bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
From Small to Large Ecological Networks in a Dynamic World
Authors: Pascual Mercedes , Dunne Jennifer A
Published: November 2023

Food webs are one of the most useful, and challenging, objects of study in ecology. These networks of predator-prey interactions, conjured in Darwin’s image of a “tangled bank,” provide a paradigmatic example of complex adaptive systems. While it is deceptively easy to throw together simplified caricatures of feeding relationships among a few taxa as can be seen in many basic ecology text books, it is much harder to create detailed descriptions that portray a full range of diversity of species in an ecosystem and the complexity of interactions among them (fig. 1). Difficult to sample, difficult to describe, and difficult to model, food webs are nevertheless of central practical and theoretical importance. The interactions between species on different trophic (feeding) levels underlie the flow of energy and biomass in ecosystems and mediate species’ responses to natural and unnatural perturbations such as habitat loss. Understanding the ecology and mathematics of food webs, and more broadly, ecological networks, is central to understanding the fate of biodiversity and ecosystems in response to perturbations.
Diversity, Complexity, and Persistence in Large Model Ecosystems
Authors: Martinez Neo D , Williams Richard J , Dunne Jennifer A
Published: November 2023

Research on how vast numbers of interacting species manage to coexist in nature reveals a deep disparity between the ubiquity of complex ecosystems and their theoretical improbability. Here, we show how integrating models of food-web structure and nonlinear bioenergetic dynamics bridges this disparity and helps elucidate the relationship between ecological complexity and stability. Network structure constraints, including trophic hierarchy, niche contiguity, and looping formalized by the “niche model,” greatly increase persistence in complex model ecosystems. Behavioral nonlinearities, particularly competition among consumers and reduced consumption of rare resources, formalized by predator interference and new “Type II.2” functional responses, further encourage persistence of species in complex food webs. Trophic dynamics are also shown to feed back to network structure, resulting in more accurate topologies than those achieved by simple structural models alone. Thus, integrating structure and dynamics of ecological networks yields remarkably comprehensive and ecologically plausible models that highlight the importance of network structure, short food chains, and behavioral ecology for ecosystem persistence and stability, and also alters our understanding of the role of omnivory in food webs. This modeling approach provides a potentially powerful framework for exploring the impacts of perturbations on ecosystems, and can be altered to include non-trophic processes, spatial effects, and evolutionary dynamics.
Peter, Paul, And Mary Magdalene
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

In this book Bart Ehrman deals with the three followers of Jesus who are arguably the most significant and intriguing: Peter, his closest disciple: Paul his most important apostle; and Mary Magdalene, his most prominent female follower. What do the New Testament and other, non-canonical texts tell us about each of them? What legends developed about them? What can we say about them as historical figures? In a separate section on each, Ehrman lays out what is fact and what is fiction and how we know. Ehrman deals with complex historical issues in clear and informative ways, explaining anecdotes culled from the traditions of these three followers of Jesus. In this way, he explains what we can know about each of these figures as real historical people, and what legends sprang up about them in the centuries after their deaths.
The Political Economy of Health and Development
Authors: Birn Anne-Emanuelle , Pillay Yogan , Holtz Timothy H
Published: November 2023

This chapter presents the main explanations for health and disease patterns, with anin-depth focus on the political economy of health approach. It then explores the role of international development processes and their influence on health since World War II, paying special attention to emerging perspectives and tools, including the human capabilities and health and human rights approaches. The chapter concludes with a discussion of international health aid from a political economy perspective.
Societal Determinants of Health and Social Inequalities in Health
Authors: Birn Anne-Emanuelle , Pillay Yogan , Holtz Timothy H
Published: November 2023

In 2004, Costa Ricans lived, on average, to the age of 77, an almost identical life expectancy to that in the United States. Yet the U.S. per capita income was more than four times that of Costa Rica (WHO 2006). Even more striking, in 2000, inhabitants of the southern Indian state of Kerala, earning, on average, less than US$3,000 per year, had a life expectancy of 74.6 (Government of Kerala 2005), while Washington, DC residents, with almost $30,000 per capita annual income, had a life expectancy of 72.6 years (Phillips and Beasley 2005; U.S. Government 2005).
Understanding and Organizing Health Care Systems
Authors: Birn Anne-Emanuelle , Pillay Yogan , Holtz Timothy H
Published: November 2023

