrepreneurs, and other agents of change who seek fundamentally new approaches to the design of industrial technologies, products, and organizations. There are four basic types of industrial transition movements based on the following goals: sunsetting industrial processes, developing alternative technologies and products, restructuring industrial organizations, and redistributing access to industrial goods. Undone science is the systematically produced absence of knowledge that industrial transition movements and other mobilized publics identify as potentially valuable for achieving their goals. Each type of industrial transition movement has its own associated type of undone science and a unique pattern of routinization.
Institutional Change, Industrial Transitions, and Regime Resistance Politics
Authors: Hess David J.
Published: May 2017

The chapter focuses on the processes of industrial change in relationship to social movements. It builds on two literatures, one on institutional logics and the other on industrial transitions, and shows similarities and differences between the two literatures. It then examines the problem of resistance from industrial regime organizations or incumbent. Empirical material is based on the case of regime resistance to energy transition policies in the U.S., where the incumbent organizations have closed down the political opportunity structure for policy reform. It then draws on research that discusses three strategies that industrial transition coalitions can use to overcome regime resistance: countervailing industrial power (finding allies in neighboring industries), ideological judo (using regime ideology and frames to advance transition policies), and dual-use design (building coalitions by redefining energy transition policies in terms of a different institutional logic).
Personal Archives and Curation Processes
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

Curation is a critical information management problem that has often been overlooked by prior information science research. Curation is important because people are increasingly acquiring large, heterogeneous archives of valuable personal data that they find difficult to manage and access. This chapter contrasts curation, where users are responsible for organizing their own personal information, with traditional information management models, which focus on consumption of public information organized by others. The chapter introduces the key curation lifecycle processes of keeping, management and exploitation, describing the interrelations between them. It argues that curation processes are deep-rooted and somewhat resistant to technology change.
Keeping
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

People can’t save personal copies of every single piece of information that they encounter so they have to actively decide what information to keep. Keeping is challenging because it requires people to predict their future information needs when those needs may change over time. Because predicting information needs is difficult, people tend to overkeep; they retain low-value information that clutters their archives, making it hard to retrieve important information. Keeping is affected by information type, with email and paper archives largely being retained, in contrast to contacts and web information. People are also generally unaware that overkeeping unimportant information makes it more difficult to retrieve valuable information.
Management
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

This chapter examines the active management processes that people engage in to promote future retrieval. Management is difficult because people have to organize information in a way that anticipates their information needs at the time of retrieval. This chapter describes two important strategies for management along with their costs and benefits. It contrasts filing, in which the user organizes information into folders based on systematic semantic classification, with piling which is a more laissez-faire strategy that organizes information into simple categories often based on the time that information was received. The chapter also draws distinctions between informative and actionable items. Actionable items require special treatment requiring them to be re-accessed at a specific time.
Exploitation
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

Exploitation is the process by which people retrieve the information that they have kept and managed. This chapter reviews different retrieval strategies, contrasting manual folder navigation with search. Unlike search, navigation requires that users actively organize their information to promote future retrieval. Mismatches sometimes occur between the retrieval structures users create when they first store information and the methods they actually use for retrieval; people can create structures that are not used because there are easier ways to access information. There are important regularities in retrieval, including a bias for recent information, and for frequently accessed information.
The User-Subjective Approach
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

This chapter suggests a new design approach developed specifically for PIM systems. It argues that PIM is unique in that the person who curates the information is the same person who later retrieves it. The user-subjective approach takes advantage of this unique feature and suggests that PIM systems should make systematic use of subjective (user-dependent) attributes. The approach identifies three specific subjective attributes – the importance of the information item to the user, the project to which it belongs, and the context in which the item is used, and suggests three design principles, one for each subjective attribute.
The Subjective Importance Principle
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

The subjective importance principle states that importance should determine the visual salience and accessibility of information. It is divided into two sub-principles: The Promotion Principle proposes that very important items should be highly visible and accessible as they are more likely to be retrieved. The Demotion Principle proposes that items of lower importance should be made less visible so as not to distract the user, but kept in their original context. This chapter describes the demotion principle. The chapter presents three designs which were developed and positively evaluated: GrayArea in which users can manually demote unimportant information items to a gray area at the bottom of the folder; DMTR which automatically demotes infrequently used mobile phone contacts; and Old'nGray that automatically demotes old versions of documents, so that users can spot the newest version at a glance.
The Subjective Context Principle
Authors: Bergman Ofer , Whittaker Steve
Published: May 2017

