bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Interlude: The Spreading Oceans
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

Well, the story of the K/AR ages of Iron meteorites ended not with a bang but a whimper. We were at a loss to explain them, so for the moment we concentrated on tuning up the experiment, trying to find some error in our technique. We couldn’t. Yet clearly something was wrong. By this time Rancitelli had measured a large number of meteorites, so we thought of plotting the measured ages against the argon contents: if there was any truth at all to the ages, they should be proportional to the argon. They weren’t. The data showed nothing but scatter. Just for fun we plotted the ages against the potassium content—and there was a definite anticorrelation! No question about it, there it was: the more the potassium, the lower the age. Not only that, but the extrapolated end point at the high potassium end gave an age of just about 4.6 billion years! The whole story—the high potassium-argon ages, the ten-billion-year story—was due to leakage of potassium from the meteorites. It had never occurred to us. We had expected that if anything, during weathering on earth and during our cutting and cleaning of the meteorites, they might lose argon, since argon is a gas and loosely bound; if they had, the true ages would be even higher than our measured values. Now we realized—well, hypothesized—that since the argon is formed in a radioactive decay it comes with a burst of kinetic energy and might well lodge itself in the iron matrix, where it would stick while the potassium slips out. Monday morning quarterbacking. Hindsight. So there went five years of my life. Trying to measure the potassium-argon ages of iron meteorites turned out to be a useless endeavor, a waste of time. Damn you, Stoenner and Zähringer! All in all, it wasn’t a great year. I was finishing my fifth year at Cornell, and was due to be either promoted and given tenure or kicked out.
The Neutrino Revolution
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

But while all this was going on, while the noble gases were being used to work out all the details of stellar processes, a different argon-based experiment was sneaking in and threatening to upset the whole applecart. I first began to learn about it way back in the fading summer of 1958, when I pulled myself up off the Westhampton sands and sauntered back to the lab, angry—in my own self-importance—that Gert Friedlander had hopped off to Europe and left me on my own. You’ll remember Ray Davis, in whose lab I was to work on the iron meteorite K/Ar problem? Well, I first met him that summer when I found Ollie Schaeffer and his mass spectrometer. In the lab next door was this courtly, soft-spoken Southern gentleman, Raymond Davis, Junior, who was putting together a most unlikely experiment and who invited me to join him in his journey into the unknown. Except that it wasn’t really unknown. It was a basic part of quantum mechanics, the theory describing the inner workings of atomic nuclei, which was put together largely during the 1920s and ‘30s—some thirty years before my sojourn at Brookhaven, and which I considered a time of ancient history, not quite real. Oh, I accepted that the 1920s had really existed, but in an intellectual way only, as a sort of existential fantasy—they had happened before I was born. (I first noticed this in others when, in the 1980s, I referred during a class lecture to the Kennedy assassination and was received with blank, uninterested stares. The students knew about it, but it had happened before they were born and had the same status as the Lincoln assassination: it was true, certainly, but basically it was a story grown-ups told.) It’s hard to realize that I’m writing this now more than twice as far removed from my Brookhaven years as those years were from the beginnings of quantum mechanics. So anyhow, it was known back then that the nuclei of atoms were held together by a binding energy which can be expressed through Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2.
Is Nature Priceless?
Authors: Collier Paul
Published: November 2020

The indignant tears of a child command attention. Daniel, aged eight, has just learned about the Brazilian rain forest and it has moved him to his first expression of political outrage. It is directed at me, not as his father, but as representative of the generation of adults who are destroying something precious before he reaches the age at which he can stop us. Through sobs and rage he shouts, “Tell the president!” Having seen me on television, Daniel has a somewhat inflated impression of my influence. Eight-year-olds are not, on the whole, always repositories of good sense, and Daniel is no exception. But by chance his anger is right on target: son and father are ethically aligned in the battleground of natural assets. First, the left flank. I agree with environmentalists that nature is special: at some level most of us recognize that. But why is it special? Mainstream environmentalists, such as Stewart Brand, offer one answer. Nature is especially vulnerable and that matters because, being dependent upon it, mankind is thereby vulnerable. But as Brand argues, many environmentalists are carrying ideological baggage that needs to be discarded. For romantic environmentalists nature is incommensurate with the mundane business of the economy: it is in some way ethically prior. Echoing Baron d’Holbach’s diagnosis of modern angst, they see industrial capitalism as having divorced us from the natural world which it is rapidly destroying. You can sense their discomfort with modern industrial society in the language that they use, replete with words such as “organic” and “holistic.” For a recent variation on the theme of Holbach, watch Prince Charles delivering the BBC’s 2009 distinguished Dimbleby Lecture. Perhaps man needs to return to a simpler, nonindustrial lifestyle. Prince Charles produces organic food, and he has created a village, Poundsbury, in the style of the eighteenth century—the last age prior to industrialization. At the extreme end of romantic environmentalism the diagnosis is more radical: mankind itself has become the enemy of what is truly good. Reflecting these sentiments, there is now a considerable cult that relishes the prospect of the extinction of mankind.
Natural Liabilities
Authors: Collier Paul
Published: November 2020

