bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Cenozoic Climate and Vegetation Change
Authors: Tzedakis Chronis
Published: November 2020

This chapter traces the history of vegetation change in the Mediterranean area in response to climate variability over the last 65 million years (Myr), with particular emphasis on the most recent part of the record. Compared to other continental areas of the globe, the Mediterranean region is somewhat unusual in the abundance of palaeobotanical information (especially palynological) that is available. This is a function of its geological setting, which in some cases has led to the relatively undisturbed accumulation of thick sedimentary sequences in tectonic and volcanic basins. These sequences have provided an opportunity to develop long records of vegetation change, sometimes extending over hundreds of thousands of years. In the marine realm, sedimentary records from the Mediterranean Sea are not only providing palaeoceanographic information but also beginning to yield palynological information, which can be placed directly within a chronological and palaeoclimatic framework. However, it is only in the uppermost part of the geological column (i.e. in the Quaternary) that there are enough records to construct a continuous thread of vegetation changes and allow meaningful comparisons between sites to determine local differences and transregional similarities (e.g. Magri et al. 2004). Moreover, the majority of terrestrial records extending before the Holocene are located in southern Europe, while the coverage of the Near East is low and of North Africa even lower. The information available for earlier periods anywhere in the Mediterranean is fragmentary at best, with large parts of the record not represented. This means that despite the relative wealth of information, the palaeobotanical record from the Mediterranean region remains very much incomplete, with significant temporal and geographical gaps. Thus, instead of providing a linear narrative of the last c.65 Myr, the approach followed here is to structure this review into separate sections, each representing different scales of environmental variability, and attempt to establish the general pattern of vegetation responses to it. These environmental regimes are here defined as (1) mega-scale (long-term climate trends), (2) macroscale (orbitally driven (Milankovitch) changes), (3) meso-scale (sub-orbital variability), and (4) micro-scale (interannual variability).
The Nature and Origin of the Vertebrate Fauna
Authors: Blondel Jacques
Published: November 2020

The aim of this chapter is to provide an account of the complex history of Mediterranean faunas as they evolved from the end of the Pliocene about 1.8 million years ago until the present day. Reconstructing this history is difficult because the Mediterranean basin is one of the most complex regions in the world and is characterized by significant geographical and topographical variation. The Mediterranean basin was formed during the Tertiary by the convergence of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates, in combination with several African microplates, Iberia, and two main African promontories: Apulia in the west and Arabia in the east (Chapter 1 and Dercourt et al. 1986). Where the African and Eurasian plates meet, seismic and volcanic activity have combined with other processes to form a very heterogeneous region. High mountains and deeply dissected topography form the main part of a coastline some 46,000 km in length, 18,000 of which are island shores (Chapter 13). A dominant feature of the region, which has had many consequences for species diversity and the process of differentiation, is the striking contrast between the northern half of the basin with its many large peninsulas—Iberian, Apennine, Balkan, and Anatolian—and the southern half with its more or less rectilinear shorelines. In addition, there is a marked biogeographical contrast between the western and the eastern halves of the Mediterranean, the former having shifted somewhat to the north with respect to the latter. The line separating the two north–south ranges in each half of the basin runs approximately along the 36th parallel in the western half and the 33rd in the eastern half. In the western half, west of the Sicily–Cap Bon line, biota are more boreal in character and overlap to a large degree with those of central Europe. To the east, biota have more affinities with central Asia (Blondel and Aronson 1999). Modern patterns of regional floral and faunal diversity mostly result from differential speciation and extinction rates during the Quaternary (Chapter 4).
Wildfires
Authors: Lloret Francisco , Piñol Josep
Published: November 2020

Fire is currently recognized as one of the major natural hazards of the Mediterranean basin. In an average year the total burnt area in the whole basin is around 600,000 hectares, the product of approximately 50,000 fires. The estimated annual cost is around 775 million Euros (FAO 2001). Official data on casualties due to fires are often not available, but, for example, seventy-nine people have been killed directly by fire in Portugal since 1966 and fifty in Catalonia (northeast Spain) since 1970. Fire is commonly considered to be a key component of the dynamics of Mediterranean ecosystems (Chapters 7 and 23). Long dry periods, usually in summer, and vegetation assemblages that produce large amounts of standing branches and debris, are the main factors promoting the propagation of fires. These characteristics are common to other regions of the world with a similar climate and vegetation structure including California, central Chile, South Africa, and south-western Australia. Fire is a common occurrence and a significant natural hazard in all these regions. Although initially a natural phenomenon, during the course of the Holocene human activity has become an increasingly powerful driver of fires (Chapter 9). Prevention of wildfires is now one of the top priorities of the forestry and environmental agencies across the Mediterranean region because of the huge extent of the burned surface area, the high expenditure on both fire prevention and fire fighting, and the impacts in terms of both human life and property. The development of models to investigate the relative roles of extreme weather conditions and fire suppression policies in the generation of large fires is a key area of research (Piñol et al. 2007). The pattern of fire occurrence is not uniform across the Mediterranean basin and orders of magnitude differences appear. When standardized to the forested area of each country, the average burnt area exceeds 103 ha per 103 km2 per year in Greece, Israel, Italy, Algeria, Portugal, and Spain. This means that, on average, more than 1 per cent of the forested area is burnt in these countries each year.
Boulders, Tors, and Inselbergs
Authors: Migon Piotr
Published: November 2020

