bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Outstanding Biographies of Prehistoric Monuments in Iron Age, Roman, and Medieval Spain
Authors: Sanjuán Leonardo García
Published: November 2020

Over the last decade, new questions have emerged with regard to the complex temporal patterns often seen in Iberian prehistoric monuments. A number of megalithic chamber tombs, menhirs, stelae or rock-art panels have been found to show that, as occurs in other European regions, their lives were not restricted to the period of time in which they were built or manufactured, but, on the contrary, they extended well into later (or even much later) prehistoric, protohistoric and subsequent historical periods. Evidence for this includes successive physical transformations through the incorporation of new architectural or graphic elements and/or through the reorganization of previously existing ones, the accumulation of mnemonic artefacts, as well as layouts and orientations in special landscape settings (Díaz-Guardamino 2006; 2008; 2010; 2012; 2015; García Sanjuán et al. 2008; Lillios 2008; García Sanjuán and Wheatley 2010; García Sanjuán 2011; Aranda Jiménez 2013). In this chapter we attempt to show that some prehistoric monuments built or made in the Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age played active roles in the social life of communities considered ‘protohistoric’ or ‘historic’. To achieve this, we ﬁrst examine a series of monuments with ‘outstanding biographies’, which document single reuse or repeated and/or persistent use during the Iron Age, Antiquity and/or the Middle Age. We will then try to establish some conclusions in relation to the social practices that may have led to such uses or reuses of prehistoric monuments that were thousands of years old by the time they were reinterpreted, rediscovered or reinvented. Although this is a subject that has only been seriously researched over the last decade, the list of Iberian megalithic chamber tombs used in the Iron Age, in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages is now quite substantial (e.g. Caamaño Gesto and Criado Boado 1992; Lorrio Alvarado and Montero Ruiz 2004; García Sanjuán 2005a; 2005b; García Sanjuán et al. 2008; Álvarez Vidaurre 2011). There is varied evidence supporting these cases of reuse.
Piecing Together a Past
Authors: Bradley Richard
Published: November 2020

Piecing Together the Past was one of the last books by Gordon Childe. It was published in 1955 and drew on a series of lectures he had given over the previous decade. Every chapter asked a question. The most difﬁcult was: ‘What happened in prehistory?’ There might be disagreements over particular answers, but they would be based on a single method of analysis, for it seemed as if there was only one past to study. The authors of the present volume take a different view, for, no matter which monuments they consider, they ﬁnd evidence of many separate pasts. Some of those histories were invoked at different times, and others were advocated simultaneously but by different groups of people. There was far more diversity than Childe allowed. It may have happened because his account was concerned exclusively with prehistory and with its signiﬁcance for twentieth-century thought. What took place in between was overlooked, for in 1955 few scholars envisaged a past within the past. Those who did so were more concerned with the development of archaeology as a discipline. Childe’s procedure was like that of ﬁeld projects which disregard later structures to focus on a single period. Childe was concerned with artefacts as well as monuments, but the present account considers the evidence of buildings and related structures. It is a vital distinction. Small objects might have been discovered by chance or could have circulated for a long time as heirlooms. Monuments, however, were impossible to overlook. They might be ignored as unacceptable beliefs were rejected, they might even be destroyed, but in every case their presence demanded some response. It is conventional to associate monuments with memory, as that invokes the Latin verb monere, to remind. This equation is problematical. It is implausible that a single version of the past would remain unaltered for long and more likely that it was revised as circumstances changed. At the same time, forgetting is an important cultural process (Forty and Küchler 1999) and ideas could lose their force surprisingly quickly.
“Too Poetical a Theory”: Antiquarian Ambition, East and West
Authors: Snead James E.
Published: November 2020

A few years after the conclusion of the Kentucky Mummy affair, Isaiah Thomas received a packet postmarked Circleville, Ohio—a town built within the remnants of the vast enclosure that had been emblematic of the perception of antiquities shared by the first generation of pioneers. It contained . . . two or three species of cloth, manufactured and worn by the people who erected our tumuli . . . These are fragments of the clothing found on mummies in the nitrous caves . . . [a] small, yet valuable addition to the Society’s cabinet. . . . By 1820 only limited evidence remained in the West of the desiccated burials that had recently stirred the imagination of American antiquarians and the public. The record does not tell us whether Moses Fisk ever located other artifacts from Caney Branch, or what happened to those he kept for himself. One of the associated mummies still resided in John Clifford’s Lexington cabinet, and there were undoubtedly other fragments dispersed in antiquarian collections throughout the western country, but the narrative about the history that these remains represented had been permanently disrupted. Yet even these scanty relics were restless. Just as the Kentucky Mummy herself represented cultural capital for the various “national” institutions, so the pieces of cloth and the forlorn body parts played their own symbolic role, connecting modern identity and indigenous past on the frontier. These relics circulated among western antiquarians, talismans both of material history and of membership in a community of inquiry. Thomas’s Circleville correspondent was Caleb Atwater. He had only recently come to the attention of the antiquarian world, courtesy of an 1817 western tour made by President James Monroe that included a brief stop in the mound country. Atwater met Monroe on the trip, and—in response to a presidential request—published a commentary on antiquities in the American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review that was apparently read in Worcester. Perhaps a favorable reference to the Mummy caught their eye: a month after the article appeared Atwater had been elected as a member.
Zooming In Rome, the Middle Euphrates, and Dura
Authors: James Simon
Published: November 2020