This chapter describes the subjective context principle that states that information should be retrieved and viewed in the same context in which it was previously used. The chapter describes five designs related to different context types that have been designed and positively evaluated: ChattyWeb where the user can straightforwardly retrieve their notes (internal context) associated with a recorded lecture; ItemHistory that allows the user to easily retrieve files, emails and web pages that were previously open concurrently with a target information item (external context); ContactMap which organizes personal information according to its social context and PiccyChatty that uses social information to infer the relative importance of different information items (both exploit social context). Lastly the chapter discusses Starlight which automatically notifies the user when the deadline for an important actionable message approaches (temporal context).
Architecture, Memory, and the Archive
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This Chapter draws on literature on memory and history to analyze how the archive operates as a memory laboratory facilitating the (re-)creation and transmission of different types of memories, from personal to collective, from primary to secondary. Drawing from literature on Embodied Simulation Theory, the Chapter also shows that archives can give us direct access to the world of others. Crucially, the Chapter shows that after the Second World War we have become increasingly aware of our roles as witnesses. A temporal framework based on literature drawn from anthropology, geography and human computer interaction on mapping and map-making is then used to facilitate the design of mixed reality environments. The case studies for this chapter include The Jewish Museum in Berlin; the archiving tool CloudPad; and the trail building tool Placeify.
The Art of Archiving
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This Chapter explores how archival methodologies have been used, especially after the 1930s, to generate environmental or process-led artworks and how art has influenced our understanding of what constitutes an archive. The Chapter looks at practices of accumulation, collection and curation, focusing in particular on the cabinet of curiosity to show how, among other cultures of collection and exhibition, it acts as a predecessor to archival art, including a number of time capsules. The Chapter also shows how the cabinet acted as predecessor to how we present, document and archive ourselves through social media today. The apparatus of the archive is presented as the main tool we use to frame, preserve, disseminate, and aestheticize our lives, showing how we increasingly act as citizen archivists. The case studies for this chapter include works by Michel Duchamp; Robert Morris; Andy Warhol; Ant Farm and sosolimited.
(A)live Archives
Authors: Giannachi Gabriella
Published: May 2017

This Chapter looks at the role played by transmission of the archive through the body, drawing from performance studies, bioart, database aesthetics and history of science to look at what becomes of the archive in the era of genomic experimentation. Drawing on economics, the chapter establishes the role played by the archive within the digital economy showing how the archive evolved for each of the industrial revolutions that occurred since the 18th century. Additionally, the Chapter analyzes the role played by the archive in the development of smart objects within the internet of things. The case studies for this chapter include work by the Musée de la Danse; George Legrady; Natalie Bookchin; Eduardo Kac; Christine Borland; and Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Infinity Engine, in which the human being has become its own (a-)live archive, one that, through regenerative medicine, can be modified inside out.
Hate Spin as Politics by Other Means
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

This chapter introduces the original concept of “hate spin,” defined as manufactured vilification or indignation, used as a political strategy that exploits group identities to mobilize supporters and coerce opponents. It explains why the more familiar phenomenon of hate speech should not be conflated with offense-taking. It summarizes the book’s main arguments and provides an overview of relevant literature from communication studies, legal studies, and political science. The concept of hate spin draws mainly from political sociology’s studies of contentious politics. Gamson’s concept of “injustice frames,” for example, has strong resonance with the hate spin strategy of politicizing indignation.
God, Google, and the Globalization of Offendedness
Authors: George Cherian
Published: May 2017

This chapter focuses on cross-border cases of politicized indignation. Frictions between societies with different standards of propriety and different religious sensibilities are inevitable. Political entrepreneurs have capitalized on these to generate hate spin. Three prominent cases are examined: Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel, The Satanic Verses, the Prophet Muhammad cartoons published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, and the Innocence of Muslims YouTube video. Each case shows that, behind the semblance of spontaneous combustion, hate spin agents were instigating outrage for identifiable political motives. The internet adds a new dimension to transborder hate spin, multiplying the opportunities for offense-taking. It has also introduced a new type of actor in the form of global internet intermediaries such as Google.
Engaging System
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