Boulders, tors and inselbergs (Plates III, IV, V) are regarded as the most characteristic individual geomorphological features of granite landscapes and it is their assemblages extending over large areas that give granite terrains their unmistakable appearance. Although none of these landforms is unique to granite, nor even specific to basement rocks, it is perhaps true that the most astounding ones occur within granite areas. Twidale (1982) in his Granite Landforms considered boulders and inselbergs as two key individual components of granite landscapes and devoted to them almost 100 pages, whereas the other major landforms received only 35. Likewise, rock-built residual hills figure prominently in Klimamorphologie des Massengesteine by Wilhelmy (1958). In the voluminous literature about inselbergs, papers focused on those developed in granite evidently prevail (see the reviews by Kesel, 1973 and Thomas, 1978). Likewise, granite tors, especially in classic areas such as Dartmoor (Gerrard, 1994a) do not cease to attract the attention of geomorphologists. The unifying characteristic of all three landforms considered in this section is that they are essentially outcrops of solid rock rising above a surface cut across a weathering mantle, even if the thickness and lithology of the weathering mantle may be very variable. Outside arid areas there are very few examples of tors and inselbergs, surrounded by a rock-cut platform. Therefore, the discussion about their origin and significance has inevitably been tied to the increasing recognition of the significance of deep weathering. Twidale (1981a, 1982, 2002) reviewed many early accounts and concluded that selective subsurface weathering and subsequent exposure of unweathered cores to form boulders and inselbergs had been appreciated as early as the end of the eighteenth century. Nowadays, there is little doubt that the majority of individual medium-scale granite landforms are due to selective subsurface weathering. Before the presentation of residual granite landforms commences, a few terminological issues need to be raised. Although it may appear that the distinction between boulders, tors, and inselbergs is a simple task, it is in fact not at all straightforward.
Typology of Natural Granite Landscapes
Authors: Migon Piotr
Published: November 2020

There are two major recurrent themes in geomorphological research into granite landscapes. On the one hand, there is a recognition of the extraordinary diversity of landforms supported by granitic rocks, on a variety of scales, from microrelief on exposed rock surfaces to regional landscape types. On the other hand, there are striking geomorphic similarities between basement regions across the world, noted again at the scale of individual, almost omnipresent landforms, as well as in larger landform assemblages. To account for both diversity and similarity, various attempts have been made to produce a typology of granite landscapes. One of the early systematic approaches was that presented by Wilhelmy (1958) in his Klimamorphologie der Massengesteine. In line with the dominant paradigm in German geomorphology, he was an advocate of strong climatic control on the development of landforms and, accordingly, used climatic zonation of the globe as a basis for his classification system. Seven major morphoclimatic zones with allegedly distinctive phenomena of granite weathering and denudation have been distinguished. In addition, Wilhelmy emphasized climate-controlled change in landform inventories with altitude, citing examples from Corsica, the Sinai Peninsula, and Korea. Following Lautensach (1950), he specifically mentions mountain ranges in the Korean Peninsula, where a dissected landscape typified by deep ferruginous weathering gradually gives way to assemblages typical of harsh periglacial environments as altitude increases. The problem with the climatic approach is the likely co-existence of landforms and weathering patterns of different ages, hence formed in different environmental conditions, especially in middle and high latitudes. In fairness, it has to be said that inherited components have been recognized by Wilhelmy, but the evidence for inheritance is not always conclusive. Selected controversial examples have been presented in the previous chapters. These difficulties also raise a wider methodological issue, if climatic zonation of the globe is to be an appropriate framework to analyse granite landforms. Stoddart (1969) and more recently Twidale and Lageat (1994) offered insightful reviews in this respect, concluding that the uncertainties and limitations of climatic geomorphology are far too many to make it a preferred paradigm. Thomas (1974) adopted a different approach, a morphological one, attempting to identify characteristic granite landform systems.
Geography, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
Authors: Scott Allen J.
Published: November 2020

