bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Grimm Legacies
Authors: Zipes Jack
Published: November 2017

This book explores the legacy of the Brothers Grimm in Europe and North America, from the nineteenth century to the present. The book reveals how the Grimms came to play a pivotal and unusual role in the evolution of Western folklore and in the history of the most significant cultural genre in the world—the fairy tale. Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover and preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues, and strangers to gather and share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk and fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe and have kept coming. The book looks at the transformation of the Grimms' tales into children's literature, the Americanization of the tales, the “Grimm” aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales' utopian impulses. It shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership and setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. The book concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales and raises questions about authenticity, target audience, and consumerism. The book examines the lasting universal influence of two brothers and their collected tales on today's storytelling world.
Hierarchy
Authors: Levine Caroline
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that if we consider closely the workings of hierarchical forms, we will find that they exert a far less orderly and systematic kind of domination than we might expect. It begins with a reading of Sophocles's Antigone. In this tragedy, the playwright sets a number powerful hierarchies in motion, almost all of them organized as simple binaries: masculine over feminine, king over subjects, friends over enemies, gods over humans. As these meet and intersect in the course of the dramatic action, a firm insistence on one hierarchy typically ends up reversing or subverting the logic of another, generating a political landscape of radical instability and unpredictability. The second section of the chapter expands to include other forms: what happens when bounded wholes and rhythms, too, come into the picture, organizing our experience atop or alongside hierarchies? Do these different, nonhomologous forms work with or athwart one another? The focus will be gender norms, a problem of longstanding interest in literary and cultural studies.
Genius in France
Authors: Jefferson Ann
Published: November 2017

This book spans three centuries to provide the first full account of the long and diverse history of genius in France. Exploring a wide range of examples from literature, philosophy, and history, as well as medicine, psychology, and journalism, the book examines the ways in which the idea of genius has been ceaselessly reflected on and redefined through its uses in these different contexts. The book traces its varying fortunes through the madness and imposture with which genius is often associated, and through the observations of those who determine its presence in others. The book considers the modern beginnings of genius in eighteenth-century aesthetics and the works of philosophes such as Diderot. It then investigates the nineteenth-century notion of national and collective genius, the self-appointed role of Romantic poets as misunderstood geniuses, the recurrent obsession with failed genius in the realist novels of writers like Balzac and Zola, the contested category of female genius, and the medical literature that viewed genius as a form of pathology. The book shows how twentieth-century views of genius narrowed through its association with IQ and child prodigies, and discusses the different ways major theorists—including Sartre, Barthes, Derrida, and Kristeva—have repudiated and subsequently revived the concept. The book brings a fresh approach to French intellectual and cultural history, and to the burgeoning field of genius studies.
Analytic Philosophy in America
Authors: Soames Scott
Published: November 2017

This collection of recent and unpublished essays traces milestones in the field of analytic philosophy from its beginnings in Britain and Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through its subsequent growth in the United States, up to its present as the world’s most vigorous philosophical tradition. The central chapter chronicles how analytic philosophy developed in the United States out of American pragmatism, the impact of European visitors and immigrants, the mid-century transformation of the Harvard philosophy department, and the rapid spread of the analytic approach that followed. Another chapter explains the methodology guiding analytic philosophy, from the logicism of Frege and Russell through Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn and Carnap’s vision of replacing metaphysics with philosophy of science. Further chapters review advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics that laid the foundation for a rigorous, scientific study of language, meaning, and information. Other chapters discuss W. V. O. Quine, David K. Lewis, Saul Kripke, the Frege–Russell analysis of quantification, Russell’s attempt to eliminate sets with his “no class theory,” and the Quine–Carnap dispute over meaning and ontology. The book then turns to topics at the frontier of philosophy of language. The final chapters, combining philosophy of language and law, advance a sophisticated originalist theory of interpretation and apply it to U.S. constitutional rulings about due process.
Toward a Theory of Legal Interpretation
Authors: Soames Scott
Published: November 2017

