bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Betzer and Ardisson Synthesis of (+)-Discodermolide
Authors: Taber Douglass
Published: November 2020

( + )-Discodermolide 3, a potent anticancer agent that works synergistically with taxol, may yet prove to be clinically effective. For the synthetic material to be affordable, a highly convergent synthesis is required. Jean-François Betzer and Janick Ardisson of the Université de Cergy- Pontoise have described (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2007, 46, 1917) such a synthesis, coupling 1 and 2. A central feature of their approach was the repeated application of the inherently chiral secondary organometallic reagent 5. The first use of 5 was the addition to the aldehyde 4. The product 6 was ozonized, and the resulting aldehyde was carried on to the α, β-unsaturated ester. Exposure of the hydroxy ester to benzaldehyde under basic conditions delivered, by intramolecular Michael addition, the acetal 7. The next addition of the reagent 5 was to the aldehyde 10. The adduct 11 was deprotonated with t-BuLi to effect α-elimination, providing, after protection of the alcohol, the alkyne 12. Coupling of 12 with the amide 7 gave a ketone, enantioselective reduction of which under Itsuno-Corey conditions led, again after protection of the alcohol, to the alkyne 13. Oxidation followed by selective hydrogenation and iodine-tin exchange then completed the assembly of 1. Note that PtO2, not typically used for partial hydrogenation, was the catalyst of choice for this congested alkyne. The third application of the enantiomerically-pure reagent 5 was addition to the aldehyde that had been prepared by ozonolysis of 15. Advantage was then taken of another property of the alkenyl carbamate, Ni-mediated Grignard coupling, to form the next carbon-carbon bond with high geometric control. Deprotection of the diene 17 so prepared followed by iodination then completed the synthesis of 2. The convergent coupling of 1 with 2 was carried out under Suzuki conditions. Reduction of the iodide of 2 to the corresponding alkyl lithium followed by exchange with B-OMe-9-BBN gave an intermediate organoborane, that smoothly coupled with 1 under Pd catalysis to give 18.
The Burke Synthesis of ( + )-Didemniserinolipid B
Authors: Taber Douglass
Published: November 2020

The sulfate ( + )-didemniserinolipid B 3, isolated from the tunicate Didemnum sp, has an intriguing spiroether core. A key step in the synthesis of 3 reported (Organic Lett. 2007, 9, 5357) by Steven D. Burke of the University of Wisconsin was the selective ring-closing metathesis of 1 to 2. The diol 6 that was used to prepare the ketal 1 was readily prepared from the inexpensive D-mannitol 4. Many other applications can be envisioned for the enantiomerically-pure diol 6 and for the monoacetate and bis acetate that are precursors to it. To set up the metathesis, the β, γ-unsaturated ketone 10 was needed. To this end, the keto phosphonate derived from the addition of the phosphonate anion 8 to the lactone 7 was condensed with phenyl acetaldehyde 9. The derived enone 10 was a 5:1 mixture of β, γ- and α, β-regioisomers. The diol 6 is C2 -symmetrical, but formation of the ketal 1 dissolved the symmetry, with one terminal vinyl group directed toward the styrene double bond, and the other directed away from it. On exposure to the first generation Grubbs catalyst, ring formation proceeded efficiently, to give 2. Williamson coupling with the serine-derived alcohol 11 then gave 12. To establish the secondary alcohol of 13 and so of 3, the more electron rich alkene of 12 was selectively epoxidized, from the more open face. Diaxial opening with hydride then gave 13. With 13 in hand, another challenge of selectivity emerged. The plan had been to attach the ester-bearing sidechain to 13 using alkene metathesis, then hydrogenate. As the side-chain of 3 contained an additional alkene, this had to be present in masked form. To this end, the α-phenylselenyl ester 14 was prepared. Alkene metathesis with 13 proceeded smoothly, this time using the second generation Grubbs catalyst. The unwanted alkene was then removed by reduction with diimide, and the selenide was oxidized to deliver the α, β-unsaturated ester.
The Keck Synthesis of Epothilone B
Authors: Taber Douglass
Published: November 2020

