bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The First Galaxies in the Universe
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This book provides a comprehensive, self-contained introduction to one of the most exciting frontiers in astrophysics today: the quest to understand how the oldest and most distant galaxies in our universe first formed. Until now, most research on this question has been theoretical, but the next few years will bring about a new generation of large telescopes that promise to supply a flood of data about the infant universe during its first billion years after the big bang. This book bridges the gap between theory and observation. It is an invaluable reference for students and researchers on early galaxies. The book starts from basic physical principles before moving on to more advanced material. Topics include the gravitational growth of structure, the intergalactic medium, the formation and evolution of the first stars and black holes, feedback and galaxy evolution, reionization, 21-cm cosmology, and more.
Planetary Climates
Authors: Ingersoll Andrew P.
Published: November 2017

This clear and concise introduction to planetary climates explains the global physical and chemical processes that determine climate on any planet or major planetary satellite—from Mercury to Neptune and even large moons such as Saturn's Titan. The book presents a tour of our solar system's diverse planetary atmospheres, providing a rich foundation on their structure, composition, circulation, climate, and long-term evolution. Although the climates of other worlds are extremely diverse, the chemical and physical processes that shape their dynamics are the same. As this book makes clear, the better we can understand how various planetary climates formed and evolved, the better we can understand Earth's climate history and future. Explaining current knowledge, physical and chemical mechanisms, and unanswered questions, the book brings the reader to the cutting edge of this field.
What Are Gamma-Ray Bursts?
Authors: Bloom Joshua S.
Published: November 2017

Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest—and, until recently, among the least understood—cosmic events in the universe. Discovered by chance during the Cold War, these evanescent high-energy explosions confounded astronomers for decades. But a rapid series of startling breakthroughs beginning in 1997 revealed that the majority of gamma-ray bursts are caused by the explosions of young and massive stars in the vast star-forming cauldrons of distant galaxies. New findings also point to very different origins for some events, serving to complicate but enrich our understanding of the exotic and violent universe. This book is an introduction to this fast-growing subject, written by an astrophysicist who is at the forefront of today's research into these incredible cosmic phenomena. The book gives readers a concise and accessible overview of gamma-ray bursts and the theoretical framework that physicists have developed to make sense of complex observations across the electromagnetic spectrum. The book traces the history of remarkable discoveries that led to our current understanding of gamma-ray bursts, and reveals the decisive role these phenomena could play in the grand pursuits of twenty-first century astrophysics, from studying gravity waves and unveiling the growth of stars and galaxies after the big bang to surmising the ultimate fate of the universe itself. This book is an essential primer to this exciting frontier of scientific inquiry, and a must-read for anyone seeking to keep pace with cutting-edge developments in physics today.
Spin Glasses and Complexity
Authors: Stein Daniel L. , Newman Charles M.
Published: November 2017

Spin glasses are disordered magnetic systems that have led to the development of mathematical tools with an array of real-world applications, from airline scheduling to neural networks. This book offers the most concise, engaging, and accessible introduction to the subject, fully explaining what spin glasses are, why they are important, and how they are opening up new ways of thinking about complexity. This one-of-a-kind guide to spin glasses begins by explaining the fundamentals of order and symmetry in condensed matter physics and how spin glasses fit into and modify this framework. The book then explores how spin-glass concepts and ideas have found applications in areas as diverse as computational complexity, biological and artificial neural networks, protein folding, immune response maturation, combinatorial optimization, and social network modeling. Providing an essential overview of the history, science, and growing significance of this exciting field, the book also features a forward-looking discussion of what spin glasses may teach us in the future about complex systems. This is a useful book for students and practitioners in the natural and social sciences, with new material even for the experts.
Psychology and Benfordʼs Law
Authors: Burns Bruce D. , Krygier Jonathan
Published: November 2017

