bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Agent-Based Simulations of Household Decision Making and Land Use Change near Altamira, Brazil
Authors: Lim Kevin , Deadman Peter J.
Published: November 2020

Individuals who influence decisions regarding the use of land, operate within a complex environment comprised of interacting elements that include both natural systems and human institutions. Individually, the elements of the natural and human systems that influence land-use decisions may be very complex. Within natural systems, dynamic processes, such as the hydrological cycle, and the distribution of biophysical resources, such as soil fertility, influence land-use decision making. Elements of an individual’s institutional environment can also influence the options and incentives that are available to an individual, and thus the land-use decisions that thhey make. Understanding the nature of these complex processes and interactions is a nontrivial task. However, agent-based simulation offers researchers a tool to better understand the nature of these complex systems. The recent development of computer simulation technologies by social scientists has provided a tool for not only predicting social phenomena, but also for better understanding the nature of these human systems. Replicative validity is not the goal of many social simulation efforts. Instead, researchers have focused on developing relatively simple simulations as tools for understanding the properties of social systems and the way in which interactions between actors at the local level results in the emergence of behaviors or phenomena at the global level. In this role, simulation becomes a tool for evaluating assumptions and exercising theories of action. Many of the techniques applied to social simulation can be traced back to earlier developments in the physical or natural sciences. For example, computer simulation has a relatively long history in the natural sciences in applications related to fisheries, forest environments, and watersheds. But recent advances in computer hardware and software technologies have made these technologies accessible to social scientists. Recently, we have seen simulation efforts that have included models of not only the natural system in question, but also the human system with which it interacts. In fields such as anthropology and resource management , human systems simulations are being developed which directly address the actions of human individuals or groups as they interact with a natural system. This approach to simulation is pursued in this chapter.
Making Harvard Modern
Authors: Keller Morton , Keller Phyllis
Published: November 2020

Making Harvard Modern is a candid, richly detailed portrait of America's most prominent university from 1933 to the present: seven decades of dramatic change. Early twentieth century Harvard was the country's oldest and richest university, but not necessarily its outstanding one. By the century's end it was widely regarded as the nation's, and the world's, leading institution of higher education. With verve, humor, and insight, Morton and Phyllis Keller tell the story of that rise: a tale of compelling personalities, notable achievement and no less notable academic pratfalls. Their book is based on rich and revealing archival materials, interviews, and personal experience. Young, humbly born James Bryant Conant succeeded Boston Brahmin A. Lawrence Lowell as Harvard's president in 1933, and set out to change a Brahmin-dominated university into a meritocratic one. He hoped to recruit the nation's finest scholars and an outstanding national student body. But the lack of new money during the Depression and the distractions of World War Two kept Conant, and Harvard, from achieving this goal. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the presidency of Conant's successor Nathan Marsh Pusey, Harvard raised the money, recruited the faculty, and attracted the students that made it a great meritocratic institution: America's university. The authors provide the fullest account yet of this transformation, and of the wrenching campus crisis of the late 'sixties. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century, a new academic culture arose: meritocratic Harvard morphed into worldly Harvard. During the presidencies of Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine the university opened its doors to growing numbers of foreign students, women, African- and Asian-Americans, and Hispanics. Its administration, faculty, and students became more deeply engaged in social issues; its scientists and professional schools were more ready to enter into shared commercial ventures. But worldliness brought its own conflicts: over affirmative action and political correctness, over commercialization, over the ever higher costs of higher education. This fascinating account, the first comprehensive history of a modern American university, is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the present state and future course of higher education.
All About Fibromyalgia
Authors: Wallace Daniel J. , Brock Wallace Janice
Published: November 2020

This year, six million Americans--most of them women--will go to their doctors, complaining of an illness they have no name for. The majority will be turned away or treated for depression; the few who persist will go to an average of four doctors before they receive the correct diagnosis: fibromyalgia. In their earlier Making Sense of Fibromyalgia, noted medical writer Janice Wallace and Dr. Daniel Wallace, a leading expert on this disorder, provided a comprehensive guide--for both patients and professionals--to this little known and poorly understood syndrome. Now, in All About Fibromyalgia, the Wallaces provide a thoroughly revised and updated version of that highly successful volume, incorporating a wealth of new information. This edition provides the current understanding of the disease as well as the latest drug treatments--all laid out in clear and accessible language. As in the previous volume, the authors provide a detailed, yet clear explanation of the disease. Fibromyalgia, they explain, is a form of chronic neuromuscular pain, a pain-amplification syndrome brought on by abnormal interactions between hormones, the immune system, neurotransmitters, and the autonomic nervous system. Sometimes the syndrome occurs spontaneously; in most cases, the authors write, it is associated with trauma, stress, such conditions as lupus and hypothyroidism, and over forty microbes, from hepatitis to Epstein-Barr to Lyme disease. Drawing on actual cases to illustrate their points, the authors help break through the isolation that patients often feel when doctors misdiagnose or simply ignore their symptoms. All About Fibromyalgia addresses a desperate need for information on this disease and offers reassurance to patients and their families.
Pretending
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