Dura-Europos was a product and ultimately a victim of the interaction of Mediterranean- and Iranian-centred imperial powers in the Middle East which began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achaemenid Persian empire in the later fourth century BC. Its nucleus was established as part of the military infrastructure and communications network of the Seleucid successor-state. It was expanding into a Greekstyle polis during the second century BC, as Seleucid control was being eroded from the east by expanding Arsacid Parthian power, and threatened from the west by the emergent imperial Roman republic. From the early first century BC, the Roman and Parthian empires formally established the Upper Euphrates as the boundary between their spheres of influence, and the last remnants of the Seleucid regime in Syria were soon eliminated. Crassus’ attempt to conquer Parthia ended in disaster at Carrhae in 53 BC, halting Roman ambitions to imitate Alexander for generations. The nominal boundary on the Upper Euphrates remained, although the political situation in the Middle East remained fluid. Rome long controlled the Levant largely indirectly, through client rulers of small states, only slowly establishing directly ruled provinces with Roman governors, a process mostly following establishment of the imperial regime around the turn of the millennia. However, some client states like Nabataea still existed in AD 100 (for overviews see Millar 1993; Ball 2000; Butcher 2003; Sartre 2005). The Middle Euphrates, in what is now eastern Syria, lay outside Roman control, although it is unclear to what extent Dura and its region—part of Mesopotamia, and Parapotamia on the west bank of the river—were effectively under Arsacid control before the later first century AD. For some decades, Armenia may have been the dominant regional power (Edwell 2013, 192–5; Kaizer 2017, 70). As the Roman empire increasingly crystallized into clearly defined, directly ruled provinces, the contrast with the very different Arsacid system became starker. The ‘Parthian empire’, the core of which comprised Iran and Mesopotamia with a western royal capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, was a much looser entity (Hauser 2012).
An Ethic of Care
Authors: Kiddey Rachael
Published: November 2020

The night that Tia gave birth to baby Tyrone, I went home to my flat, locked the door and sank into the bath. Thoughts raced around my head as I topped up the hot water several times, turning the tap on and off with my toes. I didn’t want to get out of the bath because I didn’t know what to do next. I’d seen a fair bit of contemporary homelessness by that point and found it to be unjust, understudied, characterized by gallows humour and ugly, in equal measure. Tyrone’s croaky voice rang in my ears. ‘She had to score, Marmite! She don’t want to go back.’ As I lay in the bath, I felt exhausted. I couldn’t decide whether to wimp out entirely, go to my old boss at the BBC and grovel for my job back, or stick with it, make contemporary homelessness the subject of a PhD and embark on serious fieldwork and doctoral study. I still couldn’t decide the next morning so, after walking the dogs at dawn, I went straight back to bed where I spent the entire day reading P. G. Wodehouse and eating toast. It was John Schofield, later my doctoral supervisor, who eventually persuaded me to make contemporary homelessness the subject of a PhD. When you write a postgraduate research proposal it is important that your research question is clearly articulated. The research context should be cogent and the theoretical novelty of the proposed research should be robust and convincing. A central element of the proposal should be a clear indication that you have thought carefully about any ethical implications that might arise from research and taken measures to address these. I duly wrote a research proposal in which I addressed these points and explained that I had fully considered the ethical implications of working with vulnerable homeless adults (and all homeless people are vulnerable by dint of the fact that they have nowhere safe to call home).
‘Are You Looking for a Body?’: Excavating Contemporary Homeless Places
Authors: Kiddey Rachael
Published: November 2020

