bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The World's Greatest Fix
Authors: Leigh G. J.
Published: November 2020

In the tradition of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, this gives the very early history of how human ingenuity overcame the risk of famine through productive agriculture. Starting with a layman's guide to the chemistry of nitrogen fixation, the book goes on to show how humans emerged from nomadic lifestyles and began developing towns and settlements. When they for the first time began planting the same fields year after year, they noticed quickly the need to ensure soil fertility. But how? The method they came up with is still in use to this day.
Buying a Computer
Authors: Pournelle Jerry
Published: November 2020

Aprevious essay (see “Which Operating System Is Right for You,” p. 16), pointed out that your choice of hardware depends largely on your choice of operating system. So let’s assume that you’ve made up your mind and decided whether you want a Mac or a PC. The next question is whether you want a desktop or a laptop. Ask yourself a couple of relevant questions. Do you work in one place or you are a “road warrier”? Is space a consideration? Will this be your only computer? And how much can you afford? Feature for feature, desktops are cheaper than laptops. Normally, they are also more expandable. You can add more RAM, a better video card, an additional hard drive, a DVD or CD burner, or any of a number of other devices—provided that there are empty slots on the motherboard for additional expansion boards and empty drive bays in the case. You might eventually be able to add a more powerful processor, thus prolonging the useful life of your computer. Desktop cases are relatively easy to open, making it possible for intrepid users to install these items themselves. So check for expandability before you buy. You’ll need a monitor, of course. You’ll pay a bit less for one that comes with your desktop computer, but the dread sign in computer ads saying, “Monitor sold separately,” may not be such a bad thing. You may want something better than your computer vendor is offering. Having a large, steady, clear monitor can make a real difference in the quality of your computing experience. Broadly, there are two kinds to choose from now, and both flat-panel monitors and CRTs have distinct advantages. Sales of flat-panel monitors are fast catching up with those of CRTs, but—as always—your choice will depend on how you plan to use your computer, how much space you have, and the extent to which you are seduced by beauty and coolness. Flat-panel monitors, with their clean, slender profiles, are indeed appealing. (To find out why, see “The Ten Best Tools and Peripherals You Didn’t Know About,” p. 196.) New flat panels (and, by the way, laptop screens) come with TFT displays (that is, active-matrix, not the older, fuzzier passive-matrix displays), and their glare-free screens are easy on the eyes.
How to Shop Safely Online
Authors: Pournelle Jerry
Published: November 2020

Whether you’re a compulsive gadget freak, an eBay addict, or a restrained occasional buyer, the Internet is a shopper’s paradise—open 24/7, offering unlimited choices, and giving us the luxury of shopping—through sleet and snow or summer heat—from our own homes. But at no time have caveats been more important for emptors than now. Devious and ingenious scam artists are just waiting to pounce on anyone who doesn’t take appropriate precautions. A few sound practices can help assure that you get what you pay for, get it on time, and don’t lose your shirt in the bargain. 1. Use a secure browser—Believe it or not, you can’t take browsers for granted. Be sure that you have the latest version of yours, including the latest updates and security patches, and that you’ve set your browser to notify you when you are entering or leaving a secure site. Be sure as well that it complies, as major browsers do (e.g., Netscape and Internet Explorer), with common industry security standards, like SSL and SET technology (see 2 just below). 2. Check out your vendor—Try to use vendors you’re familiar with. Many well-known bricks-and-mortar stores are now “clicks-and-mortar” operations, with both physical stores and sites on the Internet. If you must buy from a place you don’t know, check the site’s security. A secure site will use VeriSign’s Secure Sockets Layer technology (SSL), displaying a locked padlock at the bottom of the screen, Secure Electronic Transaction technology (SET), which shows an unbroken key, or a VeriSign logo indicating that you are at a secure Site. These are not just decorative icons. They are intended to ensure that all personal information you submit to the site will be scrambled en route through the ether and decrypted only when it reaches the licensed merchant. However, this is just the first step. Particularly if you clicked on an ad or a URL sent to you in an e-mail, and therefore did not type the URL in the address bar yourself, you should verify the security certificate (see How to Protect yourself from Frauds, Scams, and Identity Theft, p. 130).
Multimedia and You
Authors: Pournelle Jerry
Published: November 2020