My earliest memory—was I two? three?—is of a nurse or babysitter who was dressed in white and had a bad smell. When she came into my room, I would pretend to be asleep. She looked down at me (I could sense her presence), then, satisfied by my closed eyes and quiet, if shallow, breathing, would turn and leave the room. Soon her odor would go away, too, and I could breathe deeply again. This taught me a lesson of dubious value: when helpless in a situation, pretending can give you power. I, a small, weak child, had controlled the movements of an enormous, smelly adult. It was some time later, I suppose, when I learned that pretending usually doesn’t work. Although I can’t recall the time or place, I know that on one grim day of disillusionment and reckoning I discovered that when I closed my eyes I didn’t become invisible; I couldn’t transport bullies to distant, foul places by imagining them there or alter the course of unwelcome events by pretending they were otherwise. Healthy children come to know the difference between pretending that is relaxing, stabilizing, healing, necessary—we call it fantasy—and pretending that is dangerous. A hot fire burns, even if we pretend that it won’t. In our personal lives most (but not all) of us learn to instantly distinguish harmless from harmful pretending, so we do not pretend in away that endangers our lives or physical well-being. Strangely enough, society as a whole is a different story. For at least the past fifty years, probably longer, we have been working hard as a high-tech civilization to ignore the limits of safe pretending, even to blot them out of our collective memory. And the more obvious the warning signals, the more blatant our pretending has become. A few examples will make the point. The first example is genetic engineering. In the late 1950s, I was fortunate to have as one of my teachers a visiting professor from England, Francis Crick of Watson and Crick fame, who taught part of an upper-level biochemistry course on the structure of macromolecules, especially desoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA.
Durable Goods
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

I have been reading about the Lenape. It started as a kind of penance. Every day I pick up the newspaper and learn about different ethnic peoples who have been driven from their homeland by some other ethnic peoples or have been simply exterminated in place, a more lasting way of getting rid of them. One morning, while eating oatmeal and skimming over the news of the latest genocide in The New York Times, a thought occurred to me: Aren’t I lucky that this isn’t happening in New Jersey? Not that it couldn’t, but at the moment it seems quite unlikely. Why not? I wondered. Is it our democratic government that protects us? Our melting pot society? Then another answer came to mind. New Jersey has had its ethnic cleansing already, a very comprehensive one—the destruction of the Lenape. As a child I was taught in school about the Lenni Lenape Indians, who once lived in New Jersey and then didn’t. The teaching never went much farther than that; it was pretty superficial compared with what my children learned about Indians (but not about the Lenni Lenape) in elementary school. So I decided to remedy the defect in my education and bought the only book about the Lenni Lenape I could find, a scholarly paperback by Herbert C. Kraft called The Lenape: Archaeology, History, and Ethnography. I bought it out of guilt—as I said, a penance. Not guilt for what was done to the native people of New Jersey, which wasn’t my fault or even the fault of my ancestors, who arrived in America in the late nineteenth century, themselves victims of persecution. The guilt was be-cause of a feeling that to live in the New Jersey–New York–eastern Pennsylvania region—that is, Lenapehoking—without knowing anything about its prior residents was disrespectful; it was a dishonoring, even an obliteration of their memory. Because of its penitential and scholarly nature, I expected my reading to be dull; surprisingly, the book turned out to be fascinating.
The Utopia Fallacy
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

