bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Desafios e perspectivas do processo de preparação do Sínodo Especial para Amazônia
Authors: De Oliveira Márcia Maria
Published: January 2020

Este breve artigo apresenta algumas reflexões que brotam da vivência do processo de preparação do Sínodo para a Amazônia. Aborda alguns recortes da participação no V Simpósio Internacional do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Teologia da Pontifícia Universidade Católica da São Paulo – PUC/SP, e pontua alguns fragmentos da leitura do texto “Os patrões do Purus: elites fundiárias, poder e novas dinâmicas territoriais no sul do Amazonas” (COSTA, 2017) que apresenta os aspectos históricos dos processos de subjugação e dominação dos diversos povos da Amazônia a partir do processo de colonização. Objetiva apresentar contribuições para o debate do tema da sociobiodiversidade da região Pan-Amazônica, bem como as lutas e resistências desses povos que sobreviveram e continuam sobrevivendo a inúmeros processos de colonização. Apresenta pressupostos teóricos e conceituais para o entendimento do paradigma do Bem Viver enquanto experiência de cuidado da Casa Comum vivenciada pelos diversos povos da Amazônia, com destaque para o protagonismo das mulheres.
The Problem and Promise of Credit in American Life
Authors: Quinn Sarah L.
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter provides a background of America's real estate markets. Already by 1890, nearly half of U.S. households were owner-occupied, and a staggering four-fifths of farming households headed by people over the age of 60 were owner-occupied. Such high levels of homeownership required a massive amount of credit to circulate, and in the right way. This was no easy feat. Mortgages are risky and costly transactions, ones that many banks avoided, either partially or completely, for long periods of time. America's mortgage markets were also endemically unstable and inefficient. American mortgage markets are therefore old, expansive, morally supercharged, and highly consequential. All of this is ideal for a study of the social life of finance. Mortgage markets' long and troubled history also provides a context in which to understand the two cases at the heart of this book: securitization and federal credit. Both evolved as ways to manage the risks and costs associated with lending and, in so doing, improve the flow of credit across the nation.
Three Failures
Authors: Quinn Sarah L.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines three failed credit experiments on pooling loans, which articulated competing visions for a rapidly changing political economy. Each of these episodes was an attempt to move credit into the periphery in a way that was quicker, cheaper, easier, more stable, and more reliable than it had been before. To some extent, each involved corporate methods of organizing property and risk. Despite those similarities, however, there were also differences among the three experiments that reveal fundamental divides in how Americans made sense of a rapidly changing economic landscape. As Americans experimented with systems of credit distribution at the close of the nineteenth century, they fought over how competing interests should be reflected in a rapidly transforming political economy. Their clashing assumptions and values were built into these lending structures. Consequently, Americans' opinions of how credit should operate were forged through these lending structures as much as they were reflected in them. Each of these experiences resulted in hard-won insights about the challenges that plague credit markets. As such, these failures set the stage for a federal overhaul of farm credit in the early twentieth century. At stake in these efforts was not just the speed at which money might flow through credit markets, but also the principles that should guide those flows.
Credit as a Tool of Statecraft
Authors: Quinn Sarah L.
Published: January 2020

This chapter shows how Progressives returned to the issue of farm credit distribution in the early 1900s and drew on European precedents to reframe credit allocation as a way for the central government to help people help themselves. American Progressives thus replaced their earlier, more radical farm credit politics with a more moderate vision of government-supported credit as an inexpensive way of supporting self-help. The chapter then considers the Federal Farm Loan Act (FFLA). Compared with other hallmarks of Progressive Era state building, the FFLA seems relatively unimportant. Nevertheless, it was a turning point in the use of selective credit as a tool of federal statecraft in the United States. The FFLA provided federal credit on a national level that was administered through public–private partnerships and bolstered by tax expenditures. By tracing the lead-up to this policy, one can see how Progressives forged a new array of cultural and organizational approaches to federal credit that would later proliferate across policy arenas.
From a Nation of Farmers to a Nation of Homeowners
Authors: Quinn Sarah L.
Published: January 2020