Factories produce the goods that we want. They also spew out smoke. The smoky factory is, in fact, the classic image used by economists to illustrate the idea of an externality. The factory sells the goods but does not have to pay for the smoke. We now know that smoke is more damaging than previously appreciated. There is nothing more natural than carbon dioxide; it is one of the basic ingredients of life. Yet carbon has become a natural liability. It accumulates up in the atmosphere, trapping in heat. Of course carbon only becomes a problem when it passes the threshold at which it is excessive. We have passed that threshold. As the extra carbon traps in heat, the world heats up, and as it heats up the climate becomes more volatile. The consequences are wide-ranging, but Africa will be the region most severely affected. Africa is huge and climate change will not affect it uniformly, but it seems likely that the drier parts will become drier still, making staple foods unviable. Increased climate variation, which means droughts, floods, and bouts of intense heat, can wreak havoc with traditional cultivation. Agriculture, which is currently Africa’s main economic activity, will become less productive. A rapidly growing population will be scratching a living from a progressively less amenable natural environment. Carbon brings together the key themes of this book. Although it is natural, extra carbon is now a liability; there is nothing intrinsically benign about nature. It is emitted not just by industry but by a number of natural processes. For example, probably the most natural of all human economic activities is rearing cattle. Pastoralists have been ranging the wilderness for millennia. Unfortunately, in terms of global warming, they are more of a menace than nuclear power stations, which produce energy without emitting carbon. That is because cows fart. Being renewable, carbon shares much of the economics of fish and trees, except that instead of being a renewable natural asset it is a renewable natural liability. The damage it does depends not upon how much is emitted today, but on how much has been emitted cumulatively over recent decades.
Public School Education within a Democracy
Authors: Hammel Alice M. , Hourigan Ryan M.
Published: November 2020

The beginning of the school year is a time when situations similar to Mrs. Johnson’s first day occur. It is when these first lessons go awry that some music teachers first begin to think of their individual students, rather than the collective group. Who is the girl who moves slower than the rest and uses a walker? Who are the students in the small group who come late each day with a teacher to assist them? Who is the boy who bounds down the hall and begins to take down one of the brand new bulletin boards that have just been finished? The answer to the questions above is that they are all our students. They all have a place in our schools and they all deserve to have an education that includes music. As music teachers, we have both the right and responsibility to educate all the students in our schools. We are charged with studying each student who enters our classroom and with providing all students the music education they deserve. To do this, however, we must begin to plan for the inclusive education of all students before that first group heads down our hall on the first day of school. Unfortunately, until recently this was not the educational philosophy of public schools within the United States. This chapter will introduce the process we as a nation have experienced as we have come to the understanding of what an education for all students in the United States entails, including: challenges within families; the real-world realities of inclusion in practice; and a label-free approach to teaching music in the public school setting. This book is designed to facilitate the planning, implementation, and assessment of music education for students with special needs. It is written from a paradigm that advocates thoughtful inclusion and honors the teaching and learning relationship between music teachers and their students. It is hoped that this text will present a philosophy and a set of guiding principles for teaching students with special needs in a helpful and pragmatic manner.
Memristor
Authors: Keats Jonathon
Published: November 2020

The capacitor was discovered in 1745 by Ewald Georg von Kleist, whose encounter with a generator and a jar of water shocked him so severely that he declared himself unwilling to repeat the experience “for the kingdom of France.” The resistor announced itself to mankind somewhat less dramatically in 1827, followed by the inductor in 1831. For the next 140 years these three components were considered the basic elements of electronics. Each accomplished what the others could not, even in combination, and together they gave engineers rudimentary control over electromagnetism. The capacitor linked charge and current, the resistor, current and voltage, and the inductor, current and flux. Later innovations, most notably the invention of transistors in 1947, would vastly expand the capability of electronics and even more incredibly stretch our expectations, yet everyone remained satisfied with the three old “passive” elements. If any more existed there simply was no need to find them. Then along came a young engineer named Leon Chua, who, unusual for someone in his profession, had an Aristotelian turn of mind. Instead of asking himself what could be done with capacitors and resistors and inductors, he sought to define what they were. His definitions, expressed in abstract terms of charge and current and voltage and flux, suggested to him an incomplete pattern, like a crossword puzzle with all but one word filled in. In 1971 he predicted the existence of a missing link between flux and charge. He gave it a name. He called his component a memristor . Still, it was only a placeholder, since nobody had ever seen one or cared about manufacturing them. His mathematical reasoning was elegant, acknowledged those who bothered to follow it, but engineers were much more excited by his 1983 invention of a simple circuit that behaved chaotically (in the formal mathematical sense), with obvious applications in computing and security. The circuit was named in his honor, making him a very minor celebrity.
K
Authors: Keats Jonathon
Published: November 2020

