bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Th e Environment
Authors: Baldwin Peter
Published: November 2020

If We Turn To The Environment and its protection, the contrasts between the United States and Europe are less stark than the debates over Kyoto and global warming suggest. Popular attitudes across the Atlantic appear to be quite comparable. A smaller percentage of Americans than any Europeans are fearful that current population trends are unsustainable. The percentage that fears strongly that modern life harms the environment is at the lower end of a very broad European spectrum. But a higher percentage of Americans than anyone other than the gloomy Portuguese are very worried about the environment. Already long before Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth, proportionately more Americans considered global warming extremely dangerous than do the Dutch, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns. Relatively more Americans than anyone but the Swiss claim to be very willing to pay higher prices to protect the environment. Proportionately more Americans than any Europeans are prepared to pay higher taxes for the sake of nature. Americans also claim willingness more than anyone other than the Swiss and the Swedes to accept a cut in living standards to achieve such ends. A higher percentage of Americans think that government should pass laws to protect the environment than the British, Swiss, Dutch, Germans, and all Scandinavians other than the Danes. American executives are more convinced that complying with government environmental standards helps their businesses’ long-term competitiveness than their colleagues in Germany, Iceland, Austria, Luxembourg, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Spain, or Portugal. In a recent comparative ranking of environmental policy conducted by Yale and Columbia universities, the score assigned the United States was not impressive. But that of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Greece was worse. The Achilles’ heel of America’s environmental policy is its energy inefficiency, which is partly related to the size of the country and the extremities of its weather. On most other measures, U.S. rankings are better
The Invasion of the Periodic Table by Physics
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

Although John Dalton had reintroduced the notion of atoms to science, many debates followed among chemists, most of whom refused to accept that atoms existed literally. One of these skeptical chemists was Mendeleev, but as we saw in the previous chapter this does not seem to have prevented him from publishing the most successful periodic system of all those proposed at the time. Following the work of physicists like Einstein and Perrin, the atom’s reality became more and more firmly established starting at the turn of the twentieth century. Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian motion, using statistical methods, provided conclusive theoretical justification for the existence of atoms but lacked experimental support. The latter was soon provided by the French experimental physicist Jean Perrin. This work led in turn to many lines of research aimed at exploring the structure of the atom, and many developments that were to have a big influence on attempts to understand the periodic system theoretically. In this chapter we consider some of this atomic research as well as several other key discoveries in twentieth-century physics that contributed to what might be called the invasion of the periodic table by physics. The discovery of the electron, the first hint that the atom had a substructure, came in 1897 at the hands of the legendary J. J. Thomson, working at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge. A little earlier, in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had discovered X-rays in Würzburg, Germany. These new rays would soon be put to very good use by Henry Moseley, a young physicist working first in Manchester and, for the remainder of his short scientific life, in Oxford. Just a year after Röntgen had described his X-rays, Henri Becquerel in Paris discovered the enormously important phenomenon of radioactivity, whereby certain atoms break up spontaneously while emitting a number of different, new kinds of rays. The term “radioactivity” was actually coined by the Polish-born Marie Slodowska (later Curie).
Element 91—Protactinium
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

The first of our seven elements, protactinium, was one of the many elements correctly predicted by Mendeleev even in his early publications. This is not true of the famous 1896 paper, where Mendeleev used incorrect values for both thorium (118) and uranium (116). A mere two years later, in 1871, Mendeleev corrected both of these values and indicated a missing element between thorium and uranium. But Mendeleev did not just indicate the presence of a missing element; he added the following brief paragraph in which he ventured to make more specific predictions: . . . Between thorium and uranium in this series we can further expect an element with an atomic weight of about 235. This element should form a highest oxide R 2 O5, like Nb and Ta to which it should be analogous. Perhaps in the minerals which contain these elements a certain amount of weak acid formed from this metal will also be found. . . . The modern atomic weight for eka-tantalum or protactinium is in fact 229.2. Mendeleev was somewhat unlucky regarding this case since he was not to know that protactinium is a member of only five “pair reversals” in the entire periodic table. This situation occurs when two elements need to be reversed, contrary to their atomic weights, in order to classify them correctly. The most clear-cut case of this effect was that of tellurium and iodine, as discussed in chapters 1 and 2. It was not until the work of Moseley in 1914 that a clear understanding of the problem was obtained. As Moseley showed, the more correct ordering principle for the elements is atomic number and not atomic weight. The justification for placing tellurium before iodine, as demanded by their chemical properties, is that tellurium has a lower atomic number. Returning to protactinium, it appears that Mendeleev’s brief predictions were broadly fulfilled since the element does indeed show an analogy with tantalum in forming Pa2 O5 as its highest and
most stable oxide.
Element 87—Francium
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