This chapter demonstrates how, as the United States transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial nation, mortgage lenders promoted homeownership as the new measure of independence, success, and virtue. This vision was built into the deep logic of their lending structures, which brought into being a small local community of equals working together to lift themselves up. Lending cooperatives developed in the nation's towns and cities over much of the nineteenth century. On the national level, direct federal government support for urban mortgage credit was delayed until the First World War, when a set of housing crises led to national experiments in the building and financing of urban homes. These programs were temporary, but they helped change how many Americans thought about housing policy, introducing the idea that such policy was an integral part of economic growth and a potentially appropriate site of federal involvement, especially when organized through partnerships and credit support.
What We Owe One Another
Authors: Quinn Sarah L.
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter summarizes the main points of the book, points out areas for future research, and draws connections with later developments in securitization and credit programs leading up to the crash of 2007–2008. It also argues that understandings of the limits and possibilities of what people owe to each other and can expect from the state are written into the designs of financial instruments. These understandings help determine the distribution of profits and risks within specific financial transactions. This matters because the distributional politics of credit plays out simultaneously on the level of how credit fits within a political economy and on the level of specific exchanges and loans. The issue, in other words, is not just whether the people of a nation generally use credit to pay for housing or college, but the terms built into those loans. What people do in financial markets, what those financial markets are expected to do—together these dynamics make up the social life of credit in a nation.
The World of Ancient Greco­Roman Magic
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the world of ancient Greco-Roman magic. When approaching the evidence from the ancient Greco-Roman world for ritualized action, one must analyze not only what kind of evidence one is examining but also what sort of action is depicted in the evidence. One must also analyze who is performing it and for whom, where and when it is performed, why it is being performed, and how the performance works. In this study, the chapters are organized primarily by what sort of practice is involved, but the analysis probes each of the other factors as well to determine when a ritualized action may be labeled “magic.” The survey of different varieties within the discourse of magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world provides one with a better sense of the categories and criteria by which the Greeks and Romans evaluated normative and non-normative ritual activity in the ancient world.
Curses for All Occasions: Malefic and Binding Magic
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the place of curse tablets within the ancient Greco-Roman world. The curse tablet, the thin sheet of metal (lamella) with mysterious writings on it, appears as part of the standard equipment of the malevolent magician. One of the first types of magical evidence to be systematically collected and cataloged, the curse tablets have been the object of scholarly study for over a hundred years, and a number of recent studies have analyzed particular features of the curse tablet, elucidating the rules of the genre and illuminating the characteristic poetics of the magical curse. Indeed, more than 1,700 curse tablets from the ancient Greco-Roman world have been published, and many more remain unpublished, awaiting the analysis of scholars. These tablets of metal inscribed with malevolent wishes present a good body of evidence for scholars of ancient magic, since most of these curses seem to fall within everyone's intuitive definition of magic. They clearly intend harm to the target, they are mostly made and deposited in secret, and they use strange words to compel suprahuman powers to take concrete action against another for the personal benefit of the curser.
Healing and Protective Magic: Defense against the Dark Arts
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at the tradition of protective and healing magic in the Greco-Roman world. While normal strategies of defense and protection against one's enemies and the ordinary perils of life in the ancient world could be employed in everyday problems, for extraordinary crises, extraordinary means with extraordinary efficacy were needed. Such means were needed not only to ward off potential harm but also to heal the damage already done. Special knowledge might be required to determine the necessary remedy for an unusual or serious problem, whether that knowledge was transmitted in the traditional lore about various plants and minerals or in systematic treatises that compiled the arcane lore for scholarly minded philosophers and doctors. Either the traditional lore or the occult knowledge might be labeled as “magic.” Protective and curative magic channeled divine power in special ways to achieve its extraordinary effects, and so, like other forms of magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world, it was at times viewed askance as superstition and at other times eagerly sought as the only solution to otherwise insuperable problems.
Relationships with the Divine: Prayer and Magic
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This chapter distinguishes between magical prayer and religious prayer. Previous scholars have often differentiated magical prayer in terms of its coercive attitude, in contrast to a supplicative attitude of “real” religious prayer, but such a distinction ignores the subtleties of the rhetorical strategies of all of these prayers. The rituals for contacting the gods—the prayers and sacrifices and other kinds of offerings—work according to the same kinds of logical structures in the evidence labeled “magic” as in non-magical evidence. At the heart of the process is an idea of a reciprocal relation between mortal and deity, in which the mortal offers tokens of respect and honor that please the god, while the god supplies some aid that is beyond human capacity. The most notable differences in the magical materials lie not in the attitude with which the mortal approaches the deity or even in the ends for which the mortal is pleading, but rather in the dynamics of the relationship—the emphasis on the present moment and the deployment of strange elements to reinforce the extraordinary nature of the rite.
Through a Glass Darkly: Divination and Magic
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This chapter assesses divination. Divination consists of soliciting and receiving messages from the gods; it is in some sense the reverse of prayer, since it is communication from gods to mortals. As with prayer, divination is an area in which the definition of magic as an extraordinary form of ritualized action becomes particularly useful. Like prayer and sacrifice, divination forms a large part of the order of normal religion in the Greco-Roman world, so divination is only labeled “magic” when it makes claims to authority far outside this normal order, either as a superlatively efficacious procedure that depends on specialized arcane knowledge or, conversely, as a bit of traditional superstition that seems ineffective in comparison with the normally accepted procedures. Technical, indirect, or artificial divination consists in the observation of significant phenomena and the puzzling out of the significance, whereas natural or inspired divination does not rely on such interpretive techniques but rather on interpersonal communication with the divine.
The Illuminations of Theurgy: Philosophy and Magic
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on ancient ideas of theurgy. From the uses of the term in the ancient evidence, “theurgy” may be defined as the art or practice of ritually creating a connection between the mortal, material world that is before one's eyes and the unseen, immortal world of the gods. Such a practice may be a lifelong assimilation of the individual soul to the divine, or it may be a momentary activation of the connection with divine power to achieve some more immediate end on earth. Whereas normative religious action in the Greco-Roman world tends to involve just the human worshipper and the divine god in a sequence of reciprocal responses, theurgy, as it appears in the ancient evidence, attempts to bring the divine and mortal together, uniting the divine power with the human worshipper. This process of unification involves connecting elements of the cosmos at every level of being, from the lowest dregs of inanimate matter through the animal and human living creatures and up to the various kinds of divinities, including the very highest. Ultimately, theurgy appears as magic, labeled as an “extraordinary ritual practice,” whether in a positive or negative sense.
The Label of ‘Magic’ in the Ancient Greco­Roman World
Authors: Edmonds III Radcliffe G.
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter assesses why the label of “magic” is applied, by whom, to whom, and in what circumstances. Many of the things labeled as “magic”—curses or prayers or divinatory rituals—may, depending on the circumstances, be regarded as perfectly normative. However, these ritual acts may also be considered non-normative if the same things are done by different people in different contexts (social location) or with different claims to power and authority (efficacy). The chapter then considers the ways these cues of social location and efficacy are used in the discourse of magic, both for the labeling of the self and of others. For other-labeling, the dynamics are especially clear in the legal arena, where the community or its representative are deciding where that person fits within the community. In such evidence, claims of extraordinary efficacy remain secondary to the cue of the social location of the performer. By contrast, self-labeling is much rarer and appears only in limited kinds of evidence, such as the Greek Magical Papyri, but the cue of extraordinary efficacy is the most important, and claims to extraordinary social location tend to be secondary to it. The appearance of such self-labeling, however, is unusual in the discourse of magic found in other cultures, so these examples are particularly revealing for the nature of the discourse of magic in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
Risk in Complex Systems
Authors: Comfort Louise K.
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the theoretical framework of complex adaptive systems. Risk is a social construct, one created by the human actors who seek to manage a stable world, and who, aware of potential catastrophe, seek to prevent or reduce it. The challenge is how to construct a mode of considering risk holistically, but systematically in a dynamic environment that is prone to recurring hazards. Over decades, inquiry into risk and strategies to manage it have reexamined and redefined risk in relation to changing environments. Three broad themes have shaped this continuing dialogue in administrative theory and public policy. The first theme focuses on the impact of technology on social institutions, and whether changes introduced by advances in technology exceeded human capacity to manage institutions in constructive ways. The second theme focuses on the organization of collective action as a strategy to counter risk. As a third theme, the continuing dialogue addressed the escalating impact of risk on social organizations and institutions.
Assessing Risk in Complex Systems
Authors: Comfort Louise K.
Published: January 2020

