bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Evolution of Altruism in Humans
Authors: Bowles Samuel , Gintis Herbert
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the evolution of altruism in humans. Following William Hamilton, it uses the term “helping” to describe behaviors that confer benefits on others and reserves the term “altruism” for helping in situations where the helper would benefit in fitness or other material ways by withholding help. The discussion begins with an analysis of the proximal influences on an individual action such as helping using the beliefs, preferences, and constraints approach common to economics and decision theory. According to this approach, what individuals do when restricted to a specific set of feasible actions depends on their desires and goals on the one hand, and their beliefs on the other. The chapter also considers the link between social preferences and social dilemmas before concluding with an overview of a gene-culture coevolution model of group-structured populations, one assumption of which is: an explanation of the evolution of human cooperation must be contingent upon the empirical evidence.
Parochialism, Altruism, and War
Authors: Bowles Samuel , Gintis Herbert
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the coevolution of two genetically transmitted individual traits, parochialism and altruism, each providing the conditions for the evolutionary success of the other, and both jointly explaining why warfare was so frequent and lethal among early humans. It first considers the tendency of parochial altruists to engage in combat before discussing the results of simulations showing that parochialism and altruism evolve because within-group interactions for which cooperation is possible are characterized by positive assortment, and not because the parochial altruists deliberately associate with like types. It also evaluates experimental evidence that provides a test of the simulation results regarding the coevolution of parochial altruism and war. It suggests that hostility toward outsiders and a warlike disposition could have strengthened the group competition processes essential to the evolution of altruistic cooperation.
Evaluation of supertraces for a model operator
Authors: Bismut Jean-Michel
Published: November 2017

This chapter evaluates the supertrace of the heat kernel of a hypoelliptic operator acting over p × g, given a semisimple element γ‎ ∈ G. It begins by introducing a hypoelliptic operator, its heat kernel, and a corresponding supertrace Jᵧ(Y₀ᵗ), if Y₀ᵗ ∈ t(γ‎). Then, by a conjugation of the hypoelliptic operator, the chapter obtains a simpler operator where p × p and t have been decoupled. This new operator splits naturally into a scalar part and a matrix part. Hereafter, the chapter evaluates the trace of the heat kernel of the scalar part, and computes the supertrace of the matrix part of the heat kernel. This chapter concludes with an explicit formula for Jᵧ(Y₀ᵗ).
A Theory of Moral Choice
Authors: Monroe Kristen Renwick
Published: November 2017

This chapter contemplates the broader themes and implications of this work and constructs a new theory of moral choice. Most existing theories designed to guide moral behavior and examine the ethical acts of others fail to adequately capture what appeared in this volume's analysis to be the critical importance of psychological factors. The chapter thus proposes a new, empirically based identity theory of moral choice. It sketches the outlines of this theory and how it was derived from empirical analysis. The chapter then notes important literature in a wide range of fields, from linguistics and cognitive science to primate behavior and neuroscience, which offers scientific underpinnings for the theory. Finally, the chapter suggests how this theory can usefully help us understand other forms of ethical political behavior.
Value Constellations and American Political Life
Authors: Hitlin Steven , Kramer Katherine W. O.
Published: November 2017

This chapter augments the discussion of the values measures in the 2006 ANES Pilot Study in three ways. First, it compares the items drawn from the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) with the options that were presented in an alternate format, coming down strongly in support of using the PVQ items. Second, this chapter analyzes the PVQ items along two factor-derived dimensions to suggest alternative uses of these measures—uses that allow comparisons of potential ANES data with other cross-national surveys like the World Values Surveys. Third, the chapter provides empirical illustrations of the utility of this approach for understanding important political phenomena, focusing on voting behavior and presidential approval.
Attitudes toward the Progressivity of Taxes, Corporate Tax, and Estate Tax
Authors: Durante Ruben , Putterman Louis
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines attitudes toward taxation, looking in particular at views about progressivity, taxing big business, and the estate tax. ANES surveys have regularly included some measures about taxation. The chapter finds that the new measures are correlated with the traditional questions (whether rich and poor pay too much or too little in taxes), but add new content as well. Attitudes about taxation are more strongly linked to ideology and values than to economic self-interest. In addition, the new items were more closely related to ideology and less so to what one would predict from assumptions about ordinary economic self-interest.
Lending to the Borrower from Hell
Authors: Drelichman Mauricio , Voth Hans-Joachim
Published: November 2017