One of the most remarkable things about element 87 is the number of times that people claimed to have discovered it after it was predicted by Mendeleev in 1871 and given the provisional name of eka-caesium . It was recognized early on that the periodic table more or less fizzles out after element 83, or bismuth. All subsequent elements are radioactive and therefore unstable, with a few exceptions like uranium and thorium. But this fact did not deter a number of scientists from searching for element 87 among natural sources and in many cases from claiming to have isolated it. For example, Druce and Loring in England thought they had identified the element by using the classic method developed by Moseley for measuring the K α and K β lines of any element’s X-ray spectrum. But it was not to be. In the 1930s, it was the turn of Professor Fred Allison from the Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University). Allison developed what he called a magneto-optical method for detecting elements and compounds based on a supposed time lag in the development of the Faraday effect, whereby the application of a magnetic field causes a beam of polarized light passing through a liquid solution to be rotated. Allison mistakenly thought that every element gave a particular time lag, which he claimed was observed with the naked eye, and that this effect could be used to identify each substance. He boldly claimed in a number of journal articles, and even a special feature in Time Magazine, that he had observed elements 87 and also 85, both of which were still missing at the time. Literally hundreds of papers were published on this effect, including a number of studies arguing that it was spurious. But these days the Allison effect is often featured in accounts of pathological science, alongside the claims for N-rays and cold fusion.
From Missing Elements to Synthetic Elements
Authors: Scerri Eric
Published: November 2020

The periodic table consists of about ninety elements that occur naturally, ending with element 92, uranium. One or two of the first ninety-two elements are variously reported either as not occurring on Earth or as occurring in miniscule amounts. To add to the complications in drawing a sharp line between natural and synthetic elements, the element technetium was first created artificially and only later found to occur naturally on Earth in minute amounts. As we have seen in previous chapters, chemists and physicists have succeeded in synthesizing some of the elements that were missing between hydrogen (1) and uranium (92), such as promethium and astatine. But in addition, a further twenty-five or so new elements beyond uranium have been synthesized, although again one or two of these, such as neptunium and plutonium, were later found to exist naturally in exceedingly small amounts. At the time of writing, the heaviest element for which there is good experimental evidence is element-118. All other elements between 92 and 118 have also been successfully synthesized including element-117, which was announced in April of 2010. The synthesis of this element means that for the first time, and probably the last, every single space in a contemporary periodic table has been filled, although some of these elements are still awaiting official ratification. The synthesis of any element involves starting with a particular nucleus and subjecting it to bombardment with small particles with the aim of increasing the atomic number and hence changing the identity of the nucleus in question. More recently, the method of synthesis has changed so that two nuclei of considerable weights are made to collide with the aim of forming a larger and heavier nucleus. In a sense in which all these syntheses are descended from a key experiment, conducted by Rutherford and Soddy in 1919 at the University of Manchester, Rutherford and Soddy bombarded nuclei of nitrogen with α particles (helium ions) with the result that the nitrogen nucleus was transformed into that of another element.
The Boron Group
Authors: Schweitzer George K. , Pesterfield Lester L.
Published: November 2020

The elements which constitute the Boron Group of the Periodic Table are boron B, aluminum Al, gallium Ga, indium In, and thallium Tl. All five of the elements have atoms characterized by an outer electron structure of ns2np1 with n representing the principal quantum number. There are marked similarities in the elements, except for B whose small size and high charge density make it a non-metal. B evidences an oxidation state of III but shows no aqueous cation chemistry. The other elements all show cation chemistries involving an oxidation state of III, but the I oxidation state becomes progressively more stable until at Tl it is the predominant state. All ions in the group are colorless. Ionic sizes in pm are B+3(27), Al+3(53), Ga+3(62), In+3(80), Tl+3(89), and Tl+(150), with the B+3 value being hypothetical since B bonds only covalently. In line with the increasing sizes, the basicity of the oxides and hydroxides increases: H3BO3 or B(OH)3 is weakly acidic, M(OH)3 for Al, Ga, and In are amphoteric, and Tl(OH)3 or Tl2O3 is basic. The E° values in volts for the M(III)/M couples are as follows: H3BO3/B (−0.89), Al+3/Al (−1.68), Ga+3/Ga (−0.55), and In+3/In (−0.35). The E° value for the Tl+/Tl couple is −0.33 v. a. E–pH diagram. The E–pH diagram for 10−1.0 M B is presented in Figure 7.1. In the figure legend are equations which describe the lines which separate species. Considerably above the H3BO3/B line, the HOH≡H+/H2 line appears, which indicates that elemental B is thermodynamically unstable
in HOH, but in practice B has a strong tendency to be non-reactive, vigorous treatment usually being required to oxidize it.
Philosophy and Apology
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