There’s an apocryphal story, still in circulation, that the word OK was made up by President Andrew Jackson. According to the tale, Jackson used the letters when he was a major general in the War of 1812, marking his approval on papers with initials abbreviating the words oll korrect . “The Gen. was never good at spelling,” the Boston Atlas dryly concluded, recounting the story in August 1840. By that time Old Hickory, as Jackson was known, had served his eight years as president, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, was running for a second term. A native of Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren appealed to the Jacksonian vote with the nickname Old Kinderhook, using the initials O. K. as a political slogan. His Whig Party rivals sought, successfully, to turn his populist appeal into a liability by calling attention to Jackson’s alleged semiliteracy. By a sort of logical doggerel endemic in American politics, Old Kinderhook’s slogan became a symbol of his ignorance. The true origin of OK , as the American lexicographer Allen Walker Read skillfully uncovered in 1963, was much closer to the Atlas’s editorial offices. The letters did stand for oll korrect, but the spelling was no accident. The coinage almost certainly came from the waggish editor of the Boston Morning Post , Charles Gordon Greene, who was at the center of what Read characterizes as “a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations” beginning in the year 1838. The Morning Post was full of them, generally used with a touch of irony, as in the mock dignity of O.F.M. (our first men), or a fit of whimsy, as in the pure zaniness of G.T. (gone to Texas). It was only a matter of months before the fad turned to creative misspelling, a source of humor then as it was in Mark Twain’s time. There was N.C. (nuff said) and N.Y. (no yuse), as well as O.W. (oll wright). The first known appearance of OK followed that pattern.
w00t
Authors: Keats Jonathon
Published: November 2020

W00t is a contraction of an exclamation once popular in Dungeons & Dragons, Wow, Loot! , imported online by nostalgic gamers. W00t is a codeword for root, the privileged user account of a system administrator, in the jargon of old-school hackers. W00t is onomatopoeic, imitating the sounds made by video games or by Daffy Duck or by railroad trains. W00t is an acronym, standing for “We owned the other team” and also “Want one of those.” W00t originated in dance clubs, where rappers in the early 1990s inspired shouts of “Whoot, there it is!” W00t comes from the Arsenio Hall Show, the Wizard of Oz books, Pretty Woman, Bloom County. Or it may be an inversion of the old Scots negation hoot, or a perversion of woeten, ostensibly an antiquated Dutch greeting. The many contradictory etymologies of w00t, of which the above are only a sampling, have baffled journalists and addled lexicographers since at least 2007, when the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster announced that w00t was the Word of the Year. The term was chosen in a poll conducted on the Merriam-Webster website from a selection of the twenty most popular entries in the company’s user-generated Open Dictionary. In a public announcement the publisher was vague about the significance of the vote: “The word you’ve selected hasn’t found its way into a regular Merriam-Webster dictionary yet—but its inclusion in our online Open Dictionary, along with the top honors it’s now been awarded—might just improve its chances.” And in interviews with the media the Merriam- Webster staff seemed befuddled by the choice. “This is a word that was made up, has no classical roots, but has lasted,” the editor at large Peter Sokolowski told Newsweek. “I can’t say that w00t will stick, but it does show that sense of adventure in language that young people have.” In the absence of more authoritative information about the meaning of the word or where it came from reporters cobbled together whatever origin stories they could from the vast repository of lore on Wikipedia, the Urban Dictionary, and the web.
Spime
Authors: Keats Jonathon
Published: November 2020

The word robot first appeared in print in 1920, forty-one years before robotics became an industrial reality. Derived from the Czech term robota, meaning “forced labor,” the name was given to the automata in R.U.R., a play by Karel Čapek in which machines manufactured by humans eradicate their creators. When the play traveled to the United States in 1922, the New York Times called it “a Czecho-Slovak Frankenstein.” Isaac Asimov was somewhat less charitable in a 1979 essay: “Capek’s play is, in my own opinion, a terribly bad one, but it is immortal for that one word. It contributed the word ‘robot’ not only to English but, through English, to all the languages in which science fiction is now written.” Asimov was himself one of the foremost authors of this genre, coining the word robotics in a 1941 story, and nine years later formulating the Three Laws of Robotics, the first code of conduct for machines. Those laws have immeasurably influenced real-world engineers in the decades since the first working robot, the four-thousand-pound Unimate, was installed in a General Motors plant in 1961, just one example of how Čapek’s immortal word, freed of its trite theatrical frame, has profoundly impacted the evolution of technology. The fate of R.U.R. stimulates a provocative question: Can an effective work of science fiction be written in a single word? At least one seems worthy of consideration. That word is spime. Spime was coined by Bruce Sterling, a Hugo Award–winning author of numerous sci-fi novels that have helped to define cyberpunk. Many of those novels, such as Heavy Weather and Holy Fire, are set in the near future, presenting dystopic visions of what our world might become if we continue to behave as irresponsibly as we have in the past. Heavy Weather, for instance, is a story of a globally warmed environment ravaged by tornadoes, one of which threatens to devastate the planet unless “hacked” by a cyberpunk Storm Troupe.
Economic Analysis
Authors: Singer Donald , Menzie W. David
Published: November 2020