The total synthesis of Epothilone B 4, the first natural product (with Epothilone A) to show the same microtubule-stabilizing activity as paclitaxel (Taxol®), has attracted a great deal of attention since that activity was first reported in 1995. The total synthesis of 4 devised (J. Org. Chem. 2008, 73, 9675) by Gary E. Keck of the University of Utah was based in large part on the stereoselective allyl stannane additions (e.g. 1 + 2 → 3 ) that his group originated. The allyl stannane 2 was prepared from the acid chloride 5. Exposure of 5 to Et3N generated the ketene, that was homologated with the phosphorane 6 to give the allene ester 7. Cu-mediated conjugate addition of the stannylmethyl anion 8 then delivered 2. The silyloxy aldehyde 1 was prepared from the ester 9 by reduction with Dibal. Felkincontrolled 1,2-addition of the allyl stannane 2 established the relative configuration of the secondary alcohol of 3, that was then used to control the relative configuration of the new alcohol in 10. Addition of the crotyl borane 12 to the derived aldehyde 11 also proceeded with high diastereocontrol. The other component of 4 was prepared from the aldehyde 14. Enantioselective allylation, by the method the authors developed, delivered the alcohol 16. The Z trisubstituted alkene was then assembled by condensing the aldehyde 17 with the phosphorane 18. Dibal reduction of the product lactone 19 gave a diol, the allylic alcohol of which was selectively converted to the chloride with the Corey-Kim reagent. Hydride reduction then delivered the desired homoallylic alcohol, that was converted to the phosphonium salt 21. Condensation of 21 with 13 gave the diene, that was carried on to Epothilone B 4. The synthesis of Epothilone B 4 as originally conceived by the authors depended on ring-closing metathesis of the triene 22. They prepared 22, but on exposure to the second-generation Grubbs catalyst it was converted only to 23. The authors concluded that the trans acetonide kept 22 in a conformation that did not allow the desired macrocyclization.
Boom, Bust, Exodus
Authors: Broughton Chad
Published: November 2020

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders owed much of their unexpected popularity in the 2016 primaries to their respective stances on trade and immigration policy. Political elites and policy experts were bewildered by combative talk of building a wall and the ubiquity of anti-TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) sloganeering in what many saw as a bizarre election cycle. They have scrambled to explain both Trump's victory and the new political fault lines that have emerged in both major political parties, largely around trade and immigration. In struggling industrial towns and cities, the rise of Trump and Sanders was less of a surprise. These places have long weathered globalization's storm. Many feel left behind and sold short. They are anxious, and they're demanding answers. Galesburg, Illinois, is one such city.
Boom Days in Appliance City
Authors: Broughton Chad
Published: November 2020

Packing Insulation Was Mike Patrick’s first job at Midwest Manufacturing. He was one of 300 men, mostly young, hired in January 1959 to help Admiral, a Chicago-based company that owned the Galesburg factory, meet America’s seemingly insatiable postwar appetite for appliances. He had failed an eye test during the nurse’s exam at the factory and had to get glasses before he started. Patrick had suspected he needed glasses because he always had trouble see­ing the chalkboard from the back of the room in high school. But because he was an athlete, he didn’t want to tie glasses around his head during basketball games. New hires got the nastiest, most grueling jobs, and stuffing insulation— which was like prickly cotton candy—into bare metal cabinets was one of them. The cabinets came from the metal-cutting area of the factory known as the “black line,” because the steel, darkened with oil, hadn’t yet been painted. The black line was the birthplace of these early Admiral refrigerators. Flatbed semis unloaded massive rolls of thick steel from Chicago—the plant used 10 rolls a day, 50 million pounds a year—that cutters and folding machines would shape into five sides. Gun welders then joined what would become the back, the two sides, and the top and bottom of the refrigerator. They left the door for later. The fused steel cabinet dangled from an overhead conveyor as it rode to the paint shop to be cleaned of its oily residue and painted. It would continue on the conveyor to a cabinet bank, where the empty cabinets gathered until they were needed on the line. When the scheduler called for them, men would slide the cabinets to the line across a concrete floor, which had been treated with a smooth, protective coating to prevent damage. A young man then spread scalding, gooey tar into the corners and up and down the creases of the bare metal cabinets. He shot the tar out of a pistol-gripped nozzle attached to a long canvas hose that he snaked in and around the metal shell.
Applications of Neural Network Fitting of Potential-Energy Surfaces
Authors: Raff Lionel , Komanduri Ranga , Hagan Martin , Bukkapatnam Satish
Published: November 2020