This chapter outlines recent research showing that people can approximate Benford's law when generating meaningful numbers in psychology. A common theme in recent research into reasoning and decision-making has been that people are influenced by statistical relationships in the environment. However, because it is hard to know the precise statistical relationships an individual has experienced over their lifetime, rarely is it possible to test whether people are truly acting precisely in accord with an unknown naturally occurring statistical relationship. Benford's law provides an interesting test case in this regard because it is a precise statistical relationship that is both widespread and little known to the public. Hence, the chapter reveals that Benford's law has theoretical implications for decision-making research, practical implications for fraud detection, and may help cast light on Benford's law as a property of natural data.
Autocatalysis in Chemistry and the Origin of Life
Authors: Padgett John F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter provides an extensive review of the biochemistry literature on the origins of life where the concept of autocatalysis figures most prominently. There is a lively debate in the scientific literature between scientists who subscribe to an RNA-first hypothesis and scientists who subscribe to a metabolism-first hypothesis about the origin of life. Both are different versions of autocatalysis, and a sensible conclusion could be that biological life really took off when a symbiosis developed between the two. After that, the chapter reviews past formal modeling in this area, which is spotty but highly suggestive. The chapter identifies Eigen's and Schuster's model of hypercycles as the path-breaking work that first placed empirical chemistry and formal models into fruitful dialogue with each other. Finally, the chapter reviews a less successful, more philosophical descendant of autocatalysis called autopoiesis, which is the guise under which autocatalysis first was presented to social scientists.
Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy
Authors: Wolff Jonathan , Cohen G. A.
Published: November 2017

G. A. Cohen was one of the leading political philosophers of recent times. He first came to wide attention in 1978 with the prize-winning book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In subsequent decades his published writings largely turned away from the history of philosophy, focusing instead on equality, freedom, and justice. However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures. Starting with a chapter centered on Plato, but also discussing the pre-Socratics as well as Aristotle, the book moves to social contract theory as discussed by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, and then continues with chapters on Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The book also contains some previously published but uncollected papers on Marx, Hobbes, and Kant, among other figures. The collection concludes with a memoir of Cohen written by the volume editor who was a student of Cohen's. A hallmark of the lectures is Cohen's engagement with the thinkers he discusses. Rather than simply trying to render their thought accessible to the modern reader, he tests whether their arguments and positions are clear, sound, and free from contradiction. Ultimately, his lectures teach us not only about some of the great thinkers in the history of moral and political philosophy, but also about one of the great thinkers of our time: Cohen himself.
Of Empires and Citizens
Authors: Jamal Amaney A.
Published: November 2017

In the post-Cold War era, why has democratization been slow to arrive in the Arab world? This book argues that to understand support for the authoritarian status quo in parts of this region—and the willingness of its citizens to compromise on core democratic principles—one must factor in how a strong U.S. presence and popular anti-Americanism weakens democratic voices. Examining such countries as Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, the book explores how Arab citizens decide whether to back existing regimes, regime transitions, and democratization projects, and how the global position of Arab states shapes people's attitudes toward their governments. While the Cold War's end reduced superpower hegemony in much of the developing world, the Arab region witnessed an increased security and economic dependence on the United States. As a result, the preferences of the United States matter greatly to middle-class Arab citizens, not just the elite, and citizens will restrain their pursuit of democratization, rationalizing their backing for the status quo because of U.S. geostrategic priorities. Demonstrating how the preferences of an international patron serve as a constraint or an opportunity to push for democracy, the book questions bottom-up approaches to democratization, which assume that states are autonomous units in the world order. It contends that even now, with the overthrow of some autocratic Arab regimes, the future course of Arab democratization will be influenced by the perception of American reactions. Concurrently, the United States must address the troubling sources of the region's rising anti-Americanism.
Inside the Castle
Authors: Grossman Joanna L. , Friedman Lawrence M.
Published: November 2017

This book is a comprehensive social history of twentieth-century family law in the United States. The book shows how vast, oceanic changes in society have reshaped and reconstituted the American family. Women and children have gained rights and powers, and novel forms of family life have emerged. The family has more or less dissolved into a collection of independent individuals with their own wants, desires, and goals. Modern family law, as always, reflects the brute social and cultural facts of family life. The story of family law in the twentieth century is complex. This was the century that said goodbye to common-law marriage and breach-of-promise lawsuits. This was the century, too, of the sexual revolution and women's liberation, of gay rights and cohabitation. Marriage lost its powerful monopoly over legitimate sexual behavior. Couples who lived together without marriage now had certain rights. Gay marriage became legal in a handful of jurisdictions. By the end of the century, no state still prohibited same-sex behavior. Children in many states could legally have two mothers or two fathers. No-fault divorce became cheap and easy. And illegitimacy lost most of its social and legal stigma. These changes were not smooth or linear—all met with resistance and provoked a certain amount of backlash. Families took many forms, some of them new and different, and though buffeted by the winds of change, the family persisted as a central institution in society. This book tells the story of that institution, exploring the ways in which law tried to penetrate and control this most mysterious realm of personal life.
Founding Gods, Inventing Nations
Authors: McCants William F.
Published: November 2017