This chapter is concerned with the content of legal norms governing the interpretation of legal texts by legally authoritative actors in a legal system. As such, a theory of legal interpretation is a theory of the content of the law, codified or uncodified, governing legally authorized interpreters. Thought of in this way, it is a nonnormative empirical theory related to, but distinct from, (a) empirical theories about what the mass of judges in a particular legal system actually do in the cases before them; (b) moral theories about what they morally should do in particular cases; and (c) politically normative theories about what the role of the judiciary should be in an ideal system. The most important question to be answered by such a theory is, what precisely is required of legally authoritative interpreters, how much and what kind of latitude are they allowed, and what factors are they to take into account in their interpretations?
Creating Community in an Individualistic Age
Authors: Cornfield Daniel B.
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes how artist activists from Nashville are creating a “mechanically solidary” community of entrepreneurial artists alongside and partly from the ranks of an older, organically solidary corporate-era artist community. Nashville entrepreneurial musicians constitute themselves as a community by producing and performing for one another, showing up to each others' showcases, and extending mutual aid during trying moments in their lives. Here, the Nashville musician community has a tendency to “cross-promote,” and the chapter reveals how the community is largely very supportive of each other's art. In addition, the chapter also discusses the background of the present study and the approaches the author has taken in studying Nashville's artist community.
Artist Activism
Authors: Cornfield Daniel B.
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents a new sociological theory of artist activism that addresses the question of how artist activists fashion their roles as artist activists. Specifically, the theory addresses how individual subjective orientations shape the repertoire of individual and collective actions and roles assumed and enacted by artist activists. The theory attributes individual variations in role assumption and enactment to artist orientations toward success, audience, risk, and career inspiration. This is a theory-building project of the new sociology of work. Research in the new sociology of work has addressed individual risk-management strategies for advancing individual careers and social mobility of free agents. In contrast, the sociological theory of artist activism presented here addresses how artist activists build a peer community for sustaining the livelihoods of individuals and the whole occupation.
Creating Social Spaces for Artists
Authors: Cornfield Daniel B.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the pathways to becoming an artistic social entrepreneur. Previous research on social entrepreneurs has emphasized the impact of one's stock of human, social, and cultural capital on one's mobilization of requisite resources for launching and sustaining a social enterprise. Less sociological attention has been given to the influence of career-biographical factors, such as family, religion, education, and pivotal career turning points that may inspire and compel one to become a social entrepreneur and to envision and shape one's social enterprise, let alone an artistic social enterprise. The profiles of four artistic social entrepreneurs in this chapter illustrate how their strategic and risk orientations and career pathways shape the social enterprises they envision and influence their assumption and enactment of their roles as artist activists.
“Person”
Authors: Strawson Galen
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines John Locke's use of the word “person” as the root cause of the misunderstanding about his theory of personal identity. Most of Locke's readers tend to take the term “person” as if it were only a sortal term of a standard kind, that is, a term for a standard temporal continuant, like “human being” or “thinking thing.” However, they fail to take into account the fact that Locke is using “person” as a “forensic” term, that is, a term that finds its principal use in contexts in which questions about the attribution of responsibility (praise and blame, punishment and reward) are foremost. The chapter explains how a Lockean person, or more specifically Person [P], differs from the standard person and describes the three components of [P]: a whole human material body, an immaterial soul, and a set of actions both present and past.
“From the inside”
Authors: Strawson Galen
Published: November 2017