Throughout his voluminous writings, Marx insisted on the notion of capitalism as a turbulent scene of production and exchange, gripped by the forces of competition in an endless process of self-transformation. In these circumstances, every firm faces a stark choice between the continual need to upgrade its process and product configurations or eventually going out of business. The result is what Schumpeter (1942), in an explicit invocation of Marx, called ‘creative destruction’, that is, the periodic abandonment of old equipment, production methods, and product designs in favour of newer and more economically performative assets. At the same time, as both Marx and Schumpeter recognized, creative destruction is inscribed within an ever-expanding sphere of economic activity due to the growth of existing firms, the extension of entrepreneurship, and the appearance of new products on final markets. Capitalism, in brief, is a complex Weld of forces spurring constant qualitative and quantitative readjustments across all its multiple dimensions of operation (cf. Baumol 2002). Sometimes these readjustments are of cataclysmic proportions, as when steam replaced water-power in the nineteenth century; more often than not, as Rosenberg (1982) points out, they take the form of small, incremental steps, many of which may be minuscule, but which collectively produce the incessant instability descried by Marx and Schumpeter. Of late years, there has been a considerable outpouring of literature devoted to these themes, much of it partaking of institutionalist and evolutionary economic theory (e.g. Archibugi et al. 1999; Arthur 1990; David 1985; Edquist 1997; Foray and Lundvall 1996; Freeman 1995; Lundvall and Johnson 1994; Nelson 1993; Von Hippel 1988). An important aspect of this literature is the emphasis that much of it assigns to geography—and above all to the region—as an active force in moulding industrial performance qua new firm formation, learning, invention, and growth (cf. Acs et al. 2002; Antonelli 2003; Audretsch and Feldman 1996; Cooke and Morgan 1998; Feldman 1994; Howells 1999; Maskell and Malmberg 1999; Oinas and Malecki 1999; Simmie 2003; Storper 1995).
Building the Monuments of the Future
Authors: Thomas Edmund
Published: November 2020

The preservation of ancient structures like the house of Alexander at Thebes not only reinforced Romans’ sense of the passing of time, but also encouraged them to aspire to make their monuments last as long or even longer as legendary examples of the past. But the primary influence of historical archetypes was not on monuments’ precise architectural design, but on their identification as monuments by name and the implication of this for their memorializing function. This can be seen most clearly through those buildings that preserved the remains of human beings for future generations, in other words, tomb structures. It has often been argued that the purest form of building is funerary architecture, intended to commemorate and to endure, and not distracted by any social functions. This was the view of the early twentieth-century Moravian architect Adolf Loos, who wrote in his 1910 essay ‘Architektur’ that: ‘Nur ein ganz kleiner Teil der Architektur gehört der Kunst an: das Grabmal und das Denkmal. Alles andere, alles, was einem Zweck dient, ist aus dem Reiche der Kunst auszuschliessen.’ In the Roman world, tomb monuments had more complex functions for the living as well as the dead: they were not only a setting for ritual funerary processions and banquets in commemoration of the deceased, but also a backdrop to a wide range of economic and social activities in the suburbia of Roman cities, such as trade, market-gardening, and new construction. Yet the Antonine age also shows an interest in funerary buildings as a pure form of architecture in their own right. As Loos commented later in the same essay: ‘Wenn wir im Walde einen Hügel finden, sechs Schuh lang und drei Schuh breit, mit der Schaufel pyramidenförmig aufgerichtet, dann werden wir ernst, und es sagt etwas in uns: Hier liegt jemand begraben. Das ist Architektur.’ Potentially cut off from the functions of everyday life, the tomb monument expresses an ideal architecture. Tomb buildings had always been conspicuous monuments in the ancient world, and the biggest and most famous ones inspired others to follow their example.
The Semantic Web
Authors: Walton Christopher
Published: November 2020