This chapter explains how we can best “see” system using new tools, just as Galileo saw system using his improved spyglass. It starts with a graph of the astonishingly linear rise of the percentage of texts referencing system during the eighteenth century and then turns back to Bacon’s and Galileo’s efforts to use their new “resources” to move knowledge forward from Scholastic debate: the Jovian lunar “system” became evidence for a new “system of the world.” The chapter then engages Walter Ong’s question of how “system” took such rapid hold of the physical and intellectual worlds at the turn into the seventeenth century—a connection represented as a handshake in a 1640 frontispiece to Bacon’s Advancement of Knowledge. To Ong’s and Marshall McLuhan’s emphasis on the effect of print, the chapter turns to the concept of genre to add to the answer both a generic feature of system itself—its ability to act as a scalable technology—and a comparison to another genre—the fragmentary efforts of the “essay.” The chapter concludes with graphs comparing counts of “system” and “essay” during the eighteenth century and with an analysis of how system proliferated by scaling up parts into wholes and vice versa. That scalability allowed for both Enlightenment encyclopaedism and what the physicist David Deutsch calls “error-correction.”
Writing upon System—Instituting Culture
Authors: Siskin Clifford
Published: May 2017

The acting out of liberalism’s politics of blame helped to configure a new public space—a space other than the overtly political—in which to adjudicate claims about what parts of The System worked and what did not, what was of lasting value and what needed to be reformed. Those deliberations became the domain of “culture”—a term first used in its modern sense in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Once culture entered the West’s conceptual vocabulary, every group had one—in fact, every group still has to have one. Culture enacts the formal structure of system semantically as an imperative: parts (can and should) fit together into a whole. Reorganizing internally the very unity that it helped to contrive, “culture” also came to signify a subset of itself.  Among the totality of activities that we call a “culture,” is “Culture”: in Raymond Williams’s words, “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.” “Literature” was similarly doubled: what had been an inclusive category of all learning was systematized and narrowed into a high Culture subset of itself. To explain this process, this chapter tracks system’s ongoing role in configuring a period (Romantic, including Hume, Blake, Rousseau, Byron) and an author’s career (Wordsworth’s). These are “secret” histories in that system’s role has been largely written out of both narratives as part of the Arnoldian effort to elevate Culture and Literature by obscuring their links to what he saw as the contingent business of system-making.
Border Wars
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

The tension between rules and exceptions, and productivity, in language. Why this has remained an unresolved question throughout the history of linguistics and how it has given rise to endless controversies. A brief summary of the empirical case studies that illustrates the scope of the current project.
The Inevitability of Rules
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

A review of statistical facts of language especially morphology and children’s acquisition of morphology with focus on productivity. Contrary to popular beliefs, productivity should be understood as a categorical notion in language, judging from the now extensive cross-linguistic studies of language acquisition. Why language must make use of a small set of wide-ranging rules, rather than memorized expressions, and why this is a difficult task for the child learner who acquires language in a few short years.
The Tipping Point
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

Using the Elsewhere Condition as a basic principle of language, as well as a performance/processing model, this chapters derives the mathematical principle of productivity dubbed the Tolerance Principle. Psycholinguistic evidence, largely drawn from reaction time studies, for the proposed processing model. Schematic illustrations of how the Tolerance Principle is put into use during language acquisition.
When Language Fails
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

The theory predicts complete lexicalization when the number of exceptions to a rule exceeds the threshold, which leads to morphological gaps: without a productive rule, you only know the derived form if you hear it otherwise ineffability arises. Detailed numerical studies for gaps in Russian, English, Spanish, and Polish. The Tolerance Principle also directly bears on language variation and change, in that it provides/predicts the conditions under which language change is actuated. As a case study, the theory explains why—and when—the so-called dative sickness, and other instances of case substitution, took place in Icelandic in the 19th centuries.
The Logic of Evidence
Authors: Yang Charles
Published: May 2017

A completely new conceptualization of the indirect negative evidence business in language acquisition, especially in syntax. Instead of thinking about retreating from over-generalization, a derivative application of the Tolerance Principle ensures that the child is much more careful before generalizing. Shows how the learner may acquire that adjectives such as “asleep” do not allow attributive in NPs (“*the asleep cat”), and how to resolve Baker’s classic problem of dative construction acquisition (“*I donated the museum a painting”). A critique of previous proposals, including Bayesian models of inference, is also included.
Two Meanings of Complex Adaptive Systems
Authors: Wilson David S.
Published: May 2017