About halfway up Stokes Croft, Bristol, there is an area known locally as Turbo Island. It remains an unassuming triangle of land that, about five metres at its widest point, houses an advertising billboard and an electricity substation. Turbo Island was once the site of three buildings—71 to 73 Stokes Croft—that received a direct hit from a 400 lb bomb during a Second World War air raid. The foundations of the buildings remain and form a wall upon which homeless people have been known to sit, chat, and drink for several decades. The name ‘Turbo Island’ is said to derive from the amount of ‘turbo’—that is, super-strength—cider that homeless people consume at the site, cultural linguistic evidence perhaps of Turbo Island being a homeless place, a place that belongs to homeless people. Turbo Island also happens to be directly opposite the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC) headquarters (32 Jamaica Street). It was one of the first places that PRSC attempted to promote the idea that we—the wider local community—could collectively and collaboratively improve Stokes Croft for the enjoyment of everyone if we took responsibility for simple things. For example, if we collected litter, kept the streets clean and tidy, and cared for the few green spaces we had to make the area a more attractive, healthy place to spend time. It was in this vein that PRSC installed a picnic table painted with a chessboard,1 so that people who used Turbo Island had somewhere to sit and something to do. Turbo Island was (and remains to this day) a nexus point for homeless people. It was often where I first met homeless people with whom I went on to develop close working relationships. It was the place to which people most commonly returned. One afternoon, after a particularly long day of ethnographic mapping, I dived into Abdul’s convenience store to buy myself and Little Tom a drink before we crossed the street to sit on Turbo Island.
Turing’s great invention: the universal computing machine
Authors: Copeland Jack
Published: November 2020

There is no such person as the inventor of the computer: it was a group effort. The many pioneers involved worked in different places and at different times, some in relative isolation and others within collaborative research networks. There are some very famous names among them, such as Charles Babbage and John von Neumann—and, of course, Alan Turing himself. Other leading names in this roll of honour include Konrad Zuse, Tommy Flowers, Howard Aiken, John Atanasoff, John Mauchly, Presper Eckert, Jay Forrester, Harry Huskey, Julian Bigelow, Samuel Alexander, Ralph Slutz, Trevor Pearcey, Maurice Wilkes, Max Newman, Freddie Williams, and Tom Kilburn. Turing’s own outstanding contribution was to invent what he called the ‘universal computing machine’. He was first to describe the basic logical principles of the modern computer, writing these down in 1936, 12 years before the appearance of the earliest implementation of his ideas. This came in 1948, when Williams and Kilburn succeeded in wiring together the first electronic universal computing machine—the first modern electronic computer. In 1936, at the age of just 23, Turing invented the fundamental logical principles of the modern computer—almost by accident. A shy boyish-looking genius, he had recently been elected a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. The young Turing worked alone, in a spartan room at the top of an ancient stone building beside the River Cam. It was all quite the opposite of a modern research facility—Cambridge’s scholars had been doing their thinking in comfortless stone buildings, reminiscent of cathedrals or monasteries, ever since the university had begun to thrive in the Middle Ages. A few steps from King’s, along narrow medieval lanes, are the buildings and courtyards where, in the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton revolutionized our understanding of the universe. Turing was about to usher in another revolution. He was engaged in theoretical work in the foundations of mathematics. No-one could have guessed that anything of practical value would emerge from his highly abstract research, let alone a machine that would change all our lives.
Turing’s monument
Authors: Greenish Simon , Bowen Jonathan
Published: November 2020

Today Bletchley Park is a thriving monument to Turing and his fellow codebreakers. This did not happen easily. After the Second World War, the Bletchley Park site went into gradual decline, with its many temporary wartime buildings left unmaintained. The intense secrecy still surrounding the codebreakers’ wartime work meant there was no public awareness of what they had achieved, nor even that they had existed. It was only when the information embargo finally began to lift, decades later, that Bletchley Park’s importance became more widely known—but by that time the site was in danger of being razed to the ground to make way for housing estates. This chapter tells how Bletchley Park was rescued from property developers and from financial failure to become a national monument. The true heroes of this story are too numerous to mention by name—the hundreds of committed hard-working people, many of them volunteers, whose collective efforts over time saved Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, is arguably the most important single site associated with the Second World War. One of the best kept of all wartime secrets, it was acquired by the Foreign Office not long before the start of the fighting and at that time comprised some 55 acres of land, together with a large and architecturally odd mansion (see Fig. 9.1) and various associated outbuildings of the type common in large estates of the period. The mansion was built in Victorian and Edwardian times and its grounds were laid out as formal gardens, with a lake and many specimen trees. Curiously, these trees subsequently played a role in saving the site. During the war there was an almost continuous programme of construction. Numerous typical Ministry-of-Defence-style brick buildings were erected, as well as an assortment of timber huts. The huts included Hut 8, where Turing worked on Naval Enigma (Fig. 19.1). His introduction of the bombe, in 1940, was the start of Bletchley Park’s conversion into a codebreaking factory (see Chapter 12) and by the end of the war there were more than seventy buildings on the site, including the original mansion and its outbuildings. These structures supplied the capacity to house more than 3000 people per shift, as well as the large quantities of machinery and other equipment involved in the codebreaking work.
Turing, Lovelace, and Babbage
Authors: Swade Doron
Published: November 2020