At the present time, the Web is primarily designed for human consumption and not for computer consumption. This may seem like an unusual state of affairs, given that the web is vast and mature computerized information resource. However, we must recognize that the computer is presently used as the carrier of this information, and not as the consumer of the information. As a result, a great deal of the potential of the Web has yet to be realized. This book explores the challenges of automatic computer-based processing of information on the Web. In effect, we want to enable computers to use Web-based information in much the same way as humans presently do. Our motivation is that computers have a brute-force advantage over humans. Where we can gather and process information from a handful of Web-based sources, a computer may download and compare thousands of such sources in a matter of seconds. Nonetheless, despite the apparent simplicity of this task, there are a great many issues that must be addressed if we are to make effective use of this information. As a result, the automated processing of Web-based information is still in its infancy. In this book, we show how many different techniques can be used together to address this task. The automated processing of information on the Web is principally an issue of scale. There are many existing techniques in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) that may be appropriate to the task. However, there are significant issues that must be addressed if we are to scale up these techniques for use on the Web. Therefore, we present a detailed overview of the current state of the art, with a particular emphasis on practical solutions. The methods and technologies that we present in this book are of importance to all computer practitioners, as they will shape the future evolution of the Web. To appreciate the challenges of computer-based consumption of Web-based information, we consider the following scenario. Suppose we are searching the Web for information on a specific ailment.
Web knowledge
Authors: Walton Christopher
Published: November 2020

In the introductory chapter of this book, we discussed the means by which knowledge can be made available on the Web. That is, the representation of the knowledge in a form by which it can be automatically processed by a computer. To recap, we identified two essential steps that were deemed necessary to achieve this task: 1. We discussed the need to agree on a suitable structure for the knowledge that we wish to represent. This is achieved through the construction of a semantic network, which defines the main concepts of the knowledge, and the relationships between these concepts. We presented an example network that contained the main concepts to differentiate between kinds of cameras. Our network is a conceptualization, or an abstract view of a small part of the world. A conceptualization is defined formally in an ontology, which is in essence a vocabulary for knowledge representation. 2. We discussed the construction of a knowledge base, which is a store of knowledge about a domain in machine-processable form; essentially a database of knowledge. A knowledge base is constructed through the classification of a body of information according to an ontology. The result will be a store of facts and rules that describe the domain. Our example described the classification of different camera features to form a knowledge base. The knowledge base is expressed formally in the language of the ontology over which it is defined. In this chapter we elaborate on these two steps to show how we can define ontologies and knowledge bases specifically for the Web. This will enable us to construct Semantic Web applications that make use of this knowledge. The chapter is devoted to a detailed explanation of the syntax and pragmatics of the RDF, RDFS, and OWL Semantic Web standards. The resource description framework (RDF) is an established standard for knowledge representation on the Web. Taken together with the associated RDF Schema (RDFS) standard, we have a language for representing simple ontologies and knowledge bases on the Web.
Reasoning on the Web
Authors: Walton Christopher
Published: November 2020

The techniques that we can use to construct rational agents were presented in Chapters 3 and 4. In these chapters, we identified a variety of general purpose reasoning techniques that can be used by agents to accomplish goal-directed behaviour. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the construction of agent-based reasoning processes that are directed towards the Semantic Web. These processes are based on the general techniques that we described previously, but are tailored specifically for the Semantic Web. In particular, our reasoning processes are designed to operate directly on Semantic Web knowledge expressed in RDF, RDFS, and OWL documents. These reasoning processes are essentially specialized kinds of deductive reasoning systems. It is important to appreciate that the reasoning processes that we describe in this chapter have certain limitations. For each technique, we will only be able to solve certain classes of problems. These limitations are a direct consequence of the representation that we use. Thus, it is necessary that we understand what kinds of problems we can solve in each approach, as this will determine the kinds of Semantic Web applications that we can construct. In effect, we are seeking to answer two key questions: 1. What kinds of reasoning can we perform with our knowledge? 2. How do we specify the problems that we wish to solve? The first question concerns the representation of the knowledge. In Chapter 2 we stated that there is a trade-off between expressibility and efficient reasoning. In general, the more features that we have in the representation language, the more difficult it is to reason with the language. The second question concerns the definition of the reasoning process itself. As we show in this chapter, there is a further trade-off between specification complexity and reasoning power. In general, the more complex our specification formalism, the more difficult it is to reason efficiently. In this chapter, we discuss two main approaches that we can use to define reasoning processes for the Semantic Web: query languages and logic-based formalisms.
The World of the Atom
Authors: Fox Michael H.
Published: November 2020