To paraphrase the first advertisement for my first book (“Crisis is a terrifying novel. But don’t let that scare you”), this book is about the noble gases. But don’t let that scare you. It’s really about how science works. There is a general misapprehension about this. Most people, without thinking about it, visualize the universe as a railroad track disappearing into the distance, and science as the locomotive slowing wending its way along the track, learning year by year more and more about this universe in which we live. Not so. It would be more realistic to visualize the universe as a black forest hidden on a cloud-obscured night, with science as a lost child trying to find its way home, feeling blindly the branches of the trees, occasionally being slapped in the face by one, tripping over the roots of another, stumbling on a path and taking it eagerly only to find it branching or, worse, precipitately ending. Nothing to do then but turn around and go back, find another branch, another path, or, worse luck, with no path to be found, try again and again to feel your way through the dark trees striving to find some light, somewhere, anywhere. The only thing wrong with this analogy is that being lost in such a forest would be terrifying, whereas science is fun. What is right about the analogy is that science does not run along a straight path like the locomotive but bumbles to the right and left, sometimes backwards, and every once in a while takes a step closer to home, to the ultimate goal, to an understanding of our universe. The last part of that sentence, if you think about it, is astounding. Despite being born naked and ignorant of everything around us we have learned from solely our own efforts that this flat ground we walk on is actually curved, part of a spheroid, that the stars we see are suns, that everything we touch and hold is made up of a hundred or so different particles, that our world has existed not forever but for four and a half billion years, and that many of the stars are billions of years older, in fact that the entire universe is just under fourteen billion years old. This and so much more we know; a truly amazing feat, expressed best by the quote which opens this section—but another quote (by J. B. S. Haldane) serves to balance it: “The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
The Argon Surprise
Authors: Fisher David
Published: November 2020

The first thing I did in Miami was to write a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a mass spectrometer, in order to test Hess’s idea of a spreading seafloor. Funding was not a problem in those halcyon and bygone days of yore. Once, I remember, Cesare came trotting down the hall calling out that it was the end of the fiscal year and the NSF was on the phone; they were calling to say they had two hundred thousand dollars left over from the budget, and did anyone want it? No one did, we all had enough money. Lordy, lordy. (Loud sigh.) And so the money for the mass spectrometer came through, but not before summer, and I was not about to spend July and August in the Miami furnace. Instead, I arranged to go up to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where Ollie Schaeffer had become head of a new earth sciences department, to use his mass spectrometer to measure the ages on a suite of rocks brought back by one of my new friends at Miami, Enrico Bonatti, a marine geologist who had just returned from a research cruise with ocean floor samples that were perfect for testing the spreading seafloor hypothesis. He had dredged up basalts from the flanks of the East Pacific Rise and a half dozen other samples at various distances from it. So we should see young ages on the ridge rocks, and a spectrum of increasingly older ages as we moved outwards. Basalts are good material for normal potassium-argon dating, and those on the seafloor, we thought, should be even better. The basis of K/Ar dating is that you have a magma region somewhere inside the earth, with potassium continually decaying to argon. When the magma erupts, throwing out molten basaltic rocks, all the argon previously produced will bubble out and be lost to the atmosphere; as the lava cools into basaltic rocks, they will have potassium in them, but no argon, effectively setting the dating clock to zero.
Is a Fish a Natural Asset?
Authors: Collier Paul
Published: November 2020

Oil, copper, and all the other minerals can only be used once: they are intrinsically depleting natural assets. But nature is also a factory, able to continue production indefinitely. This natural process of production is, of course, reproduction: fish, trees, pandas are all capable of reproducing (although pandas do not seem to be very good at it). Such renewable natural assets are a double blessing. We did not create them and yet we can harvest them for eternity. The menace of plunder is even starker with renewable natural assets than it was with depletable natural assets. The peculiar vulnerability of reproduction compared to other processes of production is that the continued flow of consumable goods depends upon the maintenance of a massive stock of them. If cars were produced in the same way as wood, General Motors would need a stock of many times its annual production from which to cull its new cars. Instead, it just needs a factory. Plundering a factory is not nearly as enticing as plundering a huge stock of the output. The incentive for the plunder of reproduction is therefore acute. We are able to enjoy the harvest from reproducible natural assets because previous generations refrained from such plunder. They did not exhaust the stock and so infringe the rights of future generations. What was the man who shot the last dodo thinking at the time? Perhaps not very much more than “got it!”; perhaps that since it was the last one it could not breed; or perhaps he did not realize that it was the last one until it was too late. Instinctively we sense that plundering a renewable natural asset to extinction seems an appalling error. Can economics add anything useful to such sentiments? In the simplest economies everything is sustainable: the economy remains exactly the same from one year to the next. This is not a world that we should necessarily aspire to. If everything stays the same, that includes the desperate poverty of the bottom billion. Nor is it now feasible: those nonrenewable assets are gradually running out.
Restoring Natural Order
Authors: Collier Paul
Published: November 2020

