bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Serial Defaults, Serial Profits
Authors: Drelichman Mauricio , Voth Hans-Joachim
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks at the profitability of banking families. Lending to the king of Spain made good business sense; it was hugely profitable on average, despite periodic defaults and restructurings. Defaults and reschedulings reduced the rate of return, but profitability net of these losses was still high—and markedly higher than the return on alternative investments. The same conclusion emerges from analyzing the profitability of loans by the banking dynasty. Of the sixty families that lent to Philip, only five failed to earn their likely opportunity cost of capital—and these bankers provided only a negligible proportion of the short-term loans taken out by the king. As a consequence, few financiers ever stopped lending to Philip II.
The Trading Room as a Market
Authors: Lépinay Vincent Antonin
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses how the profusion of languages that the bank uses to define its products takes place in an environment that is highly competitive. The trading room in itself is a market with a fierce competition around the allotment of its most profitable sectors among the traders. Aside from financial instruments, skills are also being traded in the room. Each operator prefers to be outfitted with the most lucrative line of products, but faced with a strong hierarchy the operators themselves end up circulating from bank to bank in much the same way as products circulate from the bank to the client. Thus, these two parallel circulations in the space of the trading room and beyond create unprecedented competition.
Interiority and Its Discontents
Authors: Kurnick David
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. The book considers the contribution of writers' theatrical ambitions to their invention of what by many accounts are among the most “novelistic,” and thus reputedly individualizing, of novels. It demonstrates that the novel's interior spaces are lined with longing references to the public worlds they would seem to have left behind. The book considers four would-be playwrights noted for their antitheatricality. From William Makepeace Thackeray's hatred of pretense and George Eliot's suspicion of vain women to Henry James's early diagnoses of the culture of publicity and James Joyce's contempt for Buck Mulligan's performative flourishes, these writers are capable of rhetorically employing “theater” as a synonym for everything they most despise.
Acoustics in the Thackeray Theater
Authors: Kurnick David
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the tonal shifts of the narrative voice in Vanity Fair as encoding a yearning for public scenes of performance. Moving between public speechifying and chastened intimate address, the Thackerayan narrator offers readers an acoustic map of different imaginary scenes of reception. The pitch of Thackeray's voice—both its tone and its reach, its sound and the spaces it organizes—indexes various fantasmatic scenes of readerly witness, conveying in the process a vivid sense of the erosion of public space in the face of the exaltation of the domestic sphere. The sociohistorical imagination evident in Vanity Fair was given a new intensity of focus in his unperformed play The Wolves and the Lamb (1854) and the novel into which he later adapted it, the formally innovative Lovel the Widower (1860). In retreating from the stage, Thackeray both amplified his critique of mid-Victorian domesticity and pioneered the practice of interior monologue.
Marks of Identity
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins by looking at a very literal form of marks of identity—fingerprints—then examines the obsession of modern societies with issues of identity. While the notion of identity is not new—especially as a philosophical topic—a widespread concern with one's personal identity, and its relations to “the others” among whom one lives, seems to have emerged with greater intensity with the Enlightenment, and to gain force throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into modern time. To the extent that a characteristic of modernity is a new valuation of the individual, the obsession with identity follows almost inevitably.
Egotisms
Authors: Brooks Peter
Published: November 2017

This chapter looks into instances of individual self-obsession and what these have to say not only about persons but also the society or culture in which they must survive. As representatives of the need to write the story of the self in order to understand its identity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Stendhal (Henri Beyle) both show to a high degree the work of the shaper on the shaped: the presence of the retrospective narrator and creator of the tale of the self. If the self would tell its story to and for itself, that story will end up being as much about the narrator as the narrated, as much about the creator as the created. This instance of egotism, this self-reflexiveness and self dramatization of the speaker, may have to do with the newness, the lack of precedent of their enterprise.
Getting Incentives Right
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