The story of radiation is the story of the atom and of subatomic particles. I should warn you that I love this story because it is one of the most fascinating and compelling stories in the history of science, it involves a cast of brilliant scientists, and it changed the world. So I get enthused and want to go into too much detail—at least that is what my students think. But to really understand the story, it will be necessary to learn some complicated and apparently nonsensical ideas in physics. I will try to keep the technical details to a minimum, but if you really want to understand what radiation is and where it comes from, stick with me as we explore the story. I hope you will be fascinated, too. The beginnings of the story go back to Indian and Greek philosophers who postulated that the universe consisted of space and indivisible particles that could combine to form more complex matter. The term átomos, meaning uncuttable or indivisible, was coined by the Greek philosopher Democritus in the fourth century B.C.E . While this was purely a philosophical speculation, it was a remarkable insight. More than a thousand years later, science and experimentation began to uncover just what this meant. John Dalton is credited with being the father of modern atomic theory in chemistry. In 1803 he developed the idea that elements consist of atoms, that different atoms have different weights, and that the atoms of a specific element are all alike but are different from those of other elements. He also proposed that atoms can combine in specific proportions to make up compounds or molecules. But are atoms really indivisible, and if not, what are they made of? Nearly a hundred years after Dalton, this question began to be answered in a burst of experiments and insights at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, starting with the discovery of radiation.
Now What?
Authors: Fox Michael H.
Published: November 2020

Time is running short! When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first scientific report in 1990 on the possibility of humancaused global warming, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) was 354 ppm. When I began writing this book about four years ago, the concentration of CO2 was 387 ppm. It is now 397 ppm and rising. In spite of Kyoto, in spite of Copenhagen and Cancun, atmospheric CO2 continues its inexorable upward path. And the earth continues to warm. The United States and the world are not yet serious about changing policies to stop this spiral. Too many politicians and others have their heads buried in the sand and refuse to acknowledge the continuing deluge of data showing that the world is indeed warming. 2010 was the warmest year—and the decade from 2000 to 2010 was the warmest decade—for at least the last 100,000 years. A serious debate is ongoing among geologists to decide if the earth has formally passed out of the Holocene epoch of the last 12,000 years into the Anthropocene epoch, in which 7 billion humans are the primary factor driving climate. Sea levels continue to rise, the oceans are acidifying, glaciers and ice sheets continue to melt, the Arctic will likely be ice-free during the summer sometime this century, and weather extremes have become commonplace around the earth. Plant and animal species are migrating to higher latitudes at 17 kilometers per decade on average, and alpine species are moving to higher altitudes at 11 meters every decade. Changes like this have occurred in the past, but over time spans of thousands to tens of thousands of years, giving species time to adapt. There are those who argue that species have always had to adapt to a changing climate or die and therefore they will handle the current changes. While there is some truth to that, it ignores the fact that many species are already under great pressure from the impact of humans on habitat.
The Birth of Cryoactivism
Authors: Taillant Jorge Daniel
Published: November 2020

Juan Pablo Milana and the environmentalists of San Juan Province left a memorable impression in the mind of Argentina’s Environment Secretary, Romina Picolotti. But she realized that fighting a glacier protection battle against the very well entrenched mining industry could be a defining con¬frontation for her tenure as Secretary. If she lost the battle, it would mean her inevitable resignation as head of the agency. In her short time inside politics, she had already learned to pick her battles carefully because the political stakes were always at the highest level. The loss of any battle, however small, could be the end of her political favor with President Nestor Kirchner. And, in her case, because she was a public figure brought to the administration on technical expertise and not because of any political track, that would probably mean the end of her political career. Environment was not a priority issue for Argentina, although, as in many parts of the world, it was slowly gaining social recognition and consequently political force (these generally come in that order). As such, any politically unmanageable problem from the low-profile Environment Secretariat could mean unnecessary and unwanted political conflict for the executive branch. It would not be tolerated. Furthermore, both the president and his eventual successor Cristina Fernandez, for whom Picolotti would continue as Environment Secretary, were from prov¬inces heavily entrenched in industry—the extractive oil and gas industry—and their outlook on development was mostly aligned with and tied to the oil sec¬tor. They believed that large tracts of land without industry and development (of which Argentina has many) is land gone to waste. One preposterous plan to emerge in their home province of Santa Cruz, site of Argentina’s Glacier National Park, was to build a massive dam (Condor Cliff Dam, renamed the Nestor Kirchner Dam) by flooding a large glacier lake (Lago Argentino) well above its natural water line to harness hydrological power for downstream communities. This would flood and disturb numerous glaciosystems.But Nestor Kirchner had confided to Picolotti when he first brought her to his administration as Environment Secretary that his generation
did not understand environmental issues.
Resurgence
Authors: Taillant Jorge Daniel
Published: November 2020