Confrontation with a grand and formidable opponent can produce paradoxical results. It can unite in a common opposition people who have nothing else in common. It can evoke dramatic reserves of courage, energy, and creativity where none were suspected to exist. It also can cause sensible people who should know better to act as if the resolution of today’s problems will inevitably usher in a golden age tomorrow, as if the ending of one evil could not possibly lead to another. This is the Utopia fallacy. The central problem of our age has been bigness: bigness of corporations, weapons systems, trade organizations, human population, media conglomerates, and—enabling all other bigness—the power of science and technology. Only the earth itself is large enough, barely, to serve as a comparator for the scope of our undertakings—hence the ugly term globalization, used to describe the processes that have increasingly ruled our lives during the past century. So relentless has been the advance of bigness, so rapidly has it swallowed up everything that is small and self-contained, that it seems about to engulf the entire world, which will be fixed forever in the grip of one global production system, one global trade organization, one global currency, one global store, one global language and culture, one global media outlet, one global selection of foods, one global political entity, and one global police force. Once this condition has been reached, historical change will cease and human freedom will be a thing of the dead past. Such is the fear of many. But terrifying as it may be and useful as it is as a rallying point for the fight against globalization, this particular vision of the future is more threat than substance. Bigness and globalization are nearing the end of their dominion. For a while there will be more conglomeration and centralization, and a decade or two or three of additional damage—but the days of globalization are numbered. Now is the time to prepare ourselves for the world that will follow, a world of smallness and decentralization.
Traditions
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

he Jewish holiday of Sukkot has set me thinking about ritual traditions, wondering why they assume their curious forms and how they can out-live their originators and persist for such a very long time. Sukkot, or the feast of Tabernacles, more than any other religious holiday I observe, is defined by odd practices that make no obvious sense, yet they have been performed in approximately the same way every autumn for at least twenty-five hundred years. Although many of my friends feel that tradition sanctioned by religious authority is quite sufficient reason for observing the Sukkot rituals, I find it hard to eat a festive meal outdoors in October in a cramped and flimsy three-sided booth incompletely roofed with cornstalks, without asking myself, “Why am I doing this?” The answer, “Because your biblical ancestors spent forty years in the wilderness living in temporary booths or tents,” is adequate up to a point, but it doesn’t help to explain why, during six of the seven days of the festival, I am obliged to take four species of plants, a citron and an immature palm frond bound together with two branches of willow and three of myrtle, and point them successively east, south, west, and north, then down toward the earth and up toward the sky. The scriptural origin of the four species used during Sukkot is simple enough. In Leviticus 23:40, instructions are given that beginning on the first day of the holiday, you shall take “the fruit of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days.” No wasted words, no explanations. It was left to postbiblical rabbinic interpretation to fill in the needed details and standardize the ritual. Thus “the fruit of goodly trees became the citron (etrog in Hebrew), and the “boughs of thick trees” were declared to be myrtle branches. The method of attachment of the willow and myrtle sprigs to the palm frond (lulav), using strips of palm, was specified by the rabbis, as was the notion of waving the species in different directions.
Universities and Their Communities
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2020

I received an invitation to speak to the Heinz Endowments a few years ago. This major foundation was thinking of starting a program of charitable donations to help the environment and wanted advice about how to make the best use of its money. Would I participate, the director asked, in a one-day meeting on environmental education being organized by David Orr? My topic would be the role of the university. I went, and the following is more or less what I said to Heinz. During my first years as a board member of the Educational Foundation of America, which gives grants in a number of areas, including the environment and education, I was struck by the extreme scarcity of exciting, innovative, useful proposals coming out of the major research universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and the like. The second-tier research universities are no better; they are all scrambling to copy the bad models ahead of them. The problems that the universities are doing little or nothing to address—either in teaching or in research—are those that we must confront if our civilization is to survive. They are materialism in our culture; the deterioration of human communities; anomie; the commercialization (privatization) of former communal functions such as health, charity, and communication; the growth imperative; exploitation of the Third World; the disintegration of agriculture; our ignorance of the ecology of disease, especially epidemic disease; the loss of important skills and knowledge; the devastating decline in the moral and cultural-intellectual education of children; the impoverishment and devaluation of language; and the turning away from environmental and human realities in favor of thin, life-sucking electronic substitutes. Far from confronting these problems, universities are increasingly allying themselves with the multinational commercial forces that are causing them. The institutions that are supposed to be generating the ideas that nourish and sustain society have abandoned this function in their quest for cash. It is typical, for example, that with all the academics working on developing and patenting new crops, the only effective mechanism for monitoring and preserving the priceless and rapidly dwindling stock of existing crops in North America and Europe—the heritage of agriculture—was developed by a young farmer completely outside the university system.
Twine in the Baler
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