Lawyers, judges, and scholars have long debated whether incentives in tort, contract, and restitution law effectively promote the welfare of society. If these incentives were ideal, tort law would reduce the cost and frequency of accidents, contract law would lubricate transactions, and restitution law would encourage people to benefit others. Unfortunately, the incentives in these laws lead to too many injuries, too little contractual cooperation, and too few unrequested benefits. This book explains how law might better serve the social good. In tort law, the book proposes that all foreseeable risks should be included when setting standards of care and awarding damages. Failure to do so causes accidents that better legal incentives would avoid. In contract law, the book shows that making a promise often causes the person who receives it to change behavior and undermine the cooperation between the parties. It recommends several solutions, including a novel contract called “anti-insurance.” In restitution law, people who convey unrequested benefits to others are seldom entitled to compensation. Restitution law should compensate them more than it currently does, so that they will provide more unrequested benefits. In these three areas of law, the book demonstrates that better law can promote the well-being of people by providing better incentives for the private regulation of conduct.
Prices, Sanctions, and Discontinuities
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers a misalignment between the standards of care and damages due to a court's lack of information regarding causation. It first explains the distinction between prices and sanctions before discussing the discontinuity problem in tort law and contract law. It then examines how, under negligence law, an injurer who fails to satisfy the standard of care is liable for the harm caused by his negligence and how courts impose liability on the slightly negligent injurer for all harms caused by his behavior. It also explores how discontinuity in liability under negligence law creates misalignments that may result in overdeterrence or underdeterrence. The chapter concludes by suggesting how these misalignments could be mitigated.
Lapses and Substitution
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter deals with lapses of attention, for example by a driver or a doctor, and explains how a negligence rule gives injurers an incentive to substitute activities with unavoidable accidents for activities with lapses. Under current tort law, a lapse of attention will always be considered negligence and trigger liability for the resulting harm. However, the chapter shows that it should not be the case. After providing an overview of lapse defenses in prevailing law, the chapter examines the openness of liability law to the lapse defense and some activities that substitute unavoidable harm for lapses. It also explains how a lapse defense is implemented and shows how the lapse defense dampens inefficient substitution and increases collection of supporting information.
Total Liability for Excessive Harm
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a novel form of the negligence rule known as total liability for excessive harm to address situations in which several injurers cause harm and the court can verify the total harm caused by all injurers but not the degree of harm caused by each injurer. Under the rule of total liability for excessive harm, each individual injurer should be liable for the total harm that everyone causes in excess of the optimal harm. This rule creates efficient incentives because each injurer internalizes the marginal social benefit from reducing his excessive pollution, for example. The chapter first considers alternative liability rules such as strict liability, strict total liability, and proportionate liability, along with their limitations. It then explains the basic model of total liability for excessive harm and concludes with some real and hypothetical examples in which the rule could be applied to great advantage.
Decreasing Liability Contracts and the Assistant Interest
Authors: Cooter Robert D. , Porat Ariel
Published: November 2017

This chapter proposes a novel mechanism to solve the promisee's incentive problem: decreasing liability contracts. Compared to constant liability, a decreasing liability contract typically improves incentives for two reasons. First, in many circumstances, the promisor will breach or perform depending on which is cheaper. Second, the promisee can often increase the probability of performance or lower its costs by assisting promisor. When performance occurs in phases and promisor needs promisee's assistance, a decreasing liability contract usually increases the contract's value relative to a constant liability contract. The assistance interest refers to the promisor's interest in securing assistance from the promisee. The chapter first describes the basic model of phased contracts with promisee's assistance before discussing surprises, along with progress payment contracts and timing of payments. It also explains how renegotiations affect decreasing liability contracts and how to identify contracts in which efficiency requires decreasing liability.
Strings Attached
Authors: Grant Ruth W.
Published: November 2017

Incentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. This book demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? The book shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and it identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses. It offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas—plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered. Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, the book questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.
Ethical and Not So Ethical Incentives
Authors: Grant Ruth W.
Published: November 2017

This chapter suggests three basic standards for distinguishing ethical from unethical uses of incentives. These are legitimacy of purpose, voluntariness, and effect on the character of the parties involved. These standards, in turn, rest on the notion that ethical uses of any kind of power must treat human beings as free and rational agents. Acts of power can be judged by whether they serve a rationally defensible purpose, whether they allow for a voluntary response or are based on freely given consent, and whether they accord with the requirements of moral character. These are the conceptual materials we can use to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate incentives, just as we would distinguish between the use and abuse of other forms of power.
Introduction
Authors: Fowler Linda L.
Published: November 2017