In the days following the president’s veto of the glacier protection law on November 11, 2008, the executive power was again in political turmoil. Congress was in an uproar with the veto in part because the congressional majority held by the administration during the earlier months of the presidency was fledgling, and President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was slowly losing her political capital to an increasingly empowered opposition, one eager to bring controversial issues to the forefront of the political arena to further weaken her presidency. The glacier law, and specifically the Barrick Veto, played well into this objective. Following the veto, the Natural Resource Commission of the Lower House of Congress convened a public meeting for November 18 to discuss how to respond to the veto. Only seven of the thirty-one members of the commission (mostly opposition members) showed, shy of the minimum quorum necessary to take official action. The meeting was held anyway. Several environmental organizations were invited. Marta Maffei, the original author of the glacier law, contributed to the discussion, as did Ricardo Villalba, the director of the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA). Villalba made unusually strong public statements in defense of the glacier law, indicating that the scientific community was “shocked and saddened” by the president’s decision to veto it. Despite not having a quorum, the commission set out an action plan to bring back the law. They were aware of the official party’s intention to develop a new version, one that would appease the mining sector. Clearly, it would be a utilitarian version similar to what had been proposed in Chile. However, those present that day insisted that the same law, just as it had been passed, should be resubmitted, using the exact same text. In the meantime, the president’s office was deliberating on what to do about the fallout. Cristina Fernandez vetoed the glacier protection law because it was incompatible with Barrick Gold’s flagship project, Pascua Lama, valued by conservative estimates of the time at upward of US$20 billion.
Analytical Methodology from Lavoisier to Mendeleev
Authors: Fontani Marco , Costa Mariagrazia , Orna Mary Virginia
Published: November 2020

Within the period covered by Part II, 1789–1869, 37 true elements, almost all of them metals, were discovered. Prior to this time, about 14 metals had been discovered, excluding those that had been known from ancient times. The discovery of the elements during this period of interest is intimately related to the analytical methodologies available to chemists, as well as to a growing consciousness of just what an element is. Because these methods were also available to the less competent who may have lacked the skills to use them or the knowledge to interpret their results, their use also led to as many, if not more, erroneous discoveries in the same period. One can number among the major sources of error faulty interpretation of experimental data, the “rediscovery” of an already known element, sample impurities, very similar chemical properties (as in the case of the rare earths), the presence of an element in nature in very scarce or trace amounts, gross experimental errors, confusion of oxides and earths with their metals, and baseless dogmatic pronouncements by known “authorities” in the field. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier’s conceptualization of what constitutes an element was a radical break from the principles of alchemy. His stipulation that an element is a substance that cannot be further decomposed conferred an operational, pragmatic, concrete definition on what had previously been a more abstract concept. At the other end of the spectrum was the intuition of Dmitri Mendeleev who, contrary to the prevailing acceptance of Lavoisier’s concept, stressed the importance of retaining a more abstract, more fundamental sense of an element—an idea that in the long run enabled the development of the periodic table. What both men had in common is that they defined and named individual elements as those components of substances that could survive chemical change and whose presence in compounds could explain their physical and chemical properties. Mendeleev’s table has been immortalized in every chemistry classroom—and also concretely in Saint Petersburg, the city that saw most of his professional activity, by a spectacular building-sized model The analytical chemist depends on both of these concepts and indeed, analytical practice preceded Lavoisier’s concept by at least a century.
The Past as Propaganda: Totalitarian Archaeology in Nazi Germany (1990)
Authors: Arnold Bettina
Published: November 2020

To understand events in German prehistoric archaeology under the National Socialists, it is necessary to look at the discipline well before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the beginning of the Umbruch period of radical change. Archaeology in Central Europe on the eve of the First World War was marked by a return of the ethno-historic approach to theory; in German-speaking regions there was a new name for the discipline to go with its new orientation. The term Vorgeschichte (prehistory) was rejected as a survival of anthropological thinking: Urgeschichte (early history) was preferred as better emphasizing the continuity of prehistory with documentary history (Sklenár 1983: 132). The writings of the nineteenth-century French racial philosopher Gobineau provided a doctrine of the inequality of different races (Daniel and Renfrew 1988: 104–6). Journals and publications dealing with the subject of race and genetic engineering increasingly appeared in Germany in the early twentieth century, among them Volk und Rasse, which was founded in 1926, and Fortschritte der Erbpathologie und Rassenhygiene, founded in 1929. Neither publication survived the Second World War. The linguist Gustaf Kossinna (1858–1932), a late convert to prehistory, laid the groundwork for an ethnocentric German prehistory. Kossinna proposed cultural diffusion as a process whereby influences, ideas, and models were passed on by more advanced peoples to the less advanced with which they came into contact. This concept, wedded to Kossinna’s Kulturkreis theory, the identification of geographical regions with specific ethnic groups on the basis of material culture, lent theoretical support to the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany. ‘Distribution maps of archaeological types became a convincing argument for expansionist aims: wherever a single find of a type designated as Germanic was found, the land was declared ancient German territory’ (Sklenár 1983: 151; Fig. 7.2). Alfred Rosenberg, the NS party’s ideologist, codified this ethnocentric and xenophobic perspective: ‘an individual to whom the tradition of his people (Volkstum) and the honor of his people (Volksehre) is not a supreme value, has forfeited the right to be protected by that people’ (Germanenerbe 1938: 105).
Writing up research
Authors: Eardley William , Page Piers
Published: November 2020