I recall a true story about an Ozark farmer who telephoned his neighbors one fine June day asking for help in getting in his hay. Arriving at the hayfield, people found the farmer baling his hay, but without twine in the baler. Unbound piles of hay, which would have to be entirely reraked and rebaled, lay all over the field. The farmer, with a bottle of whiskey in his lap, was feeling no pain, as they say, and did not seem to notice the problem, nor did the dozen or so men, similarly anesthetized, standing around the pickup trucks at the edge of the field. Believing the lack of twine to be a serious problem, one of the volunteers, a newcomer to such haying operations, suggested putting a roll of twine in the baler. To which an old-timer replied: “Naw, no need for that. Ol’ Billy-Hugh [the farmer in question] is having too much fun to stop now.” This story says something important about intention. Those of us who arrived on the scene ready to work failed to understand that the purpose of the event had nothing to do with getting in hay. This was a party, haying the pretext. Once we understood that, all of us could get in the flow, so to speak. A good many things, including politics, work similarly. One of the best books ever written about politics, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Edelman 1962), develops the thesis that the purpose of political activity is often not to solve problems but only to appear as if doing so. The politics of sustainability, unfortunately, provide no obvious exception to this tendency to exalt symbolism over substance. And of symbols and words there is no end. The subject of sustainability has become a growth industry. Government- and business-sponsored councils, conferences, and public meetings on sustainability proliferate, most of which seem to be symbolic gestures to allay public anxieties, not to get down to root causes.
The Limits of Nature and the Educational Nature of Limits
Authors: Orr David W.
Published: November 2020

I teach in a liberal arts college in a small, attractive Ohio town located in an agricultural county 14 miles south of Lake Erie. The town formerly had train service that connected it easily and comfortably to the wider world. Sometime in the 1950s the trains stopped coming, and the tracks were eventually converted into a bike trail. In the intervening four decades, students arrived on campus in a variety of ways, including bus, plane, car, and a few intrepid souls still come by train to a decaying Amtrak station eight miles distant. Now many, perhaps most, come in cars that they own and that they park anywhere and everywhere in town. So like many campuses, ours is overrun by cars. And like many other colleges, we find ourselves locked in conflict with the local authorities over parking policy. Our policy is roughly to tell students, “Y’all come and bring it with you.” Unless there is a sudden outbreak of intelligence, we are likely to respond to prodding by city officials by building yet another parking lot and thereby reducing to that degree the loveliness and serenity of the town already jeopardized by urban sprawl. That, however, is an aesthetic matter on which people can and will disagree. What they cannot dispute is the cost of parking. The cost of a single parking space is estimated to be $7,000 in a paved lot and double that for a parking deck. Then there is the annual cost of policing, lighting, removing snow, and landscaping parking lots, perhaps another $1,500. From this perspective, one obvious solution is simply not to build extra parking and split the savings with those who do not to bring cars to college or drive them to work. So in return for not adding to the problem, cooperators would get a check for, say, $5,000. Those who continue to drive for whatever reason would pay a fee equal to the real costs imposed on the institution by their driving habits. Reasonable? Not according to many who believe that driving is a sacred right guaranteed somewhere in the Constitution (or was it the Declaration of Independence?) and to those who believe that automobility is now indelibly written into our behavioral genes and cannot be further altered by evolution or reason.
China
Authors: Goldsmith Jack , Wu Tim
Published: November 2020

“Long live prostitutes” was the title of Wang’s posting. Fifteen years old, living in China, and full of teenage bluster, Wang had collected fifty-four reasons to think Chinese politicians worse than prostitutes. The list included:… • There is no indicator that prostitutes will disappear, but there are many indicators that the government will collapse. • Prostitutes allow others to oppose them, unlike the government which arrests opposition and “re-educates” them through labor. • Prostitutes have no power, unlike those who use their power to suppress others. • Prostitutes do not need you to love them, unlike that group which forces you to love it. • Prostitutes win customers with credibility, unlike those who maintain power with lies. • Prostitutes sell flesh, unlike those who sell soul…. Liu Di was a psychology student at Beijing Normal University who called herself the “Stainless Steel Mouse” and ran an “artist’s club” through her personal website. In 2002, in one of her many stunts, the twenty-two-year-old urged her followers to distribute Marxist literature:… Let’s conduct an experiment of behavioral art: disseminating communism on the street! We can print copies of “The Communist Manifesto.” However, we should take “Communist” out of the title. Then, like sociologists, we ask people on the street to sign their names onto the Manifesto…. Liu Di wrote an essay titled “How a national security apparatus can hurt national security.” Echoing typical criticism of governments everywhere, she called China’s security apparatus “limitless,” or possessed of “a tendency to expand, without limits, its size and functions.” Wang’s message and the writings of Liu Di appeared on obscure Internet sites. Nonetheless, they came to the attention of the Chinese authorities and provoked swift action. Soon after Wang posted his message, it was deleted. He was arrested in Henan and subjected to an unspecified punishment. Wang’s story was printed in the People’s Daily as a warning, with the headline “15-Year-Old Youth Punished For Making Reactionary Argument That the Government is Prostitute” The State Security Protection Bureau arrested Liu Di on her university campus on November 7, 2002.
Carbon Dioxide as a Reactant and Solvent in Catalysis
Authors: Noyori Ryoji , Ikariya Takao
Published: November 2020