While we haven’t yet reached the age of true interactive Internet, there are many video, audio and multimedia formats you will encounter that can enrich your computing experience. The big three are Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and RealPlayer. All three are compatible with Macintosh and Windows, although you may have to download them. Each handles streaming audio and video, and downloadable formats such as MP3 and MPEG. All three programs will automatically download software, if available, when they need it to play a file, and each has plugins which are automatically installed for use by your web browser, so you can play multimedia content directly from a web page. Be aware that the three programs will battle for control over which program plays which files. All three have preference settings which will allow you to make that program the default player for your chosen formats. However, each also handles a couple of proprietary formats which the others do not, so it’s good to have all three. Besides playing audio and video, the latest versions of Windows Media Player (http://windowsmedia.com/) can help you make audio CDs or import music from CDs to your hard drive. Be aware that if you rip music from your CD collection to certain Windows Media formats, those files might not be playable on other computers. WMP plays files ending in the suffixes .wmv and .wma, among others. Quicktime (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/) and iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/) together handle audio and video playing, as well as advanced functions of CD-burning and music-importing. iTunes also offers the ability to share song lists over your local network—even between Macs and PCs—to convert music to MP3s, and to interface with an iPod. Quicktime plays files ending in the suffix .mov, among others. RealOne (http://www.real.com/) is the latest version of RealPlayer, which plays its own proprietary streaming formats, as well as many of the standard formats. It comes in free and pay versions, although you may have to dig for the free version. RealOne plays files ending with the suffixes .rm and .ram, among others.
Feeding the Nation: The Making of Modern Food Provisioning
Authors: Freidberg Susanne
Published: November 2020

In the late 20th century, a time when many Europeans protested against the corporate conquest of their food shops and farmlands, the sentiments expressed above were no doubt commonplace. The quotation, however, dates back to the 1889 International Hygiene Conference in Paris. Then as now, scientific and technological innovations and the expanding reach of “merchant companies” were stretching the geographic and biological limits of food supply, and sowing controversy along the way. On one hand, food was getting cheaper, more abundant, and more varied, especially in cities. On the other hand, food was coming from farther away and passing through more hands, and national governments could not assure that it was safe or truthfully marketed. As the conference-goers acknowledged, national borders were not stopping either epidemics or the trade in “falsified products.” The period between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries bears further examination not simply because it saw anxieties and controversies over food remarkably similar to those of the turn-of-the millennium period. In addition, events and developments of this era set the stage for contemporary food globalization through diverse and culturally distinctive commodity networks. With Europe’s colonization of Africa came the establishment of enduring relation ships of trade, aid, and investment in African food production. With the emergence of the bureaucratic welfare state, corporate food processing and retailing, and new food sciences and technologies, it became possible to provide the mass market with reasonably safe and wholesome food; with growing consumer awareness and activism, it became both economically and politically necessary. With the emergence of an urban bourgeois society devoted to gastronomy— the “science of taste”—both the French state and French farmers realized food’s power as an expression of natural and national distinction—a distinction that strengthened national consciousness around food on both sides of the Channel. In short, this era saw what turned out to be a number of pivotal debates and struggles over how to define and best provide for food safety and quality. It was also an era when metropolitan elites looked to their expanding overseas empires not just to enrich national economies but also to consolidate nationhood.
The Art of Teaching
Authors: Parini Jay
Published: November 2020

Becoming an effective teacher can be quite painful and exhausting, taking years of trial and error. In The Art of Teaching, writer and critic Jay Parini looks back over his own decades of trials, errors, and triumphs, in an intimate memoir that brims with humor, encouragement, and hard-won wisdom about the teacher's craft. Here is a godsend for instructors of all levels, offering valuable insight into the many challenges that educators face, from establishing a persona in the classroom, to fostering relationships with students, to balancing teaching load with academic writing and research. Insight abounds. Parini shows, for instance, that there is nothing natural about teaching. The classroom is a form of theater, and the teacher must play various roles. A good teacher may look natural, but that's the product of endless practice. The book also considers such topics as the manner of dress that teachers adopt (and what this says about them as teachers), the delicate question of politics in the classroom, the untapped value of emeritus professors, and the vital importance of a settled, disciplined life for a teacher and a writer. Parini grounds all of this in personal stories of his own career in the academy, tracing his path from unfocused student--a self-confessed "tough nut to crack"--to passionate writer, scholar, and teacher, one who frankly admits making many mistakes over the years. Every year, thousands of newly minted college teachers embark on their careers, most with scant training in their chosen profession. The Art of Teaching is a perfect book for these young educators as well as anyone who wants to learn more about this difficult but rewarding profession.
Pain and Procedure Management
Authors: Conte Paola M. , Walco Gary A.
Published: November 2020