Writing up your research is as important as undertaking the research itself. It serves as the record of the (hopefully) exhaustive work you have carried out and provides the evidence for your conclusions and interpretations. It is best to anticipate that your paper or thesis should be easy to read by an independent individual who may not have your expertise in the field you are writing about. It should flow, make sense, have structure, and demonstrate originality. Planning your write-up should be considered at the time of planning the project methodology itself, and the process of writing up is best carried out in parallel with the study as it evolves. This chapter will discuss some tips to editing the structure as you go. In general, there is an underlying structure to any write-up, be it a paper in a peer reviewed journal or a thesis. The generally accepted structure is as follows: • Abstract: • Introduction • Methods (or ‘methodology’ or ‘patients and methods’) • Results • Conclusion(s) • Introduction • Methods (or ‘methodology’ or ‘patients and methods’) • Results • Discussion • Conclusion(s) • References or bibliography. These titles are applicable to publications in peer-reviewed journals. Although the structure is universal, the style of write-up is different between writing a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, which requires a clear and concise approach, and a thesis, which needs greater detail. Universities usually have relaxed guidelines regarding the structure of chapters in writing up your thesis (e.g. PhD). However, it is generally advised that however you record your research, the above structure is incorporated into your write-up. For your thesis, there are additional ‘chapter titles’ in the write-up structure you may consider. Below is a comprehensive structured list which, in addition to the core titles (in bold), provides options you may consider to add to your thesis; • Title page • Acknowledgements • Abstract: • Introduction • Methods (or ‘methodology’ or ‘patients and methods’) • Results • Conclusion(s) • Declaration of originality • Table of contents • List of abbreviations • List of tables • List of figures • Introduction • Methods (or ‘methodology’ or ‘patients and methods’) • Results • Discussion • Conclusion(s) • Achievements • Appendices • References/bibliography .
Introduction
Authors: Bessant Rupa
Published: November 2020

The Royal College of Physicians was founded by royal charter of King Henry VIII in 1518. For nearly 500 years it has engaged in a wide range of activities dedicated to its overall aim of upholding and improving standards of medical practice. The examination for the Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) (London) was first set in 1859. The Royal College of Physicians (Edinburgh) and the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow introduced their own professional examinations in 1881 and 1886 respectively. A need to have a unified membership examination throughout the United Kingdom (UK) was identified in the late 1960s, following which the first joint examination took place in October 1968. The MRCP(UK) subsequently developed into the current internationally recognized three-part examination. From 2001, the five-station PACES (Practical Assessment of Clinical Examination Skills) examination was introduced, replacing the traditional long case, short cases and viva format. The rationale for this change was to standardize the candidate experience, to permit direct observation of candidate–patient interaction throughout the examination, and to place added emphasis on the assessment of communication skills. The MRCP(UK) format evolved further in 2009. In response to the development of competency-based training and assessment, the key components of the examination were redefined as seven ‘core clinical skills’: A) Physical examination B) Identifying physical signs C) Clinical communication skills D) Differential diagnosis E) Clinical judgement F) Managing patients’ concerns G) Maintaining patient welfare. Each ‘core clinical skill’ is assessed at several different stations of the PACES examination and the marks for each ‘skill’ are integrated. A minimum pass mark for each ‘core clinical skill’ was introduced to ensure that candidates who scored poorly in one ‘core clinical skill’ area could not pass the examination by scoring highly in another skill (a compensatory marking system had existed prior to 2009). Furthermore, the requirement to obtain a minimum overall test score has been maintained. At the time of writing this book, a score of 130/172 was required to pass.
The Landscape Context
Authors: Sharples Niall
Published: November 2020