As discussed throughout this text, health derives not just from a society’s health care system, but from an array of interlocking political, social, economic, medical, and cultural factors that operate at personal, community, national, and international levels. Moreover, the principal in Nuences on population health, including income, education, production, social welfare programs, tax policy, transportation, and housing, are not a direct part of the health care sector at all. Within the health sector, the elements that most affect health are public health activities such as water supply and sanitation, food inspection, vector insect control, disease surveillance, reduction of industrial pollution, and regulation of pharmaceuticals. Yet most people do not take these societal and public health factors into account when they think about health policy. Instead, they are likely to consider health policy as concerned with the health care system, particularly in terms of clinical or medical care services. Health care policy, then, must be distinguished from a society’s broader health policy: health care services, particularly primary health care, form an important— but far from the sole—component of health policy.
Toward Healthy Societies: From Ideas to Action
Authors: Birn Anne-Emanuelle , Pillay Yogan , Holtz Timothy H
Published: November 2023

Up to this point in the text, we have critically examined the history of international health, the key contemporary actors, the global epidemiology of morbidity and mortality, and the structural forces that shape differences in health patterns both within and between countries. In contrast to Nyerere’s aspirations, the dominant international health donors (also called global health initiatives and global health partnerships) prioritize technical silver bullets—such as vaccines (e.g., through the GAVI Alliance) and provision of antiretrovirals (ARVs) for HIV/AIDS—usually at the expense of integrated and comprehensive approaches.
“A Book Nobody Understands”
Authors: Christianson Gale E
Published: November 2023

In August 1684 A Handsome Young Astronomer Named Edmond Halley boarded the London coach for Cambridge and sat back to ponder the events that had sent him on an important mission. Earlier in the year, he had entered into a lively conversation with Robert Hooke and Sir Christopher Wren, noted architect of the new St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Halley suggested that the force of attraction between the planets and the sun decreases in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between them. If this were true, then each planet’s orbit should take the form of Kepler’s ellipse, a shape like a football, though somewhat more rounded.
The Royal Society
Authors: Christianson Gale E
Published: November 2023

Ever Since He Arrived In London, Newton Had Kept Ms Distance from the Royal Society, the scientific institution through which he gained lasting fame. When asked why he did not become more involved, he claimed that his duties at the mint demanded all his time. There were those who knew better, however. The real reason Newton did not attend the meetings was an old grudge he had nursed ever since his reflecting telescope was carried to London by his friend Isaac Barrow.
Improving the Quality of Life and Psychological Well-being of Patients with Colorectal Cancer
Authors: Lee Mo Yee , Ng Siu-Man , Leung Pamela Pui Yu , Chan Cecilia Lai Wan
Published: November 2023

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a life-threatening disease that took the lives of 1,538 Hong Kong people in 2004 alone, and an average of 1,000 people per year since year 1999 (Hong Kong Cancer Registry, Hospital Authority, 2004). CRC was recently ranked as the second most common form of cancer and the second leading cause of cancer-related death. An average of 2,050 new CRC cases was registered yearly between 1999 and 2003, and 3,582 new cases were registered in 2004. Such an upward trend in both incidence rate and mortality rate observed over the past few years is alarming and poses much public health concern. While medical advances have brought about tremendous success in prolonging the lives of CRC patients, treatments are usually both invasive and traumatic, posing a wide range of negative effects on the physical and psychological health of the patients including respiratory and cardiac complications, chronic fatigue, and leakage (Bokey et al., 1995), depression, anxiety, and impaired concentration (Walker et al., 1997), and fear of recurrence and metastasis, death anxiety, anger and frustration, disruption in work and social activities, and strains in family relations (Cheung, Molassiotis, & Chang, 2003; Lee-Jones, Humphris, Dixon, & Hatcher, 1997; Mak, 2001; Sprangers, Taal, Aaronson, & Te Velde, 1995).
Therapeutic Efficacy
Authors: Weiss Noel S
Published: November 2023

A randomized controlled trial of therapeutic efficacy is one in which (a) patients are assigned to one of two or more groups to be offered different therapeutic measures, (b) chance alone dictates whether a particular patient will be assigned to a particular group, and (c) patients in each group are monitored for the abatement of their illness or for the occurrence of the event(s) that the therapy seeks to prevent. Most randomized controlled trials provide results that can be interpreted relatively easily, for the common concern in nonrandomized studies—that the various treatment groups had inherently unequal probabilities of doing well—is much less pressing when it is only chance that determines the membership of the groups. The popularity of randomized trials has increased during the past several decades. The approach has been applied to virtually every class of therapy, from pharmaceutical agents to surgical techniques to dietary and other “lifestyle” interventions.
The Evidence For and Against Evidence-Based Practice
Authors: Mullen Edward J , Streiner David L
Published: November 2023