This chapter presents the methods and data for the comparative analysis of 12 case studies of earthquake response systems that provide the empirical basis for this book. Three primary types of data were collected for each response system. Data from these sources were analyzed for each response system, using methods appropriate for the respective periods of study. The types of data include documentary reports, newspaper reports, and on-site field observations and semi-structured interviews. Using mixed methods of documentary analysis, network analysis, and calculation of External/Internal indexes (E/I indexes), this study explores the processes of change, adaptation, failure, and renewal demonstrated in the set of 12 earthquake response/recovery systems operating in different technical, organizational, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts over the years 1999–2015. This analysis includes assessment of the changes in information technology used by organizations participating in response operations over this 16-year period.
Risk in Practice
Authors: Comfort Louise K.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the four different types of response systems that were identified by degree of adaptation to the problem of seismic risk. Auto-adaptive systems are those that are high on technical infrastructure, high on organizational flexibility, and high on cultural openness to new ideas and strategies of action. Operative adaptive systems are those systems that demonstrate awareness of seismic risk and a moderate degree of professional planning and preparedness to reduce risk of losses. Emergent adaptive systems are those systems that are low on technical structure but show some degree of flexibility in organizational processes and beginning openness to new information and new strategies of action in the cultural dimension. Meanwhile, nonadaptive systems are those systems unable to mobilize effective response operations independently after an extreme event, and virtually all assistance comes from external sources. In practice, initial conditions influenced the formation of response systems following earthquakes in all 12 cases, leading to different types of adaptation. The path dependence that follows from each distinctive set of initial conditions illustrates both the promise and the challenge of shaping communities that are resilient to seismic risk.
Emergent Adaptive Systems
Authors: Comfort Louise K.
Published: January 2020