In this chapter, several examples of NN fitting of databases obtained using either ab initio electronic structure methods or an empirical potential will be discussed. The objective of this presentation is not to provide a complete and comprehensive review of the field nor is it to acquaint the reader with the details of the reaction dynamics of the particular systems employed as examples. It is rather to provide a clear picture of the power and limitations of NN methods for the investigation of reaction dynamics. We begin with a brief overview of the literature in the field. Neural networks provide a powerful method to effect the fitting of an ensemble of potential energy points in a database. In 1993, Blank et al. employed an NN to fit data derived from an empirical potential model for CO chemisorbed on a Ni(111) surface. Two years later, these same investigators also examined the interaction potential of H2 on a Si(100)-2 × 1 surface using a data set comprising 750 energies computed using local density functional theory. To the best of our knowledge, these were the first two examples in which NNs were employed to provide the PES for a dynamics study. Hobday et al. have investigated the energies of C-H systems by using a Tersoff potential form in which the three-body term is replaced by an NN comprising five input nodes, one hidden layer with six nodes, and an output layer. In this work, the five input elements are computed by consideration of the bond type, i.e., C-C or C-H, the three-body bond angle θ, which is input to the NN in the form (1 + cos θ)2, the connectivity of the local environment, and the second neighbor information. The method was applied to carbon clusters and a wide variety of alkanes, alkenes, alkynes, aromatics, and radicals. Comparison of the atomization energies obtained using the NN potential surfaces with experimental values showed the errors for 12 alkanes, 13 alkenes, 4 alkynes, 7 aromatics, and 12 radicals to lie in the ranges zero to 0.3 eV (alkanes), 0.1 to 1.5 eV (alkenes), 0 to 0.5 eV (alkynes), zero to 1.0 eV (aromatics), and zero to 2.8 eV (radicals).
Compositions and Perception Tools
Authors: Manzo V. J
Published: November 2020

In this chapter, we will examine some ways to interact with audio processing objects in formal compositions. Examples of traditional instrumentalists interacting with Max patches in concert performances are common. In the interest of copyright availability, we will examine a composition of mine for E♭clarinet and computer (a Max patch). The remaining example patches in this chapter will deal with audio processing as it relates to hearing and some aspects of perception. In this composition, discourse, the clarinetist plays from a score while the Max patch “listens” to the performer (using a microphone) and processes the clarinet sound in predetermined ways. The Max patch follows a time-based “score” of its own for performing the effects on the clarinet sound and, thus, processes the audio signal the same way each time the piece is performed. Our purpose in exploring this patch has less to do with the effects that are used or any aesthetic you get from the piece than with the implementation of a usable timeline that both the clarinetist and the computer can perform to. 1. Open the file discourse.maxpat from within the folder discourse located in the Chapter 20 Examples folder When the space bar is pressed, a clocker within the patch will begin triggering the events in the Max patch; this is like the score for the computer. These events assume that since the user has pressed the space bar, the patch can expect to hear the notes of the score played back at tempo to coincide with the different audio processing taking place within the patch. Unless you happen to have your E♭clarinet handy (a PDF of the score is also available in the discourse folder), we will use a demo sound file of a synthesized clarinet playing this piece in lieu of actually performing it. This will give us a sense of what the piece would sound like if we were to perform the clarinet part live.
Introduction: The Tracks at Cedar Springs
Authors: deBuys William
Published: November 2020

March 1919 . Somebody killed the trader at Cedar Springs. The murderer also set fire to the trading post, and soon the dried-out floor planks and the roof beams and split-cedar ceiling erupted in smoke and flame. Except for its sandstone walls, the building would have burned to the ground. The next day a plume of smoke still hung in the Arizona sky, and people from miles around came to see what was the matter. Few automobiles had reached the windy expanses of the Navajo Reservation in those days, and men and women of all ages filed in by foot and horseback and in their buggies and buckboards. The first ones to arrive found the corpse of Charley Hubbell. Cedar Springs was less than a crossroads, not really a hamlet. It stood within a circle of rough-sided buttes a few miles east of the main road between Hopi and Winslow. It consisted of a combined general store, trading post and post office, plus various pens and corrals. Navajos from a considerable distance came to exchange sheep and handcrafts for the things they needed. Charley Hubbell lived at the trading post and presided over what went on. The people who found his body dispatched a messenger on a fast horse toward Ganado, fifty miles northeast, to find Charley’s nephew Lorenzo, who was known throughout Navajo country. A man of giant girth and matching gravitas, Juan Lorenzo Hubbell had bought the Ganado trading post forty years earlier. With acumen and persistence he built a string of almost thirty such establishments from one end of Navajo country to the other. In many cases he appointed members of his large, mixed Anglo and Hispanic family to run them. The post near Ganado, to which the messenger was sent, served as his home and headquarters. Together with its broad sprawl of barns, corrals, and storage sheds, it is preserved today as Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park System.
Oracle: Global-Change-Type Drought
Authors: deBuys William
Published: November 2020

