bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
To “affirmatively further fair housing”
Authors: King Desmond S. , Smith Rogers M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers what makes racial equality in the American housing system such a divisive issue. Because housing choices profoundly affect people's personal lives and yet also have enormous public consequences for the structure of the nation as a whole, there arose concerns to make sure that America's housing systems are not systems of racial inequality. But the fact that housing is so central to Americans' personal lives is also a major reason why they have long been more resistant to efforts to end de facto segregation in this area than in any other, except the related one of public schools. Here they remain profoundly divided even on the desirability of strong enforcement of anti-discrimination policies aimed at making residential racial integration not only an attractive ideal but an everyday reality.
Prospects of the House Divided
Authors: King Desmond S. , Smith Rogers M.
Published: November 2017

This chapter reflects on how Americans can achieve further progress in their long national struggle to reduce enduring material race inequalities. It first returns to the structure of American racial politics as analyzed in previous chapters, before discussing its present state. The chapter then suggests that the effects of the clash of the modern racial alliances have been debilitating on many fronts, illustrating through charts and graphs the effects of these racial alliances, and offers projections on how Americans can tackle current incarnations of racial inequalities, and why progress in that regard seems so slow. Finally, this chapter makes some recommendations for breaking out of the “stalemate” on race that Barack Obama perceived in 2008.
Cities of Commerce
Authors: Gelderblom Oscar
Published: November 2017

This book develops a model of institutional change in European commerce based on urban competition. Cities continuously competed with each other by adapting commercial, legal, and fin ancial institutions to the evolving needs of merchants. The book traces the successive rise of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam as commercial cities between 1250 and 1650, showing how dominant cities feared being displaced by challengers while lesser ones sought to keep up by cultivating policies favorable to trade. It argues that it was this competitive urban network that promoted open access institutions in the Low Countries, and emphasizes the central role played by the urban magistrates in fostering these inclusive institutional arrangements. The book describes how the city fathers resisted the predatory or reckless actions of their territorial rulers, and how their nonrestrictive approach to commercial life succeeded in attracting merchants from all over Europe. It intervenes in an important debate on the growth of trade in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Challenging influential theories that attribute this commercial expansion to the political strength of merchants, the book demonstrates how urban competition fostered the creation of inclusive institutions in international trade.
The Organization of Exchange
Authors: Gelderblom Oscar
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on the creation of spot markets as a means for foreign traders in Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to find buyers or sellers and negotiate deals with them. It first considers how public vending locations were constantly adapted to the size and composition of the merchant community before discussing how the work of local hostellers and brokers was regulated to ensure the availability of current commercial information to all merchants at low cost. It then examines the ability of resident traders to pass over local intermediaries and organize their own information supply by focusing on the business of one merchant, Hans Thijs, a jeweler from Antwerp who settled in Amsterdam in 1595. It also assesses the extent to which the urban magistrates were willing, in the interest of the merchant community at large, to align the financial reward for the hostellers' services with the value they added to the business of individual merchants.
Conflict Resolution
Authors: Gelderblom Oscar
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the various ways in which merchants dealt with actual disputes over business transactions. Drawing on the available evidence on commercial litigation in Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, it shows that merchants used a combination of peer pressure, arbitration, local court proceedings, and, occasionally, appeals to central courts to end their disputes, albeit with an overwhelming preference for amicable settlement. The chapter first provides an overview of amicable settlement in the three cities before discussing commercial litigation in Bruges, the courts in Antwerp, and conflict resolution in Amsterdam. It also considers the role of the central courts in settling disputes between merchants and concludes with an analysis of law merchant (lex mercatoria) in the three cities. The chapter shows that urban magistrates allowed merchants to use arbiters to settle disputes amicably and according to their own chosen standard.
Dealing with Losses
Authors: Gelderblom Oscar
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the various ways in which the merchants of the Low Countries dealt with losses from violent assaults. It shows the importance of urban competition, not only for specific groups like the German Hanse, but also for the merchant community at large that used the cities' increasingly sophisticated commodity and financial markets to share, spread, and transfer the commercial risks created by Europe's political and legal fragmentation. The chapter first considers how collective action was used by merchants to discipline rulers, as exemplified by the boycotts of Bruges, mostly by the German Hanse but sometimes also by English and Spanish traders, between 1270 and 1310. It then explores court proceedings and spreading of risks as a means for merchants to deal with losses and to organize compensation.
Hoplitai/Politai: Refighting Ancient Battles
Authors: Cartledge Paul
Published: November 2017