For early man, little of the natural world was valuable. The few natural things that were useful were abundant, and therefore undemanding. Now, thanks to technology, far more of the natural world is useful, but it must satisfy the demands of over six billion people. Abundance has been superseded by scarcity, not because the natural world has diminished but because we now know how to exploit it. The result, in the absence of effective rules, and in its various manifestations, is plunder. Some of the things we might think of as natural are already adequately protected. The fish in a fish farm, the trees planted in a private forest: these are managed within a framework of incentives that is compatible with social interests. But there are two major holes in the protective web, and too much is falling through them. One hole is created by bad governance, and the other by the limitations of good governance. In other words, one is created locally, by specific governments in the countries of the bottom billion and their management of natural assets, and the other is global and involves management of those assets beyond national boundaries. The nonrenewable natural assets in the territories of the bottom billion are seldom harnessed for the development of their societies. As a result, future generations may inherit a depleted natural world with little to show for it. The once-only chance of using assets to lift these societies out of poverty through harnessing them will have been missed. The governments of many of the poorest countries are insufficiently held to account by their citizens for the good management of the natural assets under their control. The international renewable natural assets, such as the fish of the high seas, are liable to be plundered to extinction, while the natural liabilities, such as carbon, are liable to accumulate. The fish will have been eaten, and the carbon emitted, predominantly by the citizens of the rich countries. Throughout this book I have been guided by the haunting question of what future generations will think of us.
Curriculum and Assessment for Students with Special Needs
Authors: Hammel Alice M. , Hourigan Ryan M.
Published: November 2020

Every successful music educator has a curriculum that contains a scope (overarching goals) and sequence (how we will achieve our goals and in what order) that are critical to reaching meaningful educational goals within the music classroom. Walker and Soltis (2004) state: “Working with the curriculum is an integral part of all teachers’ daily lives”. When specific curricula are not mandated (by the state, or federal government), most music educators use a set of standards or guidelines to devise a scope and sequence for classroom teaching (i.e., the National Standards). It is important as music educators to consider their curriculum when preparing to teach all students, not just students with learning challenges. This is what separates an educator from a therapist or a service provider. The questions that we will address in this chapter include: How do music educators maintain a focus on their own curricular goals while adapting that same curriculum to the individual needs of students? And how do we assess and reflect on these goals to make adjustments in our curriculum? These are difficult questions to answer. In fact, this has been a challenge for teachers since the inclusion of students with special needs began following the passage of P.L. 94–142 more than 35 years ago. Walker and Soltis explain, “While many teachers supported the goal, many were offended that rigid regulations were imposed on them without their consent”. All these issues require a thoughtful and sequential approach when preparing, presenting, and assessing instruction in the music classroom. However, the stronger the underlying curricular focus is, the easier it will be to adapt and modify your existing curriculum to individualize instruction for students who have learning differences. Your specific curriculum, if not mandated by your state or school system, will be a result of your philosophy of music education. Even when utilizing prescribed curricula, your choices in scope and sequence will reflect your values in the classroom. These same values will be reflected in the choices you make in modifying your curricula for students with special needs.
Gene Foundry
Authors: Keats Jonathon
Published: November 2020