Pediatric cancer treatment has seen an incredible increase in survival rates, so that, overall, 75% of children diagnosed with cancer will achieve longterm survival and cure (Ries et al., 2003). An estimated 9,000 new cases of childhood cancer are expected to occur each year (American Cancer Society, 2003), among which one third involve leukemia and one quarter involve a central nervous system (CNS) tumor. Other diagnoses include lymphoma, sympathetic nerve tumor, soft tissue sarcoma, bone tumor, germ cell tumor, and retinoblastoma (Gustafsson, Langmark, Pihkala, Verdier, & Lilleaas, 1998). Although less than 1% of all cancer cases are children (Stiller & Draper, 1998), pediatric cancer causes more deaths among children in industrialized nations than any other disease and after accidents is the leading cause of death among children 1–14 years of age (American Cancer Society, 2003). Improvement in survival rates is the result of increasingly aggressive treatment protocols. With these advances, however, has come greater need for supportive care to address the array of treatment adverse side effects, including pain (Gustafsson et al., 1998). In the United States, 94% of children are treated at centers that are members of a collaborative clinical trials research consortium (American Cancer Society, 2003), implying that treatment protocols, including approaches to preventing and managing adverse side effects, are the norm. To a great degree, however, management of pain has been exempt from this standardized and rigorous approach. This is somewhat ironic and unfortunate as children with cancer reported pain to be the most feared symptom they experience (Enskar, Carlsson, Golsater, Hamrin, & Kreuger, 1997). Undertreatment of pain in children is hardly unique to the cancer population (Schechter, Berde, & Yaster, 2003), and is generally because of limited information available to clinicians, persistence of misinformation about pain in children, and attitudes that denigrate adequate pain management. For example, there is a lack of research on pharmacological interventions for pain in children. Although it is agreed that randomized clinical trials for pain prevention and management would be helpful to address issues of safety, efficacy, pharmacodynamics, and pharmacokinetics in pediatrics, the pragmatics and ethics of such research, especially in very young children, have limited such progress (Berde, Brennan, & Raja, 2003).
Quality of Life in Childhood Cancer: Meaning, Methods, and Missing Pieces
Authors: Levi Rachel B.
Published: November 2020

It is only in the last three decades that the quality of the lives of children and adolescents treated for cancer and their families has become a major focus in the field of pediatric oncology. This shift from helping families to tolerate arduous treatments and prepare for early death is a result of advances in treatment and survival rates for most pediatric disease categories. One result of this paradigm shift is that quality of life (QOL) has become a critical construct within the field of pediatric oncology. The construct of QOL was initially developed for use with adult populations and was based on the definition of health generated in 1948 by the World Health Organization (WHO): “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Although there remains no universally adopted definition of QOL, the WHO’s definition of QOL as an “individual’s perceptions of their position in life in the context of the culture and value system in which they live and in relation to their goals, standards, and concerns” is frequently employed (WHO, 1993). This definition includes several domains that are considered central to the QOL construct: physical, mental/emotional, and social. This initial construct has been expanded with adult populations to include physical symptoms and functioning, functional status (i.e., ability to participate in daily and life activities), psychological functioning, and social functioning (e.g., Ware, 1984). This more expansive definition is referred to as health-related quality of life (HRQOL). HRQOL emphasizes the impact of health on one’s QOL but looks further to include other domains of life functioning that are also potentially affected by health/illness states (Jenney, 1998). The HRQOL construct was initially developed for populations of adults living with chronic illness to assess the impacts of illness/injury/disability, medical treatment, or health care policy on an individual’s life quality (for reviews, see Aaronson et al., 1991; Patrick&Erikson, 1993; Speith&Harris, 1996). Over time, there have been modifications and developments in the construct, approaches to measurement, and the measures themselves (Wilson & Cleary, 1994).
Biopsychosocial and Developmental Issues in Sickle Cell Disease
Authors: Gustafson Kathryn E. , Bonner Melanie J.
Published: November 2020

As advances in health care have prolonged and improved the quality of life of children with chronic illnesses such as sickle cell disease (SCD), psychologists have sought to understand the impact of the illnesses on children and their families and to formulate effective interventions to enhance adaptation. These efforts have been informed by a biopsychosocial conceptual approach such that the biomedical, psychological, and social-ecological processes associated with successful adaptation and effective intervention have been explored (Thompson & Gustafson, 1996). Moreover, it has been recognized that chronic childhood illness occurs within the ongoing context of the child’s cognitive and socioemotional development. Development occurs as a consequence of the transactions between the innate qualities of the biological organism and life experiences occurring in a psychosocial context (Thompson, 1985). There is a continuous and mutual influence of the child and the child’s environment, and the implications of the chronic illness for the child’s cognitive, social and emotional development will vary depending on the impact of the disease at each stage of development (Perrin & Gerrity, 1984). The child’s interactions with the environment can be affected by SCD or other chronic illness both directly and indirectly (Thompson & Gustafson, 1996). There can be a direct effect in terms of the biological processes of the disease on systems of the body that result in cognitive, motor, sensory, or other functional impairments. SCD, for example, is a hematological disorder but poses a risk to cognitive processes through central nervous system (CNS) stroke. There can also be an indirect effect of the chronic illness in terms of the effects of the disease on the child’s attainment of normative psychosocial developmental tasks that arise during phases of the life course. The pain crises that are associated with SCD, for example, may interfere with a child’s developmental tasks, including gaining autonomy, participating fully in school, interacting with peers, and forming an integrated sense of self-identity (e.g., Robinson, 1999; Sexson & Dingle, 1997). This chapter reviews the biopsychosocial and developmental issues that are relevant to SCD. Because subsequent chapters in this volume also review the neuropsychological and psychosocial issues in detail, this review is not meant to be exhaustive.
The Long Way Home
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