This chapter notes and welcomes the shift in the study of ancient Greek warfare over the past thirty years from the “narrowly technical” toward sociopolitical issues and approaches. It also examines several key issues. It considers what the causally related variables or factors that link the evolution of the hoplite phenomenon to the rise of the polis and asks whether the notorious source(s) problems prevent us from understanding them. It then looks at what tipped mass fighting over into phalanx fighting. Moreover, the chapter investigates the possibility of a hoplite “ideology” and looks at how Aristotle posited a connection between warfare and political development in Greece. In light of the nature of the sources, this chapter emphasizes the strength of a theoretical approach to the inextricable link between warfare and politics in the Greek state.
Early Greek Infantry Fighting in a Mediterranean Context
Authors: Raaflaub Kurt A.
Published: November 2017

This chapter highlights ideas on early Greek infantry fighting in a Mediterranean context. It places the emergence of hoplite warfare as part of a long interactive process associated with the rise of the polis. The polis, its institutions and political thought, evolved from the eighth to the fifth century along with its military practices. Despite intense interaction with the states of the Near East, the Greeks of the eighth and seventh centuries developed the phalanx independent of Oriental influence. The chapter examines Assyrian and Persian armies, arms, and armor as well as formation and tactics to determine that there is no prior model for the equipment and style of Greek infantry. Having no Near Eastern example, the Greeks must have invented the double-grip shield for use in the already existing phalanx for which the hoplite was always intended.
Large Weapons, Small Greeks: The Practical Limitations of Hoplite Weapons and Equipment
Authors: Schwartz Adam
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that the defining elements of the hoplite were the spear and, above all, the double-grip shield. Other items of the panoply were subject to much change and innovation over the centuries, but the shield and spear remained essentially unaltered throughout the entire hoplite era. This chapter reasons that the Greeks maintained the shield's original design—circular, concave, and about one meter in diameter—because it was preeminently suited for a specific purpose, fighting in tight formation in a phalanx. It gives a detailed analysis of the Etruscan Bomarzo shield, one of the few hoplite type shields to survive more or less intact from antiquity, and assesses a number of key sources bearing out the burden and cumbersomeness of the hoplite shield, to conclude that its weight, shape, and sheer size in terms of surface area made the shield particularly unwieldy.
Farmers and Hoplites: Models of Historical Development
Authors: Van Wees Hans
Published: November 2017

This chapter critiques the grand narrative of Hanson's The Other Greeks and argues that it is wrong in important respects. The chapter presents the social and economic changes in the eighth century that took place with the rise of the independent yeoman farmer and his culture of agrarianism as the driving force behind the political and military history of Greece. From the middle of the eighth century there was a class of elite leisured landowners that did not work the land themselves but supervised the toil of a large lower class of hired laborers and slaves. This era of gentlemen farmers who comprised the top 15–20 percent of society and competed with each other for status lasted for about two centuries. When the yeomen farmers emerged after the mid-sixth century, they joined the leisure class in the hoplite militia.
The Hoplite Narrative
Authors: Hanson Victor Davis
Published: November 2017

This chapter defends the grand hoplite narrative, pointing out the inherent difficulties in studying the origins and nature of hoplite battle. In addition, over the last two centuries of classical scholarship the “grand hoplite narrative” has emerged in most histories of Greece. The chapter suggests that the success of the orthodoxy is due to the fact that it best reflects the evidence for phalanx fighting and the larger social, economic, and political role of the hoplite. It responds to the recent attacks on the view that hoplites formed a distinct middle class, the claims that hoplites fought in an open and fluid formation, and that the phalanx was a late development. In addition, the chapter examines the debate over the weight of hoplite equipment and key elements of the traditional battle narrative.
Seeing and Shaping Objects
Authors: Wells Peter S.
Published: November 2017