From the dawn of writing in Sumer to the sunset of the Islamic empire, this book traces four thousand years of speculation on the origins of civilization. Investigating a vast range of primary sources, some of which are translated here for the first time, and focusing on the dynamic influence of the Greek, Roman, and Arab conquests of the Near East, the book looks at the ways the conquerors and those they conquered reshaped their myths of civilization's origins in response to the social and political consequences of empire. The Greek and Roman conquests brought with them a learned culture that competed with that of native elites. The conquering Arabs, in contrast, had no learned culture, which led to three hundred years of Muslim competition over the cultural orientation of Islam, a contest reflected in the culture myths of that time. What we know today as Islamic culture is the product of this contest, whose protagonists drew heavily on the lore of non-Arab and pagan antiquity. The book argues that authors in all three periods did not write about civilization's origins solely out of pure antiquarian interest—they also sought to address the social and political tensions of the day. The strategies they employed and the postcolonial dilemmas they confronted provide invaluable context for understanding how authors today use myth and history to locate themselves in the confusing aftermath of empire.
Enigmas of Identity
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

“We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,” this book claims. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite, or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation. In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, the book also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis. In doing so, it offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.
Pogrom in Gujarat
Authors: Ghassem-Fachandi Parvis
Published: November 2017

In 2002, after an altercation between Muslim vendors and Hindu travelers at a railway station in the Indian state of Gujarat, fifty-nine Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. The ruling nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party blamed Gujarat's entire Muslim minority for the tragedy and incited fellow Hindus to exact revenge. The resulting violence left more than one thousand people dead—most of them Muslims—and tens of thousands more displaced from their homes. The author witnessed the bloodshed up close. This book provides a riveting ethnographic account of collective violence in which the doctrine of ahimsa—or nonviolence—and the closely associated practices of vegetarianism became implicated by legitimating what they formally disavow. The book looks at how newspapers, movies, and other media helped to fuel the pogrom. It shows how the vegetarian sensibilities of Hindus and the language of sacrifice were manipulated to provoke disgust against Muslims and mobilize the aspiring middle classes across caste and class differences in the name of Hindu nationalism. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of Gujarat's culture and politics and the close ties he shared with some of the pogrom's sympathizers, the book offers a strikingly original interpretation of the different ways in which Hindu proponents of ahimsa became complicit in the very violence they claimed to renounce.
The French Way
Authors: Kuisel Richard F.
Published: November 2017

There are over 1,000 McDonald's on French soil. Two Disney theme parks have opened near Paris in the last two decades. And American-inspired vocabulary such as “le weekend” has been absorbed into the French language. But as former French president Jacques Chirac put it: “The U.S. finds France unbearably pretentious. And we find the U.S. unbearably hegemonic.” Are the French fascinated or threatened by America? They Americanize yet are notorious for expressions of anti-Americanism. From McDonald's and Coca-Cola to free markets and foreign policy, this book looks closely at the conflicts and contradictions of France's relationship to American politics and culture. The book shows how the French have used America as both yardstick and foil to measure their own distinct national identity. France has charted its own path: it has welcomed America's products but rejected American policies; assailed Americ's “jungle capitalism” while liberalizing its own economy; attacked “Reaganomics” while defending French social security; and protected French cinema, television, food, and language even while ingesting American pop culture. The book examines France's role as an independent ally of the United States, but he also considers the country's failures in influencing the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Whether investigating France's successful information technology sector or its spurning of American expertise during the AIDS epidemic, the book asks if this insistence on a French way represents a growing distance between Europe and the United States or a reaction to American globalization. Exploring cultural trends, values, public opinion, and political reality, this book delves into the complex relationship between two modern nations.
Constitutional Faith
Authors: Levinson Sanford
Published: November 2017