Why do lenders time and again loan money to sovereign borrowers who promptly go bankrupt? When can this type of lending work? As the United States and many European nations struggle with mountains of debt, historical precedents can offer valuable insights. This book looks at one famous case—the debts and defaults of Philip II of Spain. Ruling over one of the largest and most powerful empires in history, King Philip defaulted four times. Yet he never lost access to capital markets and could borrow again within a year or two of each default. Exploring the shrewd reasoning of the lenders who continued to offer money, the book analyzes the lessons from this historical example. Using detailed new evidence collected from sixteenth-century archives, the book examines the incentives and returns of lenders. It provides powerful evidence that in the right situations, lenders not only survive despite defaults—they thrive. It also demonstrates that debt markets cope well, despite massive fluctuations in expenditure and revenue, when lending functions like insurance. The book unearths unique sixteenth-century loan contracts that offered highly effective risk sharing between the king and his lenders, with payment obligations reduced in bad times. A fascinating story of finance and empire, this book offers an intelligent model for keeping economies safe in times of sovereign debt crises and defaults.
Taxes, Debts, and Institutions
Authors: Drelichman Mauricio , Voth Hans-Joachim
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes the fiscal institutions and borrowing instruments available to the Crown. The Castilian portfolio of fiscal and financial instruments was remarkably complete for its time. The revenue technology was a mix of useful adaptations of medieval legacy taxes combined with newer excises and trade duties. On the financing side, the Crown had both long- and short-term debt instruments at its disposal. Although the long-term juros (annuities and perpetuities) were technically nominative, they were widely traded in the secondary market, supplying a key element for the correct pricing of debt. On the short-term front, asientos—which refer to a wide variety of agreements—allowed the Crown to smooth the volatile silver revenues, leverage income outside the purview of the Cortes—Castile's representative assembly—and quickly shift resources throughout the empire.
The Sustainable Debts of Philip II
Authors: Drelichman Mauricio , Voth Hans-Joachim
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses the sustainability of debt. A systematic analysis based on the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) methodology to evaluate fiscal sustainability shows that Castile was able to service its debts in the long run. While liquidity was scarce during periods of intense warfare, years of relative peace brought large surpluses. The data collected from Castile's annual fiscal accounts produced new yearly series of revenue, military expenditure, short-term debt issues, and short-term debt service. The resulting database spans a full 31-year period—enough to employ modern quantitative techniques. This analysis provides strong evidence that Castile's fiscal position in the second half of the sixteenth century was on a solid footing. The chapter then assesses whether the events that led to major downturns in Castile's financial fortunes could have been anticipated.
Risk Sharing with the Monarch
Authors: Drelichman Mauricio , Voth Hans-Joachim
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes the role of contingent scenarios and nature of the defaults. Over the last 800 years, many periods of debt accumulation have been followed by default. Despite these disruptions, the market for sovereign debt did not disappear. At least, in the case of asiento lending to Philip II, excusable defaults were an important factor. Studying the loan documents directly, the chapter shows that a significant share of short-term loans contained contingency clauses. It then explores the different types of loan modifications along with their impact on cash flows and loan maturity. These modifications allowed effective risk sharing between king and bankers—an institutional solution that offered many of the desirable properties that contingent debt would have today.
A Day in a Trader’s Life
Authors: Lépinay Vincent Antonin
Published: November 2017