In the sprawling, climate-controlled, glass- and steel-ribbed tent of Biosphere II, Dave Breshears is killing trees. Together with Henry Adams, his graduate student accomplice, he arranged to have piñon pines dug up and hauled in from northern New Mexico. Next he saw to their replanting and watering, got them rooted, growing, and happy, and then—for some, but not for all—shut off the water. Breshears wants to find out what makes them die. Biosphere II is an unlikely setting for controlled experiments in tree murder—or for anything else. Rising from the Arizona desert like the main terminal of a misplaced airport, its design sexy and futuristic, it is full of the pride of technology and the promise of discovery. In its integration of multiple volumetric forms and vast banks of windows, it might be the architectural love child of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum and a backyard greenhouse. A scanty procession of tourists detours from the beaten path to pay twenty dollars a head to enter the structure, which was meant to be an indoor replication of everything outdoors. It is a proto–space station: Biosphere II was conceived as a living and breathing microcosm of Biosphere I, the planet Earth. Bankrolled by the Texas oilman and investor Edward P. Bass, the creators of Biosphere II hoped that it would serve as a laboratory where earthlings might learn to package (and eventually export) their bubble of life to distant planets and solar systems. Toward that end, in September 1991, with much fanfare and not a little criticism, eight so-called biospherians, four men and four women, were sealed inside the three-acre complex for a two-year stay. Socially and biologically, the expectations were utopian: they were to grow their own food, maintain a life-supporting atmosphere, and get along as a team. Functionally the results were quite different. After thirteen months, said one, “We were starving, suffocating and going quite mad.”
Hawikku: Welcome to the Anthropocene
Authors: deBuys William
Published: November 2020

History commenced for a large portion of North America on July 7, 1540. One may quibble over the dimension of territory affected, but the date is certain: it was duly written down, which is what distinguishes history, narrowly defined, from other ways of recording human experience. History is based on a documentary record; it begins when the documents start to pile up. On that July day nearly five centuries ago, a small army of Spaniards and Mexican Indians gathered before a stone village in what is now New Mexico and informed the residents thereof that henceforward they owed obedience to someone called the Pope and to the Catholic Sovereigns of Castile, in whom the Pope had entrusted authority over the bodies, souls, and lands of every person living on the islands and continent of the Mar Océano. This included the people of the stone village. No doubt these ideas sounded strange to their intended hearers, if indeed they were translated with the remotest accuracy. The intruders’ puzzling message was shouted out by someone who appeared to stare at a cloth, or a material similarly thin, flat, and flexible. It was a sheet of thick paper, nearly the size of one of the natives’ bison-hide shields. It bore many small marks, but no one from the village was close enough to observe this. Not that it mattered. The document asserting Spanish sovereignty over the village and its people was called the Requerimiento. Its purpose was to justify, in legal terms, the bloodshed and robbery that were soon to follow. An official of the Spanish host duly recited the entire document, which stipulated, on behalf of his commander, Captain-General Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, that if the natives failed to obey the commands of the Requerimiento, “I will make war against you everywhere and in every way I can. And I will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and His Majesty. I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slaves. . . . I will take your property.
Research and Teaching at the All-Administrative University
Authors: Ginsberg Benjamin
Published: November 2020

The Ongoing Transfer of power from professors to administrators has important implications for the curricula and research agendas of America’s colleges and universities. On the surface, faculty members and administrators seem to share a general understanding of the university and its place in American society. If asked to characterize the “mission” of the university, members of both groups will usually agree with the broad idea that the university is an institution that produces and disseminates knowledge through its teaching, research, public outreach, and other programs. This surface similarity of professorial and administrative perspectives, however, is deceptive. To members of the faculty, the university exists mainly to promote their own research and teaching endeavors. While professors may be quite fond of their schools, for most, scholarship is the purpose of academic life, and the university primarily serves as a useful instrument to promote that purpose. Many professors are driven by love of teaching and the process of discovery. Others crave the adulation of students or the scholarly fame that can result from important discoveries and publications. But whatever their underlying motivations, most professors view scholarship and teaching as ends and the university as an institutional means or instrument through which to achieve those ends. For administrators, on the other hand, it is the faculty’s research and teaching enterprise that is the means and not the end. Some administrators, to be sure, mainly those who plan to return to scholarship and teaching, may put academic matters first. Most administrators, though, tend to manifest a perspective similar to that affected by business managers or owners. They view the university as the equivalent of a firm manufacturing goods and providing services whose main products happen to be various forms of knowledge rather than automobiles, computers, or widgets. This perspective was famously articulated by the late president of the University of California, Clark Kerr, when he characterized higher education as the “knowledge industry,” and suggested that universities should focus on producing forms of knowledge likely to be useful in the marketplace.
Sherlock Holmes: Pioneer in Forensic Science
Authors: O'Brien James
Published: November 2020