Over the years, there have been many developments and changes in the way that social interventions and clinical treatments have been delivered, including the introduction of behavioral and cognitive-behavioral therapies (e.g., Lazarus, 1971; Thomas, 1967), the move toward time-limited, task-structured interventions (Mullen, Dumpson, & Associates, 1972; Reid & Epstein, 1972), and the use of manuals that guide what practitioners can and cannot do (Luborsky & DeRubeis, 1984). Each in its time generated considerable debate, some of it quite heated. However, it is probably safe to say that no innovation has generated as much argument and heat as the introduction of evidence-based practice (EBP) and policy. EBP has been both heralded as one of the major advances in health care, education, criminal justice, and the human services, promising to revolutionize both policymaking and practice (e.g., Gambrill, 1999; Gibbs & Gambrill, 2002; Gray, 2001; Macdonald, 1999; Marshall, 1995; Sackett, Richardson, Rosenberg, & Haynes, 1997), and excoriated as a development that will reduce professionals to mindlessly (and soullessly) following recipe books for the betterment of insurance companies (e.g., Grahame-Smith, 1995; Morgan, 1995). It has led, on the one hand, to a number of journals, texts, and centers based on its principles (e.g., Evidence-Based Mental Health, Evidence-Based Medicine, Evidence-Based Nursing, ACP Journal Club; Gibbs, 2003; Gray, 2001; Sackett, Straus, Richardson, Rosenberg, & Haynes, 2000), and on the other, to articles in leading journals holding it up to ridicule (e.g., Britton, Evans, & Potter, 1998; CRAP Writing Group, 2002; Webb, 2001).
Concise Standards for Developing Evidence-Based Practice Guidelines
Authors: Proctor Enola K , Rosen Aaron
Published: November 2023

The central challenge now confronting the profession of social work is ensuring and demonstrating that its services are effective. In our view, agencies and individual practitioners can best enhance their effectiveness by using treatment approaches that are evidence-based. Practicing on the basis of scientifically tested evidence is responsible, consistent with social work’s values and commitment to client welfare and improvement, and responsive to societal expectations and National Association of Social Workers (NASW) aspirations for effective and accountable practice. Yet we recognize the many challenges inherent in the application of evidence-based approaches in day-to-day practice. Our chapter addresses some of those challenges and lays out steps through which practitioners’ ability to apply evidence-based practice can be enhanced.
Evidence-Based Treatments for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Deciding What Treatment Method Works for Whom
Authors: Abramowitz Jonathan S , Schwartz Stefanie A
Published: November 2023

Effective treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can be divided into two broad categories: biological and cognitive-behavioral. Biological treatments include pharmacotherapy with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) and neurosurgery. Cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) includes exposure, response prevention, and cognitive therapy. These procedures can be delivered on an individual, group, or inpatient basis. Moreover, the frequency of therapy sessions may vary from weekly to daily. We begin this chapter with a brief description of the strengths and limitations of the principal treatment approaches. Next, we review the factors to be considered in deciding which treatment may be most beneficial for a given patient (Table 19.1). A brief discussion of decision factors that are less specific to OCD patients is followed by a more extensive examination of factors specifically related to OCD.
Evidence-Based Practice With Anxiety Disorders Guidelines Based on 59 Outcome Studies
Authors: Bloom Bernard L , Yeager Kenneth R , Roberts Albert R
Published: November 2023

While the number of well-designed, controlled, clinical outcome studies is not large, brief psychotherapeutic interventions appear to play a useful role in the treatment of anxiety spectrum disorders. Such interventions not only appear to be effective in their own right but also add a significant component to the benefits of medication. This chapter summarizes and describes the time-limited interventions and outcomes from 59 studies. This database includes 11 recent out-come studies that measured the effectiveness of crisis intervention and brief therapy approaches with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) precipitated by gunshot injuries, sexual assaults, terrorist attacks, vehicular accidents, and violent crimes.
Mental Illness, Substance Dependence, and Suicidality Secondary Data Analysis
Authors: Yeager Kenneth R , Roberts Albert R
Published: November 2023

Mental illness, substance dependence, and suicide are three of the most prevalent social and public health concerns throughout North America. Recent estimates indicate that every 20 minutes somewhere in the United States or Canada a suicide occurs. In the United States alone there are 30,000 suicides per year (Bush, Fawcett, & Jacobs, 2003; Institute of Medicine, 2002). This chapter seeks to explain the contributing factors leading to rehospitalization and suicide risk among the psychiatric, substance abuse, and substance dependent populations. Data from a university medical center will be reviewed regarding characteristics of inpatient hospitalization and potential contributing factors increasing the individual’s risk of a suicide attempt following inpatient psychiatric/substance dependence hospitalization. In 2001 approximately 15 million adults age 18 or greater were estimated to have suffered from a severe mental illness during the previous year. The population with the highest rate of severe mental illness was the 18-to-25-year-old age group (12%). Persons ages 26–49 demonstrated a rate of approximately 8%, with the 50 or older age group demonstrating a rate of 5%. Females were more likely than males to have a diagnosis consistent with severe mental illness (9% female versus 6% male) (National Institute of Mental Health, 2001; Bush et al., 2003; Institute of Medicine, 2002).
A Long Road Filled With Potholes
Authors: Ford Emily , Liebowitz Michael R , Andrews Linda Wasmer
Published: November 2023