This book examines the “constitutional faith” that has, since 1788, been a central component of American “civil religion.” By taking seriously the parallel between wholehearted acceptance of the Constitution and religious faith, the book opens up a host of intriguing questions about what it means to be American. While some view the Constitution as the central component of an American religion that serves to unite the social order, the book maintains that its sacred role can result in conflict, fragmentation, and even war. This book takes the view that the Constitution’s value lies in the realm of the discourse it sustains: a uniquely American form of political rhetoric that allows citizens to grapple with every important public issue imaginable. A new afterword looks at the deepening of constitutional worship and attributes the current widespread frustrations with the government to the static nature of the Constitution.
Melancholia of Freedom
Authors: Hansen Thomas Blom
Published: November 2017

The end of apartheid in 1994 signaled a moment of freedom and a promise of a nonracial future. With this promise came an injunction: define yourself as you truly are, as an individual, and as a community. Almost two decades later it is clear that it was less the prospect of that future than the habits and horizons of anxious life in racially defined enclaves that determined postapartheid freedom. This book offers an in-depth analysis of the uncertainties, dreams, and anxieties that have accompanied postapartheid freedoms in Chatsworth, a formerly Indian township in Durban. Exploring five decades of township life, the book tells the stories of ordinary Indians whose lives were racialized and framed by the township, and how these residents domesticated and inhabited this urban space and its institutions, during apartheid and after. The book demonstrates the complex and ambivalent nature of ordinary township life. While the ideology of apartheid was widely rejected, its practical institutions, from urban planning to houses, schools, and religious spaces, were embraced in order to remake the community. The book describes how the racial segmentation of South African society still informs daily life, notions of race, personhood, morality, and religious ethics. The book also demonstrates the force of global religious imaginings that promise a universal and inclusive community amid uncertain lives and futures in the postapartheid nation-state.
The Importance of Being Civil
Authors: Hall John A.
Published: November 2017

Civility is desirable and possible, but can this fragile ideal be guaranteed? This book offers the most comprehensive look at the nature and advantages of civility throughout history and in our world today. The book expands our understanding of civility as related to larger social forces—including revolution, imperialism, capitalism, nationalism, and war—and the ways that such elements limit the potential for civility. Combining wide-ranging historical and comparative evidence with social and moral theory, the book examines how the nature of civility has fluctuated in the last three centuries, how it became lost, and how it was reestablished in the twentieth century following the two world wars. It also considers why civility is currently breaking down and what can be done to mitigate this threat.
The Decomposition of Global Conformal Invariants (AM-182)
Authors: Alexakis Spyros
Published: November 2017

This book addresses a basic question in differential geometry that was first considered by physicists Stanley Deser and Adam Schwimmer in 1993 in their study of conformal anomalies. The question concerns conformally invariant functionals on the space of Riemannian metrics over a given manifold. These functionals act on a metric by first constructing a Riemannian scalar out of it, and then integrating this scalar over the manifold. Suppose this integral remains invariant under conformal re-scalings of the underlying metric. What information can one then deduce about the Riemannian scalar? This book asserts that the Riemannian scalar must be a linear combination of three obvious candidates, each of which clearly satisfies the required property: a local conformal invariant, a divergence of a Riemannian vector field, and the Chern–Gauss–Bonnet integrand. The book provides a proof of this conjecture. The result itself sheds light on the algebraic structure of conformal anomalies, which appear in many settings in theoretical physics. It also clarifies the geometric significance of the renormalized volume of asymptotically hyperbolic Einstein manifolds. The methods introduced here make an interesting connection between algebraic properties of local invariants—such as the classical Riemannian invariants and the more recently studied conformal invariants—and the study of global invariants, in this case conformally invariant integrals.
Introduction
Authors: Smith Justin E. H.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter argues that modern racial thinking could not have taken the form it did if it had not been able to piggyback, so to speak, on conceptual innovations in the way science was beginning to approach the diversity of the natural world, and in particular of the living world. It also points out an oft-neglected aspect of the scope and aims of the natural and social sciences: the emergence of racial categories, of categories of kinds of humans, which may in large part be understood as an overextension of the project of biological classification that was proving so successful in the same period.
Toward a Historical Ontology of Race
Authors: Smith Justin E. H.
Published: November 2017