Holmes may have admired Bertillon’s work, but that did not prevent him from being resentful about it in The Hound of the Baskervilles (HOUN). When Dr. James Mortimer told Holmes that Bertillon was the highest expert in Europe, Holmes admitted that he was off ended by the ranking. So who was this man held in such high regard? Alphonse Bertillon was a French anthropologist born in 1853. His poor academic performance was followed by difficulty holding a job. In 1879, his influential father Louis, a famous physician and anthropologist, obtained a job for him as a clerk with the Parisian police (Wagner 2006, 97–98). He started work in March 1879, and became interested in the problem of identifying recidivists, that is, repeat off enders. It was French policy to exile recidivists to their colonies (Cole 2001, 33). But there was no procedure for identifying them. Fingerprinting did not exist, and even mug shots were not yet used. Upon a second arrest, recidivists would merely use a pseudonym. Bertillon wanted to develop a system of identification based on ideas mentioned in 1840 by a Belgian statistician named Quetelet (Wagner 2006, 98). Bertillon found his job with the police to be very boring, as he collected and filed much information, most of it never used again and worthless. So, on October 1, 1879 (Cole 2001, 49), he submitted a report proposing a method of identification using body measurements. The report was ignored (Wagner 2006, 98). Louis Bertillon liked his son’s suggestion. Louis had in fact attempted to classify people, not identify them, by measuring the lengths of their bones. So he was naturally attracted to Alphonse’s idea to use such measurements to identify criminals (Cole 2001, 34). In 1882, with help from his influential father, Alphonse Bertillon was given two assistants and some funding. He was given three months to identify a repeat offender. He succeeded with one week remaining.
Graphs and Maps
Authors: Elsner James B. , Jagger Thomas H.
Published: November 2020

Graphs and maps help you reason with data. They also help you communicate results. A good graph gives you the most information in the shortest time, with the least ink in the smallest space (Tufte, 1997). In this chapter, we show you how to make graphs and maps using R. A good strategy is to follow along with an open session, typing (or copying) the code as you read. Before you begin make sure you have the following data sets available in your workspace. Do this by typing . . . > SOI = read.table("SOI.txt", header=TRUE) > NAO = read.table("NAO.txt", header=TRUE) > SST = read.table("SST.txt", header=TRUE) > A = read.table("ATL.txt", header=TRUE) > US = read.table("H.txt", header=TRUE) . . . Not all the code is shown but all is available on our Web site. It is easy to make a graph. Here we provide guidance to help you make informative graphs. It is a tutorial on how to create publishable figures from your data. In R you have several choices. With the standard (base) graphics environment, you can produce a variety of plots with fine details. Most of the figures in this book use the standard graphics environment. The grid graphics environment is even more flexible. It allows you to design complex layouts with nested graphs where scaling is maintained upon resizing. The lattice and ggplot2 packages use grid graphics to create more specialized graphing functions and methods. The spplot function for example is plot method built with grid graphics that you will use to create maps. The ggplot2 package is an implementation of the grammar of graphics combining advantages from the standard and lattice graphic environments. It is worth the effort to learn. We begin with the standard graphics environment. A box plot is a graph of the five-number summary. The summary function applied to data produces the sample mean along with five other statistics including the minimum, the first quartile value, the median, the third quartile value, and the maximum. The box plot graphs these numbers. This is done using the boxplot function.
Frequency Models
Authors: Elsner James B. , Jagger Thomas H.
Published: November 2020

Here in Part II, we focus on statistical models for understanding and predicting hurricane climate. This chapter shows you how to model hurricane occurrence. This is done using the annual count of hurricanes making landfall in the United States. We also consider the occurrence of hurricanes across the basin and by origin. We begin with exploratory analysis and then show you how to model counts with Poisson regression. Issues of model fit, interpretation, and prediction are considered in turn. The topic of how to assess forecast skill is examined including how to perform cross-validation. Alternatives to the Poisson regression model are considered. Logistic regression and receiver operating characteristics (ROCS) are also covered. You use the data set US.txt which contains a list of tropical cyclone counts by year (see Chapter 2). The counts indicate the number of hurricanes hitting in the United States (excluding Hawaii). Input the data, save them as a data frame object, and print out the first six lines by typing . . . > H = read.table("US.txt", header=TRUE) > head(H) . . . The columns include year Year, number of U.S. hurricanes All, number of major U.S. hurricanes MUS, number of U.S. Gulf coast hurricanes G, number of Florida hurricanes FL, and number of East coast hurricanes E. Save the total number of years in the record as n and the average number hurricanes per year as rate. . . . > n = length(H$Year); rate = mean(H$All) > n; rate [1] 160 [1] 1.69 . . . The average number of U.S. hurricanes is 1.69 per year over these 160 years. First plot a time series and a distribution of the annual counts. Together, the two plots provide a nice summary of the information in your data relevant to any modeling effort. . . . > par(las=1) > layout(matrix(c(1, 2), 1, 2, byrow=TRUE), + widths=c(3/5, 2/5)) > plot(H$Year, H$All, type="h", xlab="Year", + ylab="Hurricane Count") > grid() > mtext("a", side=3, line=1, adj=0, cex=1.1) > barplot(table(H$All), xlab="Hurricane Count", + ylab="Number of Years", main="") > mtext("b", side=3, line=1, adj=0, cex=1.1) . . . The layout function divides the plot page into rows and columns as specified in the matrix function (first argument).
The Acetate Pathway: Biosynthesis of Polyketides and Related Compounds
Authors: Morrow Gary W.
Published: November 2020