I knew he was looking at me, but I wouldn’t look up. Then I heard his voice: ‘‘What is it about yourself that you don’t want anyone to know?’’ I don’t want people to find out that I’m crazy. The answer came to mind as soon as he asked the question, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. Instead, I kept my eyes locked on the base of Dr. A.’s floor lamp and shrugged as if to say, ‘‘I don’t know. You tell me. What don’t I want anyone to know?’’ A psychiatrist, not a psychic, Dr. A. suggested I go home and think about it.
Conclusion
Authors: Horwitz Allan V , Wakefield Jerome C
Published: November 2023

In this final chapter, we tie up several loose ends of our argument. First, we consider the question: If the flaws in current diagnostic criteria are as compellingly clear as we argue that they are, then why haven’t they been changed, or why can’t they easily be changed? In addressing this question, we shift from the logic of diagnosis to the logic of powerful constituencies and vested interests that come into existence once a definition of disorder is in place. Second, we return to the evolutionary perspective on disorder that we presented in the first two chapters and that serves as the framework for much of our argument. The scholarly literature has posed many objections to this view. We review some of the most interesting objections and briefly explain why we think none of them places the evolutionary understanding of normal human functioning in doubt. Finally, this book is mainly an analysis and critique. However, many readers will be wondering what the solution to the problems we identify might be. So we offer some initial thoughts on strategies by which the approach to diagnosis of MDD might be changed to be more valid.
The Aging Self
Authors: Barusch Amanda Smith
Published: November 2023

The senior center nestles midblock in a neighborhood of small shops, restaurants, and historic homes. The parking lot is tiny. (Most people walk or take the bus.) The landscaping is meticulously groomed, with a profusion of plants. (Senior volunteers have their way with it, and the staff respect their gardening expertise.) Just before lunch, the foyer bustles with arrivals. Some cling to walkers, a few sit in wheelchairs, but most people move briskly. Announcements litter an overstuffed bulletin board, and newspapers and magazines are free for the taking. A placard near the sign-in sheet proclaims, “Old age ain’t for sissies!” The activities schedule reveals a lecture Wednesday by a local professor on the roots of terrorism; the tai chi class meets three times a week; this month’s service project is collecting books for the school in the homeless shelter; and bingo is not even offered. The cafeteria is noisy, and loud greetings echo off the walls. The crowd is mostly female, with hugs and pats for everyone. The afternoon chef (a young, overwhelmed staff member) comes out for her applause, then everyone digs in. Those who are diabetic skip dessert, but the rest of the food disappears. The room empties quickly as people head off to the afternoon’s activities. An ancient man naps in the corner.
Reaching for a Lifeline: Psychotherapy and Medication
Authors: Kant Jared Douglas , Franklin Martin , Andrews Linda Wasmer
Published: November 2023

There came a point where psychotherapy just wasn’t enough. That isn’t to say that there weren’t benefits, but my relationship with my therapist had evolved into a sort of outpouring of all my frustrations and rage. I would often come into his office, already steaming mad and with a laundry list of things that I was upset about. The idea of adjusting to a life where I had to deal with things that others my age didn’t was enough to make me angry, confused, and rebellious. I cried a lot, I punched the pillows in his office, and I spent a lot of time engaging in behaviors that were, at their best, destructive.

One day, during a family vacation, I was watching the television while my sister longed to go to the beach. What I didn’t know was that upstairs my mother and father were discussing how to break the news to me that I was going to a boarding school starting that fall.
Goddess of The Market
Authors: Burns Jennifer
Published: November 2023

Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. This extraordinary book captures the life of the woman who was a tireless champion of capitalism and the freedom of the individual, and whose ideas are still devoured by eager students, debated on blogs, cited by political candidates, and promoted by corporate tycoons.
“Black” Cultural Capital and the Conflicts of Schooling
Authors: Carter Prudence L
Published: November 2023