A Friday in July . . . Boston is a tangle of cranes and earthmovers, half-built flyovers and half-dug trenches and a huge steel snake slithering along the narrowest of paths through the chaos—Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited, weaving its way through the city’s $15 billion highway construction project known as the Big Dig and heading westward toward Albany, Cleveland, and Chicago. We’ve said our last goodbyes to the family, hauled our backpacks into our two-person sleeping compartment, and finally, after weeks of ever-more frantic preparation, begun to feel the rhythm of the world rumbling slowly by beneath us, the rhythm of our lives for the next six months. The train picks up headway as it groans past the hallowed green walls of Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox and the spiritual center of New England, the dense triple-decker blocks of the inner suburbs and the verdant lawns and oak groves of the outer suburbs. James and I sit across from each other, grinning slightly, both a little intoxicated by a cocktail of excitement, relief, and anxiety. Family, friends, work, school, daily antagonisms, and well-worn rituals are all receding physically if not yet mentally. Over the horizon ahead loom Alaska, the Pacific, Japan, Vladivostok, Lake Baikal, and 25,000 miles or so of who knows what else. But it’s no big deal, we tell ourselves. We’re heading home, just taking the long way. Just past dawn, west of Cleveland, we’re running two and a half hours late. Our sleeping car attendant, Fred, tells us that we lost time overnight to track repairs, slow-loading mail shipments, and freight trains. Once you start to lose a little time on this run, he says, you quickly end up losing a lot, because the tracks are owned by the freight companies, and their trains have priority. If an Amtrak train slips off schedule, it starts the kind of chain reaction of delays that have earned this train the nickname the Late Shore Limited. I ask Fred if we’re going to make our connection in Chicago. “Not if we keep stopping like this,” he says.
Across the Sleeping Land
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

Siberia is the Sleeping Land, a huge subcontinent barely awakened by the first nomads who arrived here uncounted millennia ago, and still, toward the end of the nineteenth century, so devoid of people that in much of it you could travel hundreds of miles in almost any direction and see no evidence that humans had ever existed. Yet the aim of Tsar Alexander III in committing Russia to carve the longest railroad in the world across this great nowhere was not primarily to provide an avenue for settlement by immigrants from overcrowded and often impoverished European Russia. A hundred years after the railroad’s completion, Siberia remains today one of the least-populated places on earth. No, the primary purpose was empire building. It was a way to gain better access to the region’s dazzling natural riches, which were the property of the tsar; to protect the eastern flank of the empire against Chinese and Japanese designs and provide a launching pad for Russia’s own designs to the east; and to bind together a string of Russian settlements flung out over a contiguous land mass larger than that ever claimed by any other single entity. To accomplish its goal of uniting Vladivostok on the Pacific with Moscow and then St. Petersburg on the Atlantic, Russia had to do something that nearly all engineers at the time judged impossible—carve a passable corridor through a continent’s worth of forest, bog, permafrost, stone, and swamp. The work was done by free peasants, imported labor, and prisoners wielding wooden shovels, specially designed machinery, dynamite to blast through permafrost, and bonfires to melt it. Workers had to contend with plague and cholera, searing arctic winters and blistering summers, and attacks by insects, tigers, and bandits. It took twenty-five years from the first felled tree to the last spike, it cost roughly a billion rubles all told, or perhaps as much as seven billion in today’s dollars, and by the time it was done in 1916, the empire was nearly bankrupt and on the verge of collapse. But to a large extent, the effort to bind together at least Russia itself, if not the larger empire, succeeded.
One of the Best Enterprises in Russia
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