This chapter highlights the following problem: if race is acknowledged to not exist in any transhistorical sense, and to have a vague and constantly mutating referent throughout history, then how can we know we are picking out the right textual sources that will tell us what people thought about race and when? It also argues for the necessity of a sort of casuistical approach, which does not eschew the study of particular cases, anecdotes, offhand examples or remarks that occur in the course of making other philosophical arguments. All of these, it will be argued, should be taken seriously in any attempt to give a general account of the functions race fulfills in the history of modern philosophy.
Race and Its Discontents in the Enlightenment
Authors: Smith Justin E. H.
Published: November 2017

This chapter surveys some of the more important developments in the history of the concept of race in eighteenth-century Germany. It reveals an inconsistency between the desire to make taxonomic distinctions and a hesitance to posit any real ontological divisions within the human species. This inconsistency was well represented in the physical-anthropological work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was, in many respects, the most important eighteenth-century theorist of human difference. Johann Gottfried Herder, a contemporary of Blumenbach's, was intensely interested in human diversity, but saw this diversity as entirely based in culture rather than biology, and saw cultural difference as an entirely neutral matter, rather than as a continuum of higher and lower. Herder constitutes an important link between early modern universalism, on the one hand, and on the other the ideally value-neutral project of cultural anthropology as it would begin to emerge in the nineteenth century.
Strains and Drug Resistance
Authors: Dye Christopher
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the geographical distribution of resistant forms of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and their time trends. Apart from drug resistance, there are plenty of other main questions about M. tuberculosis population genetics. To combat epidemics of drug-resistant TB, it is vital to understand why some resistant strains have greater reproductive fitness than drug-susceptible strains. The chapter first provides an overview of genetic variation in M. tuberculosis before discussing resistance (new and acquired) to first-and second-line drugs. It then considers the link between drug resistance and HIV coinfection, global distribution of drug-resistant TB, relative reproductive fitness, and absolute reproductive fitness. It shows that drug resistance is preventable and reversible, but this must be corroborated and expanded with longer series of data from a wider range of countries, countries with high rates of HIV infection (for example, Botswana and South Africa), and those reporting cases of extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB).
Why Australia Prospered
Authors: McLean Ian W.
Published: November 2017

This book is the first comprehensive account of how Australia attained the world's highest living standards within a few decades of European settlement, and how the nation has sustained an enviable level of income to the present. Beginning with the Aboriginal economy at the end of the eighteenth century, the book argues that Australia's remarkable prosperity across nearly two centuries was reached and maintained by several shifting factors. These included imperial policies, favorable demographic characteristics, natural resource abundance, institutional adaptability and innovation, and growth-enhancing policy responses to major economic shocks, such as war, depression, and resource discoveries. Natural resource abundance in Australia played a prominent role in some periods and faded during others, but overall, and contrary to the conventional view of economists, it was a blessing rather than a curse. The book shows that Australia's location was not a hindrance when the international economy was centered in the North Atlantic, and became a positive influence following Asia's modernization. Participation in the world trading system, when it flourished, brought significant benefits, and during the interwar period when it did not, Australia's protection of domestic manufacturing did not significantly stall growth. The book also considers how the country's notorious origins as a convict settlement positively influenced early productivity levels, and how British imperial policies enhanced prosperity during the colonial period. It looks at Australia's recent resource-based prosperity in historical perspective, and reveals striking elements of continuity that have underpinned the evolution of the country's economy since the nineteenth century.
The New Terrain of International Law
Authors: Alter Karen J.
Published: November 2017

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. This book charts the developments and trends in the creation and role of international courts, and explains how the delegation of authority to international judicial institutions influences global and domestic politics. The book presents an in-depth look at the scope and powers of international courts operating around the world. Focusing on dispute resolution, enforcement, administrative review, and constitutional review, the book argues that international courts alter politics by providing legal, symbolic, and leverage resources that shift the political balance in favor of domestic and international actors who prefer policies more consistent with international law objectives. International courts name violations of the law and perhaps specify remedies. The book explains how this limited power—the power to speak the law—translates into political influence, and it considers eighteen case studies, showing how international courts change state behavior. The case studies, spanning issue areas and regions of the world, collectively elucidate the political factors that often intervene to limit whether or not international courts are invoked and whether international judges dare to demand significant changes in state practices.
Newton and the Origin of Civilization
Authors: Buchwald Jed Z. , Feingold Mordechai
Published: November 2017