Estimated undiscovered mineral resources are based on grade-and-tonnage models made up of deposits of varying economic viability (chapter 6). Many deposits used in grade-and-tonnage models have not been developed because they cannot yet be mined economically. Although technological advances act over time to lower mining costs and environmental impacts, thereby allowing formerly uneconomic deposits to become operating mines, some deposits in these models might “never” be mined for one or more of a variety of reasons, including relatively low tonnages and grades, deep burial, or occurrence in or near environmentally sensitive areas. Few nonacademic problems related to mineral resources are resolved by knowing the amount of metal that exists in some piece of land. Mineral policy issues and problems typically revolve around the effects of minerals that might be economically extracted. This is true if the problem concerns exploring or developing minerals, values of alternative uses of the land, or environmental consequences of minerals development. In resource assessments of undiscovered mineral deposits and in the early stages of exploration, including planning, a need for prefeasibility cost models exists. In exploration, these models separate economic from uneconomic deposits to help focus on targets that can benefit the exploration enterprise. In resource assessment, these cost models can be used to eliminate deposits that would probably be uneconomic even if discovered and allow estimation of the social value of the resources. Data used in grade-and-tonnage models do not necessarily represent economic deposits. Many of the deposits used in the models were found not to be economic and were not mined, whereas other deposits were mined long ago under economic conditions that no longer exist. In this chapter we briefly explore some alternative measures of value used in assessments and then develop the basis for simplified economic filters to separate the clearly economic from the clearly uneconomic deposits. The equations used are not difficult, but they require care in their application because many of the apparently small cost factors can have large effects on the final economic discrimination.
A Perfect Moral Storm: Climate Change, Intergenerational Ethics, and the Problem of Moral Corruption
Authors: Gardiner Stephen M.
Published: November 2020

The most authoritative scientific report on climate change begins by saying: . . . Natural, technical, and social sciences can provide essential information and evidence needed for decisions on what constitutes “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” At the same time, such decisions are value judgments. . . . There are good grounds for this statement. Climate change is a complex problem raising issues across and between a large number of disciplines, including the physical and life sciences, political science, economics, and psychology, to name just a few. But without wishing for a moment to marginalize the contributions of these disciplines, ethics does seem to play a fundamental role. At the most general level, the reason is that we cannot get very far in discussing why climate change is a problem without invoking ethical considerations. If we do not think that our own actions are open to moral assessment, or that various interests (our own, those of our kin and country, those of distant people, future people, animals, and nature) matter, then it is hard to see why climate change (or much else) poses a problem. But once we see this, then we appear to need some account of moral responsibility, morally important interests, and what to do about both. And this puts us squarely in the domain of ethics. At a more practical level, ethical questions are fundamental to the main policy decisions that must be made, such as where to set a global ceiling for greenhouse-gas emissions and how to distribute the emissions allowed by such a ceiling. For example, where the global ceiling is set depends on how the interests of the current generation are weighed against those of future generations, and how emissions are distributed under the global cap depends in part on various beliefs about the appropriate role of energy consumption in people’s lives, the importance of historical responsibility for the problem, and the current needs and future aspirations of particular societies. The relevance of ethics to substantive climate policy thus seems clear. But this is not the topic that I wish to take up here.
I 10, 1
Authors: Ling Roger , Arthur Paul , Clarke Georgia , Lazer Estelle , Ling Lesley A. , Rush Peter , Waters Andrew
Published: November 2020