As the nineteenth century was the age of iron and the twentieth belonged to silicon, the present century will be identified with carbon. CO2 is the iconic greenhouse gas, imprinted on our vocabulary with talk of carbon footprints and allowances and offsets. For synthetic biologists, however, the carbon debacle has counterintuitively positioned this debased element as our savior. The future they foresee will supplant grimy factories of concrete and steel with clean colonies of living cells. To use the terminology of Freeman Dyson, gray technology will be replaced by green. Among the most celebrated physicists of the twentieth century, Dyson has become one of the foremost promoters of synthetic biology, a field that technologically is to genetic engineering what genetic engineering is to crop cultivation. Conceptually the distinction is even more radical than that: whereas genetic engineering merely modifies preexisting creatures more precisely than selective breeding, synthetic biology aims to fabricate entirely new organisms from nonliving materials. Unconstrained by genetic history, these artificial life forms can be intelligently designed to produce fuels or pharmaceuticals with unprecedented efficiency. The sheer audacity of synthetic biology lends itself to hyperbole, aptly captured in a 2007 Nature editorial: “For the first time, God has competition.” Yet the language of synthetic biology, also known as bioengineering, hardly bespeaks a cosmic paradigm shift. DNA constructed at a so-called gene foundry gives specialized function to a generic cell referred to as a chassis. A Victorian industrialist would have no trouble following the metaphoric language. He might even find work as a bioengineering consultant: the quaint iron age phrasing reflects the old-fashioned framework underlying this brave new discipline. After all, radical as artificial life may be philosophically—and significant as it may be environmentally—it’s technically just a strenuous construction project, with manufacturing challenges akin to building a bridge or a steam engine. That may explain why one of the most successful synthetic biologists working today, the Stanford University professor Drew Endy, trained as a civil engineer. Together with colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Endy has methodically approached synthetic biology as a problem of developing reliable building blocks and assembly protocols.
Conficker
Authors: Keats Jonathon
Published: November 2020

Some called it Downadup. Others preferred Kido. As soon as the Conficker worm started spreading over the internet on November 20, 2008, security firms agreed that they faced a pandemic and immediately began to cooperate on containing it, but they couldn’t reach a consensus about what to name it. The worm continued to propagate unabated, infecting an estimated 15 million computers, including systems in the German military and British Parliament. By the following April the media had reported on the worm so extensively that PC World compared its notoriety to the celebrity of Paris Hilton, dubbing Conficker “the world’s most famous piece of malware.” Nevertheless several security companies still insisted on calling it Downadup. And though nobody was any closer to eliminating it, the worm had acquired several more identifiers, official codes such as TA08–297A, VU827267, and CVE-2008–4250, seldom referenced by anyone. Conficker will always have conflicting monikers. Most malware does. Despite periodic attempts to standardize the naming process, no system has ever become ubiquitous. Even the first, codified in 1991 when a mere thousand viruses were in circulation, was ignored as often as it was followed by the half-dozen computer firms then in the nascent security business. And no wonder. Mandating the form Family_Name.Group_Name.Major_Variant.Minor_Variant[:Modifier] , it made Linnaean binomials seem, comparatively, to roll off the tongue. A 1999 revision only bloated the nomenclature, requiring that virus platform and malware type also be specified, while ignoring a much deeper problem: even researchers who followed the formula seldom agreed on what to call the groups and families. Each new worm or virus averaged four totally incompatible appellations—generally unpronounceable strings of letters—and every month the number of worms and viruses in the wild increased by thousands. Hackers spread much of the malware by email. You’d get a virus embedded in the attachment to a message ostensibly coming from a personal contact. If you opened the attachment the virus would take over your computer’s email software, automatically forwarding itself, now in your name, to every address on your own contact list, renewing the whole infection process.
Greenhouse Development Rights: A Framework for Climate Protection That Is “More Fair” Than Equal Per Capita Emissions Rights
Authors: Kemp-Benedict Eric , Kartha Sivan
Published: November 2020

There is a fairly broad consensus among both the philosophers who write about climate change and the majority of the climate-policy community that efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions—“mitigation” in the jargon—should not harm the ability of poor countries to grow economically and to reduce as rapidly as possible the widespread poverty their citizens suffer. Indeed, this principle of a “right to development” has been substantially embraced in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) itself. Yet as the evidence of the risks from climate change has continued to mount and calls have grown for more stringent mitigation targets, the need to give substance to this right has come into conflict with the evident unwillingness of already “developed” countries to pay the costs of adequately precautionary mitigation. The long and the short of it is that almost any reasonable ethical principles lead to the conclusion that, as Henry Shue (1999) put it straightforwardly, “the costs [of mitigation] should initially be borne by the wealthy industrialized states.” In the words of the UNFCCC, “the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof,” and this point is embodied in practical terms in the Kyoto Protocol itself, in which only the 40 developed “Annex I” countries have binding emissions limits. Yet particularly because of the rejection of Kyoto by the United States but also because of the weak efforts at mitigation that have taken place so far in Europe, Japan, and other industrialized countries, we find ourselves in a situation in which precaution requires that emissions be reduced extremely soon in poor countries, too, but the rich countries can’t yet be said to have fulfilled their obligations to “take the lead.” The delay in taking action so far, the increasing evidence of current climate-change impacts and greater risks than previously estimated, and the speed with which we must now move all imply substantially greater costs for adequately precautionary action than were previously estimated.
Epidemics in Early Wars
Authors: Smallman-Raynor Matthew , Cliff Andrew
Published: November 2020