Isaac Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, published in 1728, one year after the great man’s death, unleashed a storm of controversy. And for good reason. The book presents a drastically revised timeline for ancient civilizations, contracting Greek history by five hundred years and Egypt’s by a millennium. This book tells the story of how one of the most celebrated figures in the history of mathematics, optics, and mechanics came to apply his unique ways of thinking to problems of history, theology, and mythology, and of how his radical ideas produced an uproar that reverberated in Europe’s learned circles throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. The book reveals the manner in which Newton strove for nearly half a century to rectify universal history by reading ancient texts through the lens of astronomy, and to create a tight theoretical system for interpreting the evolution of civilization on the basis of population dynamics. It was during Newton’s earliest years at Cambridge that he developed the core of his singular method for generating and working with trustworthy knowledge, which he applied to his study of the past with the same rigor he brought to his work in physics and mathematics. Drawing extensively on Newton’s unpublished papers and a host of other primary sources, the book reconciles Isaac Newton the rational scientist with Newton the natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian, and chronologist of ancient history.
Upscaling Downtown
Authors: Ocejo Richard E.
Published: November 2017

Once known for slum-like conditions in its immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, New York City's downtown now features luxury housing, chic boutiques and hotels, and, most notably, a vibrant nightlife culture. While a burgeoning bar scene can be viewed as a positive sign of urban transformation, tensions lurk beneath, reflecting the social conflicts within postindustrial cities. This book examines the perspectives and actions of disparate social groups who have been affected by or played a role in the nightlife of the Lower East Side, East Village, and the Bowery. Using the social world of bars as windows into understanding urban development, it argues that the gentrifying neighborhoods of the postindustrial city are increasingly influenced by upscale commercial projects, causing significant conflicts for the people involved. The book explores what community institutions, such as neighborhood bars, gain or lose amid gentrification. It considers why residents continue unsuccessfully to protest the arrival of new bars, how new bar owners produce a nightlife culture that attracts visitors rather than locals, and how government actors, including elected officials and the police, regulate and encourage nightlife culture. By focusing on commercial newcomers and the residents who protest local changes, the book illustrates the contested and dynamic process of neighborhood growth. Delving into the social ecosystem of one emblematic section of Manhattan, it sheds fresh light on the tensions and consequences of urban progress.
Learning as a Rational Foundation for Macroeconomics and Finance
Authors: Evans George W. , Honkapohja Seppo
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the central ideas about learning and bounded rationality for macroeconomics and finance. It first introduces the main methodological issues concerning expectation formation and learning before discussing the circumstances in which rational expectations may arise. It then reviews empirical work that applies learning to macroeconomic issues and asset prices, along with the implications of the use of structural knowledge in learning and the form of the agents' decision rules. As an application, the scope of Ricardian Equivalence is considered. The chapter also presents three applications of the learning approach to monetary policy: the appropriate specification of interest rate rules; implementation of price-level targeting to achieve learning stability of the optimal rational expectations equilibrium; and whether under learning, commitment to price-level targeting can be sufficient to rule out the deflation trap of a zero interest rate lower bound and return the economy to the intended rational expectations steady state.
Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Places
Authors: Zackin Emily
Published: November 2017

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help. This book argues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the U.S. Constitution. The book shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. This book looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism. Shedding light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights, the book challenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.
How Do You Feel?
Authors: Craig A. D. (Bud)
Published: November 2017