Current understanding of the basic optical and physiological processes involved in how we see is explained in a number of recent books on the subject by specialists in cognitive psychology and in the various branches of neuroscience. This chapter reviews some aspects of the topic that are particularly relevant to the subject of this book. Although in common parlance we speak of seeing with our eyes, in fact we do not see with our eyes, but with our brains. The eyes conduct light, via the retina at the back of the eyeball and the optic nerve, to the various different regions of the brain that are involved in seeing; as many as thirty have been suggested by neuroscientists. Seeing is thus a complex process that takes place in conjunction with other processes in which the brain is involved.
Arranging Spaces
Authors: Wells Peter S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes the arrangement of objects in grave in late prehistoric Europe. Graves provide direct views onto how people arranged objects so as to make those objects visually meaningful to them. Arrangements on the floors of graves, in burial chambers, or in other kinds of funeral settings enable us to see those objects in the way that the people who participated in the event saw them—from the same viewpoint, in their relation to one another, and in relation to the overall frame (walls) of the grave. In many, if not most, instances, the placement of objects in a burial setting was a critical and dramatic part of the funeral event. It is likely that participants witnessed the placing of each object in the grave chamber, while perhaps a few words were spoken about each and its significance to the occasion.
Performances
Authors: Wells Peter S.
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with performances, which refer specifically to actions that people carried out in social contexts—“with an audience” and with their material culture. To be a performance, an action must be aimed at communicating with others. A performance involves some kind of movement by a person or persons, and the focus here is with those movements that involved the manipulations of objects. These include throwing swords into the lake at La Tène; arranging bent and broken scabbards in the ditch at Gournay-sur-Aronde; and placing iron tools in the fire at Forggensee. At Snettisham, they buried gold neckrings. All these actions were performed by prehistoric people and were held in open spaces where they could be seen by others, in some cases by large numbers of them.
The Flame of Eternity
Authors: Michalski Krzysztof
Published: November 2017

This book provides a reexamination and new interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy and the central role that the concepts of eternity and time, as he understood them, played in it. According to this book, Nietzsche's reflections on human life are inextricably linked to time, which in turn cannot be conceived of without eternity. Eternity is a measure of time, but also, the book argues, something Nietzsche viewed first and foremost as a physiological concept having to do with the body. The body ages and decays, involving us in a confrontation with our eventual death. It is in relation to this brute fact that we come to understand eternity and the finitude of time. Nietzsche argues that humanity has long regarded the impermanence of our life as an illness in need of curing. It is this “pathology” that Nietzsche called nihilism. Arguing that this insight lies at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy as a whole, the book seeks to explain and reinterpret Nietzsche's thought in light of it. It maintains that many of Nietzsche's main ideas—including his views on love, morality (beyond good and evil), the will to power, overcoming, the suprahuman (or the overman, as it is infamously referred to), the Death of God, and the myth of the eternal return—take on new meaning and significance when viewed through the prism of eternity.
Good and Evil, Joy and Pain
Authors: Michalski Krzysztof
Published: November 2017

This chapter posits an understanding of Nietzsche's “genealogy of morals.” The genealogy of morals is an attempt to show the dynamic hidden behind our moral concepts, the intractable tension that arises from the fact that these concepts are an expression of life and, accordingly, that each one of them is also a kind of power that can injure or destroy, as well as aid or liberate. It is an account of human life as it is, here and now, of the terror that lurks in its depths, as well as of our flight from it, if only, as today, into the pleasant slumber of contemporary culture; of the power of human life, which introduces into the world the only kind of meaning one can find there, and of its irremediable weakness, which adds falsehood and deception to the world and thereby makes it both habitable and interesting.
Reason, Which Hurts
Authors: Michalski Krzysztof
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents an account of human life primarily through Nietzsche's character of Zarathustra, who argues that human life is irreducibly diverse and thoroughly dangerous. We are constantly trying to rebuild our home within it, constantly trying to glue all the pieces of the world we live in into a whole, to order it, to turn it into “our world.” But we will never be able to remove from this world the threat of catastrophe, of destruction, of the end; we will never achieve certainty that the next step in our lives won't march us into the abyss, into which everything that has been familiar till now, everything nice and warm and orderly, vanishes. In other words, an essential feature of life as we live it is chance: the new, unexpected, alien side of life. In its every moment, life is torn open, discontinuous, fractured: diversified.
The Death of God
Authors: Michalski Krzysztof
Published: November 2017