This chapter reveals the findings and analysis that characterize emergent adaptive systems. Four earthquake response systems are characterized as emergent adaptive systems: the 1999 Marmara, Turkey, earthquake; the 1999 Chi Chi, Taiwan, earthquake; the 2005 Pakistan earthquake; and the 2008 Wenchuan, China, earthquake. Regarding awareness of seismic risk, scientists and researchers had studied and mapped seismic risk in each case, but this knowledge was not widely transmitted to the local communities in which the earthquakes occurred, nor was it integrated into public policy and practice. Regarding technical infrastructure for communication, each of the four earthquake-affected communities had modest technical infrastructures for communication, but they were not yet widely distributed through the communities. Similarly, in each of the four earthquake response systems, some organizational capacity existed in the communities prior to the events. This capacity allowed responsible actors to mobilize resources to meet immediate needs generated by the earthquakes, but in all four cases, the local capacity was easily overwhelmed by the size, scope, and severity of the events experienced and could not be sustained by the operational system that was generated.
Nonadaptive Systems
Authors: Comfort Louise K.
Published: January 2020

This chapter outlines the findings and analysis for nonadaptive systems. Specifically, it looks at the three nonadaptive seismic response systems developed following the 2001 Bhuj, Gujarat, India, earthquake; the 2004 Sumatra, Indonesia, earthquake; and the 2010 Haïti earthquake. In practice, each system adapted to the shattered context in which it was operating to some extent. Indeed, some adjustments were made, but none altered the operational environment substantially. In Gujarat, the shadow of hostility with neighboring Pakistan curbed the flow of information between jurisdictional levels to support rapid response and recovery. In Sumatra, the earthquake and tsunami led to the resolution of the long-standing civil conflict with the Free Aceh movement, a very positive outcome, but the organizational networks and communications channels among national, provincial, city, and district jurisdictions that had been ruptured for decades needed to be rebuilt. In Haïti, the existing government was overwhelmed by the enormous tasks confronting the small nation, which, in most cases, involved full-scale redesign and development. In each case, the international community gave generously in humanitarian assistance to meet the immediate needs of the affected populations, but the local capacity to carry out the longer-term tasks needed to be developed.
Evolving Patterns of System Response
Authors: Comfort Louise K.
Published: January 2020