An increased awareness of global atmospheric carbon levels and heightened efforts to recover industrial emissions prior to their release into the environment has led to the availability of an unprecedented amount of carbon dioxide for industrial utilization. Unfortunately, chemical utilization of carbon dioxide as an industrial feedstock is limited by thermodynamic and kinetic constraints. Toxic carbon monoxide, the main competitor in many processes, is used in industry instead because CO2 is perceived to be less reactive and its efficient catalytic conversion has remained elusive. The major commercial uses of CO2 today are in beverages, fire extinguishers, and refrigerants, where inert physical properties such as oxidative and thermodynamic stability are advantageous. It is this stability that has limited the use of CO2 to only a very few synthetic chemical processes (urea, aspirin, carbonates) despite the enormous availability of this resource. The conversion of CO2 into useful organic compounds will likely rely on the use of metal catalysts to lower energy inputs. Increasingly, the use of supercritical carbon dioxide appears to offer significant advantages in the catalytic activation of CO2 to yield useful products. Liquid or supercritical CO2 (sc CO2) can be used as a reaction medium and can potentially replace conventional organic solvents to serve as an environmentally benign reaction medium (Ikariya and Noyori, 1999; Jessop and Leitner, 1999; Jessop et al., 1995b; Noyori, 1999). A supercritical fluid (SCF) is any substance that has a temperature and pressure higher than their critical values and which has a density close to or higher than its critical density (Jessop and Leitner, 1999; Jessop et al., 1995b). Carbon dioxide has a critical temperature of 31.0 °C and a critical pressure of 71.8 bar. The supercritical region of the phase diagram is the one at temperatures higher than the Tc and pressures higher than the Pc at which the liquid and gas phases become indistinguishable. Below Tc, liquid CO2 can be maintained under relatively modest pressures. Subcritical liquid CO2 behaves like any other nonpolar liquid solvent. Properties such as density are continuous above the Tc and discontinuous below it.
Fluorous Phases and Compressed Carbon Dioxide as Alternative Solvents for Chemical Synthesis: A Comparison
Authors: Leitner Walter
Published: November 2020

The principal goal of basic research in chemical synthesis is the development of efficient tools for functional group transformations and for the assembly of building blocks during the construction of molecules with increasing complexity. Traditionally, new approaches in this area have focused on the quest for new reaction pathways, reagents, or catalysts. Comparably less effort has been devoted to utilize the reaction medium as a strategic parameter, although the use of solvents is often crucial in synthetically useful transformations. The first choice for a solvent during the development of a synthetic procedure is usually an organic liquid, which is selected on the basis of its protic or aprotic nature, its polarity, and the temperature range in which the reaction is expected to proceed. Once the desired transformation is achieved, yield and selectivity are further optimized in the given medium by variation of temperature, concentration, and related process parameters. At the end of the reaction, the solvent must be removed quantitatively from the product using conventional workup techniques like aqueous extraction, distillation, or chromatography. If the synthetic procedure becomes part of a large-scale application, the solvent can sometimes be recycled, but at least parts of it will ultimately end up in the waste stream of the process. Increasing efforts to develop chemical processes with minimized ecological impact and to reduce the emission of potentially hazardous or toxic organic chemicals have stimulated a rapidly growing interest to provide alternatives to this classical approach of synthesis in solution. At the same time, researchers have started to realize that the design and utilization of multifunctional reaction media can add a new dimension to the development of synthetic chemistry. In particular, efficient protocols for phase separations and recovery of reagents and catalysts are urgently required to provide innovative flow schemes for environmentally benign processes or for high-throughput screening procedures. Fluorous liquid phases and supercritical carbon dioxide (sc CO2) have received particular attention among the various reaction media that are discussed as alternatives to classical organic solvents. The aim of this chapter is to compare these two media directly and to critically evaluate their potential for synthetic organic chemistry.
The Strength of Strong Ties : The Importance of Philos in Organizations
Authors: Krackhardt David
Published: November 2020