This book brings together startling evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to present revolutionary new insights into how our brains enable us to experience the range of sensations and mental states known as feelings. Drawing on own cutting-edge research, the author has identified an area deep inside the mammalian brain—the insular cortex—as the place where interoception, or the processing of bodily stimuli, generates feelings. The book shows how this crucial pathway for interoceptive awareness gives rise in humans to the feeling of being alive, vivid perceptual feelings, and a subjective image of the sentient self across time. The book explains how feelings represent activity patterns in our brains that signify emotions, intentions, and thoughts, and how integration of these patterns is driven by the unique energy needs of the hominid brain. It describes the essential role of feelings and the insular cortex in such diverse realms as music, fluid intelligence, and bivalent emotions, and relates these ideas to the philosophy of William James and even to feelings in dogs. The book is also a compelling insider's account of scientific discovery, one that takes readers behind the scenes as the astonishing answer to this neurological puzzle is pursued and pieced together from seemingly unrelated fields of scientific inquiry. This book will fundamentally alter the way that neuroscientists and psychologists categorize sensations and understand the origins and significance of human feelings.
Randomness in Evolution
Authors: Bonner John Tyler
Published: November 2017

This book challenges a central tenet of evolutionary biology. The book makes the bold and provocative claim that some biological diversity may be explained by something other than natural selection. The book makes an argument for the underappreciated role that randomness—or chance—plays in evolution. Due to the tremendous and enduring influence of Darwin's natural selection, the importance of randomness has been to some extent overshadowed. The book shows how the effects of randomness differ for organisms of different sizes, and how the smaller an organism is, the more likely it is that morphological differences will be random and selection may not be involved to any degree. The book then traces the increase in size and complexity of organisms over geological time, and looks at the varying significance of randomness at different size levels, from microorganisms to large mammals. The book also discusses how sexual cycles vary depending on size and complexity, and how the trend away from randomness in higher forms has even been reversed in some social organisms.
At the Time of Creation
Authors: Van De Mieroop Marc
Published: November 2017

This book examines how the ancient Babylonians approached the question of what true knowledge was. The ancient Babylonians left behind a monumental textual record that stretches in time from before 3000 BC to the first century AD. The system of reasoning the Babylonians followed was very unlike the Greek one, and thus that of western philosophy built upon the Greek achievements. It was rooted in the cuneiform writing system. The book focuses on one area and explores it in three structurally related corpora: epistemology as displayed in writings on language, the future, and law. This chapter considers the poem entitled Babylonian Creation Myth, which belongs “before philosophy,” the importance of the Sumerian and Akkadian languages to Babylonian hermeneutics, the Babylonian cosmopolis, the written and oral traditions of ancient Mesopotamian culture, and intertextuality of Babylonian texts.
Constructing Reality
Authors: Van De Mieroop Marc
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the principles of the Babylonian word lists, how lexicography was formulated, and how it interacted with other writings. It argues that Babylonian lexicography was a scientific activity intended to foster understanding of the world. The chapter proposes a straightforward semiotic analysis of the Babylonian lexical lists, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model. Since the lists are two-dimensional—structured on two axes, the horizontal entry and the vertical succession of entries—they are highly suitable for a structuralist reading, syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The chapter considers the syntagm and paradigm of the lexical lists. It also explains the building blocks, and especially how words entered a lexical list, the parallelism between poetry and lexical lists, and how the lists were applied in real life. Finally, it provides an overview of Babylonian grammatology and the significance of the lexical lists to epistemology.
Of Ancient Codes
Authors: Van De Mieroop Marc
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the genre of law codes in ancient Mesopotamia. Hammurabi authored—or more likely commissioned—one of the earliest surviving law codes in world history. Hammurabi’s code is part of a small corpus of ancient Near East writings about law that was founded on the principles contained in lexical and omen lists. The law codes of the ancient Near East show how aspects of Babylonian epistemology could be imitated by others even if they did not employ the Babylonian writing system that lay at its core. The chapter first considers the historical context of the law codes before discussing the format of these laws. The composition of law codes flourished in Babylonia in the late third and early second millennia, when four kings commissioned them: Ur-Namma and Lipit-Eshtar in the Sumerian language, Dadusha and Hammurabi in Akkadian.
The Philosopher-King
Authors: Van De Mieroop Marc
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how the entire text of the Babylonian law code was reworked under each king who commissioned them. The overall character of the law codes and the manner of formulation remained the same, but the authors felt free to change the order and selection of paragraphs. At the core of all the codes is a list. What we call paragraphs are statements phrased in a limited number of formats and strung together just like the entries of the lexical and omen lists. The chapter offers a structural analysis of the codes that looks at each entry as a syntagm and at the sequence of entries as a paradigm. It shows that the royal proclamations of laws guaranteed that there was a coherent system of justice in place, and even more, that it was grounded in wisdom.
Don't Blame Us
Authors: Geismer Lily
Published: November 2017