The principles on which all modern computing machines are based were enunciated more than a hundred years ago by a Cambridge mathematician named Charles Babbage.’ So declared Vivian Bowden—in charge of sales of the Ferranti Mark I computer— in 1953.1 This chapter is about historical origins. It identifies core ideas in Turing’s work on computing, embodied in the realisation of the modern computer. These ideas are traced back to their emergence in the 19th century where they are explicit in the work of Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Mechanical process, algorithms, computation as systematic method, and the relationship between halting and solvability are part of an unexpected congruence between the pre-history of electronic computing and the modern age. The chapter concludes with a consideration of whether Turing was aware of these origins and, if so, the extent—if any—to which he may have been influenced by them. Computing is widely seen as a gift of the modern age. The huge growth in computing coincided with, and was fuelled by, developments in electronics, a phenomenon decidedly of our own times. Alan Turing’s earliest work on automatic computation coincided with the dawn of the electronic age, the late 1930s, and his name is an inseparable part of the narrative of the pioneering era of automatic computing that unfolded. Identifying computing with the electronic age has had the effect of eradicating pre-history. It is as though the modern era with its rampant achievements stands alone and separate from the computational devices and aids that pre-date it. In the 18th century lex continui in natura proclaimed that nature had no discontinuities, and we tend to view historical causation in the same way. Discontinuities in history are uncomfortable: they offend against gradualism, or at least against the idea of the irreducible interconnectedness of events. The central assertion of this chapter is that core ideas evidenced in modern computing, ideas with which Turing is closely associated, emerged explicitly in the 19th century, a hundred years earlier than is commonly credited.
Turing’s theory of morphogenesis
Authors: Woolley Thomas , Baker Ruth
Published: November 2020

In 1794 the Romantic poet William Blake asked a deep question:… Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? . . . Did He who made the Lamb make thee?... The answer was a mystery. But Blake apparently assumed that it must involve some supernatural power—perhaps the Christian God. Most of his contemporaries would have agreed with him. Even 150 years later, in the middle of the 20th century, this answer was still widely accepted. But by this time the study of embryology had progressed enough to suggest that the marvellous development of an undifferentiated egg-cell into an embryo of increasingly complex form could in principle be given a scientific answer. Moreover, embryologists believed that the answer would refer to chemicals—called ‘organizers’—that cause successive changes in the cytoplasm as the egg gradually develops into organs of differing types. But this was about as far as it went. Just what those so-called organizers were was unknown; how they might be able to produce not merely chemical changes but also novel patterns and shapes—like the tiger’s stripes and its magnificent muscles and head—was equally mysterious. The then-fashionable talk of ‘self-organization’ served more to prohibit reference to Blake’s immortal hand or eye than to offer specific answers: indeed, that notion was a highly abstract one. It was understood as the spontaneous emergence (and maintenance) of order out of an origin that is ordered to a lesser degree—where ‘spontaneous’ meant not magical or supernatural, but somehow caused by the inner nature of the system itself. However, the ‘order’ and ‘origin’ (not to mention ‘emergence’ and ‘maintenance’) were unspecified.
Introducing Turing’s mathematics
Authors: Whitty Robin , Wilson Robin
Published: November 2020