Schools are more than institutions where teachers impart skills and lessons; they are places where teachers transmit cultural knowledge. As a child growing up in Mississippi and attending de facto segregated schools, I did not realize that education is as much about being inculcated with the ways of the “culture of power “ as much as it is about learning to read, count, and think critically. This culture of power, as scholar and educator Lisa Delpit (1997) calls it, encompasses a body of rules, tastes, appreciations, and styles for success that are fashioned by the dominant social classes whose members are mainly White, middle- and upperclass. Not only do the dominant classes determine what is included in the canons of Western literature, music, history, social studies, and the sciences but they also control the norms of cultural preservation and self-presentation.
Steps in Intervention Research
Authors: Fraser Mark W , Richman Jack M , Galinsky Maeda J , Day Steven H
Published: November 2023

Intervention research has three related purposes. First, it is through intervention research that programs are developed and refined. Intervention research provides a systematic process in which research findings, empirically grounded theory, and practice knowledge are conjoined either to create new programs or to modify existing ones. Second, intervention research attempts to answer the fundamental question of whether a program innovation is effective in producing the desired outcomes. Intervention research is crucial in this regard because it employs a range of methods that collectively permit drawing causal conclusions about a program’s impact. That is, intervention research allows us to conclude that a program is responsible for an observed outcome and that the outcome is not spuriously the result of some other factor. Third, because intervention research involves drawing these causal inferences, the findings from intervention research can inform theory. Application of findings to theory is often done in post hoc mediational analyses through which the researcher attempts to determine the mechanisms of the intervention—in other words, what made the program work. When the mediators of program outcomes are identified, they can inform broader conceptualizations of social and health problems.

None of these three purposes can be achieved in a single study. Therefore, a series of studies, each with a different research design, is needed. Suggested by Rothman and Thomas (1994) and others such as Flay (1986), these designs range from small single-case or single-group pilot studies (which carefully chart intervention processes) to more elaborate experimental studies (which assess proximal and distal outcomes). Both inductive and deductive processes are used in an ongoing interplay between data (both qualitative and quantitative) and program design.

It is incorrect to think of intervention research as primarily a quantitative approach relying principally on experimental tests of manualized interventions. Indeed, intervention research may begin with a clinician who, with just one case, tries a new strategy and then writes down what she or he did. Throughout the process of designing and developing interventions, qualitative analyses have an important place. Program materials may be reviewed by consumers or practitioners in focus groups, or they may be critically evaluated by experts in the problem area. Though it obtains little credibility in the hierarchy of evidence (see Chapter 1), this type of review is integral to intervention research. In the spirit of methodological pluralism (i.e., the idea that many methods can inform knowledge development), intervention research nearly always involves a variety of methods. Underpinning all the methods used in intervention research is the idea that program components are optimized in a series of studies conducted systematically and rigorously.
Step 2: Create and Revise Program Materials
Authors: Fraser Mark W , Richman Jack M , Galinsky Maeda J , Day Steven H
Published: November 2023

Developing the written materials for a program, including treatment manuals, practice protocols, and other resources, is a defining feature of intervention research. Treatment manuals direct interventions by spelling out the specifics of how programs are to be implemented. As such, manuals tend to be prescriptive and many are comprised of session-by-session content.

From program theories developed in Step 1 of intervention research, manuals articulate strategies for changing malleable mediators, that is, those factors that seem to explain or account for outcomes and that may be subject to change in intervention. Moreover, manuals are tempered with an understanding of real-world influences that might arise and have the potential to constrain an intervention in practice. These influences include organizational culture and climate, relevant policies, practice guidelines, agency protocols, community conditions, and cultural factors that may affect intervention agents, their training, and program delivery.

Typically, manuals specify program objectives and activities. In some programs (e.g., the Casey Family Program described in Chapter 1), the selection of activities is guided by needs or risk assessment that is used in matching content to program participants. In other programs, a single intervention is implemented. In many manuals, activities and other program content are specified in sessions or lessons, which may include scripted discussion, demonstration, learning exercises, or role-plays. Session materials often contain illustrated handouts to be used in application drills or homework assignments that can be completed between sessions.
The World Beyond The Unit
Authors: Cahn Katharine
Published: November 2023

Child welfare work does not happen in a vacuum. Keeping children safe and connected requires a high degree of collaboration with community partners, families, treatment providers, foster parents, community advocates, courts, law enforcement, and others. Providing staff members the resources they need calls for effective connection with this external community, as well as with managers and colleagues within the same agency.