This book examines the formal hearing activity of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees from 1947 to 2008 to assess their efficacy in promoting due process and public understanding with respect to international affairs. In particular, it analyzes how much time the committees spent on public and secret hearings, what factors influenced their decisions to engage in oversight of national security, and how they allocated their efforts to routine program review compared to scrutiny of crises and scandals. The empirical results and case studies suggest that the Senate's national security committees had an uneven record over the sixty-two years of the study. The book uses these findings as a basis for rethinking the nature of national security oversight and proposing several reforms to promote public deliberation and education about U.S. foreign relations.
Guarding the Guardians through Oversight
Authors: Fowler Linda L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter reviews previous scholarship about congressional scrutiny of the executive branch and about general patterns of legislative influence on foreign policy decisions. In the spring of 2004, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee proposed public hearings regarding the conduct and objectives of the Iraq War. A month later, Senator John Warner, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, scheduled two days of hearings to investigate abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib Prison. The chapter examines the hearing activity of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees from 1947 to 2008 to assess the overall trends in oversight and identify similarities and differences in their behavior. It also considers what scholars know about congressional involvement in U.S. foreign policy, what they have concluded about oversight of national security more generally, and why these perspectives do not appear to fit together.
Institutional Change and Senate Committee Hearings
Authors: Fowler Linda L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines long-term institutional changes in the Senate committee system that devalued committee work and negatively affected the total hearing activity of Armed Services and Foreign Relations. It begins with a review of expectations and measures regarding the influence of the shifting institutional context on Senate committee hearings in general and on Armed Services and Foreign Relations sessions in particular. It then analyzes the effects of various long-term changes on the frequency of public hearings first by Senate committees in the aggregate and then by the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. It also considers the influences on the frequency of executive hearing days by the two national security committees. Finally, it looks at the Panama Canal to illustrate the confluence of trends that created a watershed moment for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Police Patrols and Fire Alarms in U.S. Foreign Policy
Authors: Fowler Linda L.
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines partisan calculations about party reputations as influences on routine and event-driven public hearings, using the classic typology of police patrols and fire alarms. It considers committee choices regarding the content of national security oversight hearings by comparing routine inquiries to reviews of major crises and scandals. The chapter uses the unique characteristics of fine-grained coding of hearings to develop measures for police patrol and fire alarm oversight of national security. It also discusses expectations about committee behavior as well as the distribution of patrols and alarms for the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, particularly as they relate to changes in military casualties from 1947 to 2008. Finally, it explores crisis oversight as a form of committee review that is particularly important to democratic accountability.
Introduction
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on manhunts—the concrete historical phenomena in which human beings were tracked down, captured, or killed in accord with the forms of the hunt. These were regular and sometimes large-scale practices whose forms were first theorized in ancient Greece, long before their enormous expansion in the modern period in conjunction with the development of transatlantic capitalism. The main problem has to do with the fact that the hunter and the hunted do not belong to different species. Since the distinction between the predator and his prey is not inscribed in nature, the hunting relationship is always susceptible to a reversal of positions. Prey sometimes band together to become hunters in their turn. The history of a power is also the history of the struggles to overthrow it.
Hunting the Poor
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the hunting of the poor. The founding act of modern policing can be traced back to the immense hunt for the poor, idle people, and vagabonds that was launched in Europe in the seventeenth century. The notion was that the way to get rid of poverty was to intern the poor. However, neither hunting the poor nor prohibiting begging made poverty disappear. And that probably did not matter, since the function of these measures lay elsewhere. As Michelet diagnosed it, “the court, the powerful, do not like to see these great troops of poor wretches wandering about, a living accusation of the administration.” Then as now, if poverty could not be eradicated, the poor had to be made invisible. Moving from the embarrassing visibility of itinerant mendicancy to the tranquil invisibility of poverty interned—that was the chief function of hunting the poor to confine them.
Hunting Jews
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the hunt for Jews. In the course of their history, hunts for Jews went schematically through three major mutations: hunts by mobs, then hunts by states; religious hunts, then racist hunts; murderous hunts, then genocidal hunts. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the new strategic project of extreme right-wing movements was to mobilize anti-Semitic hunting against the existing state apparatuses, to intensify the power of political subversion exercised by such hunting packs and to turn around what had long functioned as a safety belt for state authority to make it a means of seizing state power. But if their strategy later proved to be historically capable of attracting a crucial fraction of the dominant social strata, that was also because in doing so its function of diverting social antagonisms did not disappear: it smothered the class struggle by means of race war, even at the price of destroying the old forms of state power.
Conclusion
Authors: Chamayou Grégoire , Rendall Steven
Published: November 2017