While our selection of the time period, AD 1850–1990, for the analytical work we undertake in Chapters 3 to 12 is conditioned by the availability of consolidated morbidity and mortality data for both military and civil populations from the middle of the nineteenth century, this time-window gives only the most recent outlook upon an association between war and disease which can be traced back to the great struggles of ancient times. So in the present chapter, in so far as the historical record allows, we review the early history of war epidemics. Our narrative follows a temporal sequence. We consider in turn evidence from antiquity (1500 BC–AD 500) (Sect. 2.2), the Middle Ages (AD 500–1500) (Sect. 2.3), and the modern period (AD 1500–1850) (Sect. 2.4–2.6). To obtain a picture of the geographical distribution of belligerent parties and associated conflicts, 1500 BC–AD 1850, Table 2.1 is based on a subset of the information included in Table 1.4 and gives the number of units engaged in each of the c.2,000 wars and war-like events listed by Kohn (1999). All told, Table 2.1 identifies 2,267 engagements, with the number rising from 365 (antiquity), to 786 (Middle Ages) and 1,116 (modern). As noted in Section 1.2.3, the Old World and Europe especially dominate the geographical record; entry of the New World awaited European colonization in the modern period and the beginning of a written record for the Americas and Oceania. As a marker of recorded conflicts, Table 2.1 defines the broad geographical limits to an historical review of war-related epidemics. A review of all the wars that underpin the tabulation is outside the compass of this book. As noted in Section 1.4, relevant information is simply not available for the majority of early wars while, even for relatively recent conflicts, the nature of the disease(s) that beset military and civil populations continues to defy confident retrospective diagnosis. Inevitably, language barriers offer a further limit to our coverage. But within these constraints it is possible to sample from the available evidence and to obtain some idea of the magnitude and scope of war epidemics prior to AD 1850.
Further Regional Studies
Authors: Smallman-Raynor Matthew , Cliff Andrew
Published: November 2020

In Chapters 7 to 11, we have examined a series of recurring themes in the geography of war and disease since 1850 through regional lenses. In this chapter, we conclude our regional–thematic survey by illustrating further prominent themes which, either because of their subject-matter or because of their geographical location, were beyond the immediate scope of the foregoing chapters. In selecting regional case studies for this chapter, we concentrate on wars which have not been examined in depth to this point (the South African War and the Cuban Insurrection) or which, on account of their magnitude and extent, merit examination beyond that afforded in previous sections (World War I and World War II). Four principal issues are addressed: (1) Africa: population reconcentration and disease (Section 12.2), illustrated with reference to civilian concentration camps in the South African War, 1899–1902; (2) Americas: peace, war, and epidemiological integration (Section 12.3), illustrated with reference to the civil settlement system of Cuba, 1888–1902; (3) Asia: prisoners of war, forced labour, and disease (Section 12.4), illustrated with reference to Allied prisoners on the line of the Burma–Thailand Railway, 1942–4; (4) Europe: civilian epidemics and the world wars (Section 12.5), illustrated with reference to the spread of a series of diseases in the civil population of Europe during, and after, the hostilities of 1914–18 and 1939–45. As before, the study sites in (1) to (4) span a broad range of epidemiological environments, from the cool temperate latitudes of northern Europe, through the tropical island and jungle environments of the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, to the warm temperate and subtropical savannah lands of the South African Veld. Diseases have been sampled to reflect this epidemiological range. The South African War (1899–1902) has been described as the last of the ‘typhoid campaigns’ (Curtin, 1998)—a closing chapter on the predominance of disease over battle as a cause of death among soldiers (Pakenham, 1979: 382). From the military perspective, typhoid was indeed the major health issue of the war, accounting for a reported 8,020 deaths in the British Army (Simpson, 1911: 57).
Climate
Authors: Rogers Jeffrey C. , Winkler Julie A.
Published: November 2020