This chapter turns to Plato's Phaedo as well as the Gospel of Matthew: two narratives about death, and two visions of human nature. Christ's cry on the cross, as told by Matthew, gives voice to an understanding of human life that is radically different from that of Socrates. For Phaedo's Socrates, the truly important things in life are ideas: the eternal order of the world, the understanding of which leads to unperturbed peace and serenity in the face of death. The Gospel is the complete opposite: it testifies to the incurable presence of the Unknown in every moment of life, a presence that rips apart every human certainty built on what is known, that disturbs all peace, all serenity—that severs the continuity of time, opening every moment of our lives to nothingness, thereby inscribing within them the possibility of an abrupt end and the chance at a new beginning.
Truth on the Cross
Authors: Boldizzoni Francesco
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with a discussion of the roots of economic history. It then turns to the identity crisis faced by economic history today, brought about by the development of a movement founded in the United States at the end of the 1950s known as “new economic history” or “cliometrics.” History is normally expected to improve our understanding of the past. It is probably agreed that what distinguishes good historical research is its capacity to throw light on the workings of societies that differ to varying degrees from our own. However, the aim of cliometrics is not to increase our knowledge of the past. It is to create narratives of the past compatible with neoliberal economics, and often it is a highly ideological exercise to endorse specific worldviews, theories, and policy recommendations.
The World we Have Lost
Authors: Boldizzoni Francesco
Published: November 2017

This chapter is the first of two that intends to show that it is possible to practice a different type of economic history from cliometrics, without lapsing into narrative history. It involves approaches that were molded in continental Europe but were not exclusive to Europe, and had the Annales school as their catalyst but were not coincident with it. The chapter discusses the model that Polish historian Witold Kula introduced in his An Economic Theory of the Feudal System (1962). In fewer than two hundred pages, it demolishes the claims of neoclassical microeconomics to universality and shows how its theorems are not applicable to preindustrial eastern Europe. Starting from an investigation of this context, it creates appropriate alternative theoretical tools for explaining it. But the usefulness of this type of history also extends to the present, suggesting that the workings of each particular economic system needs to be understood on its own.
Introduction
Authors: Burgess Alexis G. , Burgess John P.
Published: November 2017

This book examines recent philosophical inquiries into what it is for a thing to be true. Probably the best-known saying about truth by a philosopher is Aristotle's assertion: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.” The book gives a nontechnical account of the most often discussed aspects of Alfred Tarski's views and considers the debates regarding deflationism, realism, and antirealism. It also explores views on liar-style paradoxes, with an account of the work of Saul Kripke, along with arguments advocating deviation from classical logic and arguments emphasizing the role of context in communication. Finally, it analyzes the connection between the issue of the solvability or unsolvability of the paradoxes and the issues between deflationism and inflationism.
Indeterminacy
Authors: Burgess Alexis G. , Burgess John P.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how the notion of indeterminacy challenges the equivalence principle (“Saying something is true is equivalent to just saying it”). Indeterminacy involves cases where we have a question “Are things thus?” to which neither the affirmative nor the negative answer seems appropriate. If the question “Are things thus?” cannot be answered “Yes” or “No,” then it seems the corresponding declarative “Things are thus” cannot be called “true” or “false,” and so it seems we have a counterexample to the bivalence principle, according to which every proposition is either true or false. The chapter first considers two classes of examples, involving phenomena of presupposition and vagueness, before discussing various conceivable lines of response to the problems they raise. In particular, it looks at denial strategy, disqualification strategy, deviance strategy, doublespeak strategy, dependency strategy, and defeatism. Finally, it analyzes a third type of case, involving a purported special kind of relativity.
Pelé Meets John Von Neumann in the Penalty Area
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

The movie A Beautiful Mind (2001) portrays the life and work of John F. Nash Jr., who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. A class of his theories deals with how people should behave in strategic situations that involve what are known as “mixed strategies,” that is, choosing among various possible strategies when no single one is always the best when you face a rational opponent. This chapter uses data from a specific play in soccer (a penalty kick) with professional players to provide the first complete test of a fundamental theorem in game theory: the minimax theorem. The minimax theorem can be regarded as a special case of the more general theory of Nash. It applies only to two-person, zero-sum or constant-sum games, whereas the Nash equilibrium concept can be used with any number of players and any mixture of conflict and common interest in the game.
Making the Beautiful Game a Bit Less Beautiful
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