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book outlines the history of the changing morphology of cynegetic powers, the ones that are exercised by tracking and capturing subjects. Whereas an author like René Girard postulates a kind of invariant of violence in human societies that is for him essentially based on a logic of expiatory sacrifice, this book has instead tried to bring out what was specific, in their motives and functions, to each of the great historical phenomena of manhunting. Contrary to what the theory of the scapegoat claims, the choice of prey, for example, is never arbitrary or “relatively indifferent”: it is governed by targeted strategies that remain unintelligible so long as they are reduced to the uniform model of a sacrificial violence.
Illness as Work: Human Market Transition
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the “epidemic” of disability in post-Soviet Ukraine, and more specifically how state laws on the social protection of Chernobyl sufferers have turned suffering and disability into a resource affecting family, work, and social identity. It shows how the line between sickness and health becomes a highly politicized one as traditional forms of Soviet social organization, particularly the labor collective, are being replaced by a new architecture of welfare claims, privileges, laws, and identities. It also discusses the role of the Exclusion Zone in an informal Soviet economy and capitalist transition, as well as the ways in which workers micromanage inflation with a sick role sociality in their everyday lives. Finally, it considers the establishment of medical-labor committees to handle the growing number of disability claims related to the Chernobyl explosion and highlights a city of sufferers where so many individuals have gained their illnesses for life.
Biological Citizenship
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the experiential and political aspects of biological citizenship in post-Soviet Ukraine, with particular emphasis on the relationship between an emerging medical classification of the ill effects of the Chernobyl disaster and the social process of distribution of disability entitlements. Drawing on the experiences of three sufferers, the chapter considers the kind of experiences and social initiatives that have emerged between state medical classification and the redistribution of social welfare goods. It also explores the importance that Soviet administrators placed on the environment as a political tool to “normalize” catastrophe, and how that normalized environment influenced life stories and medical case histories. Finally, it discusses the ways that law, medicine, and corruption intersected with respect to the processing of disability claims.
Conclusion
Authors: Petryna Adriana
Published: November 2017

This chapter summarizes the book's main findings and their implications. It describes the Chernobyl aftermath as a prism that reflects, contains, and reconfigures the vexed political-economic, scientific, legal, and social circumstances in post-Soviet Ukraine. It emphasizes the disharmony among lawmakers, radiation scientists, health professionals, and sufferers as they stood along the continuum of knowledge production, power, moral sensibility, and self-disclosure. It considers how the radiation research process facilitated the naturalization of illnesses in bodies as a matter of “social health.” The chapter also discusses a number of ethical issues that bear on the fate of Chernobyl sufferers; for example, how future changes in social and economic contexts will affect the legitimacy of compensation mechanisms and categories of suffering. Biological citizenship, it argues, represents a complex intersection of social institutions and the intense vulnerabilities of populations exposed to the determinations of the international political economy.
Statistics, Data Mining, and Machine Learning in Astronomy
Authors: Ivezic Željko , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T , Gray Alexander
Published: November 2017

As telescopes, detectors, and computers grow ever more powerful, the volume of data at the disposal of astronomers and astrophysicists will enter the petabyte domain, providing accurate measurements for billions of celestial objects. This book provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the cutting-edge statistical methods needed to efficiently analyze complex data sets from astronomical surveys such as the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, the Dark Energy Survey, and the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. It serves as a practical handbook for graduate students and advanced undergraduates in physics and astronomy, and as an indispensable reference for researchers. The book presents a wealth of practical analysis problems, evaluates techniques for solving them, and explains how to use various approaches for different types and sizes of data sets. For all applications described in the book, Python code and example data sets are provided. The supporting data sets have been carefully selected from contemporary astronomical surveys (for example, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) and are easy to download and use. The accompanying Python code is publicly available, well documented, and follows uniform coding standards. Together, the data sets and code enable readers to reproduce all the figures and examples, evaluate the methods, and adapt them to their own fields of interest.
Classification
Authors: Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander , Connolly Andrew J. , VanderPlas Jacob T. , Gray Alexander
Published: November 2017