Public awareness of climate and its societal impact has substantially increased in the recent decade. An extraordinarily persistent El Niño from 1992–5 followed by another strong event in 1997–8 have been particularly newsworthy. Severe storms, both on the mesoscale and synoptic scale, and extreme events such as cold waves, heat waves, flooding, and regional droughts regularly continue to draw attention. Concern about anthropogenic climate warming has engendered considerable public debate over its detection, potential impacts, and public policy issues. In keeping with the importance of climatic issues, American geographer-climatologists are contributing extensively to the climate research literature and the understanding of both the physical aspects and impacts of the climate system. We have elected to use this forum to demonstrate the remarkable breadth of climatic research interests among American geographers during the past decade, rather than to focus on a few key contributions. A thematic approach is used to organize the large body of literature. This approach eschews the more traditional definitions of the subfields of climatology (e.g. physical, dynamic, synoptic, and applied climatology), which we felt did not accurately reflect the integrative and innovative nature of much of the current research by geographer-climatologists. We found that a large portion of the recent contributions of geographer-climatologists can be organized around the thematic areas of atmospheric circulation, surface–atmosphere interactions, hydro-climatology, and climatic change. In addition, we identified a substantial research effort focused on the evaluation of climatological observations and the development of analytical techniques appropriate for climatological research. A small number of papers by geographer-climatologists whose explicit intention was the formulation of policy for the private and public sectors was also identified. Atmospheric circulation has been a major research focus in the last decade. Geographer-climatologists have been concerned with the frequency, spatial and temporal variability, and physical causes of extratropical and tropical circulation systems. Climatological analysis of atmospheric circulation has traditionally fallen within the subfields of dynamic and synoptic climatology. Dynamic climatology encompasses the largest scales of atmospheric circulation with emphases on theoretical and modeling approaches to climate analysis (Rayner et al. 1991). Synoptic climatology incorporates more regional scales, often with application of circulation and synoptic weather types to explain local climate variability (Harman and Winkler 1991; Yarnal 1993).
Coastal and Marine Geography
Authors: Psuty Norbert P. , Steinberg Philip E.
Published: November 2020

The 1990s witnessed a significant increase in popular interest in the US regarding the geography of the world’s coastal and marine spaces. Factors motivating this renewed interest included growing public environmental awareness, a decade of unusually severe coastal storms, more frequent reporting of marine pollution hazards, greater knowledge about (and technology for) depleting fishstocks, domestic legislation on coastal zone management and offshore fisheries policies, new opportunities for marine mineral extraction, heightened understanding of the role of marine life in maintaining the global ecosystem, new techniques for undertaking marine exploration, the 1994 activation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, reauthorization of the US Coastal Zone Management Act in 1996, and designation of 1998 as the International Year of the Ocean. Responding to this situation, the breadth of perspectives from which coastal and marine issues are being encountered by geographers, the range of subjects investigated, and the number of geographers engaging in coastal-marine research have all increased during the 1990s. As West (1989a) reported in the original Geography in America, North American coastal-marine geography during the 1980s was focused toward fields such as coastal geomorphology, ports and shipping, coastal zone management, and tourism and recreation. Research in these areas has continued, but in the 1990s, with increased awareness of the importance of coastal and marine areas to physical and human systems, geographers from a range of subdisciplines beyond those usually associated with coastal-marine geography have begun turning to coastal and marine areas as fruitful sites for conducting their research. Climatologists are investigating the sea in order to understand processes such as El Niño, remote-sensing experts are studying how sonic imagery can be used for understanding species distribution in three-dimensional environments, political ecologists are investigating the ocean as a common property resource in which multiple users’ agendas portend conflict and cooperation, and cultural geographers are examining how the ocean is constructed as a distinct space with its own social meanings and “seascapes.” Despite (or perhaps because of ) this expansion in coastal-marine geography, the subdiscipline remains fragmented into what we here call “Coastal Physical Geography,” “Marine Physical Geography,” and “Coastal-Marine Human Geography.”
European Geography
Authors: Koulov Boian , McCarthy Linda
Published: November 2020

The European Specialty Group (ESG) was founded with considerable enthusiasm in 1992. Its organization and the rapid membership increase were in response to the historic changes following the fall of the Iron Curtain, the reintegration of the European continent, and a heightened interest in the evolution of European political and economic life. The purpose of the ESG is to move beyond the Cold War legacy of East–West division of the continent and foster research, teaching, and scholarly interaction on the geography of the new Europe. The ESG also serves as a bridge between US geographers working on Europe and their counterparts in the rest of the world. Finally, the group promotes the study of Europe within the discipline of geography and facilitates the exchange of information and ideas among its members and Europeanists in other disciplines, government, and private agencies. Research on Europe has been undertaken at a variety of spatial scales. A number of books reflect the pan-European scale (Berentsen 1993, 1997; Harris 1991, 1993a, b, 1997; Jordan 1996; McDonald 1997; Murphy 1991; Unwin 1998). The national scale also has received attention due to the continued importance of the different national contexts despite increased European integration, in conjunction with difficulties created by the lack of comparable statistical databases at a sub-national scale for the countries across Europe. Regardless of spatial scale several consistent themes have emerged. Within political geography focus is clearly on the new divisions of Europe, states–nations relationships, sub-national political transformation, the twin forces of democratization and nationalism, and ethnic conflict. Within economic geography research has centered around issues of “widening” versus “deepening” in the EU, globalization and pan-European integration, the impacts and implications of the incorporation of Central and Eastern European nations into the European economy, and the spatially uneven nature of economic change. Geographers also have been active in addressing issues of environmental damage, population, and migration. This chapter takes a regional approach that reflects the typical focus of most research. The material is treated systematically within sections on Western, Nordic, Eastern, and Mediterranean Europe.
Type-theoretical checking and philosophy of Mathematics
Authors: de Bruijn Nicolaas Govert
Published: November 2020