This chapter is concerned with the implications of incentives. It studies an incentive change in a natural setting where both productive and sabotage activities can be directly observed: soccer. The analysis proceeds in four steps. First, it describes the basic behavioral changes that took place after the change to the three-point rule. Second, it uses the control matches in the cup tournament to estimate the effects caused by the change in rewards. Third, it tries to understand the underlying mechanisms through which these changes took place and the reason they neutralized each other in terms of goal scoring by examining the way the behavior of teams changed during the match. Finally, it shows that this change represented undesirable sabotage rather than, say, desirable greater intensity in the games.
From Argentina Without Emotions
Authors: Palacios-Huerta Ignacio
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on psychological pressure in a competitive environment. It tests the hypothesis that if incentives become sufficiently large, the performance of professional players should become much less subject to the effects of anxiety, distress, and other pressures, perhaps even entirely free from psychological biases. This hypothesis is studied by taking advantage of a unique natural experiment in Argentina that was run for only one season. In the season 1988–89, the Argentine league championship decided to experiment with an unusual point system: After each drawn (tied) match, there would be a penalty shoot-out to determine which team got a bonus point.
A Leap in the Dark
Authors: Laurence Jonathan
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes the state of the relationship between immigrant-origin Muslim minorities and their Western European host countries in the twenty-first century. Just over 1 percent of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims reside in Western Europe, yet this immigrant-origin minority has had a disproportionate impact on religion and politics in its new and former homelands. For host societies, Islam in Europe is no longer just a matter of ginger diplomacy with former colonies or current trading partners: the integration of Muslims has become a nation-building challenge of historical significance. Moreover, Muslims' long-term integration into European politics and society is a work in progress, as the chapter reveals the unintended consequences, the establishment of the Islam Councils, and other such complications arising from the host countries' engagement with their resident Muslim minorities.
European Outsourcing and Embassy Islam
Authors: Laurence Jonathan
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores the origins of the privileged status enjoyed by foreign Islamic governments in the first stage (c. 1960–1990) of state–mosque relations in Europe. Several factors help explain why European governments gave them that status. Europeans were interested in a good trade relationship and the even flow of oil, in avoiding the politicization of migrant populations, and above all in orienting the immigrants to eventually go back to their original homelands. A template of temporary migration defined the host governments' demand for religious interlocutors during the first stage, during which they experimented with return-oriented policies and the outsourcing of linguistic, cultural, and religious programs. But this did not constitute a fully developed approach: rather, it reflected the absence of a policy toward the new Muslim minority.
Muslim Integration and European Islam in the Next Generation
Authors: Laurence Jonathan
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the future prospects for Muslims' political and social integration. A number of the social, cultural, and political adjustments that will characterize Europe in coming generations are already under way, although often the results are not visible to the naked eye. This chapter examines the pre-electoral political behavior and earliest known voting preferences and demographic future of the postcolonial—and post-guestworker—Muslim minorities of Europe. It argues that the most serious threats to successful emancipation—violent extremism among Muslims and right-wing nativism among “host societies”—may ultimately be weakened by a confluence of demographic trends and old-fashioned integration processes.
Feasibility, Normativity, and Institutional Guarantees
Authors: Tomasi John
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers John Rawls' conception of ideal theory, with particular emphasis on the implications of problems of feasibility for normative political philosophy and market democracy's institutional guarantees. It defends Rawls' general view of ideal theory, first by explaining why the objection to market democracy—that even if market democratic institutional forms appear attractive in theory, they are unlikely to deliver the goods in practice and so are defective for that reason—has little force when applied against the idealism of left liberalism. It then examines why such arguments are equally ineffective when trained against the idealism of free market fairness. It also analyzes Rawls' idea of “realistic utopianism” before concluding by asking whether market democratic regimes that treat economic liberty as constitutionally basic can realize all the requirements of justice as fairness.
Direct and Indirect Treatments
Authors: Mutz Diana C.
Published: November 2017