This small corner house had acquired an irregular plan in its final phase, thanks, on the one hand, to the offset caused by the fountain at the street corner (Pls. 1, 2), and, on the other, to the small kitchen yard projecting westwards into the neighbouring property 1 10, 2-3. Its entrance, protected by a pent roof, the beam-holes for which (19 cm. in diameter) are visible beneath its modern replacement (Pl 3), was set at the right extremity of the north facade. It opened directly into the central hall (room 1), which can for convenience be called an ‘atrium’, though lacking the architectural pretensions and distinguishing features of traditional atria. Decorated with simple late Third Style paintings in a predominantly red, black, and yellow scheme, this ‘ atrium’ was around 3.50 m. high, and measured 3.75 m. by 5.35 m. on the ground. At its north end the east wall opened in a recess which may in an earlier phase have functioned as a latrine; its side walls preserve the grooves for a wooden shelf which, though rather high and deep (65 cm. above ground and 74 cm. deep), could possibly have been a lavatory seat. By the last period, however, this recess had been blocked by the construction of a stairway, and could only be entered, if it was still used at all, at a height of about 1 m. above floor level. Outside the recess, and also apparently put out of commission by the stairway, was a lararium, the sole relic of which was part of a painting on the north wall showing the Lares and a Genius; the left-hand Lar was missing and had almost certainly been clipped by the stairs. A socket in the wall just beneath the painting could have held a stone shelf for offerings, but is more likely to have been for a wooden beam which bridged the gap between the wall and the first three steps of the stairway, built in masonry against the east wall. The remaining steps, in wood, would have rested on this beam and risen westwards above the street door (Fig. 34 (S3)).
I 10, 10-11: Casa Degli Amanti
Authors: Ling Roger , Arthur Paul , Clarke Georgia , Lazer Estelle , Ling Lesley A. , Rush Peter , Waters Andrew
Published: November 2020

The casa degli amanti (house of the lovers), at the south-west corner of the insula, falls into two fairly distinct halves: the atrium complex, oriented on the street to the west, and the peristyle with its surrounding rooms, oriented on the street to the south and on the property boundary to the east. In the atrium complex, the atrium is misplaced to the south of the central axis, allowing space for two large rooms to the north, one of which was possibly a shop or workshop (5.50 m. × 4.70 m.), with a separate entry from the street (I 10, 10), while the other (5.80 m. × 4.50 m.), decorated with mythological wallpaintings and provided with a wide opening on to the peristyle, must have been a dining-room or oecus (room 8). Each of these had a segmental vault rising from a height of about 3.50 m. at the spring to slightly over 4 m. at the crown. In the first the vault is missing, but the holes for some of its timbers are visible in the east wall and a groove along the north wall marks the seating for the planking attached to them; at a higher level, in the north and south walls, are the remains of beam-holes for the joists of the upper floor or attic (see below). The arrangements in room 8 are now obscured by the modern vault constructed to provide a surface for the reassembled fragments of the ceiling-paintings; but the shape of the vault is confirmed by the surviving plaster of the lunettes, while a beam-hole for the lowest of the vault-timbers is visible above the corner of the western lunette in an early photograph (Superintendency neg. C 1944). The shop I 10, 10 had a small window high in the street wall to the south of Its entrance; whether there were any additional windows above the entrance, it is impossible to say, since this part of the wall is a modern reconstruction. Room 8 was lit by a splayed window cut in the angle of the vault and the eastern lunette, opening into the upper storey of the peristyle.
I 10, 18
Authors: Ling Roger , Arthur Paul , Clarke Georgia , Lazer Estelle , Ling Lesley A. , Rush Peter , Waters Andrew
Published: November 2020

Of all the houses in the insula, this is the least easy to study. It is now used as a base for a team of workmen, and certain rooms (2,3,10) are so full of materials and equipment as to put severe restrictions upon the possibility of observation and measurement, while others (6, 6A, 8A) have been filled with topsoil and turned into a fruit and vegetable garden. In addition, the perilous condition of the wooden stairs restored against the south wall of the atrium has prevented close examination of features beneath them. Like I 10, 3 this modest house is relatively broad at the front (8.90 m.), but contracts towards the rear. The front part is of classic type, with a central fauces flanked by symmetrical rooms opening into a compluviate atrium. The room to the north of the fauces (2), slightly under 3 m. square, has a simple painted wall decoration of red fields and is presumably to be identified as a cubiculum; that to the south (3) is somewhat larger (2.80 m. × 3.50 m.) and has slightly more elaborate paintings (including red and yellow fields), so may perhaps have been an oecus. The atrium is not actually centred upon the fauces but misplaced southwards to allow space for two rooms on its north side. Because of this misplacement, the shallow impluvium, now destroyed by exposure to weathering but recorded in the plan and photograph published by Elia, was set with its north edge aligned on the south wall of the fauces. On the south side of the atrium were the wooden stairs just mentioned, which climbed eastwards to the upper floor above room. The two rooms on the north side are, first, a shallow recess or ala (4), 2.30 m. wide by 1.85 m. deep, decorated with Third Style paintings, and, secondly, a tiny cubiculum or storeroom (5, measuring 2 m. × 1.50 m.), which was apparently devoid of all natural lighting other than what came through the doorway. Behind the atrium the width of the house is occupied by two rooms.
Karl Polanyi’s Anthropological Theory of Economy
Authors: Moller Astrid
Published: November 2020