Just as families thrive in supportive environments and struggle in impoverished environments, so too does a child welfare unit require a resourceful and supportive context in which to do its work. Just as an understanding of (and competency with) the political, social, and economic ecology of a family will empower a social worker engaged with the family, so too will such competence empower a child welfare supervisor engaged in supporting workers.
Which Rights Should Be Universal?
Authors: Talbott William J
Published: November 2023

We hold these truths to be self-evident... So begins the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What follows those words is a ringing endorsement of universal rights, but it is far from self-evident. Why did the authors claim that it was? William Talbott suggests that they were trapped by a presupposition of Enlightenment philosophy: That there was only one way to rationally justify universal truths, by proving them from self-evident premises. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the authors of the U.S. Declaration had no infallible source of moral truth. For example, many of the authors of the Declaration of Independence endorsed slavery. The wrongness of slavery was not self-evident; it was a moral discovery. In this book, William Talbott builds on the work of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, J.S. Mill, Amartya Sen, and Henry Shue to explain how, over the course of history, human beings have learned how to adopt a distinctively moral point of view from which it is possible to make universal, though not infallible, judgments of right and wrong. He explains how this distinctively moral point of view has led to the discovery of the moral importance of nine basic rights. Undoubtedly, the most controversial issue raised by the claim of universal rights is the issue of moral relativism. How can the advocate of universal rights avoid being a moral imperialist? In this book, Talbott shows how to defend basic individual rights from a universal moral point of view that is neither imperialistic nor relativistic. Talbott avoids moral imperialism by insisting that all of us, himself included, have moral blindspots and that we usually depend on others to help us to identify those blindspots. Talbott’s book speaks to not only debates on human rights but to broader issues of moral and cultural relativism, and will interest a broad range of readers.
Introduction
Authors: Talbott William J
Published: November 2023

Are there any universal rights? Much has been written on this question. A problem about phrasing the question this way is that the very idea of someone’s having a right to something is an idea with a historical lineage. There were human societies long before anyone even had any such idea. It seems puzzling to think that someone might claim that rights existed before anyone had ever articulated the idea itself. How could it make sense to think that the members of a prehistoric human community might have had rights, when no one had ever had such a thought? Historically, natural rights theorists typically appealed to God as the source of individual rights to provide a solution to this puzzle. The suggestion is that even before human beings had the idea of a right, God had it. Thus, God made it true that human beings have rights, even before the human beings themselves had any inkling of this fact.
An Epistemically Modest Universal Moral Standpoint
Authors: Talbott William J
Published: November 2023

In this chapter, I take up the challenge to explain how it is possible to make universal moral judgments. To make such judgments requires that we be able to attain a universal moral standpoint. I do not believe that aspiring to attain such a standpoint guarantees we will attain it, because we can be blind to our own biases and to the biases of those who influence us. Fortunately, the situation is not hopeless. When we are not overly influenced by our own interests and prejudices or those of others, we are able to make fallible, but reasonably reliable, universal moral judgments. In this chapter, I try to explain how we do so.
Islam, State, and Society in Bangladesh
Authors: Ahmad Mumtaz
Published: November 2023

Unlike many other Muslim countries identified with Islamic resurgence or Islamic radicalism where this phenomenon emerged as a gradual process, or was anticipated by observers as an incremental development of long-term socioreligious and political trends, Bangladesh entered the world of Islamic radicalism with a bang. In August 2005, Bangladesh made international headlines when bomb blasts occurred simultaneously in sixty-three of sixty-four districts of the country, throwing the government and the people in utter chaos and panic. Only one outside observer had seen what was coming: in April 2002, a cover story in the Far Eastern Economic Review by Bertil Lintner described—in a rather sensational tone—this second largest Muslim country in the world as a ‘‘cocoon of terror’’ and showed pictures on its title of look-alike bin Ladens springing to life.
Religion in England’s First Colonies
Authors: Butler Jon
Published: November 2023

The English settlers of New England intended to make religion the focus of their settlement. These ﬁrst immigrants were alienated English Puritans called separatists, who had already fied England for the Netherlands because of their inability to achieve further reformation in the Church of England at home. They originally received a charter for land in Virginia but landed instead near Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December 1620. They renegotiated their charter with London authorities and celebrated the famous first Thanks-giving with nearby Indians in October 1621.
The Flowering of Religious Diversity
Authors: Butler Jon
Published: November 2023

Thomas Dongan was perplexed. In 1683, he had become governor of New York, the old Dutch colony that the British had conquered in 1664. Dongan was a Roman Catholic who keenly felt the desirability of religious tolerance. But he had never encountered such religious diversity as he had found in New York. When he arrived from England in 1683, he expected to find one or two ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, the Protestant state church of the Netherlands, and a Church of England minister preaching to the small but growing English population in New York. Instead, Dongan encountered a religious blend so rich and confusing that he hardly knew what to make of it. The Dutch Reformed Church was indeed the town’s largest congregation; Dongan observed that there were “not many of the Church of England, [and] few Roman Catholics.” But New York teemed with other groups. It harbored an “abundance of Quaker preachers and women [preachers] especially.”
African and American Indian Religion
Authors: Butler Jon
Published: November 2023