Codes of Finance examines a bank to reveal how financial operators and financial products coexist. This coexistence is tense because the bank deals with innovative products that yield unexpected reactions on unevenly charted markets. Because the designs of the financial products introduced here is coextensive to the lives of traders, engineers, and salespeople, these innovations are major protagonists and need to be fleshed out. How can we describe a world that is a patchwork of individuals, machines, and products? A series of sharp definitions up front is tempting, but would miss the crucial uncertainty surrounding many of the latest innovations of finance. Understanding, defining, and controlling new products are indeed central concerns of the operators we are about to study. To introduce the reader to the concrete daily practices of these characters, I offer a snapshot of the typical day of the trader....
Questioning Finance
Authors: Lépinay Vincent Antonin
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter considers the significance of examining how financial operators and financial products coexist. This coexistence is tense because the bank deals with innovative products that yield unexpected reactions on unevenly charted markets. Since the designs of the financial products introduced here is coextensive to the lives of traders, engineers, and salespeople, these innovations are major protagonists and need to be fleshed out. The chapter also explains how the book is a case study of economic derivation, but rather than look at derivatives as a class of economic goods, it studies derivation as a process. In doing so, it fills the gap between propagandists of financial engineering and its blunt critics by offering some elements of an analysis of economic derivation.
Hedging and Speculating with Portfolios
Authors: Lépinay Vincent Antonin
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents a detailed description of the management of the traders' huge portfolios. Traders of capital guarantee products (CGPs) sit at the intersection of several exchanges. This delicate position owes much to the design of the products they manage: CGPs involve complex combinations of underlying securities that traders are not expert in but must still buy and sell. The chapter introduces a crucial actor in the trading room: the pricer—a computational machine that provides traders with the market values of their contracts. In a market in which products are designed to create asymmetry between the bank and its clients or other competing banks, pricers that provide traders with values and risks produce the only knowledge available.
Reverse Finance
Authors: Lépinay Vincent Antonin
Published: November 2017