This chapter provides a comparison across the set of 12 earthquake response systems, examining the degree of integration achieved between their internal capacity to adapt to an altered disaster environment for managing response operations, and their dependence on external resources, knowledge, and skills to implement coherent actions for response and recovery, based on analyses of External/Internal index values. Not surprisingly, the four subsets of earthquake response systems demonstrated capacity for adaptation to varying degrees, but importantly, the variance appeared not to depend on the presence of technical infrastructure alone. Nor did the variance depend on the robustness of the organizational infrastructure of planning and preparedness for a seismic event alone. Rather, the variance appeared to depend on the degree of integration of the technical infrastructure for communication into the organizational plans for seismic risk reduction. This integration of social/organizational planning with the advances of technical communications infrastructure produced a powerful vehicle for expanding communication and information exchange that creates a new pattern of building community resilience to disaster.
Forensic Idols
Authors: Ossa-Richardson Anthony
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the role of ambiguity in a hermeneutic setting that sees it only as doubt and never as plenty, namely, the English common law, where discussions about the nature of ambiguity serve as a proxy for a deeper controversy about what it means to interpret a text—a will, a contract, or a statute. Of the three hermeneutic disciplines—literature, law, and theology—it seems best to begin with the law for three reasons. First, its setting is closely bound to the rhetorical discourses discussed in the previous chapter. Second, legal hermeneutics stands somewhat apart from scripture and literary exegesis in that it never countenances the legitimacy of deliberate ambiguity. Third, of the three subjects, law is the most essential to society. If it was important to determine the sense of a line in Horace or St. John, it was far more so in a contract, for at stake there was not merely a grasp of the classics or the soul's eternal salvation, but money. Indeed, the machine of legal practice, of arguing and deciding cases, has always held to a rhythm of finding and resolving ambiguities. Rather than trying to cover all bases in the history of legal ambiguity, the chapter approaches the topic through its connection to the more fundamental hermeneutic problem of intention.
River and Ocean
Authors: Ossa-Richardson Anthony
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at Scriptures, whose ambiguity is seen both as a difficulty to shake people out of exegetical complacency and as an inspired involution of multiple meanings on the page. These meanings are not only allegorical, mystical, or typological, but also literal, according to a widespread Catholic idea neglected by previous historians of biblical scholarship. The doctrine of multiple literal senses marked yet another battleground between the company of two armies, Protestant and Catholic—barring two or three defections—in the early seventeenth century. It encapsulated a profound distinction between two views of Scripture: the one a river to be cleansed and traced to the source, the other an ocean in which to swim, even to abandon oneself. Why, then, has this controversy been entirely ignored by scholarship? As modernity encroached, the doctrine became an embarrassment to Catholics, and in 1845 a professor of theology at Louvain, Jan-Theodor Beelen, wrote a treatise against it. But there are deeper reasons for the neglect. The history of biblical hermeneutics as written to date is more than usually Whiggish, seeking the precursors to Schleiermacher and Gadamer; the German and Lutheran backstory has therefore seemed inevitable, and from this perspective Catholic hermeneutics since Luther and Erasmus has been an irrelevance. Subsequently, the occlusion of the Catholic voice was attended by a narrowing of the possibilities of what biblical interpretation could be.
Satura Lanx
Authors: Ossa-Richardson Anthony
Published: January 2020

This chapter assesses the implications of artificial ambiguity for the early modern study of classical poetry. The early modern encounter with ambiguity in poetry took its cue from rhetoric. This is important because it helps to explain why the role of ambiguity in poetry was so heavily circumscribed, as it had to be in rhetoric—both were held to involve the persuasive communication of ideas. The chapter then considers a word that connects readings of deliberate ambiguity in witticisms and in poetry: elegantia, ‘elegance’. It is difficult to get the measure of this apparently simple term. Silke Diederich has argued that, whereas it meant for Cicero the quality of the Attic genus subtile, ‘precise, neat, tasteful, well-chosen, with discreet adornments’, it came to denote for later Roman critics a refined, aristocratic mode of expression. The word elegentia itself exhibits an ambiguity, or an unresolved contradiction. The term precisely describes the notion of perspicuous ambiguity, or ambiguity without obscurity, the double sense of a witticism. The chapter then argues that without a sense of how some critics defended ambiguity in poetry, one will struggle to understand how contemporary poets might have conceptualised their own ambiguities.
Adloyada
Authors: Ossa-Richardson Anthony
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores an older, mystical attitude to interpretation in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, whose writings, whatever their philosophical value, had a seismic impact on the Romantic thinkers of the next generation. It might be thought that Hamann earned his place in a history of ambiguity by his prose style. This is partly the case: few styles are so equivocal, and few have had so little precedent and so many imitators. However, the chapter argues that Hamann's prose style was really a style of reading Scripture, one that looked to the past, embracing both ambiguity and what would later be theorised as irony. Indeed, imitation is a key component of his register throughout his works, as he himself acknowledged—the ambiguous persona a hallmark of his satirical office. Another component is fragmentation, both on a prosodic level and on a semantic level. The fragmentation is also a function of the many literary and scholarly references spliced together in his work. Hamann called his ‘Aesthetica’ a ‘rhapsody in cabbalistical prose’, a rhapsody in the sense of a patchwork of ideas, quotations ripped out of context and repurposed.
The Combination Room
Authors: Ossa-Richardson Anthony
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter reviews William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, a book about ambiguity in lyric poetry, but one that rejects the dominant concept in previous analyses of that subject, namely, artificial ambiguity. Its innovation was to adopt instead a form of inspired ambiguity, one made possible by the earlier invention of dramatic irony, and also, on another front, by the Freudian unconscious. Indeed, Empson was working with a structural analogue of inspired ambiguity, in which the two voices in a verse are not God and man but conscious and unconscious, or else conflicting desires or ‘forces’ in the author's mind. The chapter then considers in fuller detail three structuring concepts in Seven Types, embodied in three key words, each related to an idea that extends back through and beyond Freud. The first, ambivalence, is psychological; the second, primitive, is anthropological; and the third, hypocrisy, is ethical. All three are closely related, and by triangulating them, one may see with greater clarity what Empson brought to the traditions he inherited.
Afterword
Authors: Ossa-Richardson Anthony
Published: January 2020