In 1973, Mark Granovetter proposed that weak ties are often more important than strong ties in understanding certain network-based phenomena. His argument rests on the assumption that strong ties tend to bond similar people to each other and these similar people tend to cluster together such that they are all mutually connected. The information obtained through such a network tie is more likely to be redundant, and the network is therefore not a channel for innovation. By contrast, a weak tie more often constitutes a “local bridge” to parts of the social system that are otherwise disconnected, and therefore a weak tie is likely to provide new information from disparate parts of the system. Thus, this theory argues, tie strength is curvilinear with a host of dependent variables: no tie (or an extremely weak tie) is of little consequence; a weak tie provides maximum impact, and a strong tie provides diminished impact. Subsequent research has generally supported Granovetter’s theory (Granovetter 1982), but two issues have been neglected in the research stream. First, there is considerable ambiguity as to what constitutes a strong tie and what constitutes a weak tie. Granovetter laid out four identifying properties of a strong tie: “The strength of a tie is a (probably linear) combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie” (1973:1361). This makes tie strength a linear function of four quasi-independent indicators. At what point is a tie to be considered weak? This is not simply a question for the methodologically curious. It is an important part of the theory itself, since the theory makes a curvilinear prediction. If we happen to be on the very left side of the continuum of tie strength, then increasing the strength of the tie (going from no tie to weak tie) will increase the relevant information access. On the other hand, at some point making the ties stronger will theoretically decrease their impact. How do we know where we are on this theoretical curve? Do all four indicators count equally toward tie strength? In practice, tie strength has been measured many different ways.
Knowing What We Know : Supporting Knowledge Creation and Sharing in Social Networks
Authors: Cross Rob , Parker Andrew
Published: November 2020

The way in which this manager relied on his network to obtain information and knowledge critical to the success of an important project is common and likely resonates with your own experience. Usually when we think of where people turn for information or knowledge we think of databases, the Web, intranets and portals or other, more traditional, repositories such as file cabinets or policy and procedure manuals. However, a significant component of a person’s information environment consists of the relationships he or she can tap for various informational needs. For example, in summarizing a decade worth of studies, Tom Allen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that engineers and scientists were roughly five times more likely to turn to a person for information than to an impersonal source such as a database or a file cabinet. In other settings, research has consistently shown that who you know has a significant impact on what you come to know, as relationships are critical for obtaining information, solving problems, and learning how to do your work. Particularly in knowledge-intensive work, creating an informational environment that helps employees solve increasingly complex and often ambiguous problems holds significant performance implications. Frequently such efforts entail knowledge-management initiatives focusing on the capture and sharing of codified knowledge and reusable work products. To be sure, these so-called knowledge bases hold pragmatic benefits. They bridge boundaries of time and space, allow for potential reuse of tools or work products employed successfully in other areas of an organization, and provide a means of reducing organizational “forgetting” as a function of employee turnover. However, such initiatives often undervalue crucial knowledge held by employees and the web of relationships that help dynamically solve problems and create new knowledge. As we move further into an economy where collaboration and innovation are increasingly central to organizational effectiveness, we must pay more attention to the sets of relationships that people rely on to accomplish their work. Certainly we can expect emerging collaborative technologies to facilitate virtual work and skill-profiling systems to help with the location of relevant expertise.
A Social Network Perspective on Human Resources Management
Authors: Brass Daniel J.
Published: November 2020

It is, of course, highly appropriate that the study of personnel and human resources management in fact focuses on individuals in organizations; and, it is to the credit of my industrial/organizational psychology friends that so much progress has occurred in the recruitment, selection, training, appraisal, compensation, and career development of employees. However, to focus on the individual in isolation, to search in perpetuity for the elusive personality or demographic characteristic that defines the successful employee is, at best, failing to see the entire picture. At worst, it is misdirected effort continued by the overwhelming desire to develop the perfect measurement instrument. There is little doubt (at least in my mind) that the traditional study of personnel and human resources management has been dominated by the perspective that focuses on the individual or the organization in isolation. We are, of course, continually reminded of the need for an interactionist perspective; that is, that the responses of actors are a function of both the attributes of the actors and their environments (cf. Schneider, 1983). Although our research sometimes seems to ignore this dictum, the predominant model in human resources management has been one of matching the characteristics of the worker with the characteristics of the organization (Betz, Fitzgerald, & Hill, 1989). The characteristics of the organization, or more recently, the organization’s strategy (Snell, 1992; Wright & McMahan, 1992), defines the relevant individual attributes to be considered in recruitment, selection, training, appraisal, and compensation and promotion. Even with this “matching model,” the environment is little more than a context for individual interests, needs, values, motivation, and behavior. Beginning with Cattell and Binet, our human resources management task has been to develop methods of measuring these individual differences. I do not mean to suggest that individuals do not differ in their skills and abilities and their willingness to use them. I, too, revel in the tradition of American individualism. I will not dismiss the dispositional approach or the lure of “macro organizational psychology” (Staw & Sutton, 1993) to suggest that individuals are merely the “actees” rather than the actors (Mayhew, 1980).
On the Role of Non-Gaussian Noises on Noise-Induced Phenomena
Authors: Wio Horacio
Published: November 2020