In the mid-1600s, Mohegans living in eastern Connecticut interred several bodies at their principal burial ground, near modern-day Norwich. Along with the body of Lucy Occum, who had been converted to Christianity yet was also a medicine woman, the Mohegans had placed a bowl inlaid with wampum, the brightly colored cylindrical beads often used as currency in Indian transactions. With Hannah Wequot, the daughter of Chief Uncas, a seventeenth-century Mohegan leader, they had buried a bowl carved from a pepperidge tree knot and decorated with the figure of an owl. With a third, unknown Mohegan they had included a small “Hobbomocko” doll used to ward off evil spirits. In 1868, looters invaded the Mohegan burial mound, scattering skeletons and removing hundreds of items buried with them, including the Hobbomocko doll and the bowls buried with Lucy Occum and Hannah Uncas. The looters sold most of the items they retrieved to collectors, and some later found their way to museums.
The Monetary Systems of the Han and Roman Empires
Authors: Scheidel Walter
Published: November 2023

Beginning in the third century B.C.E., the imperial unification of both East Asia and the Mediterranean gave rise to increasingly standardized currency systems that sought to establish stable means of payment. In both cases, the eventual monopolization of minting tied the success of these currencies to the fortunes of the state. Yet despite these basic similarities, substantial differences prevailed. While silver and later gold dominated the monetary economy of the Roman Empire, the victorious Chinese regimes operated a system of bronze coinages supplemented by uncoined precious-metal bullion. This raises a series of questions. How did these differences arise, and why did they persist well beyond antiquity? How did the use of different metals affect the relationship between the nominal and intrinsic value of monetary objects? Did the minting of precious metals in the West and China’s reliance on copper determine overall levels of monetization? To the best of my knowledge, none of these issues has ever been addressed from a comparative perspective. The failure to do so has made it harder to appreciate the specific properties of each of these two monetary systems. Explicit comparison brings the constituent elements of each tradition into sharper relief: by DE familiarizing the familiar, it invites us to question established interpretations and reconsider the nature of putative causal relationships.
Keens from the Absent Chorus: Troy to Ulster
Authors: Martin Richard P
Published: November 2023

What experimentation is to science, comparison should be to philology—a way to test hypotheses and produce new ones that account for more of the data, more economically. What one chooses to compare, of course, will affect the results. On one end of the spectrum lies the tracing of curious resemblances among otherwise isolated words, motifs, or customs and the urge to weave around these an intriguing narrative, either of primitive origins, long-distance cultural contact, or deep genetic relationship.1 The nineteenth century’s fascination with atomistic and often obscure comparanda gave way in the twentieth century to a more dependable tendency to compare total structures, linguistics leading the way to the other end of the spectrum, with anthropology trailing some decades later. Neither method was specifically designed for the study of verbal art, although Frazer’s great work was prompted by a scene in Vergil’s Aeneid and Leévi Strauss’s best-known article starts with the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles.
Muslims In America
Authors: Curtis Edward E
Published: November 2023

Muslims are neither new nor foreign to the United States. They have been a vital presence in North America since the 16th century. Muslims in America unearths their history, documenting the lives of African, Middle Eastern, South Asian, European, black, white, Hispanic and other Americans who have been followers of Islam. The book begins with the tale of Job Ben Solomon, a 18th century African American Muslim slave, and goes on to chart the stories of sodbusters in North Dakota, African American converts to Islam in the 1920s, Muslim barkeepers in Toledo, the post-1965 wave of professional immigrants from Asia and Africa, and Muslim Americans after 9/11. The book reveals the richness of Sunni, Shi'a, Sufi and other forms of Islamic theology, ethics, and rituals in the United States by illustrating the way Islamic faith has been imagined and practiced in the everyday lives of individuals. Muslims in America recovers the place of Muslims in the larger American story, too. Showing how Muslim American men and women participated in each era of U.S. history, the book explores how they have both shaped and have been shaped by larger historical trends such as the abolition movement, Gilded Age immigration, the Great Migration of African Americans, urbanization, religious revivalism, the feminist movement, and the current war on terror. It also shows how, from the very beginning of American history, Muslim Americans have been at once a part of their local communities, their nation, and the worldwide community of Muslims. The first single-author history of Muslims in America from colonial times to the present, this book fills a huge gap and provides invaluable background on one of the most poorly understood groups in the United States.
A Case Study on Rusty Crayfish: Interactions between Empiricists and Theoreticians
Authors: Bampfylde Caroline J , Bobeldyk Angela M , Peters Jody A , Keller Reuben P , McIntosh Christopher R
Published: November 2023