This afterword argues that all definitions of ambiguity only raise further questions. It is not the historian's task to answer them, and not his task to define ambiguity; to do so would impose a false coherence on a slovenly profusion of conversations. It is his job to trace out the possibilities of such questions, not to foreclose them in advance. Ambiguity not only has a history, it is inseparable from history, makes history possible: it lies in the gulf that separates poet from critic, legislator from barrister, tragic hero from playgoer, prophet from Church Father, friend from friend, self from self, historian from exasperated reader. Ultimately, the history of ambiguity is not a history of progress or decline, not a record of pathology and delusion, and not a romance of liberation from classical strictures. It is the history of a mind that has found too many past answers and will not choose between them.
Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean
Authors: Terpstra Taco
Published: January 2020

From around 700 BCE until the first centuries CE, the Mediterranean enjoyed steady economic growth through trade, reaching a level not to be regained until the early modern era. This process of growth coincided with a process of state formation, culminating in the largest state the ancient Mediterranean would ever know, the Roman Empire. Subsequent economic decline coincided with state disintegration. How are the two processes related? This book investigates how the organizational structure of trade benefited from state institutions. Although enforcement typically depended on private actors, traders could utilize a public infrastructure, which included not only courts and legal frameworks but also socially cohesive ideologies. The book details how business practices emerged that were based on private order yet took advantage of public institutions. Focusing on the activity of both private and public economic actors, the book illuminates the complex relationship between economic development and state structures in the ancient Mediterranean.
Public Institutions and Phoenician Trade
Authors: Terpstra Taco
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses the trade diaspora, an institution that was all but obligatory for regular, long-distance trade in the absence of third-party enforcement. Traders could do business in a foreign community because people from their homeland had moved there permanently and could vouch for them. If a promise to pay or deliver according to agreement was not fulfilled, foreign settlers could be held accountable for any debt of their fellow citizens. All members of a diaspora network—itinerant and stationary alike—ultimately faced expulsion if they behaved opportunistically. The chapter then focuses on a single diaspora: the Phoenician. Because of their centuries-long Mediterranean mercantile tradition, one can trace their interaction with public institutions through much of Greco-Roman history.
Epilogue
Authors: Terpstra Taco
Published: January 2020

This epilogue addresses the weakening of the Roman state. In the third century CE, the Roman Empire began having trouble maintaining its geographical integrity, a problem that would grow noticeably worse thereafter. The split between an eastern and western half in 395 CE was the most dramatic manifestation of that decreasing ability. After the empire split in two, especially the west in the course of the fifth century saw the abandonment of peripheral areas, although signs of declining state power appeared in the east as well. However, as the western half eventually disintegrated, the eastern half recovered. In the sixth century, it managed to extend its rule over parts of the west, including the Italian heartland. But even with this westward expansion—and even allowing for healthy economic activity in some eastern regions—as a military and economic organization, the Roman Empire was nothing like the mighty state it once had been. The chapter then considers the effects of the empire's disintegration on human welfare.
Concluding Remarks
Authors: Terpstra Taco
Published: January 2020

This concluding chapter assesses the impact of Roman imperial rule on the impetus toward innovation. Although the political and economic unification of the Mediterranean reduced transaction costs, it may also have reduced the drive toward innovation in both a technological and an institutional sense. As such, the chapter presents the idea that the politically unified Roman Mediterranean was unlikely to produce the accelerating pace of technological and institutional innovation seen in late-medieval and Early-Modern Europe. That notion would certainly need further study and demonstration. But however preliminary at present, it might help explain why only the fragmented world that emerged out of the ruins of the Roman Empire would eventually achieve the breakthrough progress that would bring the fruits of the Industrial Revolution.
Gateway State
Authors: Miller-Davenport Sarah
Published: January 2020