Most of the studies of noise-induced phenomena assume that the noise source is Gaussian (either white or colored). Here we present recent results of some of those noise-induced phenomena when driven by a noise source taken as colored and non-Gaussian, generated by a nonextensive g-distribution. In all the cases analyzed we have found that the response of the system is strongly affected by a departure of the noise source from the Gaussian behavior, showing an enhancement and/or a marked broadening of the corresponding system's response. The general result is that the value of the parameter q, optimizing the system's response, results in q ≠ 1 (where q = 1 corresponds to a Gaussian distribution). These results are of great relevance for many technological applications as well as for some situations of medical interest, like the noisy control of Wenckebach rhythms…. Fluctuations (or noise) have had a changing role in the history of science. We can identify three different stages. During the a first one, which lasted until the end of nineteenth century, noise was considered a nuisance to be avoided or eliminated. In the second stage, which started at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible to extract more information from a physical system through the study of fluctuations via Onsager, fluctuation-dissipation, and other related relations. The third stage corresponds to the last few decades of the twentieth century, with the recognition that in many situations noise can actually play a driving role that induces new phenomena. Some examples are noise-induced phase transitions [18, 27, 28], noise-induced transport [2, 29, 34, 35], stochastic resonance [17], and noise-sustained patterns [18]. Most of the studies on the noise-induced phenomena indicated above assume that the noise source is Gaussian (either white or colored). In addition to the intrinsic interest in the study of non-Gaussian noises, there is some experimental evidence, particularly in sensory and biological systems [3, 16, 20, 30, 32, 39], indicating that in at least some of these phenomena the noise sources could be non-Gaussian. The use of non-Gaussian noises in such studies is rare, mainly due to the difficulties of handling them and to the possibility of obtaining some analytical results when working with Gaussian (particularly white) noises.
A Legacy of Empires? An Exploration of the Environmental and Medical Consequences of Metal Production in Wadi Faynan, Jordan
Authors: Gilbertson David D. , Taylor Sharon
Published: November 2020

We have explored, and outline herein, the accumulation of copper in humans, plants, and animals in a remote desert area of southwest Jordan, Wadi Faynan, where mining and smelting activities began about 7000 years ago and effectively ceased 1500 years ago. The archaeological core of the area, Khirbet Faynan, is the ruin of the Roman city of Phaino, one of the major mining and smelting centers of the Roman world. In addition, the Faynan area was one of the most important suppliers of copper to ancient Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt (Klein and Hauptmann 1999). Ancient industrial archaeology abounds in the form of adit and shaft mines, ore and metal processing sites, kilns, and spoil and slag heaps (Hauptmann et al. 1992, Hauptmann 2000). The industrial archaeology is closely associated with a complex and extensive irrigated system of fields, which must have been constructed and maintained to feed the workforce in this remote arid area (Barker et al. 1998, 2000). Wadi Faynan is therefore ideally suited to explore the environmental impact of metal production in the past, and its impact, if any, in the modern environment. The study area is located in the hot and very arid Jordanian Desert at the mountain front at the eastern margin of the Wadi Araba, between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. These environmental conditions promote the widespread deflation and redistribution of dusts, which inevitably include metalliferous materials released from eroding spoil and slag heaps and ore processing sites (Gee et al. 1997, Pyatt and Birch 1994). The geology of the region is very complex and of key importance to understanding the consequences of mining and pollution in the region. Copper and locally lead mineralization is present in several rock strata, in particular the Numaya Dolomite Limestone of the Durj Dolomite Shale Formation and the Umm’ Ishrin Sandstone Formation of Middle and Early Cambrian age (Barjous 1992, Bender 1974, Hauptmann 2000, Rabb’a 1992). Adjacent to Khirbet Faynan is a reservoir that was abandoned as a water storage facility before the fifth century BC.
Soldiers and Nationalism : The Glory and Transience of a Hard-Won Territorial Identity
Authors: Dijkink Gertjan
Published: November 2020