The Angara River races out of Lake Baikal like a daughter fleeing her angry father for the arms of her lover. So goes the legend of the powerful river that is Baikal’s only outlet. Until the 1950s, you could see a huge rock near the mouth of the river that was said to prove the legend—the rock hurled by father Baikal toward his recalcitrant offspring, hoping to block her way as she ran off to join her beloved Yenisei, the great river to the west. Today, only a tiny tip of what’s known as Shaman Rock is still visible. Powerful Baikal could not block his daughter’s way and tame her energies, but humans could. They captured daughter Angara behind a series of hydroelectric dams and put her to work for the good of the Soviet people. One of the dams raised the level of Baikal by a meter and submerged most of the great rock in the river. Isolated in the middle of sparsely populated Siberia, its colossal depths and unique ecosystem enclosed behind its barrier of mountains, it would be easy to imagine that Baikal remains a world unto itself. But today that would be just an act of imagination. The lake may have stood apart for millions of years, but in the last 100 years, humans have speeded up time and collapsed space, and Baikal can no longer blithely follow its own, idiosyncratic course. Some changes were already evident early in the twentieth century. The Barguzin sable, source of so much wealth over more than 200 years, was on the verge of extinction, its long decline punctuated by Nicholas II’s belated decision to protect it with the Barguzinsky Nature Reserve. The limits of the limitless lake itself were starting to be tested, too—Baikal’s populations of omul and sturgeon were crashing as human populations rose, spawning habitat was disrupted, and new fishing technology was introduced. And along its southern shores, workers were clearing, blasting, flattening, and filling in, laying the path for the needle that would truly puncture Baikal’s bubble of isolation, 250 years after the arrival of the first Russians.
Connecting the Dots
Authors: Thomson Peter
Published: November 2020

Really, though—who among us, Russian or otherwise, isn’t a sucker for a deft illusion? Who doesn’t want to believe that the girl really has vanished? And in a time when talk of The End of Nature on our almost fully industrialized planet rings chillingly true, who doesn’t want to believe that there are still a few scraps of earth left with the power to take the worst that humans can throw at them and turn it into nothing at all? Like I said, that’s one of the reasons I came here— to witness the Great Baikal’s awesome act. And the illusion is easy to get sucked into, because here’s the thing: It’s not just smoke and mirrors and nationalistic Russky hype. It’s largely true—despite decades of hefty daily doses of contaminants from the Angara industrial corridor, the Selenga River, the Baikalsk mill, and other sources, there’s been little discernable change in the overall chemistry of the lake—the vast majority of Baikal’s twenty-three quadrillion liters of water remain as pure as just about any on earth. It seems that something remarkable really is going on here. We know it’s not that contaminants are just blending into Baikal’s tremendous volume to the point of becoming undetectable. Scientists have detected miniscule amounts of industrial contaminants even far from the known hot spots, although nowhere near what they’d expect from the amounts they suspect are going into the lake. Nor is it that the lake is merely turning a trick on a grander scale that just about every body of water performs—using its plants and animals and microbes to metabolize and break down some pollutants. Normal biological processes here and elsewhere do destroy some contaminants fairly quickly, but many of the industrial pollutants coming into the lake don’t break down significantly for years or decades, and those basic biochemical limitations are no different among Baikal’s flora and fauna than anywhere else. And the water itself? Well, scientific tests prove it—it’s just plain H2O. It doesn’t have unique properties that allow it to alchemically transform tenacious pollutants into harmless substances. It’s just water.
The Role of Fortuity in Racial Policy-Making
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

The Interest-Convergence Principle discussed in the previous chapter can be stated in two rules:… Rule 1. The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accom­modated only when that interest converges with the interests of whites in policy-making positions. This convergence is far more important for gaining relief than the degree of harm suffered by blacks or the character of proof offered to prove that harm. Rule 2. Even when interest-convergence results in an effective racial remedy, that remedy will be abrogated at the point that policymakers fear the remedial policy is threatening the superior societal status of whites, particularly those in the middle and upper classes…. As discussed in chapter 4, the involuntary sacrifice of black rights can serve as catalysts enabling whites to settle serious policy differences. I now see that these silent covenants that differ so much in result are two sides of the same coin. The two-sided coin, with involuntary racial sacri­fice on the one side and interest-convergent remedies on the other, can be referred to as racial fortuity. Racial fortuity resembles a contract law concept: the third-party bene­ficiary. In brief, two parties may contract to provide goods or services to a third party. For example, a husband wishing to have flowers delivered weekly to his wife contracts with a florist to provide this service. If the florist fails to do so, the husband can sue, but there is a large and complicated body of law as to whether the wife can sue the florist. Although she was the intended beneficiary, she was not a party to the contract and may not even have known about it. One aspect of this body of law is clear. The contracting parties must intend to confer a benefit on a third-party. As one court put it: “The test is whether the benefit to the third person is direct to him oris but an incidental benefit to him arising from the contract. If direct, the third party may sue on the contract.” Thus, in many states, the wife could sue the florist. If the benefit were incidental, however, the third party has no right of recovery. Consider this hypothetical example. If Gotham Foods contracts with Ace Builder to build a new shopping center in the heart of Inner City, an all-black area, black residents may benefit from new job opportunities, better shopping at lower prices, and an upgrading of property values. Other businesses may be attracted to the area with similar benefits.
School Litigation in the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