This book explores the development of Hawaiʻi as a model for liberal multiculturalism and a tool of American global power in the era of decolonization. The establishment of Hawaiʻi statehood in 1959 was a watershed moment, not only in the ways Americans defined their nation's role on the international stage but also in the ways they understood the problems of social difference at home. Hawaiʻi's remarkable transition from territory to state heralded the emergence of postwar multiculturalism, which was a response both to independence movements abroad and to the limits of civil rights in the United States. Once a racially problematic overseas colony, by the 1960s, Hawaiʻi had come to symbolize John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. This was a more inclusive idea of who counted as American at home and what areas of the world were considered to be within the U.S. sphere of influence. Statehood advocates argued that Hawaiʻi and its majority Asian population could serve as a bridge to Cold War Asia—and as a global showcase of American democracy and racial harmony. In the aftermath of statehood, business leaders and policymakers worked to institutionalize and sell this ideal by capitalizing on Hawaiʻi's diversity. Asian Americans in Hawaiʻi never lost a perceived connection to Asia. Instead, their ethnic difference became a marketable resource to help other Americans navigate a decolonizing world. As excitement over statehood dimmed, the utopian vision of Hawaiʻi fell apart, revealing how racial inequality and U.S. imperialism continued to shape the fiftieth state—and igniting a backlash against the islands' white-dominated institutions.
Introduction
Authors: Miller-Davenport Sarah
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter explains that global decolonization and Hawaiʻi statehood complemented U.S. efforts to promote the nation-state as the primary building block of the postwar global order. As the leading power of the noncommunist world, the United States “startlingly naturalized the free nation,” drawing on the tradition of Open Door diplomacy to advance its own political and economic interests as European colonialism collapsed. Against this background, Hawaiʻi, as an overseas colony legally distinct from the rest of the United States, appeared to many as an aberration needing resolution. Thus, the ideas on multiculturalism developed in Hawaiʻi were not mere rhetoric: poststatehood Hawaiʻi became a physical center for facilitating the new cultural encounters of the Cold War, with varying degrees of success. For those Americans seeking to sway the loyalties of people in Asia and the Pacific, Hawaiʻi was not only seen as a symbolic representation of America's commitment to democracy and diversity; it was also a place where people from both Asia and the U.S. mainland were physically transported in order to prove the veracity of that message. But those cultural encounters did not always go as planned.
“The Picture Window of the Pacific”
Authors: Miller-Davenport Sarah
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores the post-World War II congressional debates on Hawaiʻi statehood. It shows that it was not until the statehood debates that Hawaiʻi began to acquire a popular reputation as a vibrant interracial community where “East meets West.” This image emerged only through contentious political struggle, as advocates battled opponents who believed Hawaiʻi's people were a threat to white supremacy. Mainland opponents, most of them Southern Democrats, assailed statehood as a colonialist maneuver that would dilute U.S. national identity. Many of these opponents feared that Hawaiʻi would provide the crucial votes necessary for civil rights legislation if the territory were made a state. Statehood advocates at first claimed Hawaiʻi should be granted statehood because of its similarity to the mainland. By the end of the statehood debates, however—as Asia grew in importance in U.S. Cold War policy—Hawaiʻi was promoted by its supporters as a place whose cultural connections to Asia could be used to advance American global interests.
Through the Looking Glass
Authors: Miller-Davenport Sarah
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines how activists, journalists, and writers constructed Hawaiʻi as a paradigm of racial equality in the context of the national civil rights movement. While the vision of Hawaiʻi as a racial paradise went back to social science discourses of the interwar period, the statehood debates of the postwar era politicized the Hawaiʻi fantasy. The media championed the idea that Hawaiʻi could serve as a model for mainland race relations. The black press and many civil rights activists likewise turned to Hawaiʻi as proof that “integration works.” This was an aspirational picture that overlooked Hawaiʻi's own racial tensions, which would eventually rise to the surface as the glow of statehood dimmed. Moreover, these accounts ultimately helped promote the new state as a place where mainlanders could escape the hostile race relations of mainland—one of the implicit messages of Hawaiʻi's tourism industry—rather than a viable social model that could be emulated.
Formal Verification of Control System Software
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

The verification of control system software is critical to a host of technologies and industries, from aeronautics and medical technology to the cars we drive. The failure of controller software can cost people their lives. This book provides control engineers and computer scientists with an introduction to the formal techniques for analyzing and verifying this important class of software. Too often, control engineers are unaware of the issues surrounding the verification of software, while computer scientists tend to be unfamiliar with the specificities of controller software. The book provides a unified approach that is geared to graduate students in both fields, covering formal verification methods as well as the design and verification of controllers. It presents a wealth of new verification techniques for performing exhaustive analysis of controller software. These include new means to compute nonlinear invariants, the use of convex optimization tools, and methods for dealing with numerical imprecisions such as floating point computations occurring in the analyzed software. As the autonomy of critical systems continues to increase—as evidenced by autonomous cars, drones, and satellites and landers—the numerical functions in these systems are growing ever more advanced. The techniques presented here are essential to support the formal analysis of the controller software being used in these new and emerging technologies.
Critical Embedded Software
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