Alan Turing’s mathematical interests were deep and wide-ranging. From the beginning of his career in Cambridge he was involved with probability theory, algebra (the theory of groups), mathematical logic, and number theory. Prime numbers and the celebrated Riemann hypothesis continued to preoccupy him until the end of his life. As a mathematician, and as a scientist generally, Turing was enthusiastically omnivorous. His collected mathematical works comprise thirteen papers, not all published during his lifetime, as well as the preface from his Cambridge Fellowship dissertation; these cover group theory, probability theory, number theory (analytic and elementary), and numerical analysis. This broad swathe of work is the focus of this chapter. But Turing did much else that was mathematical in nature, notably in the fields of logic, cryptanalysis, and biology, and that work is described in more detail elsewhere in this book. To be representative of Turing’s mathematical talents is a more realistic aim than to be encyclopaedic. Group theory and number theory were recurring preoccupations for Turing, even during wartime; they are represented in this chapter by his work on the word problem and the Riemann hypothesis, respectively. A third preoccupation was with methods of statistical analysis: Turing’s work in this area was integral to his wartime contribution to signals intelligence. I. J. Good, who worked with Turing at Bletchley Park, has provided an authoritative account of this work, updated in the Collected Works. By contrast, Turing’s proof of the central limit theorem from probability theory, which earned him his Cambridge Fellowship, is less well known: he quickly discovered that the theorem had already been demonstrated, the work was never published, and his interest in it was swiftly superseded by questions in mathematical logic. Nevertheless, this was Turing’s first substantial investigation, the first demonstration of his powers, and was certainly influential in his approach to codebreaking, so it makes a fitting first topic for this chapter. Turing’s single paper on numerical analysis, published in 1948, is not described in detail here. It concerned the potential for errors to propagate and accumulate during large-scale computations; as with everything that Turing wrote in relation to computation it was pioneering, forward-looking, and conceptually sound. There was also, incidentally, an appreciation in this paper of the need for statistical analysis, again harking back to Turing’s earliest work.
Can Archaeological Models Always Fulfil our Prejudices?
Authors: Rivers Ray
Published: November 2020

The past few years have seen a significant growth in the use of quantitative models in archaeology. Such modelling has a long, albeit uneven, history, using ideas going back to Christaller’s (1933) use of Dirichlet/Voronoi tessellations of space in the early 20th century to construct ‘central places’. These elementary techniques for geometrizing social relations survived as late as the 1980s, most simply supplemented or replaced by other low-technology, ‘ruler and compass’ methods, such as Renfrew’s XTENT model (Renfrew 1975a, 1975b; Renfrew and Level 1979). By that time, archaeological modelling (e.g. Clarke 1968, 1977; Johnson 1977) was already incorporating the graph theory techniques of the social geographers, exemplified by the burgeoning network modelling of proximal point analysis (PPA) (e.g. Terrell 1977, 1986) and by the network-based spatial interaction models (SIMs) of the social planners and transport modellers (e.g. Wilson 1970; Wilson and Bennett 1986). However, even when adapted to historical processes (Rihll and Wilson 1987, 1991), such quantitative models were not part of the archaeological mainstream and limitations on computer power and cost meant that they had only restricted application. By the 1990s, these limitations were reinforced by a post-processual critique which led to a shift in emphasis in archaeology towards viewing space as a construct of human activity, a movement from ‘space to place’ (Hirsch 1995). Although SIMs had led this shift by downplaying the role of geography in characterizing social interactions, the dialogue about quantitative modelling turned against its reductive nature, even to the extent of shying away from mathematical analysis (e.g. Sheppard 2001). However, cheap computer power and the ready availability of commercial software packages have led to a revival in network methods. See Lock and Pouncett (2007) for an early overview, and for the current state of the art see Kandler and Steele (2012) and recent monographs edited by Bevan and Lake (2013) and Knappett (2013), as well as the other chapters in this book. The main focus of this article concerns the ‘retrodictive ability’ of archaeological models. In the absence of ‘laws’ of human behaviour, there is great freedom in how to proceed.
The Donkey’s Tale
Authors: Mitchell Peter
Published: November 2020

Readers must draw their own conclusions as to whether Eeyore’s assessment that ‘That Accounts for a Good Deal’ is valid regarding what they have read thus far and whether they agree that the statement of a Tswana informant consulted by Martha Geiger and Alice Hovorka—‘Donkeys made me who I am today’—captures an important truth about their overall significance in human history. This final chapter summarizes my own thoughts on the matter. It starts by identifying the key themes that run through the donkey’s tale, the millennialong association between people and donkeys and mules. Can we recognize durable or recurring sets of connections, either practical or symbolic? Are consistencies discernible across time and space, independent of cultural context, perhaps because of biological and behavioural propensities that all mules and donkeys may share? What kind of worlds, in short, did the donkey make? One theme that undoubtedly warrants attention is the widespread demotion in the donkey’s status following the adoption and spread of other riding animals— horses and camels—across much of the Old World. How far does this in fact permit, or encourage, us to use donkeys to write a history of the subaltern, of the oppressed, something that archaeology still often neglects? Whether the framework of interspecies relations within which donkeys have existed—and still exist—truly permits us to write a history of the donkey (rather than of donkeys and people), let alone a donkey’s history of the worlds the two have shared, also demands consideration. In turn, this requires us to think carefully about how active the donkey has been in the creation of those worlds. Responding to these points connects as much with the status and recognition we are prepared to extend to Equus asinus as it does with framing the questions by which to continue investigating our shared past. People domesticated donkeys some 7,000 or more years ago somewhere in northeastern Africa, most likely because of the assistance they could offer in supporting a mobile pastoralist way of life by reducing the costs of moving personal possessions, children, the infirm, and perhaps even young animals.
Personhood and Re-Embodiment in Osteological Practice
Authors: McClelland John , Cerezo-Román Jessica I.
Published: November 2020