We saw in the previous chapter how Otto Wallach’s early proposal regarding the structural origin of terpenoid natural products was later refined by the insightful work of Leopold Rudzicka, leading to the biogenetic isoprene rule and all that it implies. In a nearly parallel fashion, we find in our present chapter a second, unrelated class of naturally occurring compounds whose characteristic structural features prompted an initial innovative hypothesis by J. N. Collie near the turn of the 20th century. Collie proposed that certain natural compounds might arise from precursors containing repeated “ketide” (–CH2CO–) units which could then undergo subsequent condensations and other reactions typical of carbonyl compounds to produce some of the observed structures. Unfortunately, Collie’s work was more or less ignored and largely forgotten for nearly a half century, only to be reimagined and expanded in the middle of the century by A. J. Birch, another pioneer whose proposals met with considerable initial resistance. But unlike his predecessor, Birch ultimately prevailed by providing experimental results that supported a comprehensive theory of the biochemical origin of the group of compounds now universally known as “polyketide” natural products. This structurally diverse family includes some of the most useful medicinal agents now known to us, with many members possessing powerful antibacterial, antifungal, anticancer, immunosuppressant, and even cholesterol-lowering biological properties. As we see in Fig. 5.1, such structures range from the relatively simple to the exceedingly complex and may include large macrocyclic lactone rings (macrolides) such as erythromycin, polycyclic ethers such as monensin A, polycyclic structures which may be partly or mostly aromatic as in tetracycline, griseofulvin, or daunorubicin, or nonaromatic polycyclics such as tacrolimus and lovastatin. Some also contain noncyclic linear components that may be saturated, oxygenated, or unsaturated, as seen in different regions of amphotericin B which, like erythromycin, daunorubicin, and many other polyketides, also possesses an aglycone core which has been glycosylated with a carbohydrate component at a specific position. But in spite of this range of structures, many polyketide compounds share some common features that ultimately become more evident upon closer inspection; six-membered rings (either aromatic or nonaromatic) and multiple oxygens which tend to appear in a repeating 1,3-relationship to one another on both acyclic, cyclic, and aromatic structures.
Introduction: The Global Imperative
Authors: Valentine Scott
Published: November 2020

The years 2006–2007 represented an intellectual tipping point for climate change advocacy. Over this short period of time, there was ample evidence of a general convergence of understanding between many environmentalists and economists on the perilous threat posed by climate change. In the summer of 2006, the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth turned climate change into an issue of public concern in the United States. The domestic debate that the film helped inspire escalated over the next year to a point where energy policy suddenly became a vote swaying issue in American politics. This development became a topic of interest for the rest of the world because signs of a weakening in American reticence toward climate change mitigation would have significant repercussions for the 128 nations that were struggling to keep the Kyoto Protocol from falling apart. In October 2006, a comprehensive independent study called the Stern Review, commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, presented an assessment of the anticipated impacts of climate change. As a foreboding sign of the content which would follow, the report began by describing climate change as “the greatest and widest ranging market failure ever seen”. The report concluded that the long-term costs of climate change were expected to be so great that early action to abate global warming was the most cost-effective alternative. It estimated that the net benefits (benefits less costs) from reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to achieve a stabilization level of 550 parts per million (ppm) by 2050 would be in the neighborhood of US$2.5 trillion. In February 2007, the first of four reports that comprise the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released. The goal of this first report was to “describe progress in understanding of the human and natural drivers of climate change, observed climate change, climate processes and attribution, and estimates of projected future climate change.”
Super Rules
Authors: Steinberg Paul F.
Published: November 2020

If you watch a group of children at play in an unstructured situation, soon you will be treated to a microcosm of how societies make rules, boiled down to the essentials. After some random running about, the children will eventually seek to build a social structure in the form of a game. The process unfolds with remarkable swiftness and predictability. By definition, every game requires rules, and these are the subject of considerable haggling at the outset. You have to touch the tree to be safe; no one can go past the rocks. The participation rules are negotiated with special care, because every child knows intuitively that these will affect the outcome. You have more people, so we get the big kid. It is equally fascinating to observe who makes the rules of the game. Over a chorus of competing ideas, the rulemaker is often the oldest or most assertive child, but not always. Someone may make a credible threat based on her resources and the power that accompanies them: It’s my ball and I don’t want to play that game. Alternatively, she may appeal to a source of moral authority recognized by the other players—it’s my house and my birthday party. Once settled, all participants in this miniature society must understand and abide by the rules. Those who break them are subject to a collective outcry from the group and even efforts at third-party enforcement: Mom, Richard keeps cheating! The situation is not so very different from the inner workings of our entire civilization, which is built upon a vast infrastructure of rules. Every business and every community, every religion and nonprofit organization, every terrorist network, taco vendor, and art museum relies on social rules to achieve its ends. Throughout this book we have seen how our lives and our landscapes are shaped by these rules, be they policies or property rights, safety codes or shared cultural norms. We are now ready to take a closer look at a special and very powerful category of rules—I call these super rules—that decide how other rules are made.
Traveling Light: Gunstock Hollow and Dag Hammarskjöld
Authors: Lane Belden C.
Published: November 2020