The archaeological landscape of Wessex is one of the best known in Europe. There are very few students of archaeology who have not been taken to see sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury, Maiden Castle, and Danebury. Most archaeology departments insist that an in-depth knowledge of the region is essential for the training of an archaeologist, and as a student at Glasgow in the 1970s, one of the most distant departments from the region, it was considered a prerequisite for me to visit Wessex. I was loaded on to a coach and after a long journey I arrived at Devizes, where we stayed for a week of site and museum visits. I remember very little of what we saw, certainly the sites named above, but I do remember that I was tremendously excited by certain road signs. As we drove across the landscape I was confronted by names that were exotically familiar: All Cannings Cross, Gussage All Saints, Tollard Royal, and Overton Down. These names were exotic, particularly for a northerner brought up on names like Milngavie and Auchenshuggle, but very familiar since they cropped up frequently in the lectures and text books that were a feature of my course. It should be stressed that this course was untouched by the new ideas of statistical and behavioural studies that were so popular in other universities. My lectures were dominated by site and sequence and at this time, the late seventies, the sites that were available to us were the sites of Wessex that had been excavated and published by the great excavators of the previous generation. Today I am regularly involved in two trips to the region for the undergraduates studying archaeology at Cardff University. The first trip involves a visit to the hillforts of Maiden Castle and South Cadbury and the chalk figure at Cerne Abbas. These visits are very site focused and involve standing around listening to me giving a lecture on the context of hillforts—when they were built, what they were for, their distribution and the specific sequence of the particular site we are visiting.
Defining the Individual
Authors: Sharples Niall
Published: November 2020

During the 1985 excavation at Maiden Castle (Sharples 1991a), a large grain storage pit cut into the back of the rampart of the Early Iron Age hillfort was excavated. About half way down the fill of that pit the left femur of a mature adult was exposed. This bone was lying in a relatively sterile soil layer and it was not marked by any special finds or careful constructions; in many respects it could easily be dismissed as a discovery with little significance. Fifty years ago such bones would have been regarded as accidental losses, simply rubbish conveniently disposed of in a handy receptacle. It could be an indication that excarnation was the general means of disposal and that this occurred close to or actually inside settlements, but it might also indicate the accidental disturbance of human remains in graves located at the hillfort. In recent years we have come to understand that these deposits are much more significant. A number of archaeologists (Whimster 1981; C. Wilson 1981; Cunliffe 1992) came to realize that the presence of human remains on Iron Age settlements was a distinct cultural tradition characteristic of central southern England. The work of J. D. Hill (1995b) has enhanced our understanding of this phenomenon by emphasizing that the deposition of human remains is part of a complex suite of actions which involves the arrangement of different categories of material in carefully placed deposits. The process of deposition was clearly intimately involved in the definition of social relationships in the Iron Age of central southern England. It is difficult to imagine that if we, as archaeologists, could immediately recognize a human bone, our ancient pit diggers could not. The placement of this bone was a deliberate act, and the location of this deposit was carefully chosen. Hill (1995b) has shown that these pit deposits were carefully structured. Human remains are normally found in layers that are largely sterile, but a pit chosen for the deposition of human bone will normally have fills containing other carefully selected deposits. These mark the pit as a bank of socially constructed material.
Recent and Future Changes in Ocean Carbonate Chemistry
Authors: Orr James C.
Published: November 2020

This chapter is about the ongoing human-induced shifts in fundamental ocean carbonate chemistry that are occurring globally and are a growing concern to scientists studying marine organisms. It reviews the current state of ocean pH and related carbonate system variables, how they have changed during the industrial era, and how they are expected to continue to change during this century and beyond. Surface-ocean pH has been relatively stable for millions of years, until recently. Over the 800 000 years prior to industrialization, average surfacewater pH oscillated between 8.3 during cold periods (e.g. during the Last Glacial Maximum, 20 000 yr ago) and 8.2 during warm periods (e.g. just prior to the Industrial Revolution), as reviewed by Zeebe and Ridgwell in Chapter 2. But human activities are upsetting this stability by adding large quantities of a weak acid to the ocean at an ever increasing rate. This anthropogenic problem is referred to as ocean acidification because ocean acidity is increasing (i.e. seawater pH is declining), even though surface-ocean waters are alkaline and will remain so. The cause of the decline in seawater pH is the atmospheric increase in the same gas that is the main driver of climate change, namely carbon dioxide (CO2). Due to increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the ocean takes up large amounts of anthropogenic CO2, currently at a rate of about 106 metric tons of CO2 per hour (Brewer 2009), which is equivalent to one-fourth of the current global CO2 emissions from combustion of fossil fuels, cement production, and deforestation (Canadell et al. 2007 ; Le Quéré et al. 2009 ). If we would partition these emissions equally per capita, each person on the planet would be responsible for 4 kg per day of anthropogenic CO2 invading the ocean. To grasp the size of the problem, this invisible invasion may be compared with a recent, highly visible environmental disaster. The ocean currently absorbs anthropogenic carbon at a rate that is about a thousand times greater than from when carbon escaped from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil well that exploded on 20 April 2010, releasing 57 000 barrels of petroleum per day into the Gulf of Mexico until it was capped almost 3 months later.