The repatriation movement in the USA has had a profound impact on how human remains are viewed by osteologists and archaeologists. Federal repatriation legislation, including the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, PL 101–610; 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 1990) and the National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA, PL 101–185; 20 U.S.C 80q et seq., 1989) have led museums to transfer control of collections to affiliated descendant communities. Similar laws have been enacted in the states (e.g. A.R.S. §41–844, §41–865 [Arizona]; Cal. Health and Saf. Code, §8010, et seq. [California]; La. R.S. 8:671, et seq. [Louisiana]; Me. R.S. 13:1371– A [Maine]), with some preceding federal action and others a response to it (Seidemann 2010). Ancestral skeletal remains and objects were once regarded as cultural resources under the authoritative control of scientists (Colwell- Chanthaphonh 2009: 6–12). The struggle for the rights of indigenous people and others to determine disposition of ancestral remains challenged scientific authority and led to self-reflection on the part of the profession. Osteologists and archaeologists were reminded that they are dealing with deceased persons and that their actions are socially constructed manipulations of the dead, not unlike the work of other mortuary practitioners. This work is inextricably concerned with reconstructing identities. This involves both an effort to characterize the identities of past individuals or groups in life and to transform the dead anew, creating new identities for a variety of audiences. The process of identity reconstruction may be considered a re-embodiment of the person and that process is what this chapter is about. We illustrate this discussion with a case study of the analysis and repatriation of individuals exhumed from the Alameda-Stone Cemetery, Tucson, Arizona, USA. We use this example to show how individual and community identities are formed, neglected, transformed, and reconstructed in a large multicultural burial assemblage. The human body is universally regarded as an aesthetic object and an inseparable component of personal identity, but its value as an object of scientific inquiry is perhaps uniquely emphasized in Western thought. Once restricted to science and the medical profession, interest in the materiality of the body has now found a much broader audience.
Mood disorders
Authors: McKnight Rebecca , Price Jonathan , Geddes John
Published: November 2020

Variations in mood are part of normal experience; we all have our ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days and different ways of managing these. Sadness is a natural re­sponse to loss, adversity, stress, or other negative life experiences and is not necessarily abnormal. The main difference between normal sadness and a mood disorder is that normal sadness is usually a temporary state strongly relating to the person’s current situation, whereas mood disorder is a more persistent pervasive change in mood which affects social and occupational functioning. Primary mood (or ‘affective’) disorders are very common, and are also seen in most other psychiatric disorders or co-morbid to a physical illness. The distribution of mood variation in the general population is probably continuous, producing a spec­trum of severity (see Fig. 21.1). As with all psychiatric disorders, classification is descriptive and based on clinical characteristics. The most useful current approach to classification is based on the clinical course. Fundamental elements of this approach include: … ● classifying an illness as a single episode, recurrent, or persistent; ● distinguishing between people who have only low mood (unipolar depression) and those who also have elated mood (bipolar disorder); ● classifying episodes of illness according to severity: depressive episodes are mild, moderate, or severe; elated mood is hypomanic or manic (Table 21.1). … The classification includes two categories for less severe and more chronic illnesses: … ● Dysthymia: chronic mildly low mood which lasts at least several years but does not meet criteria for a recurrent depressive disorder. ● Cyclothymia: chronic instability of mood with periods of mild depressive and elation, none of which are severe enough to meet criteria for bipolar disorder or recurrent depressive disorder. It is often seen in relatives of those who have bipolar disorder, and some patients may eventually meet criteria for bipolar disorder themselves. The prevalence of mood disorders is hard to accurately ascertain, as many patients with low mood do not seek professional help. This is especially common in men. However, data from research studies (which tend to use structured diagnostic criteria) and large national sur­veys (self- report) give very similar results, outlined in Table 21.2. Bipolar disorder epidemiology is well cap­tured, as patients tend to seek help and the diagnostic criteria are well defined.
Anxiety and obsessional disorders
Authors: McKnight Rebecca , Price Jonathan , Geddes John
Published: November 2020