This chapter relates John Locke's use of the word “consciousness” to the notion that a subject of experience's field of consciousness is identical with its “field of from-the-inside givenness,” where this includes all its present experience, as well as all memories accessible from-the-inside, and also everything somatosensorily available. The chapter suggests that a subject of experience's field of consciousness is identical with its field of morally-affectively-concerned from-the-inside experience, and that Lockean consciousness is always accompanied by concernment. Finally, it considers the fundamental and forensic aspect of Locke's view of personal identity, the commonsense point that “human beings won't on the Day of Judgment be responsible for all the things they have done in their lives, but only for those that they're still Conscious of and so still Concerned in.”
“Person”—Locke’s Definition
Authors: Strawson Galen
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines John Locke's definition of “Person” by showing that “the Person or self that I am, the individual morally accountable subject of experience [P] that I am, considered at any given particular time t, consists of the following things: [M] my living body at t, [I] my soul at t, and [A] all the actions and experiences, past and present, of the individual persisting subject of experience that I am of which I am now (occurrently or dispositionally) conscious at t.” The chapter also analyzes Locke's statement that consciousness of one of Nestor's actions would make one “the same person with Nestor” and argues that he is not concerned with the essential link between consciousness and concernment, but with the sensory-cognitive core of consciousness and the no less purely cognitive capacity for temporally extended full self-consciousness.
Aristocracy About 1760: The Constituted Bodies
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents a descriptive survey of the constituted bodies of the middle of the eighteenth century, with especial reference to their membership and recruitment. It covers the diets of Eastern Europe, councils and estates of the Middle Zone, provincial estates and parlements of France, and parliaments and assemblies in the British Isles and America. It argues that nothing was more characteristic of the eighteenth century than constituted bodies of parliamentary or conciliar type. They existed everywhere west of Russia and Turkey. They were more universal than the institution of monarchy, more widespread than the famous middle class. All defended their liberties as they understood them. In defending their rights and justifying their pretensions, the constituted bodies elaborated a good deal of political theory.
The American Revolution: The Forces in Conflict
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the players involved in the American Revolution, which is considered a great event for the whole Euro-American world. In the Age of the Democratic Revolution, the American Revolution was the earliest successful assertion of the principle that public power must arise from those over whom it is exercised. It was the most important revolution of the eighteenth century, except for the French. Its effect on the area of Western Civilization came in part from the inspiration of its message (which in time passed beyond the area of Western Civilization), and in part from the involvement of the American Revolution in the European War of American Independence, which aggravated the financial or political difficulties of England, Ireland, Holland, and France.
Two Parliaments Escape Reform
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on events in Europe in the years between 1774 and 1789, or between the beginnings of the American and of the French revolutions. During this period, the stresses and conflicts grew more acute. Events in America aroused the sense of a new era in Europe, encouraged a negative attitude in Europe toward European institutions, and induced a belief in the possibility of change in the directions desired by persons hitherto excluded from political life. The influence of America, and of much indigenous European development, operated in general in a democratic direction. But real events in Europe, as distinguished from the stirring up of ideas, seemed to be going the opposite way. There was a widespread aristocratic resurgence, or perhaps only a “surgence,” a rising bid for power and recognition, or successful offensive against antiaristocratic forces, whether monarchic or democratic, at the very time when other developments, such as the impact of the American Revolution, made a great many people less willing than ever to accept any such drift of affairs.
The Revolutionizing of the Revolution
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

In 1792, the French Revolution became a thing in itself, an uncontrollable force that might eventually spend itself but which no one could direct or guide. The governments set up in Paris in the following years all faced the problem of holding together against forces more revolutionary than themselves. This chapter distinguishes two such forces for analytical purposes. There was a popular upheaval, an upsurge from below, sans-culottisme, which occurred only in France. Second, there was the “international” revolutionary agitation, which was not international in any strict sense, but only concurrent within the boundaries of various states as then organized. From the French point of view these were the “foreign” revolutionaries or sympathizers. The most radical of the “foreign” revolutionaries were seldom more than advanced political democrats. Repeatedly, however, from 1792 to 1799, these two forces tended to converge into one force in opposition to the French government of the moment.
Liberation and Annexation: 1792–1793
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

In 1792, the French army occupied Belgium, and the Russian army, closely followed by the Prussian, occupied Poland. In both cases the entering powers announced themselves as liberators, and were welcomed as such by certain elements in the population. The French in Belgium within a few weeks passed to a policy of annexation. The Russians and Prussians had annexationist designs on Poland from the beginning. The French were soon driven out, but returned in 1794, so that Belgium remained incorporated into France for twenty years. The Russian and Prussian monarchies never gave up what they took of Poland in 1793, except that for a few years the Prussian segment belonged to Napoleon's Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Only with the destruction of the Russian and Prussian monarchies themselves, in 1918, were the annexations of 1793 undone, and then only in part. This chapter, under the formal parallel of liberation and annexation, traces the realities which these terms represented in 1792–1793—that is, to show who was liberated from what, or how and why annexed—and to indicate also the impact of these events on the further radicalizing of the revolution in France itself.
Victories of the Counter-Revolution in Eastern Europe
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