In complex systems theory, two meanings of a complex adaptive system (CAS) need to be distinguished. The first, CAS1, refers to a complex system that is adaptive as a system; the second, CAS2, refers to a complex system of agents which follow adaptive strategies. Examples of CAS1 include the brain, the immune system, and social insect colonies. Examples of CAS2 include multispecies ecosystems and the biosphere. This chapter uses multilevel selection theory to clarify the relationships between CAS1 and CAS2. The general rule is that for a complex system to qualify as CAS1, selection must occur at the level of the complex system (e.g., individual-level selection for brains and the immune system, colony-level selection for social insect colonies). Selection below the level of the system tends to undermine system-level functional organization. This general rule applies to human social systems as well as biological systems and has profound consequences for economics and public policy.
Proximate Mechanisms of Individual Decision-Making Behavior
Authors: Glimcher Paul W.
Published: May 2017

In the early twentieth century, neoclassical economic theorists began to explore mathematical models of maximization. The theories of human behavior that they produced explored how optimal human agents, who were subject to no internal computational resource constraints of any kind, should make choices. During the second half of the twentieth century, empirical work laid bare the limitations of this approach. Human decision makers were often observed to fail to achieve maximization in domains ranging from health to happiness to wealth. Psychologists responded to these failures by largely abandoning holistic theory in favor of large-scale multi-parameter models that retained many of the key features of the earlier models. Over the last two decades, scholars combining neurobiology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary approaches have begun to examine alternative theoretical approaches. Their data suggest explanations for some of the failures of neoclassical approaches and revealed new theoretical avenues for exploration. While neurobiologists have largely validated the economic and psychological assumption that decision makers compute and represent a single-decision variable for every option considered during choice, their data also make clear that the human brain faces severe computational resource constraints which force it to rely on very specific modular approaches to the processes of valuation and choice.
A Typology of Human Morality
Authors: Gintis Herbert
Published: May 2017

This chapter suggests a typology of human morality based on gene–culture coevolution, the rational actor model, and behavioral game theory. The basic principles are that human morality is the product of an evolutionary dynamic in which evolving culture makes new behaviors fitness enhancing, thus altering our genetic constitution. It is thus predicated upon an evolved set of human genetic predispositions and consists of the capacity to conceptualize and value a moral realm governing behavior beyond consequentialist reasoning.
Adaptation and Maladaptation in the Past
Authors: van der Leeuw Sander E.
Published: May 2017

Adaptation and maladaptation are best viewed as different phases in the relationship between a society and its (social and natural) environment. This chapter looks at that relationship over two scales (millennial and centennial) and attributes the transitions (“tipping points”) between adaptation and maladaptation to the unintended consequences of human actions. These, in turn, are due to the difference in dimensionality between the environment and humans’ perception of it. Transitions between adaptation and maladaptation occur when a society’s “value space” (i.e., the total set of values that the society knows, which keep that society functionally together) does not expand at a sufficient pace to keep up with the growth of the society’s population. This chapter argues that this is the case in the current, western-dominated global system, and suggests that an inversion of global information flows (i.e., spreading information rather than concentrating it in the West) has the potential to reenergize the global economic system. This needs to be achieved while respecting the environment, hence the term green growth. It implies rephrasing the current economic and political debates from “burden sharing” to “opportunity creation,” both for the developing and for the developed world.
Innovation Policy as Creating Markets, Not Only Fixing Them
Authors: Mazzucato Mariana
Published: May 2017

Successful innovation policies are those that actively create and shape markets, not only fix them. In the past this has been achieved through “mission-oriented” policies aimed not at fixing market failures or minimizing government failures, but rather on maximizing the transformative impact of policy. Countries around the world are currently striving to achieve innovation-led growth that is both inclusive and sustainable. For this to happen, public policy needs to support innovation and direct future activities. Innovation policy must focus on building more “symbiotic” (less parasitic) innovation “ecosystems.” This chapter discusses new types of policy questions needed to address the collective, uncertain, and persistent nature of innovation and posits four key areas: directing public policy, evaluating public policy, organizational change to accommodate risk taking and exploration, and the socialization of risks and rewards.