In the community, the term ‘anxiety’ is frequently as­sociated with a stressful Western lifestyle and thought of as a modern phenomenon— but this is far from the case. Anxiety disorders were clearly described as early as the writings of Hippocrates, and have been preva­lent in literary characterization to the present. Anxiety disorders are the most common type of psychiatric disorder, with one in three people experiencing them during a lifetime. They are characterized by marked, persistent mental and physical symptoms of anxiety, that are not secondary to another disorder and that impact negatively upon the sufferer’s life. Anxiety dis­orders may be primary psychiatric conditions, or a sec­ondary response to the stress associated with physical illness and its treatment. Many people with anxiety disorders never seek medical attention, but these are commonly seen conditions in both primary and sec­ondary care, and they may present with either mental or physical complaints. Obsessive– compulsive disorder is also considered in this chapter. Its relationship to anxiety disorders is uncertain— classification systems currently separate the two— but there are some important common features. Normal anxiety is the response to threatening situ­ations. Feelings of apprehension are accompanied by physiological changes that prepare for defence or escape (‘fight or flight’), notably increases in heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, and muscle tension. Sympathetic nervous system activity is increased, causing symptoms such as tremor, sweating, polyuria, and diarrhoea. Attention and concentration are fo­cused on the threatening situation. Anxiety is a bene­ficial response in dangerous situations, and should occur in everyday situations of perceived threat (e.g. examinations). Abnormal anxiety is a response that is similar but out of proportion to the threat and/ or is more pro­longed, or occurs when there is no threat. With one exception, the symptoms of anxiety disorders are the same as those of a normal anxiety response. The ex­ception is that the focus of attention is not the external threat (as in the normal response) but the physio­logical response itself. Thus in abnormal anxiety, at­tention is focused on a symptom such as increased heart rate. This focus of attention is accompanied by concern about the cause of the symptom.
Eating disorders
Authors: McKnight Rebecca , Price Jonathan , Geddes John
Published: November 2020

The term ‘eating disorder’ describes a range of conditions characterized by abnormal eating habits and methods of weight control which lead to a significant impairment of psychological, social, and physical functioning. Eating disorders are serious, complex conditions; they are not simply a problem of eating too much or too little, or an attempt to achieve the perfect physique. Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality of any psychiatric disorder, and it is notoriously difficult both to engage eating- disordered patients, and to treat them success­fully. There is a positive association between early diag­nosis and prognosis, so the skills to recognize an eating disorder— whether they present with psychological or physical symptoms— are essential for all clinicians. At the time of writing, the description of eating dis­orders within diagnostic classification systems has been undergoing considerable change. Under the ICD- 10 and DSM- IV classification systems, three main eating disorders were recognized (Fig. 27.1): … 1 anorexia nervosa; 2 bulimia nervosa; 3 eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS). … However, this classification has been shown to have various difficulties: … ● The majority of cases were attracting an ‘EDNOS’ label, whereas it was supposed to be a residual category (Fig. 27.1). ● EDNOS contained within it the subdiagnosis ‘binge eating disorder’ (BED). Recent research has demonstrated BED accounts for approximately 10 per cent of eating disorders in clinical cohorts. ● The categorical nature of the system does not allow for the fact that most eating disorders change over time, and frequently move back and forth along the spectrum of presentations. ● The DSM- 5 classification system (see ‘Further reading’) has tried to tackle the first two of these difficulties, and the upcoming ICD- 11 will echo these changes (Table 27.1) There is now a separate category for BED, and three other defined conditions. This is a positive change, but has only reduced the ‘NOS/ unspecified’ percentage to some extent, and has not considered the changeable nature of eating disorder symptomatology. Hopefully in the future a solution to the difficulty of turning a spectrum of pathology into a categorical system will emerge.
The Age of Em
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times: an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs. In this new economic era, the world economy may double in size every few weeks. Some say we can't know the future, especially following such a disruptive new technology, but Professor Robin Hanson sets out to prove them wrong. Applying decades of expertise in physics, computer science, and economics, he uses standard theories to paint a detailed picture of a world dominated by ems. While human lives don't change greatly in the em era, em lives are as different from ours as our lives are from those of our farmer and forager ancestors. Ems make us question common assumptions of moral progress, because they reject many of the values we hold dear. Read about em mind speeds, body sizes, job training and career paths, energy use and cooling infrastructure, virtual reality, aging and retirement, death and immortality, security, wealth inequality, religion, teleportation, identity, cities, politics, law, war, status, friendship and love. This book shows you just how strange your descendants may be, though ems are no stranger than we would appear to our ancestors. To most ems, it seems good to be an em.
Implementation
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