Anton von Werner’s Im Etappenquartier vor Paris (In quarters before Paris) is based on a sketch done by the painter during the German military campaign against France in October 1870. German soldiers amuse themselves with songs at the piano in a requisitioned manor house near Paris (Brunoy). Attracted by the music, the French concierge and child appear in the doorway. Some mundane activities to further enhance the atmosphere are in progress: lamps are lighted and a fire is kindled in the fireplace. We even know the song that is performed: Schubert’s “Am Meer” (By the sea), with words by Heinrich Heine. Nothing yet anticipates the disillusioned statement of George Steiner that became characteristic of late-twentieth-century reflection on war and culture: “We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.” In Werner’s painting, war still seems to be an innocent affair that first of all produces mud-stained boots. These boots and the sphere of fraternization that even encompasses the French housekeeper were meant to evoke the impression of sincerity in German soldiers, according to a German art historian. Ultimately converted into a painting, the picture became really popular when it was sold on the German market as a small tapestry after 1895. As the German writer and critic Ludwig Pietsch wrote at the time, “[Such pictures show] the good-natured and sentimental nature of the national character [. . .] which even in the rough and wild times of war and in the midst of an irreconcilable enemy cannot be denied.” Not surprisingly, the French reading of this picture (once or twice on exhibition in Paris) is somewhat different: “The attitudes of the lumpish soldiers with their blusterous posture, their heavy mud-stained boots, are completely in contrast to the refinement of the furniture. The conquerors behave somewhat like vandals. At the right in the doorway, the maid, on whom an officer seems to have designs, watches the scene accompanied by her daughter, who is hardly able to hide her fear.”
Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought
Authors: Boken Vijendra K. , Cracknell Arthur P. , Heathcote Ronald L.
Published: November 2020

Agricultural droughts affect whole societies, leading to higher food costs, threatened economies, and even famine. In order to mitigate such effects, researchers must first be able to monitor them, and then predict them; however no book currently focuses on accurate monitoring or prediction of these devastating kinds of droughts. To fill this void, the editors of Monitoring and Predicting Agricultural Drought have assembled a team of expert contributors from all continents to make a global study, describing biometeorological models and monitoring methods for agricultural droughts. These models and methods note the relationships between precipitation, soil moisture, and crop yields, using data gathered from conventional and remote sensing techniques. The coverage of the book includes probabilistic models and techniques used in America, Europe and the former USSR, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and it concludes with coverage of climate change and resultant shifts in agricultural productivity, drought early warning systems, and famine mitigation. This will be an essential collection for those who must advise governments or international organizations on the current scope, likelihood, and impact of agricultural droughts. Sponsored by the World Meterological Organization
Responses of Individual Plant Species to Serpentine Soils
Authors: Alexander Earl B. , Coleman Roger G. , Keeler-Wolfe Todd , Harrison Susan P.
Published: November 2020

In this chapter we summarize current knowledge of the physiological, evolutionary, and distributional effects of serpentine on individual plant species (see also the excellent review of the evolutionary ecology of serpentine plants by Brady et al. [2005]) A useful terminology for discussing plant responses to serpentine is Kruckeberg’s classification of species as serpentine avoiders, indifferents, endemics, and indicators (Kruckeberg 1954, 1984). Serpentine avoiders are taxa that are seldom or never found on serpentine, whereas indifferent (or bodenvag) taxa are found with roughly equivalent frequencies on and off of serpentine. Endemics are species or subspecific taxa that are entirely or almost entirely restricted to serpentine. Serpentine indicators are taxa that are either locally more common on serpentine than on other substrates or restricted to serpentine in only parts of their geographic or ecological ranges. As with any classification system, this one is only a starting point for understanding natural variation. Plant responses form a continuum from complete restriction to serpentine on one hand and complete avoidance of it on the other, and many taxa lie in between, with markedly higher or (more often) lower abundances on serpentine. It is especially common for species to be partly restricted to serpentine but also to occur on other unusual substrates (e.g., limestone, acid soils, or scree; Rune 1953), or for species to be restricted to serpentine at lower but not at higher elevations or latitudes (Rune 1953, Kruckeberg 1984, Brooks 1987). The degree of restriction to serpentine also commonly depends on the strength of other influential environmental variables such as climate, and on the history and diversity of the surrounding region. Moreover, “indifferent” taxa often show divergence into serpentine-tolerant and intolerant ecotypes, which may or may not represent the early stages of formation of new endemic species. Many fascinating ecological and evolutionary questions thus lie at the transitions between avoidance, indifference, indicator status, and endemism. Serpentine endemics have been further classified in terms of their inferred evolutionary history as either neo- or paleoendemics. Neoendemics (called “true serpentinophytes” by Rune 1953) are species that are thought to have originated through a localized shift onto serpentine, as evidenced by their narrow present-day geographic distributions and the proximity of closely related taxa on other substrates.