Chapter 6 described techniques for estimating joint probability distributions from multivariate data sets and for identifying the inherent clustering within the properties of sources. This approach can be viewed as the unsupervised classification of data. If, however, we have labels for some of these data points (e.g., an object is tall, short, red, or blue) we can utilize this information to develop a relationship between the label and the properties of a source. We refer to this as supervised classification, which is the focus of this chapter. The motivation for supervised classification comes from the long history of classification in astronomy. Possibly the most well known of these classification schemes is that defined by Edwin Hubble for the morphological classification of galaxies based on their visual appearance. This chapter discusses generative classification, k-nearest-neighbor classifier, discriminative classification, support vector machines, decision trees, and evaluating classifiers.
“Why do you leave? Fight for us!”
Authors: Ghassem-Fachandi Parvis
Published: November 2017

This chapter demonstrates how the Godhra incident became the occasion to declare a bandh (general strike) that was supported by all the main institutions of civil society and by political parties. The bandh call allowed a large part of a poor and despondent city population, who work as daily wage earners and cannot afford to skip income, to engage in street activities. Some of the themes present in these interactions include: a carnivalesque atmosphere of fun on the street in relation to a purported sense of anger, a cultivated and aloof distancing from the unfolding events by the middle class, the abdication of civic order and the visible passivity of the state police, invocations of sacrifice as idiom for killing, the discernment of an uncanny presence in sensitive city space, and imaginative material that mainly concerned sexual fantasies about women.
Word and Image
Authors: Ghassem-Fachandi Parvis
Published: November 2017

This chapter illustrates how a paradigmatic structure emerged in the news coverage of February 28, 2002 and the following days, in which the depth of a story is constructed not through certainty of fact or evidence but through allusion and accumulated suggestion. One person's suggestion is supplemented by another person's insinuation that, in turn, results in a tale without closure told repeatedly. The word imagery throughout Sandesh is generally one of sacrifice, blood, revenge, and martyrdom. While pretending to describe violence, the paper is actually mobilizing for it through word suggestions and evocations. The chapter looks at the overlapping of three discrete themes: the fear of terrorism (the ISI, or Pakistani intelligence services), traditional ritual practices and butchering, and the register of the supernatural.
Ahimsa, Gandhi, and the Angry Hindu
Authors: Ghassem-Fachandi Parvis
Published: November 2017

This chapter begins with an error in a newspaper clipping, something that came over The Times of India at a most inopportune moment. The error attributed violence to Gandhi, while it placed him in a pantheon of important national leaders, all of whom are said to oppose violence. The thumbnail version of ahimsa (nonviolence) is the seemingly arbitrary addition or subtraction of “non-” to “violence,” the inclusion of the himsa of ahimsa as part of a political movement and its cultural resources. Violence and nonviolence have become that over which one establishes mastery and thus over the appeal and power that a figure like Gandhi carries. In a Hindu nationalist context, ahimsa stands in the service of himsa, the one a sign of strength, the other a sign of cowardice.
America à la Mode: The 1980s
Authors: Kuisel Richard F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter discusses the warmth of French towards America, and much associated with America, in the 1980s as a prelude to the creeping chilliness in perceptions and relations that followed, while watching the underlying rivalry that generated controversies. It examines how the French responded to the American model—principally Reagan's domestic policies. Among the reasons for transatlantic amity was the admirable way Washington navigated the end of the Cold War. The splendid performance of the U.S. economy in the mid-1980s and the personal appeal of Reagan enhanced America's reputation. French domestic politics also contributed when the attempt at advancing socialism crashed and “Reaganomics,” at least to some French conservatives, briefly seemed attractive.
Anti-Americanism in Retreat: Jack Lang, Cultural Imperialism, and the Anti-Anti-Americans
Authors: Kuisel Richard F.
Published: November 2017