The year that saw the survival of the revolution in France saw its extinction in Poland. The same months in which it became clear that structural changes would spread to Belgium and Holland saw the stamping out of “Jacobinism” in Austria and in Hungary. This chapter describes—not the failure of revolution in Eastern Europe, since, except in Poland, no revolution was attempted—but the triumph and strengthening of counter-revolutionary forces in Eastern Europe at this time. These were the forces, agrarian and conservatively aristocratic, which had already largely destroyed the work of Joseph II in the Hapsburg Empire and combined to annihilate the Polish constitution of 1791.
The French Directory between Extremes
Authors: Palmer R. R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the extreme Left of the French Revolution led by an obscure journalist who called himself “Gracchus” Babeuf and his co-worker Philippe Buonarroti, a French citizen of Italian birth, and their Conspiracy of Equals of 1796. The Conspiracy of Equals has always been looked back on with respectful interest by partisans of the modern Left, as the first manifestation of the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How far the Conspiracy was “communistic” remains uncertain. But even the inner leadership had diverse aims, and the whole movement was so secret and so short-lived that the secondary organizers, not to mention the ordinary followers, never knew who the leaders were or what their purposes might be.
From Sheaf Cohomology to the Algebraic de Rham Theorem
Authors: Zein Fouad El , Tu Loring W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter proves Grothendieck's algebraic de Rham theorem. It first proves Grothendieck's algebraic de Rham theorem more or less from scratch for a smooth complex projective variety X, namely, that there is an isomorphism H*(Xₐₙ,ℂ) ≃ H*X,Ω‎subscript alg superscript bullet) between the complex singular cohomology of Xan and the hypercohomology of the complex Ω‎subscript alg superscript bullet of sheaves of algebraic differential forms on X. The proof necessitates a discussion of sheaf cohomology, coherent sheaves, and hypercohomology. The chapter then develops more machinery, mainly the Čech cohomology of a sheaf and the Čech cohomology of a complex of sheaves, as tools for computing hypercohomology. The chapter thus proves that the general case of Grothendieck's theorem is equivalent to the affine case.
Biomolecular Feedback Systems
Authors: Del Vecchio Domitilla , Murray Richard M.
Published: November 2017

This book provides an accessible introduction to the principles and tools for modeling, analyzing, and synthesizing biomolecular systems. It begins with modeling tools such as reaction-rate equations, reduced-order models, stochastic models, and specific models of important core processes. It then describes in detail the control and dynamical systems tools used to analyze these models. These include tools for analyzing stability of equilibria, limit cycles, robustness, and parameter uncertainty. Modeling and analysis techniques are then applied to design examples from both natural systems and synthetic biomolecular circuits. In addition, the book addresses the problem of modular composition of synthetic circuits, the tools for analyzing the extent of modularity, and the design techniques for ensuring modular behavior. It also looks at design trade-offs, focusing on perturbations due to noise and competition for shared cellular resources. Featuring numerous exercises and illustrations throughout, the book is the ideal textbook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. For researchers, it can also serve as a self-contained reference on the feedback control techniques that can be applied to biomolecular systems.
Quantitative Viral Ecology
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

When we think about viruses we tend to consider ones that afflict humans—such as those that cause influenza, HIV, and Ebola. Yet, vastly more viruses infect single-celled microbes. Diverse and abundant, microbes and the viruses that infect them are found in oceans, lakes, plants, soil, and animal-associated microbiomes. Taking a vital look at the “microscopic” mode of disease dynamics, this book establishes a theoretical foundation from which to model and predict the ecological and evolutionary dynamics that result from the interaction between viruses and their microbial hosts. The book addresses three major questions: What are viruses of microbes and what do they do to their hosts? How do interactions of a single virus–host pair affect the number and traits of hosts and virus populations? How do virus–host dynamics emerge in natural environments when interactions take place between many viruses and many hosts? Emphasizing how theory and models can provide answers, the book offers a cohesive framework for tackling new challenges in the study of viruses and microbes and how they are connected to ecological processes—from the laboratory to the Earth system. The book is an innovative exploration of the influence of viruses in our complex natural world.
Population Dynamics of Viruses and Microbes
Authors: Weitz Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how virus–host interactions affect population dynamics. Models of virus–host interactions suggest that long-term persistence between a single virus population and a single host population is possible. Population dynamics models demonstrate that one potential effect of a viral infection is to shift a community from bottom-up to top-down control. One hallmark of top-down control is a decrease in host abundance with virus addition. A second hallmark of top-down control is an increase in resource concentration with virus addition. Virus–host population dynamics can exhibit oscillations. These oscillations are typified by phase lags between peaks in population abundances of host and virus, in which the host peak precedes the viral peak. The period of oscillations is often much longer than the latent period time between viral infection and lysis.
Social Evolution and Inclusive Fitness Theory
Authors: Marshall James A.R.
Published: November 2017

Social behavior has long puzzled evolutionary biologists, since the classical theory of natural selection maintains that individuals should not sacrifice their own fitness to affect that of others. This book argues that a theory first presented in 1963 by William D. Hamilton—inclusive fitness theory—provides the most fundamental and general explanation for the evolution and maintenance of social behaviors in the natural world. The book guides readers through the vast and confusing literature on the evolution of social behavior, introducing and explaining the competing theories that claim to provide answers to questions such as why animals evolve to behave altruistically. Using simple statistical language and techniques that practicing biologists will be familiar with, the book provides a comprehensive yet easily understandable treatment of key concepts and their repeated misinterpretations. Particular attention is paid to how more realistic features of behavior, such as nonadditivity and conditionality, can complicate analysis. The book highlights the general problem of identifying the underlying causes of evolutionary change, and proposes fruitful approaches to doing so in the study of social evolution. It describes how inclusive fitness theory addresses both simple and complex social scenarios, the controversies surrounding the theory, and how experimental work supports the theory as the most powerful explanation for social behavior and its evolution.
Continuity of homotopies
Authors: Hrushovski Ehud , Loeser François
Published: November 2017