In accordance with the hermeneutical principles laid down in the introduction, this chapter will be devoted to an account of the theoretical models underlying the analysis and interpretation of the source material. Karl Polanyi’s empirical observations resulted in a series of ideal-types such as can be employed for the evaluation of the evidence from Naukratis in the following chapters. Polanyi’s works do not form one single, complete theory of economy; rather, they should be seen—as Sally Humphreys has put it so aptly—as sketches of areas within largely unexplored territory. It is of course true that George Dalton went to great lengths to develop Polanyi’s ideas further; the fact nevertheless remains that they continue to be far from accepted as paradigms for all further research in the field of economic anthropology or economic history. Indeed, such continuations of Polanyi’s approach have served only to limit unduly the openness that is the very advantage of his ideal-types. It is for this reason that one should return to Polanyi himself and employ his original ideas. His work has been taken up by only a few within the realm of the economic history of classical antiquity, something due partly to his own—problematic—statements on the subject of Greek history, and partly to lack of interest shown for anthropological approaches within ancient history. Polanyi disagreed with the view that markets were the ubiquitous form of economic organization—an attitude regarding the notion of the market as essential to the description of every economy—and also with the belief that it is the economic organization of any given society which determines its social, political, and cultural structures. For his part, Polanyi contended that an economy organized around the market first came into being with the Industrial Revolution, and that it was not until then that the two root meanings of the word ‘economic’—on the one hand, in the sense of provision with goods; on the other, in the sense of a thrifty use of resources, as in the words ‘economical’ and ‘economizing’—merged.
Mortality and Morbidity in Modern Wars, I: Civil Populations
Authors: Smallman-Raynor Matthew , Cliff Andrew
Published: November 2020

In this chapter, we examine the time trends that have occurred in the causes of morbidity and mortality in civil populations over the last century and a half. Particular attention is paid to the period since 1900 when international comparative data become readily available. We begin with two case studies—of Australia, and England and Wales—to establish the main trends affecting the advanced economies over this period. Next, using data collected by Alderson (1981), we extend our analysis to 31 countries to give global coverage. We look first at the statistical evidence of change. It is shown that mortality and morbidity from all causes have declined. Since 1850, it is the infectious diseases which have witnessed the most spectacular falls in their contribution to total mortality and morbidity. Within the general decline, however, sharp upturns in both mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases occur during times of war. In the second half of the chapter, we examine some of the factors which lie behind the declines. Notwithstanding the general falls, in recent years there has been a revolution of interest in infectious diseases arising from a sharp resurgence of both old and new diseases. The former include drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and the latter HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). The disease setting is also evolving with environmental change and increased human interaction. And so the chapter is concluded with an assessment of the potential significance of infectious diseases in the present century in times of peace and war. In Australia, notifiable diseases data are collected by states and territories under their public health legislation; collection has taken place on a regular basis since 1917. The legislation has required medical practitioners and some other classes of people to notify health authorities of the number of cases recorded of certain communicable and other diseases. The resulting data were published in the Medical Journal of Australia from 1917 to 1922, Health, 1924 to 1939, and in the Commonwealth Year Book since 1945. Additionally, the Commonwealth Department of Health and its successors have published an annual compilation of notifiable diseases data in the Department’s Annual Report.
Pan America: Military Mobilization and Disease in the United States
Authors: Smallman-Raynor Matthew , Cliff Andrew
Published: November 2020

In the previous chapter, we outlined a number of methods employed by geographers to study time–space patterns of disease incidence and spread. In this and the next four chapters we use these methods to explore five linked themes in the epidemiological history of war since 1850. We begin here with Theme 1, military mobilization, taking the United States as our geographical reference point. Military mobilization at the outset of wars has always been a fertile breeding ground for epidemics. The rapid concentration of large—occasionally vast—numbers of unseasoned recruits, usually under conditions of great urgency, sometimes in the absence of adequate logisitic arrangements, and often without sufficient accommodation, supplies, equipage, and medical support, entails a disease risk that has been repeated down the years. The epidemiological dangers are multiplied by the crowding together of recruits from different disease environments (including rural rather than urban settings) while, even in relatively recent conflicts, pressures to meet draft quotas have sometimes demanded the enlistment of weak, physically unfit, and sometimes disease-prone applicants. The testimony of Major Samuel D. Hubbard, surgeon to the Ninth New York Volunteer Infantry, US Army, during the Spanish–American War (1898) is illustrative: . . . I examined all the recruits for this regiment . . . Practically all the men belonged to one class . . . They were whisky-soaked, homeless wanderers, the majority of whom gave Bowery lodging houses as their places of residence . . . Certainly the regiment was composed of a class of men likely to be susceptible to disease . . . The regiment was hastily recruited, and while the greatest care was used to get the best, the best had to be selected from the worst. (Hubbard, cited in Reed et al., 1904, i. 223) . . . But the problem of mobilization and disease is not restricted to new recruits. As part of the broader pattern of heightened population mixing, regular service personnel may also be swept into the disease milieu while, occasionally, infections may escape the confines of hastily established assembly and training camps to diffuse widely in civil populations.
Oceania:War Epidemics in South Pacific Islands
Authors: Smallman-Raynor Matthew , Cliff Andrew
Published: November 2020