It was new to me. Backpacker magazine had listed Gunstock Hollow as the “best Southern hollow in America,” and I was curious. The dog and I set out one weekend, hiking the middle fork of the Ozark Trail into this hollow nestled between two ridges. Three days remained in deer hunting season that year, so I tied a red bandana around Desert’s neck and wore a bright orange vest myself. With a name like Gunstock Hollow we figured we ought to be careful. Gunstock Hollow is typical of a lot of closed-in wilderness sites in the Ozarks. Thickets of densely growing trees give it a secluded and mysterious air, muffling sound. A wandering stream runs through it, leading down to Neal’s Creek below. Two huge cedar trees, a couple hundred years old, stand watch in the middle of the valley. The haunting trees and a series of knoblets that pepper the area give the place its character. You find deer tracks everywhere. I wouldn’t call it the “most beautiful hollow” in the Ozarks, however. I suspect its name drew the attention of Backpacker magazine as much as anything else. “Gunstock Hollow” fits the hard-core romanticized image that people have of rural Missouri—a place where moonshine distillers have been replaced by meth cookers, where desperados like Jesse James have morphed into the criminal mania of backwoods communities steeped in the drug culture. The stereotype of the illiterate, inbred, shotgun-wielding hillbilly is reshaped today in the stark and violent world of Winter’s Bone. All this is certainly part of the history (and reality) of the region, yet I’m intrigued by the tendency to make wilderness more sensational than it is. Tourist boards and backpackers alike are prone to fabricate a backcountry of the imagination, something more colorful, edgy, and dangerous. Exaggeration attracts tourists. It enhances the image of those who brave its dark wilderness trails and points up the stark simplicity of the people who live there. The Ozark Mountains lend themselves to tall tales as it is, but storytellers like to accentuate the dark, eccentric, and scandalous. Maverick places delight us.
Community: Lower Rock Creek and Teilhard de Chardin
Authors: Lane Belden C.
Published: November 2020

I’m up for vigils, but the monks are still asleep. They were noisy last night at compline. The peepers were nearly as loud as the bullfrogs. The whole choir chanted like mad as stars came out over the creek. When I first set up camp along this quiet Ozark stream, I hadn’t realized I’d entered a cloister full of exuberant frogs cheered by yesterday’s rain. Their enthusiastic interpretation of the Psalms made me think of the deep-throated chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks. The sound echoed off the steep rock walls where Cathedral Canyon narrows at this point. Its acoustical effect seemed to take their performance to new heights of liturgical excellence. The night sounds of a Missouri forest are often exhilarating. A humid summer evening offers a riot of jazz improv, as raucous as last night’s monkish choir. The jam begins with the soft background rhythm of grasshoppers rubbing their legs against their wings, punctuated by the loud clicking of cicadas. Green tree frogs then add a nasal quank, quank, quank to the high-pitched call of the peepers and the rasping, vibrating prreep of chorus frogs. Think of a fingernail running over the teeth of a comb. Then, just as things are warming up, the bullfrogs—Missouri’s state amphibians—launch into the deep jug-o-rum that resonates from their great puffed cheeks. It’s Louis Armstrong on a late-night riff in a crowded New Orleans bar. Lower Rock Creek runs through a narrow gorge cut into the rock of the St. Francois Mountains. Some people call it Cathedral Canyon, others Dark Hollow. It has no official name. It’s not on most maps. But it’s one of my favorite, most secluded places in the Ozarks. Driving down in the rain yesterday I was happy to find the road into the trailhead in worse shape than ever, the trail itself almost overgrown. The blackberry bushes are full, spider webs undisturbed. Not many guests seek out the solitude of this cloistral setting. It’s just another forgotten Missouri hollow.
Beyond Rationalization: Inverting the Pyramid, Remaking the Educational Sector
Authors: Mehta Jal
Published: November 2020