Ancient Humans Were Aware Of The Tides, but did not know that the far-off moon influenced the ebb and flow of the earth’s oceans. Similarly, the forces that over two hundred years caused black parents to oscillate between segregated and integrated education for their chil­dren were often hidden or disguised. What was obvious was the desire to provide their children with an education. Black children were taught in churches and community halls. Beginning in the nineteenth century, black parents in a few northern cities enrolled their children in public schools as soon as those schools were available,. When, as was often the case, the schooling proved disappointing, frustrated parents attributed the ineffective instruction at the schools to one of two assumptions that turned out to be faulty:…1. If the schools were all black, failure was attributed to the racially segre­gated character of those schools. “If whites were attending these schools,” black parents concluded, “conditions would be better.” This has been the predominant diagnosis both in the nineteenth and, as I shall describe in chapter 10, in the twentieth century. 2. If their children were attending predominantly white schools, blacks assumed that these schools were demonstrably better in physical resources and, thus, the quality of education would be better. In fact, however, school officials provided better schools for middle- and upper-class white students than for the children of the working class. And whatever a white school’s quality, it might not be available to black children or, if it were, it might not be appropriate to meet their needs. Because school officials favor whites, black parents often conclude, our children don’t stand a chance in the integrated schools…. The experience of black parents in Boston, Massachusetts, with separate and integrated school policies, is both instructive and repre­sentative. When public schools opened in Boston in the late eighteenth century, black children were neither barred nor segre­gated. But by 1790, racial insults and mistreatment had driven out all but three or four black children. In this regard, the Boston children’s experience was no different from those of other “free” black children in northern schools. Racial hostility rendered educational equality for black children impossible even though they were attending the same schools as whites.
The School Desegregation Era
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

Yale Law School Professor Alexander Bickel was a major consti­tutional scholar of his time. When, in 1970, he questioned the long-term viability of the Brown decision in a highly praised book, civil rights lawyers and liberal scholars were annoyed. Few of us at that time had any doubts that we would eventually prevail in eradicating segrega­tion “root and branch” from the public schools. Now, more than three decades later, Professor Bickel’s prediction, heavily criticized at the time, has become an unhappy but all too accurate reality. In this chapter I will examine the resistance by whites and the rigidity by civil rights lawyers and leaders that combined to transform Bickel’s prediction into prophesy. Even the optimists among us had continuing reasons to regret the “all deliberate speed” standard for implementing Brown I. The Supreme Court insisted in Brown II that its unique-compliance formula was intended to do no more than allow time for the necessary adminis­trative changes that transformation to a desegregated school system required. After a decade of experience with the standard, Judge Robert L. Carter, former NAACP General Counsel, surmised that the formula actually permitted movement toward compliance on terms that the white South could accept.1 Until Brown II, Carter said, constitutional rights had been defined as personal and present, but under the guise of judicial statesmanship, “the Warren Court sacri­ficed individual and immediate vindication of the newly discovered right of blacks to a desegregated education in favor of a remedy more palatable to whites.” Carter suggests that the Court failed to realize the depth or nature of the problem, and by attempting to regulate the pace of desegrega­tion so as to convey a show of compassion and understanding for the white South, it not only failed to develop a willingness to comply, but instead aroused the hope that resistance to the constitutional imper­ative would succeed. As had happened so frequently before, southern politicians began waving the Confederate flag and equating the Brown decision with a Supreme Court-led attack on states’ rights. Highway billboards called for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and candidates were elected to office on campaigns based on little more than shouting “Never.”
Moving Beyond Racial Fortuity
Authors: Bell Derrick
Published: November 2020

Agospel Song Asks: “What do you do when you’ve done all you can and it feels like it’s never enough?” The answer, “Just stand,” seems so passive, but as interpreted by those who framed those words out of the difficulties of their own lives, it means to keep on, to not give up in the face of seemingly fruitless struggle. It draws on a necessary maxim of the oppressed: to “make a way out of no way.” Those of us who have labored for decades in racial-justice campaigns can identify with that gospel lyric, particularly civil rights lawyers whose primary mission was trying to desegregate school systems. The school issues of today grow out of societal conditions that affect educational efforts across the economic spectrum. They can’t all be laid at the doorsteps of Brown’s failure, but looking back over the decades, I wonder whether the long school desegregation effort was an unintended but nonetheless contributing cause of current statistical disparities that some critics angrily attribute to the continuing effects of racism. Others, not all of whom are white, assert with equal vehemence that blaming failure on racism is an excuse; that we need to get up off our dead asses, drop the welfare tit, stop having “illegitimate” babies, and find jobs like everybody else. More objective observers of black distress view the source as the lack of employment, the bedrock of survival and success in this society. In the post–World War II years, racial reformers felt that gaining racial equality would eliminate the barriers that underlay the economic disparities between blacks and others. While a powerful symbol, the call for equality was easier to make than for a great many blacks to realize. Just as the Brown decision in 1954 did not open up law-firm jobs when I graduated from law school in 1957, the hard-fought liti­gation to erode public manifestations of segregation meant little to those black people far less fortunate than I as they looked in vain for openings in schools, jobs, and housing.
Processes of the Long-Term Carbon Cycle: Organic Matter and Carbonate Burial and Weathering
Authors: Berner Robert A.
Published: November 2020