So far, the geographical foci of our regional–thematic examination of the linkages between war and disease have been the great continental land masses of the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. We now turn our attention to a different stage for the geographical spread of war epidemics—oceanic islands. As well as the particular interest which attaches to islands as natural laboratories for the study of epidemiological processes (Cliff et al., 1981, 2000), island epidemics also hold a special place in war history. For example, we saw in Chapter 2 how the islands of the Caribbean became staging posts for the spread of wave upon wave of Old World ‘eruptive fevers’ (especially measles, plague, smallpox, and typhus) brought by the Spanish conquistadores to the Americas during the sixteenth century. Much later, the mysterious fever that broke out on the island of Walcheren in 1809 ranks as one of the greatest medical disasters to have befallen the British Army. In this chapter, we examine the theme of island epidemics with special reference to the military engagements of Australia, New Zealand, and the neighbouring islands of the South Pacific since 1850. Figure 11.1 serves as a location map for the discussion, while sample conflicts—exclusive of tribal feuds, skirmishes, and other minor events for which little or no documentary evidence exists—are listed in Table 11.1. Our analysis begins in Section 11.2. There we provide a brief review of the initial introduction and spread of some of the Old World diseases which occurred in association with South Pacific colonization and conflicts during the last half of the nineteenth century. In Sections 11.3 and 11.4, we move on to the twentieth century. In the Great War, Australia and New Zealand made a relatively larger contribution to military manpower than any other allied country. At the end of the conflict, the return of many tens of thousands of antipodean troops from the battlefields of Europe fuelled the extension of the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic into the South Pacific region (Cumpston, 1919). In Section 11.3, we examine the spread of influenza on board returning troopships and subsequently within Australia, New Zealand, and the neighbouring islands of the region.
Institutions, Agency, and Industrial Practices
Authors: Gertler Meric S.
Published: November 2020

Why are firms in some regions or nations so successful at adopting particular new production technologies and work practices while those in other places are not? What role do culturally defined characteristics, traits, and attitudes play in determining the degree of success in this process? Moreover, to what extent can such successful practices be replicated or ‘manufactured’ in other less fortunate locations? These questions figure prominently in a number of important debates, both theoretical and practical, and constitute the central issues of concern for this book. Scholars interested in the theory of regional and national economic development have, at least since the mid-1980s, engaged in a lively debate over the nature of change in the contemporary economy, and the forces producing such change. Considerable attention has been focused on the set of new production and innovation practices that many see as the foundation of firms’ competitive success in a period described variously as the era of post-Fordism. after-Fordism, ‘new competition’, ‘new social economy’, ‘knowledge-based economy’, or ‘learning economy’. These practices include the use of highly flexible, advanced manufacturing technologies, the reorganization of work inside the firm to enhance innovative capacity, improve quality, and increase responsiveness to changing market demands, and the restructuring of external relations—with customers, suppliers, and competitors—as firms supplement arm’s-length, market-based transactions with closer co-operation and collaboration to improve their responsiveness and innovative capability. The international literature in economic geography, industrial economics, economic sociology, political science, and management studies is now replete with case studies of individual countries and regions where firms have developed and employed such practices to great effect, enabling them to increase sales at home and abroad, and to maintain or expand their workforces. The most celebrated cases include Germany’s Baden-Wurttemberg, the Third Italy (especially the regions of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany), Silicon Valley, and Japan’s Tokyo-Osaka corridor. In this multidisciplinary literature, interest has converged around a common theme: the role of culture in shaping the internal and external practices of firms.
Tacit Knowledge in Geographical Context
Authors: Gertler Meric S.
Published: November 2020