Compared with ordinary humans, it is much easier to directly read the internal state of an em mind. This should allow some types of “mindreading.” Consider taking two ems and trying to match parts in one of them to parts in the other, to say which parts are the “same.” during the early opaque em era it will usually not be possible to make a complete match. Even so, some parts could be matched, such as the parts that receive initial inputs from eyes and ears. For matched parts, it should be possible to put the parts of one emulation into the same brain activation state as that of the matching parts in another emulation. So, for example, one might force an emulation to see and hear exactly what another emulation sees and hears. More parts can be matched for emulations of the same original human, especially if they have diverged for a shorter subjective time. Such more closely matched emulations could thus be arranged to more fully “read” each other’s minds. Mild mindreading might be used to allow ems to better intuit and share their reaction to a particular topic or person. For example, a group of ems might all try to think at the same time about a particular person, say “George.” Then their brain states in the region of their minds associated with this thought might be weakly driven toward the average state of this group. In this way this group might come to intuitively feel how the group feels on average about George. Of course this should work better for closer copies, and after this exercise participating individuals might still return to something close to their previous opinions of George. Even when minds cannot be matched part for part, statistical analysis of how activation in different parts and situations correlates with actions and stated feelings should allow cheap partial mindreading, at least for some shallow “surface” aspects of emulation minds. Both of these types of mindreading require access to the internal state of an emulation process. Those not granted such access have an even weaker ability to read minds than do humans today. Today, humans routinely leak many features of their brain states via tone of voice, gaze, facial expressions, muscle vibrations, etc.
Lifecycle
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

How many kinds of tasks does a typical em worker regularly do in the course of their job? Looking at job performance today, we see that while extreme specialization can give maximum productivity in the short run, over a longer time a modest degree of task variation is often more productive, because of improved learning and engagement ( Staats and Gino 2012 ). Ems add an important new consideration to this usual tradeoff between task specialization and task variety. Whereas human minds have a limited rate at which they can do tasks, em minds can run at different speeds. So the limited subjective career length of an em can be spent either on more scope in tasks or on more scope in time. That is, an em worker can either run faster and simultaneously do and coordinate more related tasks, or it can run slower and coordinate fewer tasks over a longer period of time, and improve at those tasks in the process. Some tasks require a continual response to external drivers. These tasks include managing physical systems, such as driving cars. Such tasks usually require mental response times as fast as the slower of two rates: the rate at which outside disturbances arise to which it is useful to respond, and the rate at which the managed system such as a car is capable of responding to such disturbances. When choosing between mind speeds faster than this minimum response rate, one of the main tradeoff s is between getting really good at each task, and coordinating more related tasks. One can either do a more specific task more times over a longer narrower career, or do a wider range of related tasks over a shorter career. During either sort of career one could split off many spurs to do short-term tasks that do not need to be well remembered. Long, narrow careers can achieve high levels of competence while adapting to changing job detail, but require expensive communication between workers to coordinate related tasks. In contrast, having the same worker do a wider range of tasks allows for flexible coordination without communication across those tasks, but comes at the cost of more transitions for each worker between different tasks (Wout et al. 2015), and often lower competence because of less task specialization and a shorter career.
implications
Authors: Hanson Robin
Published: November 2020

It tends to be easier to make social predictions about the middle of a distribution of characteristics, than about the tails of such a distribution. For example, it is easier to predict the typical time spent sleeping or eating, and the typical style of such activities, than the maximum or minimum time spent in such activities, or the styles of sleeping or eating done by those who spend an unusual amount of time in these functions. This is in part because when scenarios can differ according to a great many variables, this high-dimensionality creates a lot more detail to specify about the tails (i.e., extremes) compared with the middle of a distribution. This is also in part because hard-to-anticipate factors often have disproportionate effects on distribution tails. As ordinary humans are on the periphery of the em society, such issues make it harder to make predictions about humans in an em society. Even so, we should try. Ems are so fast that humans will only experience days in the time that a typical em experiences years. This suggests that during the entire em era humans will only achieve modest psychological and behavioral adaptations to the existence of ems. The human world will mostly look like it did before ems, except for a limited number of changes that can be made quickly. Ems being faster than humans also suggests that most substantial changes to human behaviors during the em era are driven by outside changes, rather than from within human society. Relevant outside changes include wars, changing prices such as wages, interest rates, and land rents, and an explosion of new products and services from the em economy. Because ordinary humans originally owned everything from which the em economy arose, as a group they could retain substantial wealth in the new era. Humans could own real estate, stocks, bonds, patents, etc. Thus a reasonable hope is that ordinary humans become the retirees of this new world. We don’t today kill all the retirees in our world, and then take all their stuff, in part because such actions would threaten the stability of the legal, financial, and political world on which we all rely, and in part because we have many direct social ties to retirees. Yes we humans all expect to retire today, while ems don’t expect to become human, but em retirees are vulnerable in similar ways to humans.