Over and over again across the 20th century and a decade into the 21st, Americans have sought to rationalize their schools, with limited results. Is there a better way? In the pages that follow, I argue that there is. At base, you could say that the entire American educational sector was put together backwards. Beginning early in the 20th century, teaching became institutionalized as a highly feminized, low-status field; universities, unwilling to associate with training low-status teachers, trained instead a set of male administrators to control and direct those teachers; failures of schools prompted additional levels of control and regulation from afar, further diminishing autonomy and making the field less attractive to talented people. Successful systems from abroad essentially do the reverse. They choose their teachers from among their most talented students; they train them extensively; they provide opportunities for them to collaborate within and across schools to improve their practice, they provide the needed external supports for them to do this work well; and they support this educational work within stronger welfare states. This is true of East Asian countries like Korea and Japan, but it is also true of non-Confucian countries like Canada and Finland. While it is not yet clear how much of this success are due to which of these factors, it is clear that many of the world’s leading countries take a fundamentally different approach than the one favored in the United States. As a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) volume sums up what it sees as the lessons from nations that lead the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings: “The education development progression is characterized by a movement from relatively low teacher quality to relatively high teacher quality; from a focus on low-level basic skills to a focus on high-level skills and creativity; from Tayloristic forms of work organization to professional forms of work organization; from primary accountability to superiors to primary accountability to one’s professional colleagues, parents and the public; and from a belief that only some students can and need to achieve high learning standards to a conviction that all students need to meet such high standards.”
The New Story of Humanity : Brains, Minds, and the Environmental Crisis
Authors: Nadeau Robert
Published: November 2020

While sitting in a window seat during a flight from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about twenty years ago, I had an experience that changed the course of my life. On the ground below, vast numbers of trucks and mile-long strings of railroad cars were moving along extensive networks of highways and tracks that threaded out in all directions, like a circulator system in some giant organism. Products from factories and farms were flowing through these arteries toward distant cities and coastal ports, and raw materials were flowing in the other direction to processing and manufacturing plants. In my mind’s eye, the web-like connections between electric power plants, transformers, cables, lines, phones, radios, televisions, and computers resembled the spine and branches of a central nervous system, and the centers of production, distribution, and exchange and all connections between them within the global economy. This conjured up the image of a superorganism feeding off the living system of the planet and extending its bodily organization and functions into every ecological niche. I realized, of course, that the global economic system is not an organism. It is a vast network of technological products and processes that members of our species created in an effort to enhance their material well-being. But this system does in ecological terms feed off the system of life on this planet and extend its organization into every ecological niche. After my plane landed at Dulles International Airport, I asked a simple question that required years of research to adequately answer. How did members of one species among the millions of species that have existed on this planet manage to increase their numbers and the scope and scale of their activities to the point where the capacity of the system of life on an entire planet to support their existence is being undermined? The answer is that our species, fully modern humans, evolved against all odds the capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems.
The Old Story: Sovereign Nation-States and Myths of National Identity
Authors: Nadeau Robert
Published: November 2020

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.
Anxiety
Authors: Shorter Edward
Published: November 2020

In 1970 Aubrey Lewis, the past master of the Maudsley Hospital, England’s premier psychiatric facility, was 70 years old. In his long decades of experience, he was puzzled by the rise of anxiety as a popular stand-alone diagnosis. The evolution of the term, he said, had gone through two phases. The first was using anxiety “as a qualifying term for the agitated depression of melancholia.” Anxious melancholia meant melancholia out of control. In the second phase, anxiety became “a qualifying term for a neurosis in which subjective feelings of alarm are associated with visceral disturbances.” This would be Freud’s anxiety neurosis. He noted that the number of articles on anxiety in the scientific literature had increased from three in 1927 to 222 in 1960—and was still rising. As Lewis wrote in 1970, anxiety was about to undergo a third phase in its evolution: Anxiety, or panic, attacks would shortly occupy center stage. Anxiety, another part of the nervous syndrome, has a distinctive story line: For most of the history of psychiatry, it was considered part of some other disorder, or not really attended to at all. Clinicians paid no particular heed to whether their patients were worried or fearful: These emotions were part of the human condition. Augustin Jacob Landré-Beauvais, professor of clinical medicine at the Salpêtrière Hospice in Paris, in his great catalogue of signs and symptoms written in 1809, takes it for granted that anxiety will be present in infectious illnesses. “Anxiety accompanies the better part of acute illnesses and some chronic illnesses, and is produced by various causes,” he said, and considered it an advance warning of an attack among “hypochondriacs, hysterics, and epileptics.” Then throughout the nineteenth century anxiety became part of the nervous package. As the nervous syndrome disaggregated in the early twentieth century, anxiety was spun off to become a free-standing disorder, “anxiety neurosis” in psychoanalytic parlance. More recently, anxiety tout court has morphed into panic disorder, and we shall shortly watch panic stride to the center of the stage.