This chapter describes direct and indirect treatments, that is, treatments that either directly and overtly try to move the respondent in a particular direction, or that indirectly do so in a more unobtrusive (and often clever) manner. Direct and indirect treatments are highly flexible and can be used to test hypotheses of all kinds. Researchers can implement not only random assignment, but also card sort techniques, false feedback, and just about any treatment that occurs in the lab. The chapter shows how most experimental treatments that can be executed in social science laboratories can also be administered remotely via telephone or Internet to randomly selected members of the relevant population.
Treatments in the Context of Games
Authors: Mutz Diana C.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines games-based treatments, which are an out-growth of conducting experiments online, where gaming seems only natural and where highly complex, multi-stage experimental treatments can be experienced by participants. It begins with a description of how treatments have been implemented in the context of several classic economic games using random population samples. In these studies, the biggest challenge is adapting the often complex instructions and expectations to a sample that is considerably less well educated on average than college student subjects. In order to play and produce valid experimental results, participants in the game have to understand clearly how it works and buy into the realism of the experimental situation.
Is Political Engagement Better Than Sex?
Authors: Berger Ben
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the most prominent arguments for political engagement's importance to democratic polities, including those put forward by Alexis de Tocqueville, and shows that each presents circumstantial and ultimately inconclusive evidence. It first considers the benefits that political engagement offers to individuals and communities before discussing how essential those benefits are to the health of liberal democracy. It then evaluates defenses of political engagement's intrinsic and instrumental value and proceeds to build a case for the importance of political engagement that can stand up to critical scrutiny. It contends that were should avoid very low political engagement because it might badly undermine a democracy's claims to political legitimacy. Instead, we should care about the increased, voluntary political engagement that might ensue if political institutions were more responsive, political education were more effective, and if our attention deficit democracy could be treated through liberal means.
Algebraic Surfaces and the Miyaoka-Yau Inequality
Authors: Tretkoff Paula
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses complex algebraic surfaces, with particular emphasis on the Miyaoka-Yau inequality and the rough classification of surfaces. Every complex algebraic surface is birationally equivalent to a smooth surface containing no exceptional curves. The latter is known as a minimal surface. Two related birational invariants, the plurigenus and the Kodaira dimension, play an important role in distinguishing between complex surfaces. The chapter first provides an overview of the rough classification of (smooth complex connected compact algebraic) surfaces before presenting two approaches that, in dimension 2, give the Miyaoka-Yau inequality. The first, due to Miyaoka, uses algebraic geometry, whereas the second, due to Aubin and Yau, uses analysis and differential geometry. The chapter also explains why equality in the Miyaoka-Yau inequality characterizes surfaces of general type that are free quotients of the complex 2-ball.
Existence of Ball Quotients Covering Line Arrangements
Authors: Tretkoff Paula
Published: November 2017

This chapter justifies the assumption that ball quotients covering line arrangements exist. It begins with the general case on the existence of finite covers by ball quotients of weighted configurations, focusing on log-canonical divisors and Euler numbers reflecting the weight data on divisors on the blow-up X of P2 at the singular points of a line arrangement. It then uses the Kähler-Einstein property to prove an inequality between Chern forms that, when integrated, gives the appropriate Miyaoka-Yau inequality. It also discusses orbifolds and b-spaces, weighted line arrangements, the problem of the existence of ball quotient finite coverings, log-terminal singularity and log-canonical singularity, and the proof of the main existence theorem for line arrangements. Finally, it considers the isotropy subgroups of the covering group.
Appell Hypergeometric Functions
Authors: Tretkoff Paula
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the complete quadrilateral line arrangement, and especially its relationship with the space of regular points of the system of partial differential equations defining the Appell hypergeometric function. Appell introduced four series F1, F2, F3, F4 in two complex variables, each of which generalizes the classical Gauss hypergeometric series and satisfies its own system of two linear second order partial differential equations. The solution spaces of the systems corresponding to the series F2, F3, F4 all have dimension 4, whereas that of the system corresponding to the series F1 has dimension 3. This chapter focuses on the F1-system whose monodromy group, under certain conditions, acts on the complex 2-ball. It first considers the action of S5 on the blown-up projective plane before turning to Appell hypergeometric functions, arithmetic monodromy groups, and an invariant known as the signature.
Private Nonmarket Rule-Making in Context
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents a typology of global regulation, which differentiates the institutional setting for rule-making, which is either public or private, from the global selection process, which is either market based or nonmarket based. Four types of global regulatory governance are discussed. The first type, termed “public (governmental) nonmarket standard-setting,” involves collaboration through traditional intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) or transgovernmental cooperation among domestic regulators. The second type is market-based private regulation, which entails rule-making by firms or other bodies competing, individually or in groups, to establish their preferred technologies or practices as the de facto standard through market dominance or other strategies. The third type of global regulation—private yet nonmarket-based—is regulation by focal rule-making institutions, such as the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The fourth type of regulation results from market-like international competition between public regulatory agencies.
The Politics of Nuts and Bolts—and Nanotechnology
Authors: Büthe Tim , Mattli Walter
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines how companies affected by international product standards assess these standards and the extent to which they are able to influence rule-making in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Drawing on the results of a business survey among standards experts in firms in the United States and four European countries (Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom), the chapter considers the importance of institutional complementarity in international standard-setting across five industries: chemicals; rubber and plastic products; medical instruments and medical devices; petroleum products; and iron and steel products. It shows that high complementarity between standard-setting institutions at the domestic level and the institutional structure of standardization at the international level favors European over American interests in ISO and IEC. By contrast, the relatively poor fit between U.S. domestic institutions and the international structure puts U.S. firms at a disadvantage.
Being Numerous
Authors: Izenberg Oren
Published: November 2017