This chapter looks at the current state of physical systems controlled by an onboard computer. Typically this covers transportation systems such as cars, aircraft, railway systems, space systems, or even medical devices, all of them either for the expected harmfulness for people, or for the huge cost associated with their failure. The chapter shows how the increase of computer use in those systems has led to huge benefits, but also an exponential growth in complexity. Furthermore, the drawback of this massive introduction of computers to control systems is the lack of predictability for both computer and software. This chapter shows how the aerospace industry, and more generally critical embedded systems industries, is now facing a huge increase in the software size in their systems. This in turn creates a greater system complexity increase because of safety or performance objectives. Moreover, this complexity leads to the need to integrate even more advanced algorithms to sustain autonomy and energy efficiency.
Formal Methods
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

This chapter gives a brief overview of some formal methods and their use in the context of critical embedded systems development. While testing is a common practice for a lot of engineers as a way to evaluate whether the program they developed fulfills its needs, formal methods are less known and may require a little introduction to the non-expert. This chapter thus serves as a reasonable introduction to the control expert engineer. It first defines the semantics of programs: their basic properties and their meaning. Then, the chapter outlines different formal verifications and explains how they reason on the program artifact. A last part addresses the soundness of the analyses with respect to the actual semantics.
Control Systems
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

This chapter sketches the typical development of control systems and refers the reader to classical books for more details on control system design. Historically, control design started in the continuous world: a system had to be controlled, and its dynamics was captured by the equations of physics, for example, using ordinary differential equations. Then, control theory provides means to build a controller: another system, used in combination with the system to be controlled, is able to move the system to the requested state. The chapter thus begins by presenting a typical process leading to the development of a controller in the aerospace domain. It then gives an idea of each step.
Invariant Synthesis via Convex Optimization
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on the computation of invariant for a discrete dynamical system collecting semantics. Invariants or collecting semantics properties are properties preserved along all executions of a system and verified in all reachable states. A subset of these invariants are defined as inductive. Inductive invariants are properties, or relationships between variables, that are inductively preserved by one transition of considered systems. Intuitively, it is not required to consider a reachable state and all (or part of) its past while arguing about the validity of the invariant, but only the single state. Applying the induction principle, this chapter obtains that any state satisfying the property is mapped to a next state preserving that same property.
Floating-point Semantics of Analyzed Programs
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on floating-point semantics. It first outlines these semantics. The chapter then revisits previous results and adapts them to account for floating-point computations, assuming a bound on the rounding error is provided. A last part focuses on the approaches to bound these imprecisions, over-approximating the floating-point errors. Here, provided bounds on each variable, computing the floating-point error can be performed with classical interval-based analysis. Kleene-based iterations with interval abstract domain provide the appropriate framework to compute such bounds. This is even simpler in this setting because of the focus on bounding the floating-point error on a single call of the dynamic system transition function, that is, a single loop body execution without internal loops.
Convex Optimization and Numerical Issues
Authors: Garoche Pierre-Loïc
Published: January 2020

This chapter aims at providing the intuition behind convex optimization algorithms and addresses their effective use with floating-point implementation. It first briefly presents the algorithms, assuming a real semantics. As outlined in Chapter 4, convex conic programming is supported by different methods depending on the cone considered. The most known approach for linear constraints is the simplex method by Dantzig. While having an exponential-time complexity with respect to the number of constraints, the simplex method performs well in general. Another method is the set of interior point methods, initially proposed by Karmarkar and made popular by Nesterov and Nemirovski. They can be characterized as path-following methods in which a sequence of local linear problems are solved, typically by Newton's method. After these algorithms are considered, the chapter discusses approaches to obtain sound results.
Prologue
Authors: Hoffnung-Garskof Jesse E.
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter briefly illustrates the major themes of this volume. It presents two fundamental arguments about race. The first is that race is a social rather than a natural phenomenon. The institution of racial slavery existed in many parts of the Americas, producing strikingly similar consequences in each of the many societies that sought to integrate former slaves as free workers and citizens after emancipation. Nevertheless, the contours of how race actually worked—including how people were classified, and what legal and social consequences those classifications carried—could be markedly different in local contexts. The second is that the systems for organizing societies around race intersected, in each of these contexts, with other social hierarchies, including class, gender, and sexuality. Understanding the particular racial politics that this group of migrants articulated requires situating these decisions within the kinds of racial, class, and gender strictures they encountered in their places of origin.