This chapter details the rise of anti-Americanism in France, in particular French socialist minister of culture Jack Lang's attack against American popular culture. Lang began by refusing to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.
The Prerequisites of Servitude
Authors: Viroli Maurizio
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on servitude. Although Italian history has had moments and examples of moral greatness and a sincere love of liberty, for many centuries it has been a history of servitude, variously in thrall to foreign masters, despotic governments, and the spiritual and temporal dominion of a church that employed both the word and alongside it the sword and the gallows; at times the Italians have been oppressed by all three at once. Indeed, a long familiarity with servitude has shaped Italian mores, which—it is well known—constitute the most tenacious of all social forces. The principal trait of the servile soul is how little respect it has for itself and for others. Even if it may seem strange, servants have no self-respect; they sense that they have little worth and so they willingly accept their condition. This lack of self-respect brings with it indifference, which, in turn, generates a full and continuous cynicism.
Introduction
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This introductory chapter talks about how every creature is guided by its eyes as it carries out its accustomed behaviors. Each animal's eyes allows it to execute the behavior necessary for its survival. This study of how visual systems function to meet the ecological needs of animals is called visual ecology. Researchers who work at various levels of inquiry, from genes to behavior, call themselves visual ecologists, but all are primarily concerned with how animals use vision for natural tasks and behaviors. Although the outcomes of visual ecological research may well have implications for health or may be applicable for use in engineering or technology, the research itself centers on the animal of interest and on how it employs its visual system to meet its own ecological needs.
Light and the Optical Environment
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter explains how humans, and nearly all animals on Earth, witness astonishing variation in their optical environment. Brightness changes by many orders of magnitude each day, and colors also shift dramatically. Those animals that enter forests and especially the water experience even larger changes. Given this, it is surprising that nearly all the natural light on Earth ultimately comes from two sources, the sun and bioluminescence. A final source of light that is potentially relevant to vision is mechanoluminescence. In this process, light is produced by mechanical processes, including deformation (piezoluminescence), fracturing (triboluminescence), and crystallization (crystalloluminescence). The latter two have been suggested as being at least partially responsible for ambient light at deep-sea vents.
Visual Pigments and Photoreceptors
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on visual pigments and photoreceptors. In living things, photoreception inevitably begins with a photochemical event—a molecule intercepts a photon of light and is somehow changed. Various molecules, generally known as photopigments, perform this function in animals and plants. The molecules involved in vision are called visual pigments. In all animals, vision ultimately depends on a single family of proteins that all have descended from one common ancestor—these are the opsins. The chapter cites the hydrothermal vent crab as a good example of how changes of visual pigments appearing in various developmental states reflect ecological adaptation. The animal's life stages require visual systems sampling opposite ends of the visual spectrum.
The Eye Designs of the Animal Kingdom
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter studies the eye designs of the animal kingdom. Today, there are ten generally recognized optical eye types that have evolved in various branches of the animal kingdom. Whereas vertebrates possess only one of them, invertebrates possess all ten, from simple assemblies of photoreceptors that underlie phototaxis to advanced compound and camera eyes that support a sophisticated range of visual behaviors. Some invertebrates even possess several eyes of more than one type. The chapter identifies some of these eye types in the context of sensitivity and resolution, namely, pigment-pit eyes, compound eyes, and camera eyes. The last of these are characteristic of the vertebrates, although they are also commonplace among the invertebrates. The remaining nine eye types are found only within the invertebrates.
Spatial Vision
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter talks about how humans are accustomed to seeing the world in high resolution. Compared to many other animals, humans' eyes are not particularly sensitive to light; nor is their sense of color especially good. The undoubted splendors of nature's ultraviolet colors are totally invisible to humans, as are the world's rich natural sources of polarized light. But when it comes to discerning fine spatial detail, few animals come close to humans. But regardless of whether the visual task is to follow a tiny target or to keep track of the physical arrangements of objects in a scene, all aspects of animal life have steered the evolution of spatial vision, particularly the distribution of an eye's sampling stations in visual space.
Color Vision
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter addresses why animals have evolved different numbers, ranges, and placements of spectral channels in their color-vision systems. It also examines the factors, such as water transmission, visual task, phylogeny, and activity patterns, that drive the evolution of such diverse modes of seeing color. Even in the absence of any color sense, trees are still visible, as most of the information in natural scenes can be gained from achromatic cues alone. Color vision, however, gives an animal more information, allowing it to make quicker and more informed decisions. The chapter attempts to disentangle man's experience of color from that of other animals to provide an objective measure of what color vision is and how evolution has molded its variety of forms.
Vision in Attenuating Media
Authors: Cronin Thomas W. , Johnsen Sönke , Marshall N. Justin , Warrant Eric J.
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that it is important to understand vision through attenuating media, especially for visual ecologists studying aquatic species. Few areas of visual ecology are filled with more misconceptions, however. Common myths include: that visibility is degraded entirely by light scattering; that water is blue due to light scattering; and that one can see farther underwater using yellow lens filters because they screen out the blue, scattered light. The chapter dispels these myths and explores how vision is affected by both water and fog. There is only a small section on contrast attenuation in air because it is a far less significant issue in nearly all cases. Air does indeed absorb and scatter light. However, it does so to a much, much lesser extent than water does.
The Presidential Difference in the Civil War Era
Authors: Greenstein Fred I. , Anderson Dale
Published: November 2017