This chapter explains how intimate relations between the bank and its clients and investors strain the bank's boundaries. The intrusion of investors reversed the privileges of the trading room: from being an aggressively calculating center, it became subjected to calculations by investors; from being an engineer of finance, it became engineered by finance. Shareholders who intrude into the bank demand that banks be run as portfolios of securities are handled, which goes beyond the request that management rules be made public. They demand that the firm be nothing but a bundle of cleanly priced activities on par with, and comparable with, securities. This enforced porosity spurred a reaction among financial operators to engage in “reverse finance” to slow down the process of commoditization that threatened them.
Henry James’s Awkward Stage
Authors: Kurnick David
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes Henry James's The Other House, which was conceived as a play but published as a novel in 1896. Almost exclusively reliant on dialogue and dense with the notation of movements that frustrate readerly visualization, the novel constantly alludes to the theatrical status it appears to have abandoned; James reworked the novel back into a play in 1909. Both versions suggest that the domestic tragedy constituting the plot is contained in the space of a theatrical auditorium. Similar invocations of theatrical space haunt 1899's The Awkward Age, a novel whose characters begin to play to an imaginary theatrical audience that James posits just beyond the “footlights” of the diegetic universe. In abandoning James's fabled “center of consciousness” in favor of elaborating a group subject, these dramanovels document James's ambivalence regarding the interiorizing narrative approach of which he would become the acknowledged master.
What Is Hope?
Authors: Martin Adrienne M.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter explores the meanings of hope and posits two approaches to a philosophical inquiry into hope: the syndrome analysis and the incorporation analysis. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of a syndrome analysis, before turning to a dualist theory of motivation, upon which the chapter delineates a structure of hope, wherein an element that unifies hope as a syndrome is way of incorporating hope's other elements into one's rational scheme of ends. In addition, the chapter discusses the author's own encounters with the concept of hope as well as brief explorations thereof from a number of belief systems—theological, philosophical, and otherwise—and examines the orthodox definition of hope as well as its critics. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of this volume.
Incorporation
Authors: Martin Adrienne M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter further elaborates the incorporation analysis. Hope does indeed involve the basic elements of the orthodox definition—the desire for an outcome and a subjective probability estimate between 0 and 1. In addition, hope, when most fully realized, makes use of our capacities of self-reflection and rational justification; when we hope, we treat both our desire and our probability assignment as justifying reasons for hopeful activities. This is the feature that unifies the syndromatic elements of thought, feeling, and planning, and makes hope a distinctive and cohesive practical attitude. The chapter argues further that the justifications to which we commit ourselves in virtue of hoping are practical justifications, and that there are few epistemic or theoretical limitations on rational hope. It concludes by addressing the disadvantages of this analysis.
Suicide and Sustenance
Authors: Martin Adrienne M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the implications of the incorporation analysis for the role of hope in influencing motivation. It focuses on hope in the context of a “trial”—an extreme challenge to one's ability to live well or flourish, a circumstance that makes literal or figurative suicide tempting—but this chapter's argument extends to less profound circumstances, as well. The chapter argues that hope has the potential to influence motivation in an interesting and distinctive variety of ways, but that its influence is, for the most part, contingent: hope is not, in itself, a uniquely powerful or reliable form of sustenance.
The “Outcast of the Universe”?
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the case of an impostor. Within the general plot of disguise and misprision there may be a special place for the impostor, the willful trickster who would have others believe he or she is another. The version of the impostor most familiar in the popular imagination may be the spy, especially the double agent. The spy offers a version of one's worst fears about the instability of one's self, one's proteanism as a certain hollowness. Meanwhile, psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch became interested in what she called “as-if” personalities who only tentatively inhabit one identity. Ultimately, imposture allows one to live out a life according to one's fantasies without attributing this life to one's self, since one knows one's “true” identity is not up to the fantasy.
Discovering the Self in Self-Pleasuring
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on masturbation, the sex that one has with oneself. If masturbation becomes a “problem”—rather than simply a fact of life, dating from infancy and openly discovered at puberty—with the advent of modernity, this must have some bearing on the problem of individual identity, especially the sense of the individual as solitary, a system complete in itself, a body responsive to itself. The “problem” of masturbation may derive from a sense that the world outside the self has become unnecessary: that the self has become entirely solipsistic and self-satisfying. This is dangerously unproductive in an age of nascent capitalism, where the imperative to productive work includes the channeling of sexuality to disciplined reproduction. But even more disturbing is the suspicion that autoeroticism may suggest a discovery that self-love—narcissism—is the primary and original form of the erotic, which makes the socialization of the individual as crucial as it is difficult and possibly doomed.
The Derealization of Self
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the importance of the place of the knower in relation to the known, the narrating I to the narrated I, when they are one and “the same” person—whatever that oneness and sameness may mean, which in fact turns out to be problematic. The strange workings of derealization are potentially helpful in understanding some of the writers who undertake to explore the enigma of identity in its peculiarly modern forms. Such writers include Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Italo Svevo, and Sigmund Freud. These writers all tend to come upon moments at which introspection, or inquest into the formation of the self, encounters a dissolution or estrangement of self that is somehow key to its understanding.
The Identity Paradigm
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This epilogue reflects on the critical importance of the identity paradigm—and especially the identificatory paradigm—in culture. To see the identificatory paradigm at work, in a range of cultural and social contexts—in legal settings and debates, in fictions from low and high culture, in confessional and psychoanalytic discourse—is to bring to attention something characteristic and important about people's lives, singly and collectively. To grasp the predominance and the importance of the identity paradigm is to recognize something ineradicable and significant in culture. The chapter then presents something of a contradiction: the self sees itself from the inside as a place of depth, meaning, and as the center of the universe, whereas the self viewed from the outside is merely the point of intersection of impoverished data.
Introduction
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This book examines how the law of torts, contracts, and restitution can be improved by showing how private law reduces the cost of accidents, lubricates bargains, and encourages unrequested benefits. It considers the two pervasive rules of tort law that provide incentives for actors to reduce accident costs: strict liability and negligence. It also explains how contract law achieves effiency through the remedy of damages and how restitution law allows benefactors to recover gains that their beneficiaries wrongfully obtained from them. The book makes three central claims: misalignments in tort law should be removed; in contract law, promisee's incentives should be improved; and the law should recognize some right of compensation for those who produce unrequested benefits. Each claim is based on the desire to reform private law and to make it more effective in promoting social welfare.
The Injurer’s Self-Risk Puzzle
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers a misalignment due to courts' ignorance of the injurer's self-risk when they set the standard of care. In setting the standards of care, courts consider the risks the injurer created toward others, and systematically exclude the risks the injurer created for himself. Thus courts set the standard of care for driving in light of the danger to others, without accounting for the danger to the driver. The chapter explains why courts should determine liability by reference to the risk imposed by the injurer on others and himself. It first considers the Hand Rule or Learned Hand formula, applied by courts to determine the negligence of the injurer, before discussing the “net burden” interpretation of the Hand Rule. It then presents four paradigmatic examples, based on real cases, that illustrate the pervasiveness of joint risks in law. It concludes by analyzing several objections that could be raised against the self-risk argument.
Unity in the Law of Torts and Contracts
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with the problem of providing efficient incentives for the promisor and promisee simultaneously and repurposes the model of torts in a way that unifies tort law and contract law. In the basic torts model, the injurer and the victim can reduce the probability and severity of accidents by taking precautions. “Precaution” against accidents can be reinterpreted to fit contracts and other bodies of law. The chapter first considers forms of precaution and the paradox of compensation, showing that compensating victims is often inconsistent with double responsibility at the margin that is required in efficient incentives. It then examines three mechanisms that allow liability law to combine compensation and incentives for efficient precaution: the fault rule, invariant damages, and a coercive order from a court, such as an injunction against a nuisance.
The Relationship between Nonlegal Sanctions and Damages
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines positive externalities caused by nonlegal sanctions. It first considers a wrongdoer's incentives in cases where nonlegal sanctions are dead-weight losses versus cases where nonlegal sanctions transfer or create value. It then presents theoretical arguments about victims' incentives before making the case for deducting nonlegal sanctions and explaining how this affects legal standards of care and damages. It also describes three elements of social costs and benefits and whether each is internalized by wrongdoers: plaintiff's harm from the wrong, defendant's harm from the nonlegal sanctions, and other peoples' benefit from the nonlegal sanctions. The chapter introduces the notion of “ideal net damages,” which it asserts should be awarded by courts in the typical case where nonlegal sanctions benefit other people, and “practical net damages,” suggesting that courts must deduct the burden of the nonlegal sanction on the wrongdoer.
Conclusion
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This book has advanced three central claims, each related to a different branch of private law. First, to achieve efficiency under negligence law, all foreseeable risks should be included when setting standards of care and awarding damages. Second, to achieve efficient contracts, the law should respond more to the promisee's incentives for cooperation and reliance. Third, the law should encourage unrequested benefits by making the beneficiaries compensate the benefactors more often, and by reducing the liability of injurers and breaching parties who externalize benefits. In support of these claims, the book has introduced novel principles such as total liability for excessive harm, anti-insurance, decreasing liability contracts, and the public goods theory of restitution. In conclusion, the book proposes three main legal reforms to improve private law in terms of promoting social welfare, such as removing misalignments in tort law or reducing the benefactor's liability for accidents.
Beyond Voluntariness
Authors: Grant Ruth W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter returns to the contrast between treating incentives simply as a form of trade and treating incentives as a form of power. The problem with the “trade” approach is that it tends to focus on voluntariness as the only important ethical issue to consider. To increase a person's choices always seems to be a good thing, but it does not settle every ethical question. The chapter identifies two conceptions of voluntariness: Voluntariness I (choice) and Voluntariness II (autonomy). Voluntariness I is a standard that can be met so long as the incentive is not coercive. Voluntariness II is a more demanding requirement that leads to considering—and criticizing— manipulative, exploitive, paternalistic, and seductive offers as well.
Watchdogs on the Hill
Authors: Fowler Linda L.
Published: November 2017