The organic subcycle of the long-term carbon cycle, where organic matter burial and weathering are involved, constitutes the major control on the evolution of atmospheric oxygen. It is also important as a secondary factor affecting atmospheric CO2. Thus, it is important to better understand the processes whereby organic matter is buried in sediments and oxidized upon subsequent exposure to weathering during uplift onto the continents. This is especially true of the Paleozoic rise of land plants, which had a large effect on atmospheric CO2 because of increased global organic burial due to the addition of plant debris to sediments. The burial of organic matter in marine sediments is impacted strongly by the availability of the nutrient elements, phosphorus and nitrogen, so a complete discussion of the cycling of organic carbon should involve some discussion of the cycles of these elements. Carbonate burial is the ultimate sink for CO2 derived from the atmosphere via the weathering of Ca and Mg silicates. The location of this burial, shallow water shelves versus the deep sea floor, is important because it affects the probability that the carbonate will be eventually thermally recycled and the carbon returned to the atmosphere. Carbonate weathering is the dominant process affecting river water composition and is a key component of the cycling of carbon. Its importance to the long-term carbon cycle is that, in order to calculate the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere via Ca and Mg silicate weathering, it is necessary to correct total carbonate burial for that derived from carbonate weathering. At present, sedimentary organic matter burial occurs in swamps, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, and in the open marine environment. The ultimate sources of the organics are land vegetation and marine phytoplankton. Also, soil organic matter, which is intimately associated with clay minerals, is eroded and transported to the sea by rivers (Hedges et al., 1994). A major question is how much of the total global burial is of marine or nonmarine origin. Recent work has shown that organic burial on land is much higher than previously recognized, especially as a result of human activities (Dean and Gorham, 1998; Stallard, 1998).
Atmospheric O2 over Phanerozoic Time
Authors: Berner Robert A.
Published: November 2020

The chemical reactions that affect atmospheric O2 on a multimillion-year time scale involve the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust that undergo oxidation and reduction. This includes carbon, sulfur, and iron. (Other redox elements, such as manganese, are not abundant enough to have an appreciable effect on O2.) Iron is the most abundant of the three, but it plays only a minor role in O2 control (Holland, 1978). This is because during oxidation the change between Fe+2 and Fe+3 involves the uptake of only one-quarter of an O2 molecule, whereas the oxidation of sulfide to sulfate involves two O2 molecules, and the oxidation of reduced carbon, including organic matter and methane, involves between one and two O2 molecules. The same stoichiometry applies to reduction of the three elements. Because iron is not sufficiently abundant enough to counterbalance its low relative O2 consumption/release, the iron cycle is omitted in most discussions of controls on atmospheric oxygen. In contrast, the sulfur cycle, although subsidiary to the carbon cycle as to its effect on atmospheric O2, is nevertheless non-negligible and must be included in any discussion of the evolution of atmospheric O2. In this chapter the methods and results of modeling the long-term carbon and sulfur cycles are presented in terms of calculations of past levels of atmospheric oxygen. The modeling results are then compared with independent, indirect evidence of changes in O2 based on paleobiological observations and experimental studies that simulate the response of forest fires to changes in the levels of O2. Because the sulfur cycle is not discussed anywhere else in this book, it is briefly presented first. The long-term sulfur cycle is depicted as a panorama in figure 6.1. Sulfate is added to the oceans, via rivers, originating from the oxidative weathering of pyrite (FeS2) and the dissolution of calcium sulfate minerals (gypsum and anhydrite) on the continents. Volcanic, metamorphic/hydrothermal, and diagenetic reactions add reduced sulfur to the oceans and atmosphere where it is oxidized to sulfate. Sulfur is removed from the oceans mainly via formation of sedimentary pyrite and calcium sulfate.
Reporting From Science Journals
Authors: Siegfried Tom
Published: November 2020