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to use the period from the Mexican–American War to the Civil War (1846–1865) as a stage to assess the strengths and weaknesses of six American presidents: James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. These men merit attention because of the demands placed on the chief executive in this momentous era and because they varied so greatly in the caliber of that leadership. The chapter then provides context by discussing the background against which these six presidents performed their duties, followed by a discussion of the causes of the Civil War.
The Rough and Ready Leadership of Zachary Taylor
Authors: Greenstein Fred I. , Anderson Dale
Published: November 2017

This chapter assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Zachary Taylor, focusing on six realms: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Taylor was accomplished career officer who lived up to the nickname “Old Rough and Ready.” By February 1847, he had won a series of battles at Palo Alto, Resaca de la Palma, Monterrey, and Buena Vista. The last victory, in which Taylor's forces won despite being outnumbered three to one, earned the general instant fame. On December 2, 1847, Taylor returned to the United States and began his transition from soldier to would-be politician. After being elected president, it comes as no surprise that Taylor governed the nation in a manner better suited for the battlefield than the White House.
The United States and Eastern Europe in 1945: A Reassessment
Authors: Trachtenberg Marc
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines the policies pursued by the American government to deal with the problem of Eastern Europe in 1945. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, it was said, sought to communize eastern Europe; the western powers, and especially the United States, were deeply opposed to that policy; and the clash that developed played the key role in triggering the Cold War. But historians in recent years have been moving away from that sort of interpretation. American policy is also being seen in a new light by many historians. Increasingly the argument seems to be that U.S. leaders in 1945 did not really care much about eastern Europe—that their commitment to representative government in that region was surprisingly thin and that by the end of 1945 they had more or less come to the conclusion that the sort of political system the Soviets were setting up in that part of the world was something the United States could live with.
The Making of the Western Defense System: France, the United States, and MC 48
Authors: Trachtenberg Marc
Published: November 2017

This chapter focuses on a document formally adopted by the NATO Council in December 1954, called MC 48, a report by the Alliance's Military Committee on “The Most Effective Pattern of NATO Military Strength for the Next Few Years.” In approving this document, the Council authorized the military authorities of the Alliance to “plan and make preparations on the assumption that atomic and thermonuclear weapons will be used in defense from the outset.” One very important consequence of the new strategy from the European point of view had to do with what was called “nuclear sharing”—that is, with the provision of American nuclear weapons to the NATO allies. This policy of nuclear sharing was one of the key elements in the history of this period.
The Structure of Great Power Politics, 1963–75
Authors: Trachtenberg Marc
Published: November 2017

This chapter details events that occurred from 1963 to 1975. John F. Kennedy's most fundamental goal as president of the United States was to reach a political understanding with the Soviet Union based on the following principle: America and Russia were both very great powers and therefore needed to respect each other's most fundamental interests. The United States was thus prepared, for its part, to recognize the USSR's special position in eastern Europe. America would also see to it that West Germany would not become a nuclear power. In exchange, the Soviets would have to accept the status quo in central Europe, especially in Berlin. If a settlement of that sort could be worked out, the great problem that lay at the heart of the Cold War would be resolved. However, to reach a settlement based on those principles, Kennedy had to get both the USSR and his own allies in Europe to accept this sort of arrangement.
Attacking the French Tradition
Authors: Jaume Lucien
Published: November 2017