This chapter includes some additional material on homotopies. In particular, for a smooth variety V, there exists an “inflation” homotopy, taking a simple point to the generic type of a small neighborhood of that point. This homotopy has an image that is properly a subset of unit vector V, and cannot be understood directly in terms of definable subsets of V. The image of this homotopy retraction has the merit of being contained in unit vector U for any dense Zariski open subset U of V. The chapter also proves the continuity of functions and homotopies using continuity criteria and constructs inflation homotopies before proving GAGA type results for connectedness. Additional results regarding the Zariski topology are given.
More Than You Wanted to Know
Authors: Ben-Shahar Omri , Schneider Carl E.
Published: November 2017

Perhaps no kind of regulation is more common or less useful than mandated disclosure—requiring one party to a transaction to give the other information. It is the iTunes terms you assent to, the doctor's consent form you sign, the pile of papers you get with your mortgages. Reading the terms, the form, and the papers is supposed to equip you to choose your purchase, your treatment, and your loan well. This book surveys the evidence and finds that mandated disclosure rarely works. But how could it? Who reads these disclosures? Who understands them? Who uses them to make better choices? This book puts the regulatory problem in human terms. Most people find disclosures complex, obscure, and dull. Most people make choices by stripping information away, not layering it on. Most people find they can safely ignore most disclosures and that they lack the literacy to analyze them anyway. And so many disclosures are mandated that nobody could heed them all. Nor can all this be changed by simpler forms in plainer English, since complex things cannot be made simple by better writing. Furthermore, disclosure is a lawmakers' panacea, so they keep issuing new mandates and expanding old ones, often instead of taking on the hard work of writing regulations with bite. This book takes on the form of regulation we encounter daily and asks why we must encounter it at all.
Fear of Falling: Icarus, Phaethon, and Lucretius
Authors: Quint David
Published: November 2017

This chapter demonstrates how—through a complicated chain of intermediary texts—the depiction of Satan's fall through Chaos in book 2, which invokes the myth of Icarus, and the Son's successful ride in the paternal chariot of God at the end of the War in Heaven in book 6, which rewrites the story of Phaethon, both trace back to the De rerum natura of Lucretius. They counter the Roman poet's depiction of an Epicurean cosmos ordered by chance and in a constant state of falling through an infinite void—the “vast vacuity” of Chaos. The myths of these highfliers who fall are further countered in Paradise Lost by the motif of poetic flight. The shaping power of poetry itself and the epic high style counteract the specter of a universe without bound and dimension, or of the shapelessness of Death; poetry raises the poet over his fallen condition.
Light, Vision, and the Unity of Book 3
Authors: Quint David
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at book 3 of Paradise Lost, which sets apart an invisible God and heaven from the visible universe, divine light from sunlight. Book 3 points to a contrast between the internal illumination invoked by the blind poet and an Apollonian solar inspiration that motivates the poetry of paganism. In the episode of the Paradise of Fools, the book further criticizes—with a particular eye toward Catholic practice—the tendency of men and women to read back through analogy from God's and their own visible works to the invisible Creator, and to confuse the two. Yet, in distinguishing God's lower works from God and his heaven, Milton knows that he risks unlinking creation from Creator altogether, as do the book's alchemical philosophers, and as Satan does when he later suggests to Eve that the sun, not God, is the power source that gives life, as well as light, to the universe.
Multi-parameter Singular Integrals. (AM-189)
Authors: Street Brian
Published: November 2017

This book develops a new theory of multi-parameter singular integrals associated with Carnot–Carathéodory balls. The book first details the classical theory of Calderón–Zygmund singular integrals and applications to linear partial differential equations. It then outlines the theory of multi-parameter Carnot–Carathéodory geometry, where the main tool is a quantitative version of the classical theorem of Frobenius. The book then gives several examples of multi-parameter singular integrals arising naturally in various problems. The final chapter of the book develops a general theory of singular integrals that generalizes and unifies these examples. This is one of the first general theories of multi-parameter singular integrals that goes beyond the product theory of singular integrals and their analogs. This book will interest graduate students and researchers working in singular integrals and related fields.
Multi-parameter Singular Integrals II: General Theory
Authors: Street Brian
Published: November 2017