For police reporters, there are crimes. For political writers, elections. Sports-writers have games. And science writers have journals. In fact, there are more journal articles published every year than there are games, elections, and murders in all U.S. cities combined. So science writers must be selective. To select wisely, you'll need to know, first of all, what the major news-providing journals are, and what sorts of science they publish. You'll need to understand the different kinds of journals and different kinds of papers within them. And you'll need to comprehend how to navigate the elaborate web of censorship rules that most journals impose on reporters—a pernicious convenience known as the embargo system. Once you know all that, you can concentrate on reporting and writing. For science writers, the only journals of interest are those that are peer-reviewed, meaning that experts in the field have read the papers, and possibly suggested corrections and revisions, before the journal agreed to publish them. Traditionally, many science writers have focused on reporting from the “Big Four” peer-reviewed journals: Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Science and Nature are major sources of science news, and they should be. They are the premier interdisciplinary journals of the English-speaking world, and therefore ought to be publishing the most important research of the broadest interest to the scientific community. Naturally, such research is most likely to be of interest to the general public as well. In recent years, the Big Four have been joined by several others as regular sources of science news—particularly the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the biology journal Cell, and the neuroscience journal Neuron. And the Nature publishing group has flooded the media journal market with a whole roster of specialty journals on such topics as neuroscience, biotechnology, genetics, and materials science. Other important journals for medicine include Annals of Internal Medicine and several published by the American Heart Association, such as Circulation and Stroke. An intriguing newcomer in late 2003 from the Public Library of Science is PLoS Biology, an “open-access” journal available free online.
Earth Sciences
Authors: Chui Glennda
Published: November 2020

In August 1999, I stood in the ruins of a collapsed apartment building near Izmit, Turkey—one of 60,000 buildings destroyed in 40 seconds by the most powerful earthquake to strike a major city in nearly a century. It was a modern building surrounded by trees and greenery. A couch and a table stood intact in a room bright with potted flowers, now open to the air. A woman's coat had been carefully draped over the remains of a wall. As the stench of death rose around us, I wondered if the coat's owner was buried in the rubble beneath my feet. I was sent to Turkey to chase the science—to bring home lessons for readers who live near a strikingly similar fault system in California. But as I surveyed the damage with a team of scientists and engineers, there was no separating the science from the politics. Covered with a fine film of sweat mixed with dust from crumbled buildings and lime that had been scattered to prevent the spread of disease, we saw firsthand how corruption and greed had conspired with the forces of nature to kill more than 17,000 people. Some buildings were constructed right on the North Anatolian Fault. Its mole-like tracks plowed through barracks that had collapsed on 120 military officers, a highway overpass that fell on a bus, a bridge whose failure cut off access and aid to four villages. Researchers found concrete that was crumbly with seashells, chunks of Styrofoam where reinforcing metal bars should have been. Yet some well-reinforced buildings nicked or even pierced by the fault came through just fine, including an apartment building that moved 10 feet and had its front steps sliced off. Another home was cut in two; half collapsed, the other survived with windows intact. “How the hell?” marveled one engineer. “There's no way that building should stand in an earthquake.” That blend of science, politics, and human nature is just part of what makes earth science so compelling. It goes far beyond the academics of geology and plate tectonics to embrace earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, landslides—natural hazards that affect thousands of people and change the course of civilization.
Risk Reporting
Authors: Russell Cristine
Published: November 2020

Over the past three decades, the media has bombarded the public with a seemingly endless array of risks, from the familiar to the exotic: hormone replacement therapy, anthrax, mad cow disease, SARS, West Nile virus, radon, vaccine-associated autism, childhood obesity, medical errors, secondhand smoke, lead, asbestos, even HIV in the porn industry. A drumbeat of risks to worry about, big and small, with new studies often contradicting earlier ones and creating further confusion. It's gotten so bad that some people feel like they're taking their lives in their hands just trying to order a meal at a restaurant. “Will it be the mad cow beef, the hormone chicken, or the mercury fish?” asks an imperious waiter in one of my favorite cartoons from the Washington Post. “Urn ... I think I'll go with the vegetarian dish,” the hesitant diner responds. “Pesticide or hepatitis?” the waiter asks. The diner, growing ever more fearful, asks for water. The waiter persists: “Point source, or agricultural runoff?” Perhaps it's time for the media to become part of the solution rather than continuing to be part of the problem. Ideally, science journalists could lead the way toward improved risk coverage that moves beyond case-by-case alarms—and easy hype—to a more consistent, balanced approach that puts the hazard du jour in broader perspective. The challenge is to create stories with chiaroscuro, painting in more subtle shades of gray rather than extremes of black and white. Too often, as my late Washington Post colleague Victor Cohn once said, journalists (and their editors) gravitate toward stories at either extreme, emphasizing either “no hope” or “new hope.” Unfortunately, today's “new hope” often becomes tomorrow's “no hope” (which is a good reason for avoiding words like “breakthrough” or “cure” in the first place). Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is a classic example of this yo-yo coverage. In the '60s and '70s, the media helped overpromote hormones as wonder drugs for women, promising everlasting youth as well as a cure for hot flashes. Concerns rose, however, with reports of possible links to cancers of the breast and uterus. Later, when the uterine cancer risk was shown to return to normal by adding an additional hormone, the publicity about HRT became mostly positive again, emphasizing its potential to protect against bone loss and heart disease.