This book offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. It argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience—and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, the book reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty—from William Butler Yeats's esoteric symbolism and George Oppen's minimalism and silence to Frank O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life—what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?—ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions—all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.
Poems, Poetry, Personhood
Authors: Izenberg Oren
Published: November 2017

This book explores a set of interdependent problems in the history, theory, and politics of recent Anglo-American poetry while offering a challenge and an alternative to a nearly unanimous literary–historical consensus that divides poetry into two warring camps—post-Romantic and postmodern; symbolist and constructivist; traditionalist and avant-garde. The book advocates a shift of emphasis, from “poems” as objects or occasions for experience to “poetry” as an occasion for reestablishing or revealing the most basic unit of social life and for securing the most fundamental object of moral regard. The book considers Language poetry as well as the work of William Butler Yeats, George Oppen, and Frank O'Hara—poets who seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal and universal.
Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds
Authors: Izenberg Oren
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the long silence at the center of George Oppen's poetic career, arguing that it was driven in part by his early choice of left-political activism over art. After the 1934 publication of his Discrete Series, Oppen stopped writing poems and lived, starting in 1950, as a “known subversive” in Mexico. He would resurface in 1962 with the publication of The Materials. Focusing on the figure of Robinson Crusoe, this chapter offers an account of Oppen's poetic knowledge in relation to aesthetics and to the idea of a poetic politics. It also considers Oppen's reconceptualization of what it means “to know” and its relevance to the question of social recognition. It suggests that Oppen's return to poetry was contingent upon his conceptualization of the rigorous charity of his silence and his discovery of a way to make such silence audible.
Distant Tyranny
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how domestic market integration in Spain was much slower than it's integration with the international economy over the long run, and its progress was regionally extremely diverse. Poor transport technology and bad roads did not help matters and provide some of the background for understanding Spanish markets. Still, transport itself exhibited a trend toward slow but steady improvement over the century and a half under consideration here. Moreover, there is little evidence that Spain's political economy suffered from the sort of expropriatory failings of supposedly centralizing, all-powerful “absolutist” states that earlier literature had diagnosed. As historians of the Spanish Empire have long pointed out, in the Spanish monarchy, even in its European core, absolutism was merely a political aspiration.
Distant Tyranny
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This chapter explores how, in Spain, power was predominantly invested in bodies representing well-defined spatial sub-units rather than the corporate representations of a society of estates—such as the Crown and aristocracy—which at least theoretically were “national” in nature. This system of governance protected Spanish conceptions of contractual rule. It was a multilayered structure, but it was polycentric, not hierarchical. In other words, just as rule was not exercised from the top down from the Crown to the territories, it was not exercised from the territories to the towns. The historic territories had powerful means at their disposal to defend rights to provincial taxation and against taxation through their monarch.
Conclusions
Authors: Grafe Regina
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter shows how it is impossible to ignore that the political, economic, social, linguistic, and cultural relations between center and periphery are to this day the single most important issue in Spain while they hardly appear in the political debates. The real issue is that important parts of the political economy and historical sociology that are used to trace the emergence of early modern European nation-states and nationally integrated markets becomes questionable in light of Spanish early modern history. The first casualty is the lopsided focus of political economy on the predatory state. The unfinished construction site of the creation of the Spanish early modern nation and market was that the state never became autonomous enough.
The Chosen Few
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