This chapter turns to a general theory which generalizes and unifies all of the examples in the preceding chapters. A main issue is that the first definition from the trichotomy does not generalize to the multi-parameter situation. To deal with this, strengthened cancellation conditions are introduced. This is done in two different ways, resulting in four total definitions for singular integral operators (the first two use the strengthened cancellation conditions, while the later two are generalizations of the later two parts of the trichotomy). Thus, we obtain four classes of singular integral operators, denoted by A1, A2, A3, and A4. The main theorem of the chapter is A1 = A2 = A3 = A4; i.e., all four of these definitions are equivalent. This leads to many nice properties of these singular integral operators.
Prologue
Authors: El Amine Loubna
Published: November 2017

This prologue discusses Classical Confucian political thought—its conception of government, of the relationship between ruler and ruled, of the methods of ruling, and of the obligations of individuals toward the political community. Recent attempts to rethink Confucianism have centered on recasting core Confucian ethical values into a more democratic political vision. The tendency to favor a set of core Confucian moral values can be understood as a reaction to the critique of Confucianism by modernization enthusiasts, both Chinese and Western. Chinese communists attacked Confucianism for its patriarchal conception of the family, its hierarchical leanings, and its promotion of hypocrisy on the part of the ruler toward the masses. To counter these charges, it was felt necessary to elicit the best in Confucianism, and build upon it a modern politics.
Introduction
Authors: Berger Arno , Hill Theodore P.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Benford' law. Benford's law, also known as the First-digit or Significant-digit law, is the empirical gem of statistical folklore that in many naturally occurring tables of numerical data, the significant digits are not uniformly distributed as might be expected, but instead follow a particular logarithmic distribution. In its most common formulation, the special case of the first significant (i.e., first non-zero) decimal digit, Benford's law asserts that the leading digit is not equally likely to be any one of the nine possible digits 1, 2, … , 9, but is 1 more than 30 percent of the time, and is 9 less than 5 percent of the time, with the probabilities decreasing monotonically in between. The remainder of the chapter covers the history of Benford' law, empirical evidence, early explanations and mathematical framework of Benford' law.
Electing the Senate
Authors: Schiller Wendy J. , Stewart III Charles
Published: November 2017

From 1789 to 1913, U.S. senators were not directly elected by the people—instead the Constitution mandated that they be chosen by state legislators. This radically changed in 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving the public a direct vote. This book investigates the electoral connections among constituents, state legislators, political parties, and U.S. senators during the age of indirect elections. The book finds that even though parties controlled the partisan affiliation of the winning candidate for Senate, they had much less control over the universe of candidates who competed for votes in Senate elections and the parties did not always succeed in resolving internal conflict among their rank and file. Party politics, money, and personal ambition dominated the election process, in a system originally designed to insulate the Senate from public pressure. The book uses an original data set of all the roll call votes cast by state legislators for U.S. senators from 1871 to 1913 and all state legislators who served during this time. Newspaper and biographical accounts uncover vivid stories of the political maneuvering, corruption, and partisanship—played out by elite political actors, from elected officials, to party machine bosses, to wealthy business owners—that dominated the indirect Senate elections process. The book raises important questions about the effectiveness of Constitutional reforms, such as the Seventeenth Amendment, that promised to produce a more responsive and accountable government.
The Civilization Machine in the Early Bronze Age
Authors: Smith Adam T.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the role of things in the reproduction of a public—the first condition of sovereignty defined in Chapter 2—during the Early Bronze Age in the South Caucasus. “A public” here means a self-recognizing community that is not maintained exclusively through face-to-face interaction. It is thus in large part an assembly of strangers who are made familiar to one another through an assemblage of publicity—forms of mass mediation and sites of encounter, such as those Benedict Anderson described as fundamental to the imagination of modern nations. The suggestion that material things are critical to the creation of a public follows closely Hannah Arendt's conception of humanity as Homo faber.
The Mathematics of Various Entertaining Subjects
Authors: Smullyan Raymond M.
Published: November 2017