This chapter argues that traditionalists fail to realize the fact that for Tocqueville, the power of the people was above all a sociological and moral power, not an institutional one. Democracy in America offered an original conception of His Majesty the Majority, which was still called “the Public.” In Tocqueville's eyes, the various organs of decentralized government—the communes (dominated by great landowners) of which the monarchists dreamed, the associations of families in Lamennais, the “social authorities” exalted by Le Play and his followers—made sense only in this context. The Public was not a phantom conjured up by political dreams—a liberal illusion that in Le Play's view stemmed from “the so-called principles of 1789.” The Public was the new subject of history, or at any rate the quintessential totem of political action.
The Discovery of the Collective
Authors: Jaume Lucien
Published: November 2017

This chapter examines Tocqueville's sociology. In Democracy in America, what is properly called Tocqueville's sociology stems from his conviction that the collective is a specific object of study because it obeys distinctive laws of its own. What is original about his analysis is that he showed how individuals in society can achieve a result opposite to that embodied in their image of themselves and their expectations; to “deconstitute,” to borrow Bonald's term, is to create a different constitution: the power of the collective. The originality of Tocqueville's sociology resides entirely in the analysis of this inversion, which makes it impossible to classify him as a “methodological individualist,” as is too often alleged.
Tocqueville in the Debate about Literature and Society
Authors: Jaume Lucien
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers Mme de Staë's influence on Tocqueville's work. In De la littérature Mme de Staë contrasted the two types of society and their respective norms. She laid the groundwork for an idea that Tocqueville made his own: that there is a “democratic” literature that can and should be studied sociologically—or, as Mme de Staël put it, that should be examined “in its relations with social institutions.” Tocqueville's strength lay in the way in which he combined the contribution of two major works of the day, which deeply influenced the romantic sensibility yet managed to turn their message against Romanticism.
Tutelary Figures from Malesherbes to Chateaubriand
Authors: Jaume Lucien
Published: November 2017

The preceding discussions of Tocqueville's social and intellectual milieu show that his attitude toward that milieu was compounded by allegiance alloyed with dissidence. This chapter looks more carefully at important thinkers on the monarchical side, who served him as references, boundary markers, or counterexamples. First and foremost among these was Chateaubriand, whose legacy Tocqueville often found irritating but could not ignore. Intellectually, Chateaubriand helped to nurture Tocqueville's intuition and what we might even call his personal myth, which can be summed up as follows: (1) the French monarchy was despotic, indeed a model of what administrative power could accomplish in the way of rationalized despotism; and (2) this despotism could recur in the modern era: history was likely to repeat itself in a new form if democracy did not equip itself with institutions to slow and counterbalance the power of the central government, representing the majority.
From Hobbes to Shaftesbury
Authors: Brooke Christopher
Published: November 2017

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular the question of how he was understood as being both a funny (and dangerous) kind of Stoic and later as a funny (and dangerous) kind of Epicurean. It discusses how Hobbes came to be characterized as an Epicurean and how his critics responded to the political theory he had presented in Leviathan — particularly his arguments on natural law. The chapter focuses in particular on Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, whose philosophical sympathies led him to become an opponent of Hobbes and a supporter of the latitude-men or latitudinarians and their particular engagements with Stoicism.
From Fénelon to Hume
Authors: Brooke Christopher
Published: November 2017

This chapter views a series of philosophical exchanges in the eighteenth century, which showcases the back and forth between plausibly Stoic and Epicurean concerns and arguments. It first takes a look at François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, the major opponent from within French Catholicism of the Augustinian tendency towards Epicureanism, before turning to Bernard Mandeville's critique of Shaftesbury. The chapter also studies the moral philosophies of Joseph Butler and Francis Hutcheson, both of whom directed their arguments against Mandeville and in defence of Shaftesbury. In addition, the chapter discusses a persuasive interpretation of David Hume as a somewhat Epicurean and certainly anti-Stoic moral theorist.