An essential responsibility of the U.S. Congress is holding the president accountable for the conduct of foreign policy. This book evaluates how the legislature's most visible and important watchdogs performed from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The book finds a noticeable reduction in public and secret hearings since the mid-1990s and establishes that U.S. foreign policy frequently violated basic conditions for democratic accountability. Committee scrutiny of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book notes, fell below levels of oversight in prior major conflicts. It attributes the drop in watchdog activity to growing disinterest among senators in committee work, biases among members who join the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, and motives that shield presidents, particularly Republicans, from public inquiry. The book's detailed case studies of the Truman Doctrine, Vietnam War, Panama Canal Treaty, humanitarian mission in Somalia, and Iraq War illustrate the importance of oversight in generating the information citizens need to judge the president's national security policies. It argues for a reassessment of congressional war powers and proposes reforms to encourage Senate watchdogs to improve public deliberation about decisions of war and peace. It investigates America's oversight of national security and its critical place in the review of congressional and presidential powers in foreign policy.
Committee Goals and Oversight Strategies
Authors: Fowler Linda L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how the distinctive goals of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees led to strategic choices about how much attention to devote to oversight of national security, particularly in comparison to budget activity. It explains why divided government was not a consistent motivator for national security oversight and how indicators of long-term committee goals influenced both committees' stance toward the executive branch. It argues that the Armed Services Committee muted partisan conflict and deemphasized oversight in order to attend to funding the Defense Department, whereas the Foreign Relations Committee was a more active overseer of foreign affairs during periods of divided government. The differences between the two committees reveal how selection biases built into the committee assignment process affected the rule of law in national security and shed light on the inconsistent findings in the scholarly literature with respect to divided government.
Manhunts
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire
Published: November 2017

Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, this book takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants. Incorporating historical events and philosophical reflection, the book examines the systematic and organized search for individuals and small groups on the run because they have defied authority, committed crimes, seemed dangerous simply for existing, or been categorized as subhuman or dispensable. The book begins in ancient Greece, where young Spartans hunted and killed Helots (Sparta's serfs) as an initiation rite, and where Aristotle and other philosophers helped to justify raids to capture and enslave foreigners by creating the concept of natural slaves. The book discusses the hunt for heretics in the Middle Ages; New World natives in the early modern period; vagrants, Jews, criminals, and runaway slaves in other eras; and illegal immigrants today. Exploring evolving ideas about the human and the subhuman, what we owe to enemies and people on the margins of society, and the supposed legitimacy of domination, the book shows that the hunting of humans should not be treated ahistorically, and that manhunting has varied as widely in its justifications and aims as in its practices. The book investigates the psychology of manhunting, noting that many people, from bounty hunters to Balzac, have written about the thrill of hunting when the prey is equally intelligent and cunning. An unconventional history on an unconventional subject, this book is an in-depth consideration of the dynamics of an age-old form of violence.
The Dialectic of the Hunter and the Hunted
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers specific process involved in the experience of modern slavery and the relationship of consciousnesses that was established in it. It does so by going back to the starting point: the moment of pursuit that precedes the capture. The guiding question is how a political subjectivity can be constituted in a situation where one is a prey. How, in such a practical configuration, can one become a subject, and what kind of subject? How, being shaped by the hunting relationship, can a hunted consciousness transcend its status as prey and begin a movement of liberation? Slaveholding domination does not arise from an open struggle but rather from a relationship, which is dissymmetrical from the outset, of manhunting. Here, even before operations begin, the hunter is already in a position to be the master. The prey, taken by surprise, is not in a position to confront a group of hunters.
Technical Error: Measures of Life and Risk
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the sciences, politics, and international cooperations that informed Soviet state responses to the Chernobyl disaster and how they produced an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk. More specifically, it investigates the relationship between individual suffering caused by the Chernobyl accident and the technical measures and scales of expertise used to assess radiation-related biological injury in Ukraine. To this end, the chapter considers the work of international scientific networks in patterning initial Soviet remediation strategies and public health responses. It highlights key aspects of the initial Soviet management of the Chernobyl disaster and shows how ambiguities related to the interpretation of radiation-related physical damage subjected post-Chernobyl state interventions and medical surveillance to a variety of competing scientific and political interests. It also considers the so-called Safe Living Concept regarding radiation dose exposure and Soviet-American bioscientific collaboration report on radioactive fallout.
Chernobyl in Historical Light
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores some of the prehistory of reception of the Chernobyl disaster in various aspects of Soviet-era life from the perspective of individuals and families living outside state-designated zones. The discussion focuses on events in a time when bureaucratic lines between sufferers and nonsufferers were just beginning to be drawn, and when other informal structures of accountability regarding state-related abuses were in place. From the perspective of one family, the chapter shows how individuals reached the limits of their ability to reason, narrate, and project futures in the context of an invisible nuclear hazard. It explains how life narratives and family histories reflected a vexed and complex history of Ukraine, but also how these histories informed interpretations of the Chernobyl experience.
Probability and Statistical Distributions
Authors: Ivezi Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander , Ivezi Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander
Published: November 2017

This chapter reviews notation and basic concepts in probability and statistics. The coverage of various topics cannot be complete, and it is aimed at concepts needed to understand material covered in the book. For an in-depth discussion of probability and statistics, the chapter suggests that readers please refer to numerous readily available textbooks, such as Bar89, Lup93, WJ03, Wass10, mentioned in this book. The chapter begins with a brief overview of probability and random variables. It then reviews the most common univariate and multivariate distribution functions, and correlation coefficients. It also summarizes the central limit theorem and discusses how to generate mock samples (random number generation) for a given distribution function.
Classical Statistical Inference
Authors: Ivezi Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander , Ivezi Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander
Published: November 2017

This chapter introduces the main concepts of statistical inference, or drawing conclusions from data. There are three main types of inference: point estimation, confidence estimation, and hypothesis testing. There are two major statistical paradigms which address the statistical inference questions: the classical, or frequentist paradigm, and the Bayesian paradigm. While most of statistics and machine learning is based on the classical paradigm, Bayesian techniques are being embraced by the statistical and scientific communities at an ever-increasing pace. The chapter begins with a short comparison of classical and Bayesian paradigms, and then discusses the three main types of statistical inference from the classical point of view.
Dimensionality and Its Reduction
Authors: Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander
Published: November 2017