After millennia of mathematics we have reached a level of understanding that can be represented physically. Humankind has managed to disentangle the intricate mixture of language, metalanguage and interpretation, isolating a body of formal, abstract mathematics that can be completely verified by machines. Systems for computer-aided verification have philosophical aspects. The design and usage of such systems are influenced by the way we think about mathematics, but it also works the other way. A number of aspects of this mutual influence will be discussed in this paper. In particular, attention will be given to philosophical aspects of type-theoretical systems. These definitely call for new attitudes: throughout the twentieth century most mathematicians had been trained to think in terms of untyped sets. The word “philosophy” will be used lightheartedly. It does not refer to serious professional philosophy, but just to meditation about the way one does one’s job. What used to be called philosophy of mathematics in the past was for a large part subject oriented. Most people characterized mathematics by its subject matter, classifying it as the science of space and number. From the verification system’s point of view, however, subject matter is irrelevant. Verification is involved with the rules of mathematical reasoning, not with the subject. The picture may be a bit confused, however, by the fact that so many people consider set theory, in particular untyped set theory, as part of the language and foundation of mathematics, rather than as a particular subject treated by mathematics. The views expressed in this paper are quite personal, and can mainly be carried back to the author’s design of the Automath system in the late 1960s, where the way to look upon the meaning (philosophy) of mathematics is inspired by the usage of the unification system and vice versa. See de Bruijn 1994b for various philosophical items concerning Automath, and Nederpelt et al. 1994, de Bruin 1980, de Bruijn 1991a for general information about the Automath project. Some of the points of view given in this paper are matters of taste, but most of them were imposed by the task of letting a machine follow what we say, a machine without any knowledge of our mathematical culture and without any knowledge of physical laws.
The chicken and egg problem
Authors: Maynard Smith John , Szathmary Eors
Published: November 2020

The most fundamental distinction in biology is between nucleic acids, with their role as carriers of information, and proteins, which generate the phenotype. In existing organisms, nucleic acids and proteins mutually presume one another. The former, owing to their template activity, store the heritable information: the latter, by enzymatic activity, read and express this information. It seems that neither can function without the other. Which came first, nucleic acids or proteins? There are three possible answers: (1) nucleic acids; (2) proteins; (3) neither: they coevolved. In this chapter, we discuss various possible answers to this 'chicken or egg?' problem. In section 5.2, we discuss what seems to us the most likely answer, that at first RNA performed both functions, as replicator and enzyme. In section 5.3, we consider an alternative view, in which protein enzymes existed either before, or alongside, the first nucleic acids. In section 5.4, we ask whether, perhaps, the first replicators were not nucleic acids. Finally, in section 5.5, we ask why, given that the genetic message is carried by nucleic acids, there are only four nucleotides and two base pairs. So far, we have tacitly assumed nucleic acids preceeded proteins, without stating the main reason. Nucleic acids came first because they can perform both functions: they are replicable, and they can have enzymatic activity. For many years, a common opinion was that to be replicable almost amounted to self-replicative ability, but that it was far-fetched to assume enzymatic activity. Today, there is increasing evidence that RNA can act as an enzyme, but we are more aware of the difficulty of self-replication. It should have been expected on theoretical grounds that RNA could act as an enzyme: the possibility was discussed by Woese (1967), Crick (1968) and Orgel (1968). Consider first why proteins can act as enzymes. An enzyme has a well-determined three-dimensional structure of chemical groups that, in most cases, arises automatically from the primary structure. Substrates of the enzyme are bound by the chemical groups on the surface. This means that the reactants will be kept in close proximity, and hence experience a much higher local concentration of each other than in solution. This by itself increases the rate of the reaction.