The history of mathematics is filled with major breakthroughs resulting from solutions to recreational problems. Problems of interest to gamblers led to the modern theory of probability, for example, and surreal numbers were inspired by the game of Go. Yet even with such groundbreaking findings and a wealth of popular-level books exploring puzzles and brainteasers, research in recreational mathematics has often been neglected. This book brings together authors from a variety of specialties to present fascinating problems and solutions in recreational mathematics. The chapters show how sophisticated mathematics can help construct mazes that look like famous people, how the analysis of crossword puzzles has much in common with understanding epidemics, and how the theory of electrical circuits is useful in understanding the classic Towers of Hanoi puzzle. The card game SET® is related to the theory of error-correcting codes, and simple tic-tac-toe takes on a new life when played on an affine plane. Inspirations for the book's wealth of problems include board games, card tricks, fake coins, flexagons, pencil puzzles, poker, and so much more. Looking at a plethora of eclectic games and puzzles, this book is sure to entertain, challenge, and inspire academic mathematicians and avid math enthusiasts alike.
The Europeans and the African Problem
Authors: Herbst Jeffrey
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the persistence of what the Afro-Caribbean diplomat Edward W. Blyden called “the African Problem”—the inability of Europe to conquer Africa in the same manner as other regions—throughout the brief (by historical standards) period of formal European rule. European colonialism wrought changes in Africa that were so fundamental as to mark a new era in African politics, such as creating the immediate predecessors to today’s states. The chapter explores the broadcasting of European power in colonial Africa by focusing on the cost structure facing white leaders attempting to broadcast power, the nature of the boundaries established by the Europeans, and the state system that was created by the particular needs of state-builders and which, in turn, greatly affected the consolidation of power. The chapter shows that Europeans provided a set of answers to the African problem that allowed them to avoid the costs inherent to hegemony.
National Design and the Broadcasting of Power
Authors: Herbst Jeffrey
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the effect of national design on African politics by focusing on the ramifications of the size and shape of nations. It argues that the particular political challenges that African countries face in broadcasting power, combined with the understanding of sovereignty that has developed, cause the calculations regarding national design to be radically different from the conventional wisdom that has developed based on the European experience. In particular, unlike Europe, African conditions privilege nations that are relatively small. Fortunately, the enormous variation in the size of countries across the continent makes Africa a particularly good setting to understand the implications of national design on politics.
Introduction
Authors: Herbst Jeffrey
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter explains that the book examines state-building and consolidation in Africa over the last several hundred years by focusing on the fundamental problem confronting leaders of almost all African states: how to broadcast power over sparsely settled lands. The book’s fundamental assumption is that states are only viable if they are able to control the territory defined by their borders. It argues that the failure of many African states to consolidate their authority has resulted in civil wars in some countries, the presence of millions of refugees throughout the continent, and the adoption of highly dysfunctional policies by many leaders. Yet international society, by dint of the granting of sovereignty, still assumes that all African countries are able to control all of the territory within their boundaries. The book also evaluates different policy alternatives that might address some of the fundamental political challenges African states face today.
Between Good and Evil: The Science, Culture, and Polarization of Wolf Conflict
Authors: Farrell Justin
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines perhaps the most well-known, and most controversial, conflict in the history of Yellowstone: the reintroduction of wolves in 1995, after they had been exterminated from the Rocky Mountains just six decades earlier. Hundreds of popular and scholarly books and articles have been written about the reintroduction, nearly all of which focus on the biology, ecology, and economic impact of the wolf's return. However, the eventual restoration of wolves brought little resolution, even despite such scientific and economic certainty. This is because the ongoing war over the wolf is not ultimately about wolf science, ecosystem dynamics, or economic costs and benefits. Instead, deeper cultural commitments are knowingly, and unknowingly, pushed beneath the surface of rational policy debate, and the failure to acknowledge them hinders opportunities for conflict resolution. The goal in this chapter is to demonstrate this point and examine the competing moral orders that motivate this ongoing war over the wolf in Yellowstone.
Social Reform
Authors: Haveman Heather A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between magazines and social reform movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In particular, it looks at the “benevolent empire,” an interorganizational field that consisted of a large number of voluntary social reform associations, the religious structures that supported them, and the magazines that both supported organized reform efforts and were supported by them. The chapter first reviews the history of reform movements, with emphasis on the links among successive movements and the formal organizations that supported them. It then considers the religious roots of social reform and the specialized magazines launched by reform leaders to broadcast their views and show. It also discusses how often the many different social reform movements were covered across all magazine genres before concluding with an analysis of the antislavery movement and its interaction with both religion and magazines.
Conclusion
Authors: Haveman Heather A.
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter summarizes that the book has documented the evolution of American magazines from a few, fragile, questionable undertakings to more than a thousand robust, highly legitimate elements of print culture. Between 1741 and 1860, magazines underwent a profound transformation that were made possible by a series of changes in American society, including population growth and urbanization, advances in publishing technologies, the gradual development of copyright law, the modernization of social reform movements, and the rise of protoscientific agriculture. The chapter discusses the implications of the book's findings for understanding modernity and community, for other aspects of American society such as the establishment of various medical schools, and for those who study media in the contemporary era. It concludes by reiterating the important role played by magazines in fostering the pluralistic integration that distinguished American society from European ones in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Of Sand or Soil
Authors: Samin Nadav
Published: November 2017