The last several decades have seen rapid growth in the number of studies investigating biological invasions (Lodge 1993; Sax et al. 2005; Callaway and Maron 2006; Strayer et al. 2006; Bampfylde et al. unpublished manuscript). This growth has been led by empirical ecologists, and the work produced demonstrates the range of negative ecological impacts of nonindigenous species. This research approach generates crucial information regarding the impacts and life history of invasive species and the invasion process as an integral component of the decision-making process. However, we argue that to effectively address the impacts of invasive species, collaborative efforts among empiricists, theoreticians, and economists are required.
The Greater Athenian State
Authors: Morris Ian
Published: November 2023

If it were worth taking the time to calculate such things, we would probably find that more books and articles have been written on the Athenian Empire of 478–404 B.C.E. than on any ancient empire except the Roman. And if we worked out how much scholarship has been served up per subject of each empire, square mile of territory, or year of the empire’s existence, Athens would surely win hands down. Every schoolchild gets to hear about its leaders, poets, and monuments.
The Political Economy of the Roman Empire
Authors: Hopkins† Keith
Published: November 2023

The Roman Empire lasted as a single political system for five centuries and more. At its height, it stretched from the Black Sea to the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. This essay explores how the empire was governed, how its wealth was created, and how that wealth was distributed among competing elements of the population: the central government, the emperor, the aristocracy, the army, the city of Rome, municipal elites, peasants, and slaves.
The Social Production of Toxic Uncertainty
Authors: Auyero Javier , Swistun Débora Alejandra
Published: November 2023

Our long-term ethnography captures the collective construction of meanings and the making of (in)decisions, the waiting, in situ, as they unfold. We were there when neighbors were wondering out loud about the possible short- and long-term effects of air, water, and soil pollution; when far-fetched rumors were running rampant and neighbors were evaluating the likelihood of this or that “imminent” relocation plan; and at the time when they were fantasizing about what they would do with the montón de plata (mountain of money) they would surely receive from the courts. We were also there at the time when all sorts of often contradictory material and symbolic interventions were molding people’s perceptions of their surroundings: from the seemingly minor and inconsequential T-shirt with a corporate logo or a small fellowship to take a computer class inside the compound or a food program designed to teach neighbors to “eat well,” to the disruptive appearances of star journalists and the broadcast of Flammable’s plight on national TV, or the random visits of lawyers or officials and the ensuing high hopes continually raised among residents. We were there reading the newspaper and watching TV with residents when news about the relocation of some compound plants were announced and when municipal officials informed the public that “soon” hundreds of families were going to be moved out of the neighborhood. We were there when children’s lead screenings were suspended and when they would soon (always soon) be restarted. Ours was not a retrospective reconstruction but an embedded form of inquiry in real time and space.
Conservation for Profit
Authors: Ehrenfeld David
Published: November 2023

Since the fall of Soviet communism, the profit motive has been prescribed more than ever as the cure for many ills, including the decline of nature. Although a large part of the natural world has been damaged or destroyed by unregulated commerce, various groups of conservationists are trying to save some of the most spectacular remnants of nature, both species and ecosystems—with more commerce. The idea of turning the tables and using the methods of exploiters to prevent more serious exploitation is an interesting one, but the risks are high and not everyone in the business of saving by selling seems to have given much thought to them.
Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder
Authors: Phillips Katharine A
Published: November 2023

In a world obsessed with appearance, it is not surprising that body dysmorphic disorder, or BDD — an emotionally painful obsession with perceived flaws in one's appearance — has manifested itself as a troubling and relatively common problem for many individuals. In The Broken Mirror, the first and most definitive book on BDD, Dr. Katharine A. Phillips provided a comprehensive manual for patients and their physicians by drawing on years of clinical practice, scientific research, and professional evaluations of over 1,000 patients. Now, in Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder: An Essential Guide , the world's leading authority on BDD reaches out to patients, their friends, and their families with this concise and updated handbook. BDD causes sufferers to be obsessed by perceived flaws in their appearance and may afflict as much as two percent of the population, or nearly five million people. Many sufferers are able to function well in society, but remain secretly obsessed by their “hideous acne” or “horrible nose,” sneaking constant peeks at a pocket mirror, or spending hours at a time redoing makeup. Others find their lives disintegrate because of their appearance obsessions. It is not an uncommon disorder, simply a hidden one, since sufferers are often embarrassed to tell even their closest friends about their concerns. Using stories and interviews to show the many different behaviors and symptoms of BDD, and a quick self-assessment questionnaire, Dr. Phillips guides readers through the basics of the disorder and through the many treatment options that work and don't work. With Understanding Body Dysmorphic Disorder: An Essential Guide, sufferers will find both helpful advice and much needed reassurance in a compact, down-to-earth indispensable book.