With the dramatic increase in data available from a new generation of astronomical telescopes and instruments, many analyses must address the question of the complexity as well as size of the data set. This chapter deals with how we can learn which measurements, properties, or combinations thereof carry the most information within a data set. It describes techniques that are related to concepts discussed when describing Gaussian distributions, density estimation, and the concepts of information content. The chapter begins with an exploration of the problems posed by high-dimensional data. It then describes the data sets used in this chapter, and introduces perhaps the most important and widely used dimensionality reduction technique, principal component analysis (PCA). The remainder of the chapter discusses several alternative techniques which address some of the weaknesses of PCA.
Taming the Hyperpower: The 1990s
Authors: Kuisel Richard F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the confluence of events that shaped relations between France and the United States in the 1990s. These include the war in the Persian Gulf, which had barely subsided when a downward spiral into ethnic strife seized the inhabitants of Yugoslavia. At the same time the United States and France engaged in diplomatic brinkmanship over trade and waged a contest over reform of the Atlantic Alliance. Transatlantic sparring often occurred on many fronts and one struggle tended to complicate the other. The discussion in this chapter will be thematic rather than chronological, beginning with war, and then security, followed by trade, the “indispensable nation,” and more war, and concluding with the topic of the hyperpower.
The Paradox of the Fin de Siècle: Anti-Americanism and Americanization
Authors: Kuisel Richard F.
Published: November 2017

As the twentieth century drew to a close, Americanization was transforming how the French ate, entertained themselves, conducted business, and even communicated. Yet the fin de siècle also witnessed the strongest expression of anti-Americanism since the 1960s, which was visible in opinion polls, newspapers, books, television, and politicians' pronouncements. This chapter examines this paradox, this tension between a society seemingly immersed in America and one that posed America as “the other.” The growing anti-Americanism can be briefly explained as follows: once the Cold War ended, the transatlantic superpower, from a French perspective, became more overbearing. The French in turn became more critical of domestic trends in the United States and less comfortable with the inroads of American culture. As a result they intensified their efforts at both asserting their independence and defining themselves differently from their American cousins.
Reflections
Authors: Kuisel Richard F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some thoughts about Franco-American relations. It also discusses the reasons why the French were more eager to confront America than other Europeans. First, more than other Europeans, the French aspired to, and had the means to exercise, international leadership. If they conceded that they lagged behind the hyperpower, they were still persuaded that they were an elite nation with the power, both hard and soft, as well as the experience and self-confidence, to merit a commanding position in Europe and beyond. More keenly than others the French also distrusted American hegemony, found it unreliable and self-serving, and linked the United States with the invasive process of globalization. Second, American practices and values targeted signifiers of identity more closely in France than they did those of its neighbors.
Polarization Vision
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores how polarization sensitivity is achieved in animals and how it is used in natural behavior. Arthropods are famous for their polarization sensitivity, but other animals, including vertebrates are also capable of this. A remarkable feature of some insect systems is that the sky pattern is genetically imprinted into the neural arrangements, all the way through to the central nervous system. However, celestial navigation is not the only use to which animals can put polarization vision. Other functions may include communication, contrast enhancement, and camouflage breaking. Polarized light stimuli are abundant in nature. Although no important source of light is polarized, light may become polarized when it is scattered or reflected. These two fundamental principles produce abundant polarized light in natural scenes, which explains why polarization vision is so common.
Motion Vision and Eye Movements
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers motion vision and eye movements. It analyzes the general features and properties of motion vision that apply to all animals and examines how these are tuned for the visual ecological requirements of different species—from small creatures such as fruit flies and jumping spiders to falcons and their prey. As it turns out, far more is known of motion vision in tiny animals than in any of the larger and more familiar species. The visual stimulus for motion is a shift in the position of an image, or portion of an image, on the retina. In almost all animals, the great majority of image shifts on the retina are generated by the animal itself, through its own movements. Only completely sessile animals with utterly stable eyes escape a sense of motion dominated by self-generated stimuli.
Visual Orientation and Navigation
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explains how orientation refers to an animal's ability to move or posture itself in a desired direction relative to its environment. The ability to orient is virtually a universal feature of animal life. Many animals go a step further and navigate through the environment, finding their way from their current location to a specific destination that might be meters or kilometers away. Orientation mechanisms, and even more those that underlie navigation, are often complex and multimodal, involving not only visual cues but also sensory information about gravity, magnetic fields, chemical stimuli, mechanical and auditory cues, and even internal stimuli. As for so many other aspects of visual ecology, many of the critical observations have involved invertebrate animals, but work on vertebrates is very active as well.
Millard Fillmore and the Compromise of 1850
Authors: Greenstein Fred I. , Anderson Dale
Published: November 2017