Why do tribal genealogies matter in modern-day Saudi Arabia? What compels the strivers and climbers of the new Saudi Arabia to want to prove their authentic descent from one or another prestigious Arabian tribe? This book looks at how genealogy and tribal belonging have informed the lives of past and present inhabitants of Saudi Arabia and how the Saudi government's tacit glorification of tribal origins has shaped the powerful development of the kingdom's genealogical culture. The book presents the first extended biographical exploration of the major twentieth-century Saudi scholar Hamad al-Jāsir, whose genealogical studies frame the story about belonging and identity in the modern kingdom. It examines the interplay between al-Jāsir's genealogical project and his many hundreds of petitioners, mostly Saudis of nontribal or lower status origin who sought validation of their tribal roots in his genealogical texts. Investigating the Saudi relationship to this opaque, orally inscribed historical tradition, the book considers the consequences of modern Saudi genealogical politics and how the most intimate anxieties of nontribal Saudis today are amplified by the governing strategies and kinship ideology of the Saudi state. Challenging the impression that Saudi culture is determined by puritanical religiosity or rentier economic principles, the book shows how the exploration and establishment of tribal genealogies have become influential phenomena in contemporary Saudi society. Beyond Saudi Arabia, this book casts important new light on the interplay between kinship ideas, oral narrative, and state formation in rapidly changing societies.
The Oracle of al-Wurūd: Ḥamad al-Jāsir’s Genealogical Correspondence
Authors: Samin Nadav
Published: November 2017

This chapter follows the lives of Saudi lineage seekers as they weave in and out of Hamad al-Jāsir's letters and their own personal narratives and texts. It first examines al-Jāsir's genealogical volume Jamharat Ansāb al-Usar al-Mutahaddira fī Najd (The Preponderance of the Lineages of the Settled Families of Najd). It then relates the story of one of al-Jāsir's lineage-seeking petitioners, known as Rāshid b. Humayd. Rāshid's story calls attention to the intimate and personal concerns that propel the modern Saudi search for tribal lineages, genealogy between oral culture and textual culture, and the state's sometimes heavy hand in policing the boundaries of public culture in the kingdom.
Conclusion
Authors: Samin Nadav
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter examines the notion that a genealogical rule of governance pervades Saudi Arabia in relation to Wahhabism and Islam. It suggests that Saudi Arabia's modern genealogical culture is a direct consequence of the rise of Salaf religiosity in the kingdom and that the acute genealogical consciousness of modern Saudi society is a form of bedouin tribal vengeance against modernity. Just as the economic paternalism of the Saudi state has influenced the discourse and strategies of al-Qaeda, the kingdom's economic model has played an important role in shaping its modern genealogical culture as well. The chapter also discusses Hamad al-Jāsir's genealogical project, which preceded the wholesale politicization of the Saudi oral culture, and argues that the attachment to the Arabian past that drove such project was real and visceral, rather than an ideological fetish encouraged or manufactured by the Saudi state.
Action-Minimizing Invariant Measures for Tonelli Lagrangians
Authors: Sorrentino Alfonso
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the notion of action-minimizing measures, recalling the needed measure–theoretical material. In particular, this allows the definition of a first family of invariant sets, the so-called Mather sets. It discusses their main dynamical and symplectic properties, and introduces the minimal average actions, sometimes called Mather's α‎- and β‎-functions. A thorough discussion of their properties (differentiability, strict convexity or lack thereof) is provided and related to the dynamical and structural properties of the Mather sets. The chapter also describes these concepts in a concrete physical example: the simple pendulum.
Action-Minimizing Curves for Tonelli Lagrangians
Authors: Sorrentino Alfonso
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the notion of action-minimizing orbits. In particular, it defines the other two families of invariant sets, the so-called Aubry and Mañé sets. It explains their main dynamical and symplectic properties, comparing them with the results obtained in the preceding chapter for the Mather sets. The relation between these new invariant sets and the Mather sets is described. As a by-product, the chapter introduces the Mañé's potential, Peierls' barrier, and Mañé's critical value. It discusses their properties thoroughly. In particular, it highlights how this critical value is related to the minimal average action and describes these new concepts in the case of the simple pendulum.