This book traces the reorientation of modern liberalism and the Democratic Party away from their roots in labor union halls of northern cities to white-collar professionals in postindustrial high-tech suburbs, and casts new light on the importance of suburban liberalism in modern American political culture. Focusing on the suburbs along the high-tech corridor of Route 128 around Boston, the book challenges conventional scholarly assessments of Massachusetts exceptionalism, the decline of liberalism, and suburban politics in the wake of the rise of the New Right and the Reagan Revolution in the 1970s and 1980s. Although only a small portion of the population, knowledge professionals in Massachusetts and elsewhere have come to wield tremendous political leverage and power. By probing the possibilities and limitations of these suburban liberals, this rich and nuanced account shows that—far from being an exception to national trends—the suburbs of Massachusetts offer a model for understanding national political realignment and suburban politics in the second half of the twentieth century.
Spaces of PL Manifolds and Categories of Simple Maps (AM-186)
Authors: Waldhausen Friedhelm , Jahren Bjørn , Rognes John
Published: November 2017

Since its introduction by the author in the 1970s, the algebraic K-theory of spaces has been recognized as the main tool for studying parametrized phenomena in the theory of manifolds. However, a full proof of the equivalence relating the two areas has not appeared until now. This book presents such a proof, essentially completing the author's program from more than thirty years ago. The main result is a stable parametrized h-cobordism theorem, derived from a homotopy equivalence between a space of PL h-cobordisms on a space X and the classifying space of a category of simple maps of spaces having X as deformation retract. The smooth and topological results then follow by smoothing and triangulation theory. The proof has two main parts. The essence of the first part is a “desingularization,” improving arbitrary finite simplicial sets to polyhedra. The second part compares polyhedra with PL manifolds by a thickening procedure. Many of the techniques and results developed should be useful in other connections.
The Color of Success
Authors: Wu Ellen D.
Published: November 2017

This book tells of the astonishing transformation of Asians in the United States from the “yellow peril” to “model minorities”—peoples distinct from the white majority but lauded as well-assimilated, upwardly mobile, and exemplars of traditional family values—in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As the book shows, liberals argued for the acceptance of these immigrant communities into the national fold, charging that the failure of America to live in accordance with its democratic ideals endangered the country's aspirations to world leadership. Weaving together myriad perspectives, the book provides an unprecedented view of racial reform and the contradictions of national belonging in the civil rights era. It highlights the contests for power and authority within Japanese and Chinese America alongside the designs of those external to these populations, including government officials, social scientists, journalists, and others. It also demonstrates that the invention of the model minority took place in multiple arenas, such as battles over zoot suiters leaving wartime internment camps, the juvenile delinquency panic of the 1950s, Hawaiʻi statehood, and the African American freedom movement. Together, these illuminate the impact of foreign relations on the domestic racial order and how the nation accepted Asians as legitimate citizens while continuing to perceive them as indelible outsiders. By charting the emergence of the model minority stereotype, the book reveals that this far-reaching, politically charged process continues to have profound implications for how Americans understand race, opportunity, and nationhood.
Extensions
Authors: Epstein Joshua M.
Published: November 2017

This part discusses the fourteen extensions of Agent_Zero: endogenous destructive radii; age and impulse control; fight vs. flight; replication of the Latané–Darley experiment; introduction of memory; couplings (entanglement of passion and reason); endogenous dynamics of connection strength; growing the 2011 Arab Spring; jury processes; endogenous dynamics of network structure; multiple social levels; the 18th Brumaire of Agent_Zero; prices and seasonal economic cycles; and mutual escalation spirals. Each of these extensions is explained in detail. In particular, the affective, deliberative, and social components of Agent_Zero are modeled as independent; they all affect disposition and they are entangled. This part also presents examples involving the activation of the yellow spatial sites as well as violent occupation by Blue Agent_Zero actors.