This chapter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Millard Fillmore, focusing on six realms: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Vice President Fillmore unexpectedly became the thirteenth president of the United States following the death of Zachary Taylor on July 9, 1850. Fillmore had been sidelined in his predecessor's administration, but in his capacity as presiding officer of the Senate, he had carefully followed the heated congressional debate over the status of slavery in the Mexican Cession. Plunged immediately into a crisis when he assumed the presidency, Fillmore played a critical part in the enactment of compromise legislation that appeared at the time to have averted the threat of a war between the slave and free states.
What Difference Did the President Make?
Authors: Greenstein Fred I. , Anderson Dale
Published: November 2017

The Civil War era posed profound challenges to the six presidents. There is widespread agreement that Abraham Lincoln met that test in a superlative manner while Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan responded to it abysmally. It is also widely held that Millard Fillmore's performance was pedestrian and James K. Polk's was unusually effective. This chapter reviews the way each of these protagonists rose, or failed to rise, to the challenges of his times. It then explores the ways in which the leadership criteria employed in this book figured in the period under consideration. It concludes by discussing a pair of theoretical issues implicit in Allan Nevins' assertion in the epigraph to this chapter that if the nation had “possessed three farseeing, imaginative, and resolute” chief executives “instead of Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, the [Civil] War might have been postponed.”
The Cold War and After
Authors: Trachtenberg Marc
Published: November 2017

What makes for war or for a stable international system? Are there general principles that should govern foreign policy? This book explores how historical work can throw light on these questions. The essays in this book deal with specific problems—with such matters as nuclear strategy and U.S.–European relations. But the book's main goal is to show how in practice a certain type of scholarly work can be done. The book demonstrates how, in studying international politics, the conceptual and empirical sides of the analysis can be made to connect with each other, and how historical, theoretical, and even policy issues can be tied together in an intellectually respectable way. These essays address a wide variety of topics, from theoretical and policy issues, such as the question of preventive war and the problem of international order, to more historical subjects—for example, American policy on Eastern Europe in 1945 and Franco-American relations during the Nixon–Pompidou period. But in each case, the aim is to show how a theoretical perspective can be brought to bear on the analysis of historical issues, and how historical analysis can shed light on basic conceptual problems.
Introduction
Authors: Jaume Lucien
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to combine a study of context with an internal reading. Rather than offering a commentary on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, it attempts an interpretation based on signs, indices, and even stylistic turns of an author who revealed himself even as he attempted to draw a veil over his own views, and who can also be heard speaking in a different register in his correspondence and manuscripts as well as in the accounts of his contemporaries. To sharpen the intellectual portrait of Tocqueville the man, we need to identify the various levels of meaning contained in the text and the various audiences to which it was addressed.
Counterrevolutionary Traditionalism
Authors: Jaume Lucien
Published: November 2017

In the counterrevolutionary school, it remained an article of faith from the time of the Directory to the end of the nineteenth century that individualism is destructive of the social bond, that it is impossible to create a society from individual atoms. This chapter argues that Tocqueville did not believe that one could simply say that individualism destroys the social bond. Although he conceded the point to a certain extent, he was also impressed by the way in which individualistic Americans joined together to form associations, linking their particular interests to the general interest and ultimately creating a society with sovereignty of the people. In contrast to Bonald (who argued that democratic republics are not “constituted”) and de Maistre (who held that a democratic republic is a society without sovereignty and therefore without solidity), Tocqueville thus recognized that society could be constituted in new ways: associations linking public and private, forms of life created by decentralization, avowed or implicit religions, and so forth. But he aimed his criticism primarily at an idea that de Maistre had made famous: “the generative principle (principe générateur) of political constitutions.”