It has now become commonplace to refer to the current period of capitalist development as the era of the ‘knowledge-based’ (OECD 1996) or ‘learning’ (Lundvall and Johnson 1994) economy. No matter which label one prefers, the production, acquisition, absorption, reproduction, and dissemination of knowledge is seen by many as the fundamental characteristic of contemporary competitive dynamics. Long before this parlance became popular, scholars had expressed a deep interest in distinguishing between different types of knowledge. Philosophers of knowledge such as Ryle (1949) and Michael Polanyi (1958; 1966) anticipated later developments in social constructivist thought by enunciating what was for them a crucial distinction between knowledge that could be effectively expressed using symbolic forms of representation—explicit or codified—and other forms of knowledge that defied such representation—tacit knowledge (see Reber 1995; Barbiero n.d.). Within the field of innovation studies and technological change, and especially since the publication of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s The Knowledge- Creating Company (1995), the distinction between tacit and codified knowledge has been accorded great significance. However, in characteristically prescient fashion Nelson and Winter (1982) in their classic work had already made extensive use of the concept, which informed their analysis of organizational routines within an evolutionary perspective on technological change. In drawing attention to this concept, these authors helped revive widespread interest in the earlier work of Michael Polanyi, to the point where tacit knowledge has come to be recognized as a central component of the learning economy, and a key to innovation and value creation. Moreover, tacit knowledge is also acknowledged as a prime determinant of the geography of innovative activity, since its central role in the process of learning through interacting tends to reinforce the local over the global. For a growing number of scholars, this explains the perpetuation and deepening of geographical concentration in a world of expanding markets, weakening borders, and ever cheaper and more pervasive communication technologies. Recently, tacit knowledge has received considerable attention within the field of industrial economics (see for e.g. Cowan, David, and Foray 2000; Johnson, Lorenz, and Lundvall 2002), where a process of critical re-examination has begun.
Geography, Learning, and Convergence
Authors: Gertler Meric S.
Published: November 2020

According to an increasingly accepted view, the sovereignty of national economies has been eroded to the point where nation-states ‘have become little more than bit actors’ (Ohmae 1995: 12). With the development of globalized financial markets, the rising power of multinational corporations (MNCs), and the emergence of a new set of supranational institutions to govern economic processes on a continental or world scale, nation-states are said to have lost the ability to manage their own domestic economic affairs, having ceded control over exchange rates, investment, and even fiscal policy to extra-national forces (Strange 1997). Moreover, with the increasing leverage and reach of MNCs further contributing to the erosion of national economic sovereignty, the once distinctive character of particular national industrial ‘models’ is said to be under imminent threat. While it may still be possible to identify at least three clearly distinctive national models—an Anglo-American model, a Rhineland (German) model, and a Japanese model—the decline of national institutions, the intensification of competitive forces on a global scale, and the cross-penetration of national markets by MNCs are said to have propelled a process of convergence between these different national models (see Martin and Sunley 1997 for a review of these arguments). In most representations of this globalization dynamic, convergence is regarded as inexorable. One of the most important processes underpinning this dynamic is learning. At the global level, large corporate actors are allegedly learning from each other, so that the most successful corporate practices are emulated and diffused cross-nationally at an increasingly rapid pace. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, considerable attention was devoted to the diffusion of methods of production and workplace organization perfected by Japanese producers of cars and consumer electronics, in which American, Canadian, and European manufacturers were shown to be learning methods such as just-in-time, kaizen/continuous improvement, and other aspects of ‘lean production’ techniques from their Japanese competitors (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990). With the resurgence of the United States’ economy in the second half of the 1990s, American practices have apparently become the object of global firms’ affections, with large corporations in Europe and Asia adopting the core characteristics of US-style ‘shareholder capitalism’: especially flexible labour market practices, ‘re-engineering’, and the empowerment of shareholders (The Economist 1996a; 1996b).
Land Tenure, Property, and Development
Authors: Dale Peter , McLaughlin John
Published: November 2020

The law provides a complex set of rules that have evolved within each society to ensure its orderly running and the peaceful behaviour of its members. The law may take several forms, amongst which broadly speaking, there is statutory law and customary law. Under statutory law, all rules and regulations are written down and codified; under customary law there is no written record but it is assumed that the code is well known by all members of society. In some jurisdictions there is the common law which grew out of customary law; over time the judgements of the courts have been written down and now create precedents whereby new cases can be judged. many jurisdictions have legal regimes that combine in some fashion statutory and customary law. The law of property deals both with relations between people (in personam) and of persons to things (in rem). The law recognizes different types of interest in property and makes a distinction between the physical objects and the abstract rights associated with their use. Land as real or immovable property is in many jurisdictions taken to include all things attached to it such as buildings and other permanent fixtures. It also usually includes the minerals below the soil and the air above, unless these are specifically excluded. In some countries, however, a distinction is made between ‘land’ as a natural object with soil and a surface and ‘property’, which is taken to mean the buildings and other man-made objects attached to the land. In the present context, land will be regarded as including all construction and development, while the word ‘property’ will normally be used more specifically to relate to the abstract nature of land. Rights describe what may be done with property; they are abstract but none the less real in their effect. They have been described as being like a bundle of sticks associated with any property, one stick for each thing that can be done with the property.