In 70 CE, the Jews were an agrarian and illiterate people living mostly in the Land of Israel and Mesopotamia. By 1492, the Jewish people had become a small group of literate urbanites specializing in crafts, trade, moneylending, and medicine in hundreds of places across the Old World, from Seville to Mangalore. What caused this radical change? This book presents a new answer to this question by applying the lens of economic analysis to the key facts of fifteen formative centuries of Jewish history. The book offers a powerful new explanation of one of the most significant transformations in Jewish history while also providing fresh insights into the growing debate about the social and economic impact of religion.
The People of the Book, 200 BCE–200 CE
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the well-documented shift of the religious norm that transformed the Jews into the People of the Book. During the first century BCE, some Jewish scholars and religious leaders promoted the establishment of free secondary schools. A century later, they issued a religious ordinance requiring all Jewish fathers to send their sons from the age of six or seven to primary school to learn to read and study the Torah in Hebrew. With the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish religion permanently lost one of its two pillars (the Temple) and set out on a unique trajectory. Scholars and rabbis, the new religious leaders in the aftermath of the first Jewish–Roman war, replaced temple service and ritual sacrifices with the study of the Torah in the synagogue—the new focal institution of Judaism.
The Economics of Hebrew Literacy in a World of Farmers
Authors: Botticini Maristella , Eckstein Zvi
Published: November 2017

This chapter presents an economic theory that describes the choices regarding religious affiliation and the investment in children's literacy and education in a world populated by Jewish and non-Jewish farmers. This theory yields two main implications. First, because individuals differ in religious preferences, skills, costs of education, and earnings, some Jewish farmers invest in their children's religious literacy whereas others do not. Second, Jewish farmers who find it too costly to obey the norms of Judaism, including the costly norm requiring them to send their sons to school, convert to other religions. If the economy remains mainly agrarian, literate people cannot find urban and skilled occupations in which their investment in literacy and education yields positive economic returns. As a result, the Jewish population keeps shrinking and becoming more literate. In the long run, Judaism cannot survive in a subsistence farming economy because of the process of conversions.
The First Stars
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the emergence of the complex chemical and radiative processes during the first stages of galaxy formation. It studies the appearance of the first stars, their feedback processes, and the resulting ionization structures that emerged during and shortly after the cosmic dawn. The formation of the first stars tens or hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang had marked a crucial transition in the early Universe. Before this point, the Universe was elegantly described by a small number of parameters. But as soon as the first stars formed, more complex processes entered the scene. To illustrate this, the chapter provides a brief outline of the prevailing (though observationally untested) theory for this cosmological phase transition.
Supermassive Black Holes
Authors: Loeb Abraham , Furlanetto Steven R.
Published: November 2017

This chapter analyzes formation mechanisms for supermassive black holes, their observable characteristics, and their interactions with their host galaxies and the wider Universe. A black hole is the end product of the complete gravitational collapse of a material object, such as a massive star. It is surrounded by a horizon from which even light cannot escape. Astrophysical black holes appear in two flavors: stellar-mass black holes that form when massive stars die, and the monstrous supermassive black holes that sit at the center of galaxies, reaching masses of up to ten billion Suns. The latter type is observed as active galactic nuclei (AGN), and the chapter introduces the quasar—a point-like (“quasi-stellar”) bright source at the center of a galaxy which serves as the most powerful type of AGN—in discussing the observable nature of supermassive black holes.
A Semantic Conception of Truthmaking
Authors: Yablo Stephen
Published: November 2017

Truth for Aristotle was a metaphysical notion. Alfred Tarski showed how to conceive truth semantically, that is, in such a way that it could play a foundational role in semantics. David Armstrong, the Aristotle of truthmaking, conceives it metaphysically, as the a posteriori necessitation of truths by “things in the world.” This chapter, in a Tarskian spirit, seeks a semantic conception of truthmakers. It suggests two formal models, the recursive and the reductive. They represent tendencies in truthmaker assignment that pull, at times, in different directions. Where one can be indulged at no cost to the other, as in the case of quantifiers, that is the way to go. Otherwise a compromise has to be struck. How the tendencies trade off depends on the application. To a first approximation, though, semantic truthmakers are facts that imply truths and proportionally explain them.
Oxygen
Authors: Canfield Donald Eugene
Published: November 2017

The air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen, an amount higher than on any other known world. While we may take our air for granted, Earth was not always an oxygenated planet. How did it become this way? This book covers this vast history, emphasizing its relationship to the evolution of life and the evolving chemistry of the Earth. The book guides readers through the various lines of scientific evidence, considers some of the wrong turns and dead ends along the way, and highlights the scientists and researchers who have made key discoveries in the field. Showing how Earth's atmosphere developed over time, the book takes readers on a remarkable journey through the history of the oxygenation of our planet.